Outlook Exclusive: ‘Israel Today Is Not Faithful To The Ideas Of 1948’, Says Analyst Yonatan Touval

Israel today is a study in paradox. It is the most militarily powerful state in the region, a nuclear-armed country with one of the most technologically advanced armed forces in the world, backed by the full weight of the U.S. And it is, at the same time, more diplomatically isolated, more strategically exposed, and more politically fragile than at any point in its recent history.

This is not a contradiction. It is a consequence. Israel has spent decades investing in military capability as a substitute for political strategy. It can strike anywhere in the region. It cannot articulate what it wants the region to look like. It has the means to wage war but not the language to end one.

In the broader global context, Israel occupies an increasingly uncomfortable position. It remains a close ally of the U.S., but the terms of that alliance are under strain in ways that are new and not yet fully understood. It has diplomatic relations with Egypt and Jordan that are cold and growing colder. It had a normalisation process with the Gulf states that October 7th interrupted and the war in Gaza has deeply damaged. And it is now engaged in a military confrontation with Iran without a serious theory of what comes after.

The deepest problem, though, is not external. It is that Israel has never resolved the question at the centre of its existence: what kind of State it intends to be, on what borders, and with what relationship to the millions of Palestinians whose lives it controls. Until that question is answered, everything else – the alliances, the military operations, the diplomatic initiatives – is improvisation.

Three moments, which pull in different directions.

The first is 1967. The Six-Day War created the territorial and psychological template Israel still operates within: the idea that military initiative, speed, and technological superiority can resolve strategic dilemmas. It also created the occupation, now approaching its sixth decade – the longest military occupation in modern history, a regime of systematic dispossession, legal discrimination, and daily coercion imposed on millions of people who have no say in the political order that governs their lives. Every diplomatic calculation Israel has made since has been shaped, and ultimately deformed, by the need to sustain or justify that reality.

The second is 1973. The Yom Kippur War did more than shock Israel – it produced a strategic reorientation. The near-defeat led directly to Camp David, to the land-for-peace model, and to the consolidation of the American strategic partnership at an entirely new scale. For decades, that framework – territory exchanged for recognition, security underwritten by Washington – defined the outer grammar of Israeli diplomacy. It is precisely that logic which Netanyahu’s coalition has spent years trying to dismantle, replacing it with permanent retention of territory and normalization without concession.

The third is the Oslo process and its collapse. Oslo introduced the possibility that Israel could resolve its central dilemma through negotiation – and its failure, especially after the Second Intifada, entrenched a deep scepticism in Israeli political culture about the very idea of negotiated peace. That scepticism became the soil in which Netanyahu’s politics grew.

I would add a quieter moment: the Abraham Accords of 2020. They appeared to validate the idea that Israel could normalise relations with Arab states while bypassing the Palestinian question entirely. That was always a gamble. October 7th destroyed the premise.

That depends on which founding ideas one means, because Israel was founded on several that were always in tension with one another.

There was the democratic, secular, social-democratic idea – Mapai, the kibbutz, the labour ethos. There was the revisionist Zionist idea – Zeev Jabotinsky’s emphasis on military strength, territorial maximalism, what he called the iron wall of power. And there was the religious-nationalist idea, more marginal in 1948 but now ascendant.

What has happened over decades is that the first of these has weakened dramatically while the second and third have merged. The Israel of Ben-Gurion was not the Israel of Netanyahu, and Netanyahu’s Israel is not even the Israel of Menachem Begin. The current government includes figures – Smotrich, Ben Gvir – who represent a messianic nationalism that the founders of the state would have regarded as alien and dangerous.

In that sense, the answer is no: Israel today is not faithful to the ideas of 1948. But one could argue – and serious people do – that the tensions were present from the beginning, and that what we are witnessing now is not betrayal but the working out of contradictions that were never resolved. The occupation sharpened them. Demographics and religion deepened them. The failure of Oslo removed the last diplomatic framework that might have contained them.

I’d say it’s a small country with an outsized sense of historical consequence, and that this isn’t entirely wrong, though it has become pathological at times. It’s a country where daily life is astonishingly normal – cafés, tech offices, beach culture, an aggressive informality – and where that normality exists alongside the constant proximity of violence and strategic threat. The distance between a morning coffee in Tel Aviv and a missile alert is measured in seconds, not miles.

It’s also a country of deep internal fractures – between secular and religious, Ashkenazi and Mizrahi, Jewish and Arab-Palestinian citizens, settlers and coastal liberals – that has historically used external threat as a unifying device. When that device fails, or when the threat becomes so severe that it exposes rather than conceals the fractures, the country becomes almost unrecognisable to itself.

And it’s a country that is simultaneously one of the most written-about places on earth and one of the least understood – partly because everyone, including Israelis, projects onto it what they want to see.

This is perhaps the most painful question one can ask, and it deserves a careful answer rather than a slogan.

The founding narrative of Israel was inseparable from Jewish vulnerability – the Holocaust, obviously, but also centuries of exile, persecution, and Statelessness. That experience of vulnerability didn’t simply disappear when Israel became powerful; it became encoded in the culture, the military doctrine, the political rhetoric. Israelis will often say – and they mean it – that the country exists so that Jews will never again be powerless.

But power transforms the people who acquire it. What began as a project of refuge gradually became entangled with territorial control, military occupation, and the displacement of another people. The Nakba of 1948, the occupation of 1967, the settlement enterprise, the blockade of Gaza – each step had its own logic, its own security rationale, its own political constituency. But the cumulative effect is the situation you describe: a State born from displacement that has itself produced displacement on a massive scale.

