A new security doctrine for Israel

MADRID - Israel has a new security doctrine. It has never been published, never presented to the public, and never formally adopted by the military establishment. And yet, since October 7, 2023, it is this unwritten concept, not the doctrine forged over decades, that has shaped Israeli decision-making and now dictates the country’s entire approach to security. On Monday, Tamir Hayman, former military intelligence chief, set out the principles that, he argued, can be inferred from the policy Israel is actually applying.

The document makes clear that “Jewish identity” must prevail over “its democratic system of government”. This primacy is conceived to guarantee the survival of Israel as a Jewish state, even at the cost of eroding its “democratic values”. This is nothing new. Modern Zionism was born among the liberal-nationalist currents of nineteenth-century Europe. But unlike the emancipatory nationalisms that sought integration into Europe, Zionism organised a colonisation outwards: a population transfer articulated more as demographic engineering than as an “ancestral return”.

Herzl himself considered founding a Jewish state in Argentina or East Africa. Palestine was finally chosen, but the logic was the same: build a homogeneous space for a diaspora. The “return” narrative disguised a colonial settlement project — not merely occupying a land, but displacing and replacing those who inhabited it. The premise became explicit with Vladimir Jabotinsky in The Iron Wall (1923): no Arab people would voluntarily accept being colonised; force was the only way.

Therein lies the nucleus of “Greater Israel” — a project that does not contemplate coexistence, but the definitive subordination of the other. “Democracy” in Israel was established for the Jews after the Zionists expelled 90 percent of the Palestinian population. It makes no sense, then, to speak of “democratic decline”: the foundations on which Israel rests today are racial, and they have always been there for anyone who wished to see them.

Hayman linked this to another principle: security pursued through the establishment of “communities and forward positions in all friction zones with the Arab population, in the occupied West Bank, and in the security zones of Syria, Lebanon and Gaza”. Under this new approach, aspiring to peace is considered a repetition of the error of the “conceptzia”, the Hebrew label for the strategic assumptions widely blamed for Israel’s failure to foresee the attack of October 7.

A meaningful peace agreement in the Middle East is deemed unattainable: peace accords are mere technical, temporary arrangements requiring constant reevaluation. Peace, here, is not an intrinsic value that generates security, but an instrument for other political ends. “War is necessary, and preventive war is preferable because it allows significant gains from the outset. Its intensity may vary, but its constant presence constitutes an asset for national security,” Hayman wrote.

Surprise attacks are the only path to victory; offence takes priority over defence. If Israel cannot withstand a surprise attack or guarantee reliable early warning, the conclusion is foreordained: a standing policy of preventive attacks and preventive wars. This doctrine is no longer hypothetical: Israel applied it in its attacks on Iran in June 2025, and it leaves the door open to future unilateral action. The document also describes the United States as a “declining power” that “will soon abandon Israel in any case”, and holds that breaking ties with Washington is “essential for Israel’s independence”.

Given current social and political shifts in the United States, above all, the majority of the American public’s rejection of the genocide in Gaza, Washington will drop Israel soon regardless, the text concludes. Arab countries, meanwhile, are treated not as authentic nations but as “collections of tribes and ethnic groups lacking a common history and a foundational national perspective”. Their destabilisation is a natural process, one Israel can manage far more effectively than confronting powerful nation-states, and one it should actively encourage.

The throughline is plain. Israel’s goal has always been to destroy the sovereignty of regioal countries, one after another. Its failure in Iran has forced its strategists to admit they cannot impose their political will everywhere, and to adjust. On the “Palestinian question”, the document is explicit once more: the solution runs through the deployment of Zionist ideology and its pursuit of the total colonisation of the territory. Hence principled opposition to any political, geographical or security separation between Israel and a Palestinian entity, and to a Palestinian state itself.

Other listed priorities include national arms production, artificial intelligence, quantum computing and the expansion of illegal settlements in the occupied territories. Israel’s new security doctrine is marked by the current regional landscape, the memory of Hamas’s operation of October 7, and Iran, whose military capacity stands as the symbol of the limit of Israeli power. Finally, it is worth recalling the roots of Zionism: contrary to what its most obstinate and ignorant defenders claim, it has never been anything but an ideology and a movement of colonial character.