Civil-Military Relations in Israel

Jewish terrorism has evolved from a local enforcement problem into a distinct strategic threat to the State of Israel and its democratic character. The destructive combination of inadequate enforcement, a lack of political backing for the security agencies, and the weakness of the judicial and law enforcement systems is creating a reality marked by lawlessness, non-recognition of state institutions, and the loss of the state’s monopoly on the use of force. The lack of a decisive Israeli response to this phenomenon constitutes evidence that it is a policy directed from above. This reality poses a multidimensional threat to Israel: a security threat—diverting the IDF’s attention and forces toward confronting Jewish terrorism at the expense of defense needs in other arenas, while subjecting the military to ongoing operational strain. In addition, the risk of a violent uprising in Judea and Samaria is growing, alongside the collapse of Palestinian stabilizing mechanisms; a governance and societal threat—weakening law enforcement systems, eroding respect for state-mindedness and allowing violence to seep dangerously into Israeli society in a manner that could paralyze the functioning of the state; and an international threat—Israel’s portrayal as an aggressive, oppressive, and racist state is undermining the legitimacy of its use of force, severely damaging its standing in the region and worldwide, and raising the risk of acute diplomatic isolation. We warn of a threat to Israel’s very ability to govern and function. As history teaches us, democracies that fail to restrain radical forces within them do not survive.

What does the new security strategy entail, as reflected in statements by Israel’s political leadership and actions on the ground, and why does it pose a threat to Israel's character and national security?

This article applies Paul Kennedy’s thesis of imperial overstretch as a structural lens through which to examine Israel’s strategic trajectory in 2026. It does not contend that Israel is an empire, nor that decline is foreordained. Rather, it argues that the mechanism Kennedy identified, namely the tendency for strategic commitments to outgrow the productive base that must finance them, combined with the political incapacity of governing coalitions to redistribute burdens before the corrective window closes, operates at any scale; and that its early structural signatures are now visible in Israeli data. The analysis examines three historical cases: Habsburg Spain, apartheid South Africa, and the late Soviet Union, compared across seven structural dimensions, with each yielding a distinct implication for Israel. It then reviews the Israeli indicators in detail, with particular attention to the simultaneous narrowing of the productive base, the erosion of allied political capital documented in contemporary polling, and the transfer of the strategic burden from the foreign balance sheet to the domestic one. The argument is that the analytically and morally decisive variable is not strength itself, but the sustainability of strength; and that the central question for Israeli strategy is whether recalibration is undertaken voluntarily, from a position of strength, or imposed by crisis on terms one no longer controls.