Israel's Grand Strategy

Abstract

The prevailing joke about Israel’s grand strategy is that it doesn’t have one. Israeli statecraft can often seem improvised and reactive, privileging short-term military solutions over long-term diplomatic resolutions. This sentiment was especially evident during the turbulence of 2020 to 2025, when the diplomatic breakthrough of the Abraham Accords gave way to multi-front fighting and a war in Gaza that tarnished Israel’s global image. Despite these notions, this book argues that beneath the madness there is method: a discernible and persistent grand strategy linking Israel’s desired ends, the threats it prioritizes, and the instruments it deploys across the governments and personalities who lead its decision-making process. To make this case, this book offers a novel framework for understanding the grand strategy of small states as a “calibration” between several optional strategies of control, shaping, and adaptation from which they choose according to the scales at which they operate and the military, economic, and diplomatic means at their disposal. Through this framework, Israel can be seen as a small state seeking to “control” its local arena through military primacy, “shape” its region through flexible coalitions and selective economic and security arrangements, and “adapt” to global power politics while remaining firmly anchored in a US-led order. This framework and its limits are tested through eight case studies examining Israel’s attempts at controlling the Palestinian Authority, Hamas, and Hezbollah; its efforts to shape the Eastern Mediterranean and the Abraham Accords; and its adaptation to US priorities regarding Iran, China, and Russia.