What Role for Israel?

Over the past decades, and even more clearly in recent years, Israel has demonstrated the extent of its formidable military power. It has managed to strike its adversaries on multiple fronts, use its intelligence, technological and military superiority to impose new realities, and establish itself as one of the region’s strongest military powers.

But this is where the great paradox emerges: what has Israel gained, strategically, from all these victories?

A military victory becomes a historic victory only when it produces a reality that is safer and more stable than the one that preceded it.

The problem is that the project of “Fortress Israel,” or “Israel as a military empire,” may achieve successive victories on the battlefield while simultaneously accumulating ever greater levels of rejection, hostility and isolation around Israel.

This is where a distinction must be made between the ability to defeat an adversary and the ability to build the future.

Israel may be able to weaken Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran or any other adversary. It may be able to destroy military capabilities, occupy territory and impose new security conditions. But the real strategic question is not what happens the day after victory, but what happens ten or twenty years later.

If every war produces a new generation that is angrier, and if every military victory requires another war a few years later to protect it, then we are no longer looking at a security strategy, but at the permanent management of conflict.

More dangerously, the problem is no longer confined to the Middle East. Israel’s image on the international stage is coming under growing pressure, particularly among broad segments of younger generations, public opinion and civil society in many countries. Israel should not view this shift as merely a public-relations problem that can be addressed with a better PR campaign.

It is a potential long-term strategic risk.

States, no matter how great their military power, cannot survive on military strength alone. They need legitimacy, economic relations, alliances, political support and the ability to engage with other societies.

And if Israel reaches a point where it can defeat most of its adversaries militarily while gradually losing the support of a significant part of global public opinion, it will face a dangerous contradiction:

Israel becomes militarily stronger but could become politically weaker.

This may be one of the greatest risks to the future of the state itself. Military power can protect borders, but it cannot, by itself, safeguard a state’s legitimacy for decades.

It is at this stage that the choice facing Israel becomes clearer.

One path is to continue the model of Israel as the dominant military power in the Middle East: a state that relies on military superiority, deterrence, preemptive operations, the expansion of its security perimeter and, perhaps, direct or indirect control over the territories surrounding it.

This path may appear successful in the short term because Israel has the superiority needed to pursue it.

But it contains a structural problem: the greater the expansion of its dominance, the greater the power required to maintain it.

Every new use of force generates new resistance.

And every new resistance is used to justify a further use of force.

In this way, the state gradually turns into a military fortress living in a state of near-permanent war.

The second path begins with a radically different question:

Rather than asking how it can reshape the Middle East to make it more conducive to Israel’s interests, why should Israel not ask how it can become a natural and accepted part of the Middle East?

This is where the medical analogy becomes relevant.

When an organ is transplanted into a new body, the success of the operation ultimately depends on the ability of both the organ and the body to achieve compatibility. Trying instead to reshape the entire body to accommodate the transplanted organ is a recipe for permanent conflict.

Politically, the Israeli project has long been based on an effort to reshape its surrounding environment by force to make it more conducive to Israel’s security.

Perhaps it is time to reverse the equation.

Israel is not being asked to give up its security, its power or its citizens’ right to live in safety. It is being asked to redefine the very meaning of power.

An Israel living at peace with an independent Palestinian state, participating in a regional economy, contributing to projects in water, energy, technology, medicine and education, and opening its universities and research centers to regional cooperation could be safer than an Israel possessing thousands of additional weapons but compelled to use them every few years.

At this point, the establishment of a Palestinian state becomes more than simply a solution to the Palestinian issue.

It becomes the gateway to a historic transformation of Israel’s role itself.

The establishment of a viable Palestinian state and the end of the long military conflict would enable Israel to move from the logic of the “fortress” to that of the “partner.”

The difference between the two models is considerable.

Fortress Israel must constantly preserve its superiority over its surroundings.

Partner Israel, by contrast, needs to see its surroundings prosper.

Fortress Israel sees the power of others as a threat.

Partner Israel, by contrast, benefits from the stability and prosperity of its surroundings.

Fortress Israel constantly needs walls, borders, armies and allies to maintain its superiority.

Partner Israel, by contrast, builds shared interests that make war costly for everyone.

We thus arrive at a historic question, perhaps even more important than the question of who won this war or that:

Does Israel want to defeat the Middle East, or does it want to live in it?

The first choice may produce many military victories, but after several decades it could leave Israel militarily powerful but politically and morally isolated.

The second requires painful concessions and compromises, foremost among them genuine recognition of the Palestinians’ right to statehood and self-determination. But it opens up a possibility that military power has never been able to offer Israel since its creation:

To become a state living in security, not because everyone fears it, but because others no longer see its existence as a threat to their future.

That is the difference between a military victory and a historic victory.