Israel’s Long Walls
A grand strategy of turning Israel into an island
After Israel’s recent victories, a number of commentators have suggested that Israel’s strategy in the Middle East is implicitly or explicitly aimed at regional hegemony.
This is not, as far as I can tell, Israel’s strategy. It doesn’t seem to me that the mainstream of Israeli political thought includes any serious desire or intent to act as a regional hegemon. I don’t believe that regional hegemony is under serious discussion. They have neither the manpower nor the desire. Like the ancient Spartans, the Israelis do not covet their neighbors’ territory or wealth. They don’t even engage in significant trade with the rest of the Middle East.
Their ambition is to be left alone by their neighbors. This ambition will remain unfulfilled.
Israel is in a dangerous neighborhood. Various metaphors have been used to illustrate the strategic situation, including Jabotinsky’s ‘iron wall’ and Barak’s ‘villa in the jungle.’ Several states envision themselves as heirs to age-old empires: for instance, Iran and the Persian empire, and now Turkey and the Ottoman empire. For the Jews to be sovereign in the Holy Land is a standing affront to anyone with these ambitions for regional dominance.
Despite the fact that Israel is grounded in the Middle East, Israelis want isolation: Rather than a hegemon, a better role would be that of an offshore balancer, reinforcing regimes and sub-national security communities in the Middle East that can act as continental swords. In such a role, Israel can leverage relative wealth, intelligence capability, and technological overmatch to reinforce territorial powers and protectorates which act as geographic buffer states or as local disrupters of the hegemonic intentions of Turkey and Iran. Of course, the utility of buffer states has been dramatically altered by the proliferation of long-range drones and ballistic missiles, cyber warfare, supply chain trojans, and other remote attack vectors.
All of which begs the question: Is Iran a neighbor? As little as 20 years ago, the answer was ‘no’—for Iran to attack Israel required either terrorism, or marching an army across intervening states. But today, the technological situation has changed: Iran has ballistic missiles and drones that can reach Israel from across the Middle East, as well as significant cyber capabilities. In effect, everyone with these technologies who is within striking distance has become a direct threat..
Such a dilemma has shown up repeatedly over the course of human history: To pick one of the oldest similar situations, most of the significant ancient Greek cities were originally built inland from the coast (I.e., Corinth, Athens), around defensible mountain positions (i.e., Acrocorinth, Acropolis). With the advantages of maritime trade, why build miles inland? The reason was simple: Raiders, pirates, and attackers could appear with no warning from the sea, so building a city right against the sea was intensely dangerous. For a truly coastal city to be defensible, high walls and a navy were required, both of which were expensive.
As some cities turned to the sea, they built ports. Athens, the greatest of the Greek maritime cities in the classic age, built the Piraeus, and connected it to the city with long walls, which turned Athens, in effect, into an island. Contemporary siegecraft was not adequate for destroying these walls. As long as the walls held, and the Athenian navy dominated the sea, Athens was largely impervious to attack from the land. This negated the power of their rival, Sparta: They could come and burn the fields and olive groves, which created considerable chagrin for the landed aristocracy and the hoplites that manned the phalanx, but the city would not starve or surrender so long as the Athenian navy dominated the seas, and the Spartans did not need to be met in the field. These long walls were a technological innovation that fundamentally altered the geostrategic facts, and had enormous cultural and military significance. Most of all, Athens’ long walls gave them dramatically enhanced defensive capability.
Israel is a commercial, maritime society. Pericles said, in the funeral oration: “we have forced every sea and land to be the highway of our daring.” Israel has turned the skies into the highway for their daring, using their air force to generate surprise and alter the strategic balance across their region in ways that few anticipated two years ago. The Leviathan off-shore natural gas field has accelerated the effort to build a navy, since these facilities have to be protected. The Israeli economy faces the air and the sea. Israelis contribute in a significant way to the global balance of technological power, and are at the cutting edge in biotech, chip design, military technology, and many other fields. They are using these advantages to construct their own long walls.
The Israelis look with envy at Great Britain, Japan, Taiwan and the United States. They wish that they too could be an island, or an island in effect, with only peaceful or ineffectual neighbors on their land borders, and shielded from terrorist incursions or invasion by a maritime border. Nevertheless, through the use of a combination of intelligence, technology, and kinetic action, they are turning themselves into an artificial island. For that, they need weak neighbors, calm borders, a truly effective military force and continued technological innovation that will allow them to neutralize both direct and proxy attacks from their more-distant regional adversaries.
And they’re well on their way to achieving this ambition. The key components of such a strategy are as follows:
Israel will continue to invest in counter-drone and counter-ballistic-missile technology. With directed-energy weapons, drones and cruise missiles will be largely neutralized, at least as an attack vector aimed at key facilities and cities. Hypersonics and ballistic missiles will remain a threat, but as long as Iran and their proxies can be prevented from building and launching them en masse, the threat will be modest. As other countries buy the Israeli systems, the costs of the munitions will come down through economies of scale.
Israel now understands that passive defense at their borders will never be adequate: Regional threats need to be neutralized proactively and kinetically.
