A few days after Saudi Arabia, Türkiye and Pakistan signed their new joint-defense agreement in Mecca, IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir told senior Israeli commanders that the diplomatic activity now taking place on several fronts was the product of what he described as the IDF's historic battlefield achievements.
Perhaps.
But this interpretation reflects, in my view, a profound failure to distinguish between battlefield activity and genuine strategic success. Military achievements are meaningful only when they produce a lasting improvement in Israel’s security. If our enemies are able to rebuild, rearm, and reorganize while new alliances are simultaneously taking shape around us, then declaring victory simply because we have inflicted heavy casualties or destroyed large quantities of enemy infrastructure is premature at best.
More troubling still, I believe that this mindset reflects a dangerous degree of strategic blindness.
If Israel is to confront the challenges that may be developing around us, we cannot afford to remain committed to the assumptions and doctrines that brought us to this point. We need a fundamental reassessment of our military strategy, our intelligence priorities, our reserve system and, above all, our understanding of what constitutes strategic victory.
Let us therefore consider what this hypothetical threat could look like.
In my view, the recently signed Mecca Joint Defense Agreement should be treated as a serious warning, even if it does not, by itself, prove that the Sunni states surrounding Israel are preparing a coordinated war against us. I acknowledge that I am deliberately considering a worst-case scenario. But given Israel’s bloody experience in this region, I believe it is far wiser to prepare for the most dangerous plausible outcome than to dismiss it because it appears unlikely today.
The fact that Qatar has reportedly welcomed the emerging arrangement should also cause Israeli planners to examine carefully what this new regional alignment might eventually become.
The Turkish Foreign Minister has indicated that he expects Egypt to become part of the developing Sunni security framework, although Saudi Arabia has reportedly opposed Egyptian accession for the time being because of concerns surrounding President Sisi and Egypt’s relationship with the UAE.
Syria must also be considered. Given Türkiye’s growing influence there, it is entirely reasonable for Israeli planners to examine the possibility that Syria could eventually become part of a broader Turkish-led military architecture, including the establishment or expansion of Turkish forces on Syrian territory.
If Egypt were eventually to join such an arrangement, the strategic implications for Israel would be enormous.
Unfortunately, the chances of this occurring were just improved by President Trump’s foolhardy endorsement of the Mecca Alliance as a “great achievement". This will probably be seen as a signal for Saudi Arabia to drop its reluctance to accept Egypt as a member of the alliance. Once this occurs, consider the following:
The Egyptians are already pouring amounts of men and materiel into Sinai far above what are allowed under the Camp David Accords. Should Cairo eventually join the Mecca Alliance, Heaven only knows how many more military units they could surge into Sinai, claiming that they’re only for “defensive" purposes. What would this mean?
For the first time in decades, Israel could potentially find itself confronting a regional military alignment capable of applying simultaneous pressure from several directions. If Jordan, Hezbollah, Hamas and terrorist organizations operating in Judaea and Samaria were also to participate in such a conflict- whether formally or independently- the resulting situation could be extraordinarily dangerous.
A multi-front war on that scale could make the strategic challenges of the Yom Kippur War appear comparatively limited.
What, then, should Israel do?
Realistically, simply adopting a defensive posture and waiting for such an offensive to begin would be profoundly irresponsible. Even with full mobilization, Israel’s geographic vulnerability, limited manpower and dependence upon critical infrastructure would leave the country exposed to enormous damage from a coordinated attack.
Nor should we assume that a conventional military response would automatically produce a short war.
Even a highly successful opening campaign could leave the opposing coalition with substantial reserves, surviving command structures,industrial capacity and the ability to sustain a prolonged conflict. Israel could therefore find itself trapped in precisely the kind of drawn-out war of attrition that its geography and demographics make particularly dangerous.
That is why our strategic objective cannot merely be to win the next battle.
It must be to prevent the circumstances that would make such a war possible in the first place.
Israel needs a doctrine of strategic prevention and overwhelming deterrence. We need to ensure that no potential coalition can ever become sufficiently confident in its ability to overwhelm Israel that it concludes an attack is worth the risk.
That requires dramatically strengthening our early-warning capabilities, expanding protection for critical infrastructure, improving defenses against drones and precision weapons, rebuilding our reserves and ensuring that Israel possesses the intelligence and conventional military capabilities, such as long range ballistic missiles with maneuverable warheads, Hypersonic Glide Vehicles, and unmanned heavy strike aircraft, necessary to disrupt an emerging threat before it becomes an operational reality.
