I. The Once and Future Israeli Doctrine

As long as Israel has existed, in time of peace as in time of war, it has been surrounded by enemies who think only of destroying it. Yet never, since 1948, has Israel protected its frontiers with a network of barbed wire or a line of fortifications. To the chiefs of the Israeli army, the best defense has always been, and remains today, offense—attacking the enemy on his own territory.
~General Moshe Dayan

That passage by Dayan, one of the most famous military officers in Israeli history, appears in the foreword to The Walls of Israel, a 1968 study of the Israeli army by French writer and military expert Jean Lartéguy. As chief of the general staff of the Israel Defence Forces in the 1950s, Dayan had instilled the art of original warfare, and turned the IDF into a premier fighting force. Israel’s founding security doctrine, he explained, would be based on offence and lightning warfare—an approach born of necessity that would remain vital to Israel’s long-term safety and survival. It would not be enough for Israel to accumulate deterrent power; it would have to use it.

Since its inception in 1948, Israel’s security policy has been partly dictated by the stubborn fact of Arab enmity. For nearly a century, Palestinian Arabs have been unwilling to accommodate the Jewish state in their midst, and until very recently, most of the Arab regimes surrounding Israel have displayed the same adamant hostility. Faced with the prospect of annihilation by its neighbours, the stakes have always been existential for Israel. Had it ever been vanquished in one of its wars, its fate would have been sealed.

As a tiny country with nearly indefensible borders, Israel has had no room to retreat. At its narrowest point, it is just nine miles wide. Israel has therefore been forced to summon and sustain a people’s army that could serve as a shock force capable of striking enemy territory rapidly and with overwhelming power. It was only this ability to mobilise quickly and score decisive victories that would hold off enemy forces before they could assault or overrun the Israeli homeland.

The disparity in landmass between Israel and its foes is also reflected in a population disparity. At the time Dayan was writing, on the heels of the Six Day War, the Arabs outnumbered the Jews 33 to one. Today, sovereign Israel’s population of almost ten million people is dwarfed by 430 million Arabs, to which the Islamic Republic of Iran adds another 91.5 million. This has made a defensive crouch impossible for Israel. To borrow an analogy from the American diplomat Dean Acheson, it is not a sound strategy to sit in your parlour with a loaded shotgun waiting for something bad to happen. In Israel’s position, strategic competence meant offensive military operations.

As a historical matter, Israel’s pragmatic military doctrine had proved its value, but it imposed a high cost on Israel’s border communities, which were always vulnerable to attack and sabotage. As Lartéguy described in The Walls of Israel, with the army focused on offensive warfare, responsibility for local defence lay with “the frontier kibbutzim and all the Nahal military colonies.” In this domain, wrote Lartéguy, “one rule is absolute: A kibbutz or Nahal colony that is attacked must defend itself alone, without hope of reinforcements. The regular army has other missions.” The fragile shield of the kibbutzim had to withstand sabotage operations and raids as best it could while the long spear of the Israeli army and air force did its work elsewhere.

Since the end of the Second Intifada in early 2005, Israel’s enemies had only been able to muster isolated terror attacks, mostly ineffective rocket salvos, and agitated border mobs. Israel had become an economically dynamic “start-up nation” and a military powerhouse against which its enemies seemed to be incapable of landing a devastating blow. That changed on 7 October 2023, when Hamas terrorists crossed into southern Israel at dawn and murdered 1,200 people before carrying 251 hostages into the underground tunnels of Gaza. These events revealed that Dayan’s counsel about the imperatives of Israeli self-defence had been ignored.

II. “The War Between the Wars”

The challenges to Israel’s national security have changed over the years, but the danger on its borders has remained constant. Kibbutzim in the Gaza envelope have endured low-level but persistent violence since the foundation of Israel, particularly during multiple rounds of conflict with Hamas since Israel disengaged from the Strip in 2005. It wasn’t until October 2023, however, that this threat was fully realised. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, the chief problem was not a slow Israeli response that morning, it was a failure to preempt the attack from taking place at all.

In the years leading up to 7 October, the Israeli military was not nearly as vigorous as it needed to be. By the 2010s, the Islamic Republic of Iran had surrounded the Jewish state with zealous proxy militias, and armed them to the teeth. The most formidable member of this so-called “axis of resistance” was Lebanese Hezbollah, which possessed a fearsome arsenal of precision-guided munitions. Other forces near and far from the Israeli border—including Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza, Shi’ite militias in Syria and Iraq, and the Houthis in Yemen—provided the Iranian imperium with strategic depth.

During what Israeli generals called “the War Between the Wars,” Israel methodically pared back the tentacles of the axis without striking directly at the heads of the monster. The IDF conducted a “shadow war” to destroy convoys and ammunition depots in Syria, through which the Iranian regime funnelled advanced weaponry to Hezbollah, but the Assad government itself was spared. Likewise, Iranian nuclear scientists were assassinated on Iranian soil, but the Islamist regime was not directly attacked. Prevention, not provocation, was the order of the day. “The goal was to delay the inevitable war with Iran and its proxies,” writes Middle East expert Jonathan Schanzer, “while creating conditions under which Israel could prevail in the war that would eventually come.”

