The majority of the Israeli public has been eagerly awaiting the deal to release the hostages and is deeply invested in its completion. There is, however, strong opposition from a significant portion of the public, mainly on the political right, who see the deal as a military defeat and fear the risk Israel is taking on by freeing terrorists and withdrawing from Gaza.

The public debate is focused on values. Do we lay our emphasis on the value of saving lives and redeeming the captives, or on national resistance and the ensuring of future security? Opposing political approaches are contained within this debate. Parts of the right have not concealed their belief that the goals of the war should include the occupation and settlement of the Gaza Strip, and even the collapse of the Palestinian Authority’s rule in the territories of Judea and Samaria.

The values debate is of course important, and the political dispute over the Israeli vision is not new. But alongside these two debates there is another question that in my view has not received the attention it deserves: What is the role of the October 7 war in Israeli strategy?

Two strategic approaches can answer this question.

The War on Terror approach. According to this approach, the Hamas attack proved that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the war for the Land of Israel, has not subsided. Since their historic defeat in 1948, the Palestinians have been pushed into a war of terror and even underwent a second radicalization when their struggle changed from a nationalist to a religious struggle. The October 7 attack proved that Israel’s withdrawal from territories did not reduce terrorism but in fact intensified it to the point that it now poses an existential threat. The obvious conclusion, according to this way of thinking, is that the Gaza Strip and the cities of the West Bank must be captured and held to ensure the IDF’s freedom of action in the war on terror. This approach tends to draw the same conclusion about south Lebanon and the Syrian Golan Heights. Fighting terrorism and protecting civilians are not possible only from the border line. Therefore, Israel must expand territorially and claim buffer zones for itself in Lebanon and Syria as well as in Gaza.

The Iran-Israel War approach. According to this view, the October 7 attack is the moment that Israeli strategy finally woke up to the nature of the war launched against it by Iran. The more Israel focused on the Iranian nuclear threat, the less it understood that Iran’s strategy relied as much, if not more, on its axis of proxies as a weapon against Israel as it did on pursuing nuclear weapons. Although Iran’s proxy war on Israel had been discussed by the Israeli defense establishment for years, Israel failed to formulate either an appropriate strategy or an appropriate form of warfare to combat it. The October 7 war, therefore, was effectively a double disruption of Israeli strategic thinking that had gone on for decades.

The first component of the disruption is the fact that for years we made the mistake of thinking that the terrorism and popular uprisings we faced in Lebanon, Gaza, and Judea and Samaria marked the dying throes of the Israeli-Arab conflict. Peace and settlement processes on the one hand, and the weakening of the Arab states and trend of reconciliation with moderate states of the region on the other, created a false sense of security in Israel. In fact, Iran entered the vacuum during those decades, first quietly and then with great force, to unite the radical-religious forces in the region into a rising strategic vector that culminated in the October 7 attack.

The second component of disruption was at the military level. During the 1990s and 2000s, Israel developed an original military approach. Cutting-edge tactical intelligence and precision strike capabilities developed to counter enemy armor were creatively stretched to the point of creating an unwritten military doctrine for combating terrorism. On the tactical level, this doctrine relied on locating and attacking terrorist leadership and infrastructure targets; and on the political level, on ​​deterring the state hosting the terror through the threat of enormous damage that would be inflicted on it, mainly from the air, if it did not curb the terrorism hosted on its territory. But behind the seductive tactical efficiency, this approach hid a fundamental strategic failure. Undeterred and free to control territory, the terrorist organizations gradually developed into armies ready to attack Israel’s border fences.

According to the Iran-Israel War school of thought, the current war is the point of contact between the war vision carefully prepared by the Iranian axis and the Israeli military concept of fighting terrorism, which was rooted in the “end of wars” thinking of previous decades. This approach did not meet the challenge. The fact that Israel suffered such a catastrophic intelligence surprise, despite an abundance of information preceding the attack, shows that Israel was not looking at its enemies through the right glasses.

In reality, of course, the two approaches are not interchangeable. The current war reflects both the continuing trends of the historical war between the two national movements in the Land of Israel, one of which has become religiously radical, and the relatively new historical trend of the Iran-Israel war. Israeli strategy cannot afford to simultaneously pursue both approaches. It must determine which trend is the more dominant, as the practical implications of each are in sharp tension with each other.