Most importantly, Israeli leaders must be willing to contemplate scenarios that are deeply uncomfortable. Although some may call this process “thinking the unthinkable", I prefer to call it preparing to act on the unthinkable.
Above all else, we should not wait until an enemy coalition has completed its preparations before asking whether it represents an existential threat.
We should be asking that question now.
And this brings us back to General Zamir.
If the Chief of Staff believes that the past three years of fighting have placed Israel in a permanently stronger strategic position, then I believe he is drawing the wrong conclusion from the evidence before us. Israel has certainly demonstrated extraordinary military capabilities. Our soldiers have fought with courage and determination, and our enemies have suffered enormous losses.
But none of that guarantees the future.
The real test of military leadership is not whether an army can destroy an an enemy formation after war has begun. It is whether that army can prevent the enemy from ever acquiring the capability and confidence necessary to begin the next war.
But if that fails, our response should be so immediate and overwhelming that the enemy will never again have the ability to threaten us.
Basically, what I’m proposing would involve a series of surprise nuclear strikes, some involving pre positioned weapons, that would inflict a level of destruction that would totally decimate an enemy’s civilian and military leadership ranks, its strategic industries, its oil, gas and energy production systems and its communications networks. Our subsequent conventional attacks would, therefore, have a much better chance of finishing off the enemy’s isolated and disoriented field formations in short order.
This type of bolt-from-the-blue strategic attack has been attempted in the past. Examples include the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, Germany’s Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union, North Korea’s June 1950 invasion of South Korea and Israel’s Six Day War. However, none of those campaigns envisioned-let alone achieved, the prompt collapse of an entire enemy state along the lines that we’d be attempting against, say, Turkey and Egypt.
Would such a war plan stand a realistic chance of success?
Yes, I believe it would. But we would need both a military high command and civilian leadership that would have the courage to authorize it. And there in lies the problem.
With individuals like Benjamin Netanyahu, Yair Lapid, Gadi Eisenkot, and Naftali Bennett the possibility of any of them authorizing the type of preventive nuclear strikes just outlined is less than nil. And the same can be said for most of the generals in line to succeed the current Chief of Staff. These people are either too scared of adverse world reaction or are progressives, like Eisenkot, who have “moral" problems with causing any amount of collateral damage- even if it were unavoidable.
And, just for the record, my low assessment of our senior command was reflected in a recent survey of draftees conducted by the IDSF in August 2026. In this poll, just 30% expressed high levels of trust in the IDF’s senior command, while 41% said that they had low or very low trust in the army’s senior leadership. This lack of confidence in our high command echelon is shocking and should be rectified by a complete turnover of general staff officers. If this isn’t done, I’m afraid that the IDF will be doomed to continue its self defeating policies of “managing" threats, rather than decisively eliminating them. Most problematic, though, is the command staff’s ideological aversion to any use of nuclear weapons.
But the fact remains that unless we are prepared to employ a preventive nuclear strategy to defeat the Sunni alliance now forming, we could very well end up losing an unacceptable number of lives and the bulk of our infrastructure. Simply put,
restricting ourselves to using only conventional weapons against the Sunni alliance would be a recipe for complete disaster. Luckily, though, we have other means at our disposal that would guarantee a quick, decisive victory with a minimal amount of blood and material losses.
So, how might we initiate such a war?
I’ve long advocated launching preliminary EMP strikes as the most effective way of initiating a preventive nuclear campaign. Unfortunately, according to the late James Woolsey, the former head of the CIA, it’s something the Iranians have also thought about and have even practiced. This involved them launching a missile off a barge, and detonating its conventional warhead at an altitude of 200 kilometers- the exact height a nuclear detonation would create an EMP. This exercise was not a secret. Everyone in the region was apparently aware of its implications.
Assuming the Egyptians or Turks secretly obtained a Pakistani nuclear warhead- or, developed one themselves, they would have the means to inflict a war winning strike against us before committing their conventional forces. How could we be expected to live with this? Do we really want to wait until we’re faced with this type of threat or do we want to preventively eliminate it?
Put this way, I’d think that most rational people would probably support a strategic doctrine that puts the survival of our people as our top priority-even if that required the preventive use of nuclear weapons.
Unfortunately, given the fractured nature of our society, I just can’t see how we could ever elect a government that would act on this consensus.
I can only hope that we will eventually be able to set aside our many differences in order to form a government dedicated to our collective survival. Time, though, is running out. And our enemies are watching.