The wire was cut. The sirens were silent. Then the world broke.
October 7, 2023, was not a failure of intelligence. It was a failure of imagination. It was the final, bloody refutation of a doctrine that had governed Israel for fifty years. The doctrine of the strong fence and the quiet life. The doctrine of deterrence. The doctrine of “mowing the grass.” It was a doctrine that assumed a rational enemy. It was a doctrine that believed one could contain a firestorm with a garden hose.
In 1928, writing from Paris, Ernest Hemingway observed that “the first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war.” The Middle East has tried both. Neither worked. Now comes a third option: Pax Israeliana. An Israeli Peace. Not a request but a statement of fact, forged in the fires of Gaza, proven in the skies over Iran, and now being written into the soil of a shattered Syria.
The Arithmetic of Failure
Consider the arithmetic of containment. Fifteen years. Five major operations in Gaza. Thousands of rockets. Billions in defense spending. Zero strategic progress. This was not a strategy; it was lawn maintenance with F-16s. Israel called it “mowing the grass,” as if Hamas were dandelions rather than an ideological cancer metastasizing on its border. The metaphor itself revealed the poverty of ambition. Gardens require more than mowing. They require uprooting.
As Daniel Pipes and the Middle East Forum have long argued through the Israel Victory Project, the fundamental error lay in seeking to manage rather than win.
As Daniel Pipes and the Middle East Forum have long argued through the Israel Victory Project, the fundamental error lay in seeking to manage rather than win. For decades, Israel was the defender. It absorbed the first blow. It managed the conflict. It sought ceasefires. It accepted a level of violence that no other Western nation would tolerate for a single afternoon. That Israel is gone. Buried with its dead.
The Western mind, particularly the comfortable, post-historical European mind, is addicted to a single, fatal fallacy: the belief that all Palestinians are, at their core, rational in a way the West understands. They believe every problem has a solution that can be found in a seminar room. They believe every grievance can be assuaged with cash and concessions. This was the intellectual architecture of Oslo. It was the foundation of the 2005 Disengagement from Gaza. Give them land, give them autonomy, give them billions in aid, and they will build a Singapore on the Mediterranean.
Instead, they built a fortress of terror. They elected Hamas. They dug tunnels not for subways, but for slaughter. They used the cement given for schools to build bunkers for their leaders. They used the water pipes provided for plumbing to build rockets to fire at Israeli children.
Clausewitz taught that war is the continuation of politics by other means. For the Islamists who rule Gaza and Tehran, it is the other way around. Politics, diplomacy, and ceasefires are merely the continuation of war by other means. Their goal is not a state alongside Israel. Their goal is a state instead of Israel. It is a theological imperative, not a political dispute over borders.
The Death of Deterrence
Thomas Hobbes, that grim philosopher of power, wrote that “covenants without the sword are but words.” For 75 years, Israel believed the sword alone would suffice. Deterrence would hold. Enemies would calculate costs and benefits. Rationality would prevail.
October 7 shattered this delusion with the force of thousands of Hamas terrorists streaming across what Israel had convinced itself was an impermeable border. They came on motorcycles and paragliders, with GoPros and Kalashnikovs, to commit acts of medieval barbarism with modern tools. The footage they proudly broadcast was not meant to hide their crimes but to advertise them. This was not war as Clausewitz understood it. This was Thanatos unleashed—death as its own reward.
Thomas Hobbes, that grim philosopher of power, wrote that “covenants without the sword are but words.” For 75 years, Israel believed the sword alone would suffice.
As this author wrote in the immediate aftermath, this was “an invasion, an orchestrated massacre gleaming with the sinister glare of genocidal intent.” The Israeli response marked a turning point as decisive as any in the nation’s history. Previous Gaza operations had names suggesting limited aims: “Cast Lead,” “Protective Edge,” “Guardian of the Walls.” Defensive nomenclature for defensive thinking. This time was different. The goal was not degradation but elimination. Not management but victory.
Victory. The word itself had become almost foreign to the Israeli strategic lexicon, a relic from 1967 gathering dust in the museums of military history. Modern democracies, the conventional wisdom held, don’t seek victory. They seek stability, equilibrium, sustainable security arrangements. October 7 revealed these euphemisms for what they were: sophisticated forms of self-deception.
The Gaza War was different. A nation fights differently when fighting for survival than when fighting to prove a point. The Israel Defense Forces were not sent into Gaza to mow the grass. They were sent to pave it over. The mission was the total dismantlement of Hamas as a military and governing entity.