The war’s achievements, as well as its failures, can be understood through the tension between the war on terror approach and military-war theory.

The failure of October 7 resulted from a deep belief that had developed in the Israeli system that deterrence operations in Gaza and the MBAM (the campaign between the wars) in the north constituted a substitute for a war approach, both defensively and offensively.

The rapid and relatively low-casualty occupation of the Gaza Strip was made possible, on a professional level, by a creative and successful extension of the counter-terrorism paradigm into a war context. Israel’s intelligence and airstrike capabilities were stretched with great skill, thanks to preliminary efforts made in recent years, to cover the more ill-prepared ground forces. Land maneuvering, after all, belongs to the era of war… However, the extension of the war over 15 months, the postponement of Rafah to the last stage, Israel’s failure to destroy Gaza’s “metro” system of underground terror tunnels, and the fact that the war became an attrition campaign in which Hamas’s pace of recruiting exceeded its pace of destruction all indicate that extending counter-terrorism tactics to a war context, without an appropriate strategy, is not enough.

In Lebanon, the IDF was content for almost a year to manage response equations dictated by the enemy, and had a “zero targets” policy on the border. However, in the late summer of 2024, a series of tactical successes out of the “war on terror” playbook, from the pagers and walkie-talkie attacks to a series of targeted assassinations, changed the situation. It returned the initiative to Israel while dragging the enemy into a spiral of errors that greatly weakened its strength. The fact that at that operational high point, Israel chose not to attack the Hezbollah army and defeat it in battle highlights the lack of a principled war approach. Instead, Israel chose to be content with clearing physical infrastructure from villages that Hezbollah had already abandoned. Even Israeli excellence in counterterrorism tactics, despite its fine achievements in the north, could not bridge the lack of a convincing military-war approach and capability.

The direct confrontation that developed during the war in distant circles indicates a similar gap. The Air Force demonstrated an impressive ability, backed by the massive Israeli intelligence enterprise, to reach and strike targets in both Iran and Yemen, and even penetrate Iranian air defenses. At the same time, it is clear that the war caught Israel without a principled approach or a practical strategy. It is clear, for example, that the attack on ports and energy facilities in Yemen made no impression on Houthi decision-makers. The war increased rather than reduced their power, influence, and possibly income. Iran’s decision to attack Israel directly – twice – can be understood as a display of self-confidence that had grown stronger against the backdrop of the shuffling that characterized the war until September 2024. Even after the destruction of an Iranian S-300 radar system in April and the series of strikes on Hezbollah in September, Iran thought it would be able to deter Israel from attacking Lebanon in October. Iran deviated from the strategy we had previously attributed to it – distancing the war from itself by employing proxies to do the war-making. Israel’s strategy regarding the actions carried out against it from Iraqi territory was to ignore it.

What is Israel’s current assessment of the strategic situation? Have the achievements of the war, the fall of the Assad regime in Syria, and the rise of the Trump administration in the United States removed the threat of the Iranian “ring of fire” strangulation strategy?

If the answer is yes, then it is possible that we can once again perceive the terrorist organizations around us as weak and isolated remnants of the Arab-Israeli conflict. In relation to these organizations, which were severely damaged during the war, Israel has returned to the status of a power capable of conducting protracted wars of attrition in Gaza and Lebanon. Such an approach would place buffer zones along the borders and a Sisyphean continuation of operations at the center of Israel’s strategy for the coming years. As for Gaza, we would renew the war as soon as possible to complete the goals that had been defined for it.

But in my opinion, the notion that Iran’s war on Israel has ended is too optimistic. It is more accurate to estimate that Iran and its allies will take a strategic time-out to learn the lessons of the war, improve, adapt to the new reality (including the fall of Syria), and wait for the wrath of the Trump administration to pass. After all, the American administration could be significantly weakened as soon as 2026, when the midterm elections will take place.

Moreover, the developments in Syria have brought the influence of the other neo-imperial power in the region – Turkey – very close to Israel’s border. Turkey is also a power of political Islam, Sunni in this case, and hostile to Israel. Iran and Turkey are expected to compete and perhaps even reach the point of real strategic friction. At the same time, it is possible that the threats they both pose to Israel will accumulate rather than be offset.

