Israel’s enemies are making the security hawks’ case – Israel & Jewish News

(Oct. 1, 2026 / JNS)

Foes of the Jewish state have spent decades making the same strategic mistake: They assume that Israelis can be frightened into behaving like people who have somewhere else to go.

Sometimes this mistake takes the form of conventional war; other times, terrorism. Often, it comes as some combination of rockets, hostage-taking, economic isolation, diplomatic pressure and threats of destruction. The underlying calculation remains that if sufficient pain can be imposed, Israelis will eventually conclude that resistance costs more than retreat.

This is not entirely irrational. Coercion and deterrence work this way in international politics. States possess interests, rank them in importance and abandon peripheral ones when defending them becomes too costly.

Israel, however, increasingly regards fewer of its security concerns as peripheral. The results are ironic: Israel’s enemies’ great strategic achievement has not been frightening Israelis into submission; it has been persuading them that the security hawks may be right.

For years, Israeli strategy depended on an uncomfortable distinction between what its enemies said and what they were prepared to do. Hamas could retain maximalist ideological objectives while governing Gaza. Hezbollah could threaten Israel while remaining constrained by the devastation another Lebanon war would bring. Iran could employ revolutionary rhetoric while understanding the costs of direct confrontation.

This was not pure naiveté on Israel’s part. International relations often depend upon discounting rhetoric. Governments routinely assume that ideological language will eventually collide with material interests, self-preservation and the constraints of governing.

The Hamas-led massacre of 1,200 people in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 made that assumption much more expensive. The attack did more than expose failures of intelligence, border defense and military preparedness. It undermined a broader Israeli theory of risk: that Hamas could be contained through deterrence, surveillance, periodic military operations, economic arrangements and the assumption that governing Gaza gave it something to lose.

The political fallout from Oct. 7 extended far beyond immediate anger at Hamas. It forced Israelis to confront the severe consequences of misreading an adversary’s intent. This changed the equation.

Before the attacks, Israel could see itself as facing two primary strategic risks: overestimating the threat from Hamas—thereby incurring unnecessary military, economic and political costs—or underestimating it, only to discover that a supposedly manageable enemy was actually planning a catastrophic attack.

The events of Oct. 7 radically altered the perceived costs of those errors. The question ceased to be: What does excessive caution cost us? It became: What happens if we are wrong again?

Unsurprisingly, surveys found a profound deterioration in Israelis’ sense of personal security. A year after the attack, roughly two-thirds of respondents told the Israel Democracy Institute that their personal security had worsened.

This does not automatically produce consensus about governments, wars or tactics. Israeli society remains fiercely divided, and by Sept. 2025—when the institute released the survey—most Israelis wanted the Gaza war ended. Clearly, security pessimism and support for a particular policy is not the same thing.

Yet the underlying calculation has changed. Deterrence ordinarily seeks to persuade an adversary that an action’s costs will exceed its benefits. Threaten enough destruction, punishment or economic misery and rational governments will reconsider their intentions. However, this works only when all parties are rational, and it works best when the parties are bargaining over things they can afford to lose. Borders can be negotiated, military bases closed and trade concessions rescinded.

Ordinary deterrence says: I can hurt you, so stop. An existential threat can be heard differently: I can hurt you, therefore prepare.

But existential threats, particularly if celestially inspired, are in a different category. The cost of action is no longer measured against peace but against the possibility of catastrophe.

Israeli strategic culture was already unusually sensitive to that possibility. Israel is geographically small and lacks strategic depth. Jewish historical memory adds another layer. The Holocaust is not ancient mythology, and neither is the expulsion of ancient Jewish communities across the Middle East and North Africa. The Jewish conclusion from the 20th century was not that every threat produces annihilation, but that assuming a threat is exaggerated can sometimes have dire and irreversible consequences.

Oct. 7 reinforced that instinct. It created a strategic feedback loop that Israel’s enemies fail to appreciate. They expect that violence will increase Israeli fear. It does. Yet that fear does not produce cowering or retreat; it produces investment.

Wars generate military reforms, intelligence innovations, barriers, surveillance, defense systems and new operational doctrines. Rockets produce interception systems. Tunnels produce detection technologies and specialized combat units. Iranian missiles produce additional investment in layered air defense and long-range capabilities. The threat becomes the brief for research and development.

Ordinary deterrence says: I can hurt you, so stop. An existential threat can be heard differently: I can hurt you, therefore prepare.

More importantly, each demonstrated threat strengthens the domestic political argument of those who warned against underestimating it. This is Israel’s enemies’ strategic error. They spend years trying to illustrate that their threats are credible and then appear surprised when Israelis eventually believe them.

A militia accumulates rockets, develops tunnels, trains fighters, attacks civilians and repeatedly declares that Israel should disappear. Israeli planners then become less interested in whether each statement is literal, rhetorical or intended for domestic consumption. They begin planning for capability multiplied by possible intent.

That may produce errors of its own. A country organized around avoiding another strategic surprise can become excessively suspicious, mistake manageable threats for existential ones or reject opportunities because the cost of misplaced trust feels unbearable. Yet that is precisely the dilemma Israel’s enemies have helped create.

Another recurring mistake is interpreting Israel’s aversion to casualties as evidence that sufficient casualties will break Israeli resolve.

Israel indeed places an unusually high premium on protecting life. It spends enormous sums intercepting missiles, safeguarding civilians and recovering hostages. From the outside, such sensitivity can appear exploitable.

However, valuing life and being unwilling to fight are not synonymous. A society convinced that its children face an existential danger may tolerate enormous military expenditure precisely because it values them so highly.

The larger consequence is that Israel’s enemies continually make the case for the hardest version of Israeli security doctrine. Tell Israelis that an adversary can be contained, and restraint remains conceivable. Demonstrate that containment was an illusion, and the next Israeli leader proposing restraint faces a considerably harder question: What if you’re wrong?

That is the legacy of Oct. 7. Every future assurance about Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, Gaza or any prospective security arrangement now passes through the memory of a previous assurance that proved disastrously false.

Israel’s enemies have spent decades trying to convince Israelis that their threats should be taken seriously. Their strategic problem may be that they are succeeding.