The Israeli establishment has correctly understood that the U.S. is a declining power and that there will come a time when it cannot depend on it. The proposed solution is essentially to become ZISIS (Zionist State of Israel). However, CIA reports warn of civil war and state collapse.
On September 18, 2025, after Israel bombed Qatar, I wrote an article that proposed one simple thesis: Israel had understood that the U.S. was a declining power and that its window of opportunity to achieve its expansionist goals was now or perhaps never. The second clause of this argument was that the Gulf states had not yet grasped this or were unwilling to accept it.
On October 13, 2026, analyst Trita Parsi brought to our attention an article published the day before by Maj. Gen. (res.) Tamir Hayman, Executive Director of the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) and Chief of the IDF Intelligence Directorate from 2018 to 2021, in which he confirmed the first part of that hypothesis to be correct.
The document, titled “The ‘New’ National Security Concept: Conceptualization and Questions for Discussion,” does not claim to be official security doctrine, but rather to conceptualize the working guidelines for the Israeli establishment after October 7. The fifth of the 10 points that he lays out is headed “Self-Reliance and Severing Dependence on the United States.” It is worth quoting:
“The United States is a “declining power” and, given its ongoing social and political shifts, will soon abandon Israel in any event. Excessive dependence on the United States exposes Israel to the influence of a progressive American value system that is incompatible with Israel’s Jewish character. Severing ties with the United States is therefore not only inevitable, but essential to Israel’s independence and the resilience of its Jewish national identity.”
It is important to note that Hayman does not give this or his other assertions the full weight of official doctrine; he is trying to capture the ‘spirit’ under which the Israeli security establishment is working. Furthermore, after laying out the 10 points he considers a “new” security concept, he asks questions about what they would actually mean if they were implemented completly. For exampe, he recognizes that the severing of ties with the U.S. would have serious implications for Israel’s security, trade, and diplomacy.
Critics would argue that this decoupling is unfeasible and that without the U.S., Israel would not survive as a state. This argument is not without weight given the financial, diplomatic, technological, and military backing that the U.S. gives to Israel, but the argument Hayman makes is that the U.S. will begin to withdraw this support, so it is better to prepare for it.
He is not wrong, either. Public sentiment in the U.S. supporting Israel is declining and some politicians are beginning to see its money as a liability. This is perhaps a drop in the ocean compared to actual U.S. support, but it is a drop that no one noticed before, whereas now everyone does. The role of a good strategist is not only to understand what is happening now, but to advise how to prepare for what is coming.
It is difficult to see Israel surviving without U.S. support, but Israel is quietly building an escape route. It is strengthening military and technological ties directly with the U.S. armed forces and defense corporations, thereby bypassing public scrutiny. In an article that Naked Capitalism published a year ago titled “The Alliance Among Washington, Tel Aviv and Silicon Valley,” it was argued that they are building the foundation of a new security architecture—one that does not depend on the approval of the U.S. population.
This is part of the thesis I have been fleshing out in different articles at NC: that there is a new elite in power, and they are demanding to have a say in how society should be run. This is, of course, the Silicon Valley elite, and their vision is much closer to what Israel represents than to what the U.S. stands for—or at least claims to stand for. Hayman is aware that this “new” security concept is a redefinition of the Israeli state, one that many Americans—or, indeed, decent people anywhere—cannot support.
This is the idea of a state that is racist, and I mean that in the technical sense. Hayman writes that “the state’s Jewish identity rests on ethnic, religious, and national foundations” and that it should “maintain the primacy of Jewish identity over other national identities (such as Arab-Islamic or Christian).” He emphasizes this further when he questions how other states would diplomatically respond to this. This is a reality that many Arab Israelis, who are 20 percent of the population, already experience as severe discrimination.
It is a state based on a constant state of war, which sees peace as an instrument, not a goal. It does not consider any of its neighbors to qualify as a nation-state, meaning they can be undermined and attacked. For that purpose, Israel should prioritize offense over defense and should encourage settlers and settlement-building as a forward military tactic in the West Bank, Syria, and Lebanon, establishing “settlement and civilians as a central component of security.”
What this describes is a totalitarian society based on a ethno-religious identity, in a constant state of warfare with no respect for borders or sovereignty, and with no distinction between civilians and the military. This should sound familiar, and that’s why I have called it ZISIS: the Zionist State of Israel.
However, there is a caveat. According to a CIA report published by Drop Site, Israel is at risk of civil war or state collapse. “Years of genocide in Gaza and war in Lebanon and Iran deepen political, economic, and social fractures within the country.” The report is titled “Fracture From Within” and was compiled by the CIA’s Red Cell, tasked with developing analyses that challenge mainstream views.
That is not to say that the report is a fantastical hypothesis; rather, the writers are Israel experts taking cues from contextual developments that are too politically dangerous to express elsewhere. What these writers see is that Israel is a spark away from civil conflict or state collapse because of:
“Economic crisis and soaring military spending; heavily armed veterans returning from prolonged combat, many carrying serious psychological trauma; growing fury over ultra-Orthodox men who are exempt from military service; escalating settler violence in the occupied West Bank; and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu fighting to hold onto power and igniting a constitutional crisis.”
What these two different analyses point to is not necessarily contradictory, despite their differing focal points. There is an ongoing change in the nature of Israeli society—or, perhaps, the crystallization of change. Or, perhaps, the culmination of an momentum that was set in motion at its founding with the forced displacement of more than 700,000 people.
This is the maturation of the Zionist concept of a state, which may turn Israel into what we have called above ZISIS. But in the process, it might also break. The coin can land on either side. What is not accounted for here, but I believe is equally, if not more, important, is the moral wound of the society created by the ongoing genocide in Gaza and which plays directly into the risk of civil conflict.
Consider this recent video in which Moshe Feiglin, an Israeli politician and leader of the party Zehut, says that the morally right thing to do is to kill all the babies in Gaza. He said it in an interview with the Jerusalem Post, but it is neither the first time he has said it, nor is he the only one. There is Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich saying that they should “wipe out Gaza” because an “entity with 1.8 million terrorists should not exist.”
In case you thought that this belief is held only by politicians, here is a video of producer and comedian Lior Schlein, who confronts a group of young students who believe that all babies in Gaza should be killed because they are potential terrorists. These are not “hilltop” extremist settlers, but ordinary university students.
This moral wound is too deep to ignore, and it is only getting deeper. Recently, opposition leader Naftali Bennett called one of the most influential Haredi rabbis in Israel, Dov Lando, “antisemitic” because he said that: “It is possible, without a state [of Israel], to live well with the Arabs… to live, to respect the Arabs. It was pretty good when the Arabs were in charge. It was the best situation.” He added that the Zionists “made Arabs hate us” and that Zionism “brought physical disasters, not just spiritual ones, to the Jewish people.”
Lando was denounced by politicians across the entire spectrum, but what this reveals is that the social divide is real and will only widen. I don’t think this is going to happen in the short to medium term, but I do think that the form the Israeli state is taking will become unsustainable from within before it does from wihtout.