Israel should view the Iron Swords War as the first campaign against the Shiite alliance. Moreover, Israel’s strategic environment has changed dramatically, and its strategic thinking must take into account not one but two regional power threats: Iran and Turkey. The Middle East may be just a reflection of a neo-imperial global environment, a second Cold War. The American-Chinese-Russian confrontation may further shift the tectonic plates in our region, and not in a positive way.

If we perceive the strategic picture in this way, we can congratulate ourselves on the war’s achievements: we repelled the attack, we are in the process of rebuilding the two regions of the country that were abandoned, we are returning our captives, we have undermined the self-confidence of the Iranian enemy, and we have negated most of the military capabilities of Hamas and Hezbollah within our borders. In military theory, it is accepted that the goal of defense is to block the enemy’s initiative, gain time, and create the conditions for the next phase.

The Iron Swords War caught us by surprise because we continued to think we were conducting a war on terror while across the border, offensive armies were being built under the auspices of a regional power. The war dragged on to become a war of attrition due to our insufficient conceptual and practical readiness, and its achievements were limited for the same reason. Nevertheless, thanks to Israeli heroism, resilience, and steadfastness, and also to the successful extension of war-on-terror tactics into a war context, the war can be summarized as a successful historical defensive phase.

Now it is necessary to formulate the strategy for the next stage.

Israel must preserve the achievements of the war as much as possible by strictly and aggressively enforcing the demilitarization agreements in the north, as well as those that will be reached in the south. This enforcement will not only slow the renewal of threats in those areas but will provide Israel with a justification for war, should it become necessary.

The more we slow the build-up of our enemies (and we must not fall into thinking we can prevent it entirely), the more we will deepen Iran’s isolation and impose a higher cost on its attempts to reestablish its strongholds in the region.

Aggressive enforcement will serve Israeli strategy, if we accept that we are in the context of a historic Iranian-Israeli war. Aggressive enforcement – ​​yes. Dragging Israel into a war of attrition against guerrillas in Gaza and Lebanon and possibly Syria – no. Such a war would drain Israeli energy, slow down and disrupt the pace of rebuilding the IDF, and breathe life into the “axis of resistance”.

The strategic lull and the energy of the new administration in Washington should be exploited to renew the anti-Iranian momentum in the region, encouraging both regional and western support for the renewal of the war against the Houthis in Yemen.

In the next year or two, we must formulate a more appropriate military theory and capability and an Israeli strategy for the Iran-Israel war. In short, the IDF must be built so it can remove the military threats in Gaza and Lebanon without being dragged into a war of attrition. We have detailed what is needed for this on several occasions in the past. Israel’s Air Force, Military Intelligence, Navy, and cyber and space components must focus on the more distant threats and develop a capacity for significant disruption of enemy launch systems. Attacking “value targets” – energy and infrastructure – will not be enough. Hitting “force targets” like missile launching systems will leave Iran and its proxies exposed and insecure.

It is too early to assess where Turkey’s infiltration into our neighborhood will lead, but it can be assumed that at least some of the trends described here will be relevant in this context as well.

The State of Israel was mistaken in seeing itself as a secure regional power. October 7, 2023 taught us that we are neither invulnerable nor omnipotent. The current counterinsurgency, the perception of war as an “all-you-can-eat” meal, is a result of exactly the same error. We are being lured into a long confrontation with Iran, on its terms. Self-exhaustion is not a good strategy.

Israeli security doctrine has always relied on the merit of operational-level crushing and decisive power, and has avoided contests of endurance. Either way, whatever the definition of our strategic situation may be, the strategy must be precise and focused.

Brig. Gen. (res.) Eran Ortal recently retired from military service as commander of the Dado Center for Multidisciplinary Military Thinking. His book The Battle Before the War (MOD 2022, in Hebrew) dealt with the IDF’s need to change, innovate and renew a decisive war approach. His next book, Renewal – The October 7th War and Israel’s Defense Strategy, is about to be published by Levin Publications. A version of this article was originally published by The BESA Center.

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