Built for rapid victories, Tel Aviv now wagers its future on endless mobilization, wider buffer zones, and the impossible promise of absolute safety.
The Cradle
What began as a doctrine of deterrence and rapid victory has gradually transformed into a model of perpetual mobilization, pre-emptive warfare, and open-ended conflict, exposing Tel Aviv to mounting political, economic, legal, and strategic challenges.
For nearly three years, Israel has been engaged in a multi-front conflict stretching across Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Iran, and the occupied West Bank. What initially appeared as a series of interconnected military campaigns has increasingly evolved into a condition of open-ended warfare, one that failed to guarantee the absolute security Israeli leaders promise.
Although Israel is often perceived as having operated under a single security doctrine, its military thinking has evolved through several overlapping phases. Alongside the traditional doctrine to confront existential state threats, Israel gradually expanded its strategic framework to address irregular warfare and attacks carried out by non-state actors.
Israel’s foundational security doctrine, developed by its founding prime minister David Ben Gurion in the 1950s, rested on three pillars: deterrence, early warning, and decisive victory.
Former defense minister and military commander Moshe Dayan later expanded this thinking into a broader doctrine, known as the “Dayan doctrine,” centered on overwhelming retaliation designed to impose unbearable costs on hostile actors and surrounding populations.
Over time, this approach evolved into the notorious “Dahiye doctrine”, associated with the use of disproportionate force and large-scale destruction of civilian infrastructure in areas linked to hostile armed groups.
First associated with Israel’s 2006 war on Lebanon and later repeatedly applied in Gaza, the doctrine has drawn widespread criticism from human rights organizations and international legal experts who argue that it violates core principles of international humanitarian law.
When deterrence breaks
Many Israeli military analysts believe that Operation Al-Aqsa Flood on 7 October 2023 exposed the collapse of all three pillars of the state’s traditional security doctrine. The failure triggered a profound reassessment inside Israel’s security establishment and accelerated the search for a new military paradigm.
For decades, Israeli strategy depended on short, decisive wars, designed to end before prolonged mobilization exhausted the country socially, economically, or militarily. Yet, Israeli strategists increasingly recognized that this model was insufficient against non-state actors such as Hezbollah, whose decentralized structures and political resilience allow them to survive long wars of attrition.
Earlier this year, Israeli Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir announced the adoption of a new multi-axis military strategy centered on “Permanent Readiness.” Presented during the Leaders on the Home Front Conference in January, the doctrine shifts Israel away from traditional deterrence toward a far more aggressive and pre-emptive posture.
The strategy abandons the earlier “conflict management” approach in favor of immediate action to neutralize threats before they mature into strategic dangers. It also establishes expanded security perimeters designed to physically separate Israel from its adversaries, including Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran.
The framework closely aligns with the concept of “permanent security,” sometimes referred to by critics as the Super Sparta model, a vision previously invoked by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in describing Israel’s future trajectory.
According to the Israeli sociologist Yagil Levy, the concept draws heavily from historian Dirk Moses and reflects a “state's aspiration to achieve absolute and permanent immunity from all threats,” including hypothetical future ones, through excessive force, territorial control, and population displacement if necessary.
Doctrine under fire
Yet the new doctrine has generated fierce criticism both inside and outside Israel.
Eran Etzion, deputy head of Israel's National Security Council at the Prime Minister's Office, writing for the Italian Institute for International Political Studies, argued that the doctrine of the “forward defense” represents a “little more than an almost reflexive impulse – strategically shortsighted and ultimately unsustainable.”
According to Etzion, the doctrine largely ignores geopolitics, historical context, international law, legitimacy, and non-military considerations. Levy, meanwhile, describes the doctrine as reflecting a “paranoid consciousness” that generates self-fulfilling threats by leaving no room for deterrent compromise or political settlement.
This, according to Levy, “opens the door” to “extermination, displacement, or imposing absolute control over groups that are classified as an existential threat to the state.”
In this sense, it could be argued that the Dayan doctrine was not abandoned but adapted to fit a broader system of permanent warfare.
Strategic depth limits
Israel's strategic dilemma is intensified by geography and demography. Lacking significant strategic depth and possessing limited manpower reserves, Israel remains structurally vulnerable to prolonged wars of attrition.
