The Middle East and the Islamic World
A HOOVER INSTITUTION ESSAY FROM THE CARAVAN NOTEBOOK
Israel’s Grand Strategy Ripples
Begin at Home
ASSAF ORION
Israel’s grand strategy seeks to safeguard its national survival and character and to live
in peace with its neighbors. A small nation in a hostile region, it has had to perpetually
frustrate enemies’ attempts to destroy it, until they chose to make peace or at least accept its
existence. This has been achieved by an outsize and advanced defense enterprise supported
by a strong science and technology–based economy, which in turn is enabled by well-
educated manpower. Israel’s own capabilities are augmented by its relations with world
powers, mostly the United States, economic diversication, regional partnerships, and soft
power, enjoying support from Judeo-Christian communities. Israel was born into a conict
with Arabs, with the Palestinians in its midst. Gradually, this conict transformed into a
focused Israeli-Palestinian conict, while Arab countries either made peace with Israel or
remained at the conict’s sidelines. Israel is now the powerful side in the conict, and its
current policy seems to prefer managing the conict and shaping conditions over time than
seeking to decide it, a choice pregnant with profound risks to Israel’s identity. For decades,
Iran has generated and continues to generate the severest external security threats to Israel
through its nuclear advances and proxy warfare. Israel thus faces two different yet serious
security challenges, near and far, while its internal political struggles threaten to undermine
the pillars of its national power.
• • •
Writing a medium-size piece about Israel’s grand strategy is a trying undertaking. One
general struggle pitches brevity against depth, and a more mundane difculty is Israel’s
strategic culture, not best known for its formality and documentation. Hence, the
following essay offers an attempt to provide a historical context, identify organizing
concepts, and describe some main thrusts of Israel’s grand strategy. With an eye to Israel’s
emergence as a state, it outlines the changing security landscape from its beginning to the
present, with a special focus on defense, and lays out the fundamentals of its strategy, with
observations on how Israel navigates its strategic environment, from the outside in. Finally,
it concludes with some of Israel’s future challenges, stemming from domestic problems
rather than from external threats. Rather than serving as a policy paper providing denite
analysis and recommendation, this essay aims to provide depth, insight, and nuance to a
uniquely successful chapter in the Jewish nation’s history.
