The Existential Threat

With the proclamation of the independence of the Hebrew State on 15 May 1948, the first Arab-Israeli war broke out. Israelis refer to it as the War of Independence, while Arabs remember it as the Nakba (“the Catastrophe”). The newly established Israeli army confronted the forces of Egypt, the Emirate of Transjordan, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon.

During the first phase of the fighting, the military balance remained fragile and inconclusive. The Arab armies fielded roughly 28,000 troops, supported by a limited number of aircraft and armored vehicles. Israel, meanwhile, relied on a force of nearly 40,000 fighters, whose core consisted of the Haganah and the Palmach.

After two months of fighting, a first ceasefire was arranged in July 1948. During this period, the Israeli military leadership succeeded in unifying the Jewish armed organizations, notably the Irgun and Lehi (the Stern Group), thereby establishing both a monopoly over military force and a unified chain of political command. At the same time, Israel recruited tens of thousands of additional soldiers and acquired significant quantities of modern weaponry from Czechoslovakia, then part of the Soviet sphere of influence. The Israeli army soon numbered close to 100,000 troops, equipped with aircraft, tanks, and artillery. From that moment onward, it achieved a strategic superiority over the combined Arab armies, an advantage that, in many respects, has endured to this day.

It was in this context that the armistice agreements with Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, and Lebanon were signed. In practice, they amounted to a recognition of the reality of the State of Israel, albeit one cloaked in a misleading political discourse designed to placate an outraged Arab public, particularly the Palestinians.

From that point onward, Israel seized the strategic initiative, first during the 1956 Suez War, and later in the June 1967 War. The leaders of the Hebrew State were convinced that Israel’s national security rested not only on the superiority of its armed forces, but also on its strategic position in the Middle East as an outgrowth of the new international order led by the United States and recognized by the Soviet Union and, with it, the socialist bloc.

Yet this alone was not enough. It also required constantly invoking the memory of the Holocaust whenever a Jew, anywhere in the world or in Israel, became the target of verbal abuse, physical harm, or, all the more so, an armed attack. This is how the notion of the “existential threat” came to occupy the center of Israeli political and media discourse, invoked in response to every challenge facing Israel, whether it originated from another state, an armed organization, or an individual, and whether Israel was acting offensively or claiming the right of self-defense.

Over time, the “existential threat” became a kind of mathematical constant, embedded in every strategic equation and treated as an inescapable premise.

The expression can be found in the writings and speeches of Israeli politicians and generals, in the analyses produced by research centers, and in the work of leading intellectuals. In this respect, there is little distinction between Israel’s political and academic elites and a public whose collective imagination remains deeply shaped by an existential anxiety.

Even some of the New Historians, who once challenged this conventional narrative, eventually retreated under sustained and well-documented pressure.

The events that followed the 7 October 2023 attack demonstrated how swiftly the West came to Israel’s aid at a moment when its military capabilities had been shaken and its security establishment had failed to contain the surprise assault of Al-Aqsa Flood, both in its scale and in its immediate consequences.

Palestinian Sunni Islamist extremism succeeded in exposing many of the structural weaknesses within Israel’s military establishment, plunging its leadership into shock, uncertainty, and strategic disorientation. Had it not been for the direct involvement of Pentagon generals, who effectively assumed operational leadership during the first week in order to restore military, security, and political coherence, though not psychological stability, the outcome might have been very different.

It took more than a month, together with the near-total devastation of the Gaza Strip, for Israel’s military establishment to regain the operational rhythm now set by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Defense Minister, Israel Katz.

More than a thousand days have now passed since that catastrophe. The consequences of the “Flood” unleashed by Palestinian Sunni Islamist extremism continue to deepen for the people of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, while the surge of Israeli military power has continued to spread across the wider Middle East. Matters have reached the point where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has reportedly told the leaders of countries such as India and the United Arab Emirates that they no longer needed to go through the White House.

“All they had to do,” he said, “was turn to him personally, and everything would be taken care of.”

When one looks today at the deployment of Israeli forces across the Palestinian territories, Syria, and Lebanon, the scale of the strategic leap made possible by the events of 7 October becomes unmistakable. Yet the notion of an “existential threat” remains the cornerstone of Israel’s strategic doctrine. It now has three distinct faces that must be eliminated.

Three Faces

Orders have been issued to neutralize each of these three faces in the name of eliminating what is portrayed as an existential threat to the State and the nation.

The First Face

The first is Dr. Hossam Abu Safiya, a pediatrician, neonatologist, and director of Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahia, in the northern Gaza Strip. Time and again, he was ordered through loudspeakers to evacuate the wounded so that the hospital could be completely destroyed. Soon afterwards, shells began raining down from both the air and the ground. Yet he remained at his post, saving lives, above all those of children.

His own son, who had not yet reached the age of twenty, was killed at the entrance to the hospital. The father buried him beside the hospital wall, then returned immediately to caring for his young patients and the wounded.

When the medical complex was eventually reduced to rubble, Dr. Abu Safiya and his entire staff were arrested before the eyes of the world in live television broadcasts. Arrested in December 2024, he remains in detention to this day, where, according to testimony collected by international organizations, he has been subjected to systematic torture intended to destroy his humanity.

He continues to be held without formal charges under Israel’s Unlawful Combatants Law. The investigation into his alleged links with armed groups has, to date, failed to produce any evidence.

Yet he is still alive.

And he, too, continues to embody an existential threat.

The Second Face

She is neither a doctor nor an anonymous figure whose identity, convictions, or commitments are unknown. Nor does she live in Israel or Palestine. She is the Lebanese journalist Amal Khalil, who, alongside photojournalist Zeinab Faraj, documented the daily lives of the people of South Lebanon.

In the village of Tayri, she was targeted twice: first when the convoy in which she was travelling came under attack, and again when the house where she had sought refuge was itself struck, while rescue teams were prevented from reaching the site.

Is this not the very definition of a premeditated assassination?

All of this was accompanied by official claims that she had repeatedly been warned.

According to the Lebanese Order of Journalists, twenty-seven Lebanese media professionals have been killed since the launch of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood. The World Health Organization has also documented 137 attacks against healthcare facilities and medical infrastructure.

The Third Face

In this same month of July, on 8 July 1972, the Beirut suburb of Hazmieh was shaken by a car bomb that killed the writer, artist, and editor-in-chief of Al-Hadaf, Ghassan Kanafani, together with his niece Lamees Najm, who was not yet seventeen years old.

Kanafani himself was only thirty-six.

He had portrayed Palestine through his drawings, written novels and short stories translated into seventeen languages, authored countless political editorials, and served as a leading figure in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Yet he never carried a weapon.

Since then, the writer, the journalist, and the intellectual have themselves become existential threats.

Today, 265 journalists have been killed in the war in Palestine, while hundreds more have been wounded. International organizations have also documented attacks on, and the destruction of, dozens of media institutions.

Thus, the doctor, the journalist, and the writer become targets for assassination or imprisonment simply because they practice their profession.

This cannot simply be accepted as the natural order of things. Independent legal case files should be prepared for every victim, outside any official framework, and each case pursued individually before the competent courts. Israel’s invocation of the so-called existential threat can no longer be allowed to serve as a shield against accountability, a means of escaping justice, and an instrument for continuing to blackmail the international community.