According to Giuseppe Dentice, senior analyst at the Mediterranean Observatory (OSMED) from the Institute of Political Studies “San Pio V,” prolonged wars are structurally more costly for Israel than for many of its adversaries.
But while the Israeli military remains highly capable technologically and operationally, Israel, unlike larger states, cannot easily absorb long-term disruptions to civilian life, reserve mobilization, economic productivity, and social stability without accumulating internal strain. Prolonged mobilization gradually affects productivity, social cohesion, and political stability.
The financial burden has already become severe. Repeated mobilizations and disruptions to production and services, and lack of investments continue to depress economic performance.
The Bank of Israel estimated the total economic cost of the Gaza war at approximately 352 billion shekels ($112 billion).
However, Dentice argues that Israeli society has historically demonstrated a remarkable capacity for resilience during periods perceived as existential crises, supported by a deeply rooted security culture and strong social solidarity during wartime.
“Yet resilience is not unlimited, and while societies can tolerate emergency conditions temporarily, they struggle far more when permanent insecurity becomes normalized,” he tells The Cradle.
But the danger, he warns, is not immediate collapse, but gradual exhaustion: the erosion of institutional trust, weakening social cohesion, growing political polarization, and declining confidence in the sustainability of permanent mobilization.
A state built for emergency
Under Netanyahu’s government, Israel has been engaged in simultaneous confrontation across seven fronts: Iran, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Gaza, and the occupied West Bank. Israeli leaders increasingly acknowledge that the region has entered an era of prolonged conflict and “perpetual war.”
Yet this contradiction between a state designed for temporary emergency and a strategy that increasingly normalizes permanent conflict may represent the central strategic dilemma Israel is facing today.
Nathan Brown, professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University, argues that Israel has tried to square this contradiction through forced population displacement, layered buffer zones, the destruction of civilian infrastructure, and the fragmentation of hostile territories. In practice, this means that when adversaries cannot be eliminated outright, the spaces that sustain them will be obliterated.
But the more Israel seeks security through overwhelming force and expanded military operations, the more it risks reproducing the same cycle that helped produce Hezbollah after 1982 and strengthened Hamas over decades of occupation and blockade.
Brown tells The Cradle that “In the short term, this has produced tactical successes … But it has required a high level of mobilization, led to increasing international isolation, and shown little evidence of long-term strategic success.”
Dentice similarly argues that the challenge is structural as much as military. A state built around emergency mobilization and rapid victory may struggle profoundly once emergency conditions become permanent. Continuous militarization risks weakening democratic institutions, undermining economic sustainability, and generating long-term societal fatigue.
At the same time, military victories unaccompanied by political solutions may unintentionally reproduce the very resistance movements they aim to eliminate.
Tactical superiority, strategic exhaustion
Although Netanyahu routinely declares victory after every ceasefire and insists Israel has emerged as “stronger than ever,” many observers remain deeply skeptical.
Paul Rogers, emeritus professor at the University of Bradford, tells The Cradle that Israel is trapped in what he describes as a condition of being “impregnable in its insecurity” – militarily dominant yet strategically less secure than it was several years ago.
Meanwhile, non-state actors such as Hezbollah, Hamas, Yemen’s Ansarallah-aligned armed forces, and Iran appear increasingly adapted to the logic of long-duration asymmetric warfare.
Unlike conventional militaries designed to achieve territorial control and decisive battlefield outcomes, these actors prioritize endurance, decentralization, flexibility, and attrition. Their objective is not necessarily outright military victory, but survival and the gradual erosion of their opponent’s political will.
Dentice contends that while Israel remains overwhelmingly superior technologically, economically, and conventionally, in wars of attrition the decisive factor is often not absolute strength, but the ability to absorb sustained costs while maintaining social cohesion and operational continuity.
In that sense, Dentice thinks non-state actors may possess structural advantages in prolonged conflict precisely because they are less constrained by the economic, political, and societal pressures that a state must constantly manage.
The central question, therefore, is no longer whether Israel can win wars militarily. It is whether a state built for rapid victories can indefinitely sustain a doctrine of permanent war without ultimately exhausting the foundations of its own security.
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