I don’t think this was inevitable. But I also don’t think it was accidental. It’s the consequence of unresolved contradictions: between the democratic aspiration and the demographic anxiety, between the desire for security and the refusal to negotiate its terms, between the memory of victimhood and the exercise of power.

The arc, if you want to trace it honestly, is one of increasing strategic isolation masked by increasing military capability. After 1973, Israel made peace with Egypt – its most significant diplomatic achievement. Then it made peace with Jordan. These were real diplomatic breakthroughs, anchored in territorial compromise and strategic realism.

But since the mid-1990s, the trajectory has been one of strategic entrenchment rather than diplomatic expansion. The failure of Oslo, the unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon and Gaza, the growing reliance on military operations as a substitute for policy – all of this has led to a situation where Israel is now engaged in what I’d describe as a fuite en avant, a flight forward: the idea that each military escalation will resolve the underlying problem, when in fact it compounds it.

The current confrontation with Iran is the fullest expression of this trajectory. Israel is now involved, alongside the U.S., in a military campaign against a regional power, without a clear diplomatic endgame, without a serious theory of what comes after. The military sophistication is extraordinary. The strategic literacy is alarmingly thin.

This is the right question, and the honest answer is that Israel doesn’t currently have a coherent one, which is itself the problem.

Historically, the goal was survival, then acceptance, then normalisation. Under the current leadership, the operative goal has become something closer to permanent military dominance without political resolution – the idea that Israel can manage its conflicts indefinitely through force, technology, and alliance with the U.S., without ever having to make the difficult political choices that a genuine settlement would require.

This is not a strategy. It’s the absence of one. A goal implies an endpoint, and the defining feature of Israeli policy under Netanyahu has been the refusal to articulate one – because any endpoint would require concessions that his coalition cannot survive.

Netanyahu did not create these conditions. The settlement enterprise began under Labour governments. The occupation is nearly 60 years old. The dehumanization of Palestinians in parts of Israeli public discourse did not begin with Netanyahu. The tolerance for settler violence, the erosion of the rule of law in the West Bank, the slow normalisation of what should be intolerable – all of this has deep roots.

But Netanyahu has done something specific and consequential. He has dominated Israeli politics for three decades and has served roughly 18 years as Prime Minister. In that time, he has made these tendencies – the occupation, the settlements, the disregard for Palestinian life – the centre of Israeli governance rather than its margin. He brought the far right from the margins to the centre, empowering figures such as Ben Gvir and Smotrich in unusually senior roles. He has made corruption a governing method, incitement a political language, and impunity a constitutional principle. He has governed as a demagogue with the cunning of a statesman and the ethics of neither, and he has sought to erode the institutional guardrails – the judiciary, the media, the military’s independence – that might have constrained these tendencies.

So the honest answer is: the pathology is cultural and structural, but the acute crisis is political and personal. Netanyahu is not the cause, but he is the accelerant.

A successful Israel in 20 years is one that has done what it has so far refused to do: define its borders, settle its relationship with the Palestinians through a political framework, and integrate itself into the region as a normal state rather than a permanent garrison.

This would mean a Palestinian state of some kind – not because Israel is generous, but because the alternative is a one-State reality without equal democratic legitimacy, under demographic conditions that are contested and increasingly difficult to reconcile with permanent control. It would mean a regional security architecture that includes, rather than isolates, Iran. It would mean an Israeli foreign policy that is diplomatically literate, not just militarily capable.

Is this likely? Not at the moment. But the question was what success would look like, not what I predict. The tragedy of Israeli foreign policy is that the contours of a solution have been visible for decades. What has been lacking is the political courage – and the leadership – to pursue it.

No. And this is not a polemical claim – it’s an analytical one. A strategy requires an articulated objective, a theory of how to achieve it, and an honest assessment of costs and constraints. Israeli policy today has none of these.

What it has instead is operational excellence in the service of strategic incoherence. The military can execute extraordinarily complex operations. The intelligence services are formidable. But none of this compensates for the absence of a political horizon. You cannot bomb your way to a diplomatic outcome if you refuse to define what that outcome should be.

This is what I’ve been calling the illiteracy of this war: a leadership class that speaks fluently in the language of targets, ordnance, and operational tempo, but has no vocabulary for the political, cultural, and human dimensions of the conflicts it wages.

Israeli society is more interesting and more internally diverse than its politics would suggest. There is an extraordinary culture of innovation and improvisation – not just in tech, but in how people navigate daily life. There is a deep literary and intellectual tradition, though it’s under strain. There is a Mediterranean warmth and directness that can be both charming and bruising. And there is, beneath the bravado, a profound fatigue – a society that has been on a war footing for so long that many people have simply stopped imagining an alternative.

The aspirations of ordinary Israelis are, in many ways, remarkably ordinary: security, prosperity, a future for their children that doesn’t involve conscription into perpetual conflict. The massive protests of 2023 – the judicial overhaul crisis – revealed that a very large segment of Israeli society cares deeply about democracy, the rule of law, and the character of the state. Those people haven’t disappeared. They’ve been overshadowed by the war, but they represent a genuine counter-current.

The deeper question is whether Israeli society can produce a leadership that speaks to those aspirations rather than exploiting the fears that suppress them. That’s not a question about Netanyahu alone. It’s a question about whether a political culture shaped by decades of conflict can find its way back to the kind of moral and strategic seriousness that the country’s situation demands.