The October 7 massacre will not only be remembered as the worst terrorist attack that Israel has known since its establishment, which resulted in the murder of over 1,200 Israeli civilians. The carnage will also be remembered as an event that constituted a strategic shift point for the Jewish state.
The murderous attack by Hamas that caught the IDF off guard, together with the emerging threat from the north from the direction of Hezbollah, will have a great impact on Israel’s perception of security. The events of October 7 will certainly also affect the building of the IDF’s force, which apparently will recalculate its course with regard to the term “small and smart army” defined at the time by chief of staff Dan Shomron and his successor Ehud Barak.
Thus, the war and the changes following it will inevitably lead to many consequences for Israeli society in the coming years. In addition to the enormous sacrifice in the current campaign, Israelis will have to sacrifice more financially in order to build a protective force that will adapt to the threats around it.
Israel's concept of national security
Despite the need to adapt Israel’s concept of national security to the current era, and possibly even change it, there are still those who maintain that peace agreements are the solution to Israel’s strategic situation in the region. The main argument is that peace will ensure not only military security for the citizens of Israel by removing the threat of war, but also economic security by enabling economic growth that will help build the IDF’s military power.
It is important to remember that peace agreements do not necessarily guarantee security. History shows that these pacts have been violated many times in the past. In practice, security is guaranteed first and foremost thanks to the strength of the state, especially military strength. This insight is especially true in the Middle East, a region plagued by violence where peace agreements signed by Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East, are actually made with the other country’s government, which is known to be undemocratic and, in many cases, does not reflect the will of the people at all.
Those peace agreements were not signed with the general public, which is inherently very hostile to Israel. Surveys conducted in the Arab world over the last decade, including by the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies based in Qatar, clearly show that traditionally over 85% of the Arab world opposes recognition of Israel and signing peace agreement with the Jewish state. We all remember the fear in Israel and in the United States for the peace agreement with Egypt on the day the Muslim Brotherhood seized power there in 2012.
However, even if we follow the opinion of those who maintain that the pursuit of peace agreements is at the heart of the national security of the Jewish state, and that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s policy has always been wrong in this regard, they choose to ignore Israel’s attempts to reach an agreement with the Palestinians, both in the framework of the Kerry initiative in 2014 and in the Trump peace plan in 2020. Netanyahu’s critics have apparently “forgotten” the journey toward the Abraham Accords that culminated in 2020 with the signing of the normalization agreements with the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan.
In this context, it is not impossible that had the IDF been properly prepared for the October 7 attack, Israel would have celebrated the normalization agreement with Saudi Arabia today, which would have symbolized the end of the Israeli-Arab conflict. I wonder what those critics would claim then, those who have already explained to us that an Israeli-Palestinian agreement is more important than normalization with the Arab world.
IN CONCLUSION, national security is a field that, among other things, requires risk management in a rapidly changing environment, especially in a place like the Middle East. It seems that the strategy of containment and deterrence against Hamas was required in the last decade and a half, especially when Israel had more significant security challenges, at the center of which was the Iranian nuclear program, which undoubtedly poses an existential threat to the Jewish state.
Alongside the focus on the Iranian menace and preventing the strengthening of Hezbollah within the framework of the “war between the wars” campaign, the need to keep the Gaza Strip afloat and prevent a humanitarian crisis there is what guided the heads of the political and security echelons in Israel.
In the end, the IDF’s operational and intelligence failure is something that should be investigated and studied in order to properly deal with threats to Israel in the future. However, while the 2023 failure originated from a tactical mistake, it seems that the strategy of striving for normalization with the Arab world while bypassing the Palestinians, who once again proved that their goal is to destroy the Jewish state, still remains in effect.
The writer is a lecturer and research fellow at the University of South Wales, UK. His recent book is Israel: National Security and Securitization (Springer, 2023).