There can be no hostile armies on their borders. In the future, any Iranian attempt to establish encirclement-by-proxy must be thwarted. Israel’s strategic depth will not start at their borders, but well into the territory of their neighbors: Lebanon south of the Letanni River, Syria to the outskirts of Damascus, and Judea and Samaria to the Jordan River.
Hezbollah has been largely destroyed, and the next step is for the Lebanese army to reassert sovereignty. Until Hezbollah is comprehensively dismantled, Israel will continue attacking their facilities and people to ensure that they can never regroup or reconstruct their massive missile threat of two years ago.
Egypt and Jordan, while not values-aligned, are strongly interests-aligned with Israel, and are unlikely to engage in any substantive hostility—both regimes are far more afraid of the Muslim Brotherhood and their Iranian backers than they are of Israel, and both will continue to engage in significant security coordination with the Israelis for as long as the current regimes remain in power. Israel will continue to act to ensure that these regimes do in fact remain in power.
The Syrian army has been destroyed, and their air defenses have been eliminated. The new regime will likely be morally repugnant to Western eyes, but will have limited or no capability to harm Israeli interests.
Turkey will not be allowed to dominate Syria or construct a proxy state there: A geographic buffer will be enforced as a de facto demilitarized zone. Turkey has aspirations toward becoming a regional hegemon, especially should the Iranian regime collapse. (Though the chaos this would generate would likely harm Turkey more than it would serve its interests.)
Israel cannot and will not allow Iran to develop nuclear weapons. The current Iranian regime has been explicit about their genocidal ambitions toward the Jews of the diaspora and Israel and about their intention to attack and destroy the United States. A nuclear weapon in their hands might very plausibly be used for a first strike, and would certainly deter a variety of conventional attacks against Iran aimed at thwarting their use of terror and limiting their offensive grey-zone warfare.
The economic and social downsides generated by continuous Iranian-sponsored and -sourced missile and drone attacks on Israel are non-trivial. If nothing else, they harm the tourist industry, which is economically significant. Israel will continue to act to destroy the relevant supply chains. This means that Israel will, in effect, prevent Iran and their proxies from exercising control over their own airspace for the foreseeable future. Any action aimed at constructing an air defense network will likely be met with immediate kinetic action.
Gaza is not an existential threat. A geographic buffer will be established, and Gaza (and possibly parts of Judea and Samaria) will likely be broken into a series of small “clan-istans” or emirates, governed by individual families, who have to compete for Israeli sponsorship by providing security. It seems most unlikely that any single organization will be allowed to govern Gaza in the near future.
Israel will build regional alliances with powers that are aligned either on strategic interests and/or on values: Particularly with Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Greece.
A key policy goal in Israel must be enhancing social cohesion. One of Israel’s great advantages over their regional adversaries is that a large fraction of the population is prepared to make personal sacrifices in support of the survival of the polity. Expanding the fraction of the population that participates in the economy and from which the IDF draws manpower is critical, and will be a generational project.
The element of surprise: Israel has shown an ability to generate strategic, tactical and technological surprise, across multiple fronts and multiple domains. This will factor into the calculations of adversaries and will serve as a powerful deterrent going forward. The current wars have been won in part by revealing hidden capabilities; once these capabilities are revealed, they become dramatically less effective. Israel will need to continue investing heavily in new hidden capabilities that can generate strategic surprise in future conflicts. Such investments are both expensive and difficult to leverage into economic growth through dual-use commercialization, because they need to remain secret.
As I’ve written elsewhere, I continue to believe that the least-worst outcome (from a US perspective) to the current conflict would have included attacks on the Iranian oil terminals, which would likely have caused a regime collapse in Iran. There seems to be no appetite for such an attack: I would speculate that China and the US government have intervened to prevent this, as it would spike oil prices and create economic consequences world-wide. I think that the net benefit of this stratagem would be to the US, and particularly to those state economies (that export energy and generate oil and gas) in which Republicans are the dominant political force.
Israel’s strategy should serve as a guidepost for the United States: As hypersonics and ballistic missile capabilities proliferate, the status of the United States as an island will be eroded. North Korean nuclear tipped ICBMs can now reach North American cities. Iran could choose to invest in building ICBMs with conventional warheads, which would, at this point, be an incremental optimization activity, rather than a science project. Others could build these systems as well; the technology for ballistic missiles with regional range (IRBMs) is now well-understood and is in multiple hands. A barrage of several hundred ballistic missiles, each with 1,000 pounds of explosive, could do immense damage to cities in the United States, if we don’t invest in both (1) preventing such threats from emerging and (2) building the equivalent of Israel’s Iron Dome as a last line of defense over our cities.
Iran’s conventional ballistic missiles gave them immense leverage against Israel, up until the moments when Israel (1) demonstrated the ability to intercept nearly all of them even in a massive barrage and (2) destroyed the threat at its source. The United States appears to have no comprehensive defensive system in place comparable to Israel’s Iron Dome: Imagine the leverage that Maduro, for instance, could generate for Venezuela by copying the Iranian strategy. He would not need to build very many missiles, and they would not need any more capability than Iran’s, in order to threaten Miami, New Orleans, Houston – or the Panama Canal.