Since its establishment, a significant portion of Israel's political and economic resources has been dedicated to achieving and maintaining military and technological superiority over its enemies. This superiority was a crucial component of Ze'ev Jabotinsky's "Iron Wall" concept, which became an important part of Israel's national security doctrine, shaped by David Ben-Gurion. According to this concept, Israel must establish an "iron wall" of indisputable military superiority that would extinguish any Arab hope of destroying Israel militarily. Jabotinsky believed that only when the Arabs despaired and understood they had no chance of winning a military struggle would they be willing to negotiate political arrangements with the Jews.
Israel's absolute military and technological superiority has turned it into a highly self-confident nation. Israel not only enjoyed but also cultivated the image of a "formidable state," willing to act boldly and with unrestrained force to achieve its goals and deter its enemies. Imagine how Israel would react if Israeli security apparatus personnel were killed on its streets, if its ports were paralyzed by a cyberattack, or if enemy planes caused sonic booms over Tel Aviv. These are all actions Israel has taken against its neighbors because it could. As a paraphrase of Theodore Roosevelt's saying, Israel not only carried a big stick but also spoke loudly and clearly.
Restoring the Enemy's Hope (that Israeli Defeat Is Possible)
However, in recent years, the effectiveness of the Iron Wall doctrine has significantly eroded, even though Israel continues to maintain its military and technological superiority. The reason is that Israel has fallen into a strategic inferiority. Iran and its proxies have identified Israel's aversion to the burden of war and its addiction to quiet as evidence of weakness in Israeli society. As a result, they have patiently and persistently built a kinetic ring of fire around Israel while continuing to bleed Israel through intermittent rocket fire towards the Gaza envelope and occasionally even towards the center of the country. As they expected, these actions were not met with decisive military operations aimed at uprooting the threat but rather with a series of short and aggressive actions in Gaza or Syria, whose rationale was to quickly return to a balance that would allow the continuation of "normal life."
From a historical perspective, the Meridor Committee of 2007 will also be remembered as contributing to the “October 7th conception” and the erosion of the Iron Wall's effectiveness. The committee, established after the Second Lebanon War, recommended adding a defensive component to the national security concept, which inadvertently rendered the need to decisively win wars seemingly redundant and allowed for the enemy's power buildup.
The Religious Shift in the Struggle
Simultaneously, the struggle against Israel has shifted from a national to a religious one. The combination of a fundamentalist ideology that sanctifies death with the Iranians' self-consciousness as a historical power with a mission to export the Islamic revolution makes the iron wall doctrine, as we understand it, much less relevant. The "Islamization" of the conflict has made it more global, with direct implications, for example, on the connection between Islamist groups associated with Hamas and radical left-wing entities in the West. These two processes – the religious shift in the struggle against Israel and the global soft power attack against Israel – have contributed to rendering the Iron Wall doctrine irrelevant (for more on these processes, see the strategy document for dealing with the Iranian octopus).
In such a reality, the image of the 'formidable state,' which was strengthened after Israel's military actions and maintained its deterrence for decades following its establishment, has turned, in the eyes of Israel's enemies, into a sign of its weakness and desperation. Our enemies have managed to see, even without binoculars, that Israel's use of force, including its 'bold' and unrestrained actions, is merely tactical and aimed at buying quiet."
The Iron Wall 2.0 doctrine
There is also potential for good news. Given Israel's military and technological superiority, Iran and its proxies have not built a military force aimed at defeating the IDF on the battlefield or "conquering Tel Aviv," but rather, as mentioned, to break the spirit of Israeli society. As we identified in a previous paper, this is essentially a resilience competition between us and our enemies, where we might have several structural advantages. Israel needs to take steps to strengthen Israeli resilience, particularly preparing for a prolonged period of attrition warfare economically, militarily, and socially. In our paper, we concluded that to win the resilience competition, Israel should also challenge the sovereign space of its enemies by leveraging the social unrest resulting from oppression and economic conditions there. Ultimately, Israel's survival depends more on itself than on its enemies.
In other words, Israeli society must develop "social superiority" – mental toughness, social cohesion, and resilience that will allow it to endure a prolonged period of uncertainty and difficulty as part of the open war our enemies are waging against us. By doing so, there is a chance to eliminate their hope of imploding Israel.
Their goal is to break the Israeli spirit – so let's not break.
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