Israel's Grand Strategy

Israel is often described as a state without a grand strategy, one that wins wars through superior military and technological capabilities yet struggles to secure peace because it lacks a clear vision for durable political outcomes. That sentiment was especially evident during the turbulent years between 2020 and 2025, when the diplomatic breakthrough of the Abraham Accords gave way to a multi-front regional conflict. Israel's Grand Strategy challenges this view. It argues that beneath the veneer of tactical improvisation, Israel has pursued a discernible and persistent grand strategy that links its desired ends, prioritized threats, preferred instruments, and available resources with visible continuity across different Israeli governments and decision-makers over time. To demonstrate this pattern, this book offers a novel framework that views small-state grand strategy as a "calibration" between three geographic circles of local controlling, regional shaping, and global adaptation strategies, dictated by the state's arena of action and available military, economic, and diplomatic means. The book tests this framework through eight detailed case studies. The first three consider the local arena, examining strategies of control toward the Palestinian Authority, Hamas, and Hezbollah. The next two trace efforts to shape the regional environment through the Eastern Mediterranean and the Abraham Accords. The final three case studies, focusing on the global arena, analyze Israel's adaptation to US priorities on Iran's nuclear program, the growing US§hina rivalry, and Russia's declining influence in the Middle East. Through these case studies, Elai Rettig and Eitan Shamir show that Israel follows a consistent grand strategy. In doing so, they clarify both the strengths and limits of Israel's grand strategy, and the developments that may force its revision. The Oxford Studies in Grand Strategy is a major new series of cutting-edge monographs that examine the grand strategies of states, and those intergovernmental organizations and nonstate actors who credibly aspire to sovereignty. Books concentrate on the contemporary aspects of grand strategy, while paying due respect to the historical antecedents of a nation's grand strategy and their relevance for a leadership's current choices. The series is pluralistic in terms of theory and method, and maintains a broad view of the ways, means, and ends that undergird a grand strategy. Analytical and explanatory in contribution, books in the series feature a rigorous analysis of the interaction between domestic factors and global forces and provide a clear understanding of how that interaction shapes a grand strategy's formulation, codification, and implementation. Series Editors: Thierry Balzacq (Sciences Po, Paris), Peter Dombrowski (US Naval War College), and Simon Reich (Rutgers University, Newark)

Elai Rettig is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Studies at Bar-Ilan University, and a Senior Researcher at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies. He also teaches at Israel's National Security College (MABAL) and the Israeli Navy Academy. He has previously served as a researcher at the Institute for Maritime Policy and Strategy (MPS) in Haifa, as a Neubauer Fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) in Tel-Aviv, and as the Israel Institute Teaching Fellow at Washington University in St Louis. His work focuses on energy geopolitics, Israel's national security, and regional economic cooperation. Eitan Shamir is a Professor in the Department of Political Studies at Bar-Ilan University and the head of its MA program in Security and Strategy. He also serves as the Managing Director of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies. Before pursuing an academic career, Prof. Shamir was the head of the National Security Doctrine Department at Israel's Ministry of Strategic Affairs, Prime Minister's Office. His research and publications primarily focus on military strategy, command structures, and innovation within the military sphere. He has authored works such as Transforming Command (Stanford University Press, 2011) and The Art of Military Innovation (Harvard University Press, 2023, co-written with Edward Luttwak).