War Without Strategy: How Political Delusion Undermines Israel’s Security
A damaged residential building in Tehran, following airstrikes on March 15, 2026.
Yossi Alpher — April 6, 2026
Views and positions expressed here are those of the writer, and do not necessarily represent NJN's views and policy positions.
Q. What is wrong with Israel’s war strategy? Can we, at this point in time, draw some conclusions at the strategic level?
A. The drawbacks and disasters-in-the-making are too obvious to be swept under the carpet any longer. The problems are national and historic in nature. The point of departure for examining them is October 7, 2023. By not launching a probing inquiry into what went wrong that day, the Netanyahu government and the security establishment are delivering a host of strategic disasters.
Q. That’s a heavy allegation. Since the intelligence failure is what triggered October 7, start there. What new failures did it beget?
A. Let’s start with Israel’s north as a case study. Remember Prime Minister Netanyahu declaring triumphantly around late 2025, “Hezbollah has collapsed... it is on its knees. We’re on our way to a giant victory... We are now a global power.” Fast forward to last week: Northern Command Commander Major General Rafi Milo meets with residents of Israel’s northern border settlements, who have been under constant missile and rocket siege for over a month, and acknowledges apologetically that IDF Intelligence underestimated Hezbollah’s fighting ability. It will take months to push back Hezbollah. The northern Israelis returned to their battered homes along the Lebanon border too soon after the previous round.
What happened here? Both the national political and the national intelligence leadership failed spectacularly to address an issue of vital national-security importance: the Hezbollah threat from the north. They demonstrated they had learned nothing from the October 7 intelligence debacle. Worse, there is no indication whatsoever that the politicians have learned to stop boasting and bragging, Trump-style, or that the intelligence chiefs are cleaning house.
I find myself referring back 60 years to identify a relevant frame of reference: the behavior of the Arab world led by Egypt’s Abd al-Nasser, lying, boasting, and deluding its way into the disaster (for it) of the 1967 Six-Day War. Yes, I’m comparing us to the Arab world at its worst.
Q. This is true regarding Iran as well, not just Hezbollah?
A. Sadly, yes. The Mossad thought decapitating the Iranian leadership would topple the regime? Nobody factored in Hormuz and oil? Someone looked at the map of Middle East minorities and concluded that the Kurds would help us topple the ayatollahs’ regime in Tehran? Really? These are glaring intelligence failures, both Israeli and American. A veritable host of scholars and security retirees knew better.
Apropos decapitation, and putting aside any moral or ethical qualms, how did the entire Israeli security establishment get it into its head that killing the enemy leadership, whether terrorist (Hamas’s Sinwar) or national-political (Iran’s Khamenei)--and of course boasting about it endlessly--would somehow produce more moderate enemy leaders, or an exploitable gap in leadership, or give Israel a tangible advantage?
Is painting Israel in the eyes of the neighborhood, and indeed the world, as a country that is assassinating its way through contemporary military history, the best use of Israeli resources and security prestige? Isn’t the Knesset’s monstrous new racist death penalty law--for Palestinian Muslim terrorists only--yet another manifestation of this state of mind?
Q. You paint a very worrisome picture. What basic societal factors lie behind it? Or is this just a momentary aberration?
A. No, this is no momentary aberration. Israeli society is changing noticeably. The question here is whether this dynamic has affected core issues like our national capacity to address strategic challenges truthfully and to assess the enemy objectively. I would argue that, as we become more jingoistic and messianic, our concept of the enemy is affected. We have developed an overblown, mystical-messianic assessment of ourselves--hence greater disdain for our neighbors.
It is no accident that Israel has the most right-religious-messianic government in its history. That, in Israel’s representative democracy, appears to be what the people want. With Kahanist Itamar Ben-Gvir running the Israel Police, annexationist Bezalel Smotrich in charge of the ‘territories,’ and Orit Strook in charge of settlements and ‘national missions’--fascist terminology at its best--the outcome is inevitable. Oh, and don’t forget blustering, ignorant Minister of Defense Israel Katz, a Likudnik. This is Bibi’s very own New Middle East.
It is no accident that at a time of existential confrontation with Shiite-extremist Iran and its proxies, Israeli messianist settlers and their accomplices, some in IDF uniform, are exploiting the fog of war to expedite the expulsion of Palestinians from the West Bank. The Netanyahu government is effectively turning its back on Jewish pogroms and dead Arabs, and even moving openly toward territorial annexation.
Meanwhile, if anyone is paying attention to what is left of the Palestinian issue in Gaza, the focus is on Trump’s (currently frozen) formula for progress in the half of Gaza that the IDF no longer occupies. There, incidentally, Hamas--meaning the Muslim Brotherhood, i.e., Muslim messianism--is alive and well and in charge.
As Palestine-expert Michael Milstein notes, “Judea and Samaria are gradually replacing the Gaza Strip as the capital of Israel’s fantasies, meaning the region that reflects the replacement of smart policy by illusions.” One such illusion, propagated by some on the religious right, is that the replacement of Palestinian West Bankers by ‘hill youth’ armed settlers is good for Israel’s overall security: a ‘security belt’ protecting the rest of Israel. In fact, this portends the beginning of Israel as an apartheid entity that loses its Jewish majority, its democracy, and its soul.
History may yet look back at this juncture in time as the inflexion point for expanded conflict between two fundamentalist Middle East creeds: messianic Judaism in its settler-National Religious and Haredi permutations, and messianic Islam in its Shiite (Iran and allies) and Sunni (Muslim Brotherhood and patrons) forms.
Q. Is everything around this war so bad? So negative?
A. Of course not. Israel can point to many positive war achievements, from Iran’s temporary collapse as an active enemy, via the performance of the Israeli civilian rear under missile attack, to multiple examples of fruitful Israeli collaboration with moderate Sunni Arab neighbors. And of course, the extraordinary precedent of combat partnership with the United States.
This is precisely what enables so many in Israel to ignore or casually dismiss the erosion of Israeli strategic assets and capabilities that has accompanied this war. This is where we are increasingly resembling our non-democratic neighbors. This is where we are increasingly Trumpian.
Q. That suggests a broader global dimension...
A. Instead of smugly celebrating every self-satisfied and self-contradictory comment Trump makes about the war, Israel should look at what the man is doing to America and its values. And--closer to home--to US-Europe relations. That the growing divide within the Western world--over oil, over Hormuz, over Ukraine, over Trump’s trashing of NATO--does not worry the Israeli leadership should be yet another source of concern at this critical phase in the Iran war. Not to mention the net loss of support for Israel among Americans.
Beyond Israel’s own disastrous march to the messianic right, will history hold the Israeli and American publics to account for following or even tolerating Trump? Or will history be Trumpian?
Yossi Alpher is an independent security analyst. He is the former director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University, a former senior official with the Mossad, and a former IDF intelligence officer.
Photo by Avash Media, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