Schanzer believes the War Between the Wars “may have been the most successful military failure in modern history.” It prevented Israel’s enemies from growing stronger, but it did not actually make them weaker. This approach handed jihadists the strategic initiative in Gaza. Although Israel (and Egypt) blockaded the Strip and struck high-value targets from time to time after Hamas took power, the IDF was constrained by the fear of igniting a regional war and jeopardising its peace treaties with Jordan and Egypt. As a result, Hamas was left to decide when to initiate conflict, which it did on three separate occasions on Benjamin Netanyahu’s watch. It was never severely punished for these outrages, so it was never deterred.

As Israeli journalists Yaakov Katz and Amir Bohbot make clear in their new book While Israel Slept, Israeli leaders were aware of Hamas’s growing strength. Members of the security establishment had issued repeated warnings about Hamas and the special danger it posed. After a rocket attack on Ashkelon in February 2009, Netanyahu even pledged to topple the Hamas regime if he were elected. That pledge was never fulfilled because the costs were judged to be too high. Katz and Bohbot observe that Israeli policy toward Hamas was characterised by “intentional indecisiveness.” Beyond Netanyahu’s political machinations, there simply wasn’t the will to launch a regime-change war in the treacherous labyrinth of Gaza.

Long before the October onslaught, Hamas was building up its army and openly preparing for battle. The IDF’s tatzpitaniyot (“observers”) unit detected an uptick of Hamas military exercises in the autumn of 2023 and reported that Hamas operatives were digging holes and placing explosives along the border. There was also a surge in Hamas communication traffic in the days before 7 October. Fighters even received special religious decrees to be extraordinarily violent in a future war, which helps to explain the depravity that was soon to be released on Israeli soil.

However, these suspicious activities and suggestive fragments of intelligence were dismissed by Israel’s upper echelons, who believed the US$1 billion high-tech frontier with Gaza—the so-called “iron wall”—was impregnable. No matter how ominous the facts about Hamas’s rising threat, the IDF’s and government’s belief that Hamas in Gaza had been contained remained unshakeable. With this assumption in mind, Israel’s military and political leaders turned their attention to preparations for an inevitable war in the north. The bulk of the army, meanwhile, was deployed in or near the West Bank, which helped account for the poor response time when Israeli territory was breached in the early hours of 7 October. The upshot was the longest war in Israel’s not-especially-pacific history.

III. The Perils of Wishful Thinking

The questions asked by a reeling Israeli public after 7 October lingered for many months: How could this happen in an era of Israeli military dominance? How had Israeli leaders missed the gathering danger? Why had the political class settled for periodically degrading Hamas instead of formulating a plan to destroy it? Why had Israeli officials become complicit in Qatar’s financing of Hamas? Why was the south left so poorly defended? What had happened to the doctrine of defence by offence? Why had Israel’s traditional security doctrine been discarded?

The answers to these questions are now tolerably well-known. If Israelis ever get a commission of inquiry that investigates the political, military, and intelligence failures before 7 October, it is unlikely to uncover anything that dramatically alters the present understanding of what went wrong. The longstanding key to Israel’s strength and security—its reliance on offensive operations in hostile territory—became its greatest liability when the leadership baulked at suppressing Hamas and facilitated its growth instead. Neither the hubris of Israeli officials nor the parochialism of the Netanyahu government will be acquitted by any inquest, let alone by the verdict of history.

Israel’s Perfect Failure

Israeli intelligence and the Hamas attack on 7 October 2023.

QuilletteUri Bar-Joseph

Following the collapse of the Oslo Accords at the turn of the century with the mayhem of the Second Intifada, Israel had grown accustomed to managing the conflict rather than trying to win it outright, and this approach bred overconfidence. Growing national affluence had encouraged a preference for intelligence and technology over traditional military deterrence and manoeuvring. The notion of a “small and smart” army produced an impressive arsenal, including Iron Dome—the interception system used to shoot down rockets from Gaza and Lebanon—and underground barriers meant to prevent Hamas and Hezbollah from tunnelling into Israeli territory.

This defensive reliance on state-of-the-art technologies encouraged Hamas to go low-tech. It planned the 7 October raid with handwritten notes, disabled Israel’s “eyes” at the border with small arms, and breached the fence with bulldozers and wire-cutters. In the space of a few hours, the vulnerability of Israel’s borderlands was exposed, and Israel’s technological prowess counted for naught. The military and political elite in Jerusalem convinced itself that a steady accumulation of tactical victories would lead to enduring strategic gains. In such an environment, Israel seemed to believe it had no need for a comprehensive national strategy.

When I travelled to Gaza through the Erez Crossing in 2009, Israel’s reliance on high-tech defences was striking. It was not Israeli armour at the border crossing that caught my eye so much as the IDF cyber personnel and the glitzy equipment at their disposal—a nimble garrison of surveillance cameras, radars, and drones evidently bereft of the firepower that could wreck large contingents of enemy forces. It was, in retrospect, simultaneously impressive and unsettling.