Preventive War: Its Disappearance from Israel’s Security Toolbox and the Need for Its Return

The external and internal legitimacy for doing so stems from the fact that Israel has returned to the era of “wars of no choice.” Over the course of the still-continuing Iron Swords War, members of both the military and the general public have claimed that they identified the severity of the Hamas threat as long ago as the middle of the last decade and demanded in 1 vain that the government initia. [...] From the Ben-Gurion Doctrine (1956) through the Begin Doctrine (1981) and from Olmert (2007) to Netanyahu vis-à-vis Iran and Hezbollah (prevention of force build-up below the threshold of war) It appears that the main cause for the decline over the years of the concepts of preventive war, the preemptive attack and the preventive strike was a sense that the relevant threats had declined to such a d. [...] 5 In the IDF's 2015 strategy document by Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot, which focused on Hezbollah and Hamas, the idea of the “Campaign Between the Wars,” which presented a pattern of preventive action that remained below the threshold of war, was presented publicly for the first time: "The logic of the use of force in the 'Campaign Between the Wars' is to preserve and enhance the achievements of a. [...] He said those consequences could, in some ways, be more damaging than the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War in terms of repercussions for the Israeli civilian rear, the state of mind of the Israeli citizenry, and the image and standing of the State of Israel in the region. [...] Within the army, it is possible that the withdrawal to the border lines with Lebanon and Gaza disconnected IDF commanders from understanding the intensity of the development of the threats on the other side of the border.