As Israel’s general election looms next week, any idea that it could usher in a government committed to ending the country’s wars has evaporated. Even before the 7 October 2023 attack by Hamas, Israeli political culture was heading to the right, and that has only accelerated since.
Today, almost three-quarters of Israelis want troops to remain in Gaza – 55% of them preferring a long-term military presence in the enclave – while almost 80% want the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) to continue the war in Lebanon, according to polling. There is also a growing trend for young, secular left-leaning Israelis to leave the country.
This rightward shift should boost prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s chances of re-election, yet he may not emerge victorious. Recent polls suggest a bloc led by retired General Gadi Eisenkot is the favourite to win, although he is expected to fall short of the seats needed for an overall majority in the Knesset.
Eisenkot was brought into Netanyahu’s inner war cabinet soon after the 7 October attack, but he resigned after eight months, saying the cabinet had “completely failed” on its objectives, including returning hostages, dismantling Hamas’s ability to govern, and returning evacuated residents to northern Israel.
During the latter part of his military career, Eisenkot was a supporter of the Dahiya doctrine of military control in Lebanon. This promotes responding to a paramilitary uprising with broad-based attacks on the civilian population deemed to support the uprising. That approach has underpinned the Israeli war on Gaza, leading to the destruction of most of the territory.
If he takes office now, Eisenkot may curb Netanyahu’s efforts to centralise power – such as the prime minister’s plan to limit the role of the judiciary and other institutions – but is unlikely to deliver much change on security issues. He might exercise more caution over Iran – but that is already a losing battle, at least for now, whatever Donald Trump may claim – and he will likely continue central government support for settlers across the occupied West Bank and whatever level of force the military deems necessary in Gaza and Lebanon.
That means that regardless of whether Netanyahu or Eisenkot wins the election, what happens next depends very much on what the top brass of the IDF considers the appropriate way forward. It is here that a new analysis of IDF thinking is singularly useful – if thoroughly dismaying.
The “New” National Security Concept, published by the Israel Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), concludes that Israel must pursue permanent war, with no room for any long-term peace settlement. Given the disaster of 7 October, it says, there is no other way forward.
The analysis is written by INSS’s executive director, reservist Major General Tamir Hayman, a former commander of Israel’s National Defence College and a former chief of the IDF Intelligence Directorate, although he makes clear that it is not necessarily his personal position, but an assessment of current thinking within the upper echelons of the Israeli military.
This thinking, he suggests, is underpinned by a series of principles that can be condensed into five themes.
- Israel’s Jewish identity is more important than its democracy. The country’s continued existence as a Jewish state must be prioritised at all costs, even if it means eroding its democratic values.
- Peace is a bargaining tool, never the end goal. A meaningful peace agreement is unattainable as it would require constant reassessment – so any deal struck with Arab actors can only be temporary and a way to achieve other policy objectives. As Hayman puts it: “Politically, ‘peace’ is regarded as a naive concept representing the left-wing ‘peace camp’ which stands in tension with, or in direct opposition to, ‘security,’ which represents the right-wing ‘security camp.’”
- Arab states should not exist. Arab states should not be seen as genuine nation-states, since most are not. The Israeli military instead sees them as “collections of tribes and ethnic groups lacking a shared history and a foundational national vision”. Undermining their stability is to be encouraged, being easier to manage than facing up to strong nation-states. Precedence must be given to offence over defence, involving preventive strikes and wars, and where that is difficult, forward defence may be necessary.
- War is a foundational state in which self-reliance is essential. The decades-long pursuit of peace talks was a mistake that led to 7 October, while preventive war secures success from the start. In these preventative wars, Israel must rely on its own capabilities, as its primary ally, the United States, is a declining power that “will soon abandon Israel” due to its own “ongoing social and political shifts.
- The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a permanent Israeli-Arab conflict. The “existence of a Palestinian national movement is an inauthentic Western narrative rooted in post-colonial guilt,” Hayman writes. The struggle for Palestine is in practice an Arab attempt to destroy the State of Israel, to which there must be principled opposition. Security comes from control of the entire territory, with settlement playing an important role and, in such circumstances, “Arab inhabitants of the Land of Israel who choose to remain in the Jewish state will be granted residency rights and local self-governance”.
To repeat, Hayman’s analysis, which should be read in full, is not necessarily his personal view, but his understanding of present Israeli military thinking. If accurate, it is easy to find fault with.
Take the suggestion that Israel’s previous pursuit of peace was a mistake that led to 7 October, and it should have instead pursued preventative war to increase security and avoid the attack. In reality, the IDF fought four preventive wars in Gaza between 2008 and 2021, killing over 5,000 Palestinians, but leaving Israel far from secure. Even now, and despite over three years of further war, the IDF cannot occupy what remains of Gaza, where Hamas remains in control.
Despite such glaring errors, the polling cited earlier suggests the majority of the Israeli public will support the military’s view. Israel is a far more highly militarised state than most Global North nations, with the IDF far more part of society and culture than usual, not least since most Jewish Israelis have served in the force, and many are reservists.
This means misconduct by the military – both in Gaza and beyond – is ignored or normalised in current Israeli political culture. Such misconduct may extend to the destruction of communities, imprisonment without trial, starvation, torture and the mass killing of tens of thousands of people, many of them children.
Where there is disagreement within the IDF over its conduct, it is treated as criminally irresponsible. Take Netanyahu’s response to the recent documentary, NAZA; the prime minister has ordered the attorney general and the head of the security service to identify and prosecute the anonymous dissenting IDF personnel who gave interviews, accusing them of harming “Israel’s diplomatic and security interests”.
All of this means that, whoever wins the election next week, Israel has got itself into an insecurity trap from which it is difficult to see a way out. The phrase “impregnable in its insecurity” comes repeatedly to mind as a state that cannot face up to the decades-old reality of its suppression of Palestinian aspirations.
For now, there is no end in sight – so how might change happen? Ordinary IDF soldiers may begin to feel more angst and a willingness to move out of line, while their seniors could start to recognise that endless war produces a de-civilised society. Another option is that the loss of allies such as Germany, the UK, or a post-Trump United States sways military thinking.
There could also be a shift in public opinion within Israel, especially as international boycotts take hold. The past three years have seen support for Palestinians grow markedly right across the world, and this will not just go away. Already, Israel’s overseas diaspora find themselves in a difficult position, with the country seen as little more than a rogue state across so much of the world – this will worsen if Israel continues to insist on pursuing war, as the INSS analysis suggests.
When Hamas organised the assault and killings of 7 October, it no doubt aimed to shake Israeli society to the core. It has so far failed in that aim, yet Israel has altered, like a building that is losing its foundations. In a recent article for The Observer, former Knesset speaker Avraham Burg described Israel as a “pressure cooker, with every candidate turning up the flame.” That is not a good place for any state to be in.