It was grim, hard business. The enemy had spent fifteen years turning Gaza into the most formidable terrorist fortress in human history. A subterranean kingdom of tunnels, laced with booby traps, built beneath hospitals, schools, and mosques. Every building was a potential ambush. Every doorway a threat.
The world, from the safety of its television screens, condemned the cost. They counted the dead in Gaza but forgot to count the living in Sderot and Kfar Aza who could finally sleep without fear. They demanded proportionality. But what is the proportional response to a death cult that celebrates martyrdom and seeks to murder every Jew in the world? There is no proportional response. There is only victory or extinction. Israel chose victory.
The Head of the Octopus
For decades, the West, and often Israel itself, made another critical error. It treated the symptoms while ignoring the disease. The disease has a name: The Islamic Republic of Iran.
Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, the militias in Iraq and Syria—they are not independent actors. They are tentacles. The head of the octopus sits in Tehran. For forty years, the regime of the Ayatollahs has waged war on Israel and the West, but it has done so by proxy. It paid others to do the dying. It believed its own territory was sacrosanct. This was the second great fallacy the old doctrine tolerated.
As Jonathan Spyer has documented extensively, Iran’s “Axis of Resistance” was never about resistance—it was about expansion, domination, and the eventual destruction of Israel.
As Jonathan Spyer has documented extensively, Iran’s “Axis of Resistance” was never about resistance—it was about expansion, domination, and the eventual destruction of Israel. In the aftermath of the October 7 attack, the octopus overreached. Emboldened by what it mistook for Israeli vulnerability, Iran directed its proxies to launch a multi-front assault. It was to be their master stroke. It was their final mistake.
The Israeli response after two years of war was not what they expected. It was not another strike on a Hezbollah weapons depot in Syria. It was a war of twelve days.
On the first night, the lights went out in Isfahan. The last night saw the nuclear facility at Fordow, buried deep beneath a mountain, hit by something the world had never seen. The first Israeli missiles struck Natanz at 3:17 a.m. Tehran time on June 13. By sunrise, Iran was burning. Much of the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program—that sword of Damocles hanging over the region for two decades—was reduced to radioactive rubble in 12 days.
Iran’s response was predictable in its desperation: 550 ballistic missiles, over 1,000 drones, the full arsenal of four decades of military buildup launched in spasms of rage. The result? An 86 percent interception rate by Israeli defense systems. The emperor had no clothes. The regional hegemon was revealed as a paper tiger—dangerous still, but vincible.
The psychological impact exceeded the physical destruction. Khamenei’s regime had built its entire legitimacy on resistance to the “Zionist entity.” When that entity struck the Islamic Republic’s most protected assets with impunity, the myth died.
The 12-Day War established the second pillar of Pax Israeliana: Israeli hegemony is the new organizing principle of the Middle East. The American security umbrella is tattered and unreliable. The only hard power that can and will act to neutralize a regional threat is the State of Israel.
From Abraham Accords to Abraham Alliance
Peace agreements in the Middle East traditionally follow a predictable script. Land for peace. Recognition for withdrawal. Economic incentives for political concessions. The Abraham Accords shattered this template by acknowledging a simple truth: Israel’s enemies were also the enemies of the Gulf states. Common threats create more durable bonds than common history.
The Abraham Accords had evolved into an Abraham Alliance—a regional security framework with Israel as its technological and military cornerstone.
But October 7 tested these new relationships in ways their architects never anticipated. Would the familiar Arab street pressures force a retreat to the old reflexive anti-Zionism?
The answer came not in words but in actions. Joint naval exercises in the Red Sea. Intelligence sharing during Iranian missile attacks. Quiet but crucial overflight permissions. The participation of Israeli F-35s alongside Emirati Mirages and Bahraini observers in Greece’s Iniochos 2025 exercises sent a message more powerful than any diplomatic communiqué. This is not merely normalization. This was integration.
Defense exports from Israel to Abraham Accords nations reached $791 million. Cybersecurity cooperation was formalized through the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. The Abraham Accords had evolved into an Abraham Alliance—a regional security framework with Israel as its technological and military cornerstone.
The Syrian Laboratory
Power creates vacuums. And vacuums must be filled. Bashar al-Assad’s regime died as it had lived—not with a bang but with a whimper. When Hezbollah’s forces withdrew to Lebanon to lick their wounds from Israeli strikes, the Syrian army simply melted away. December 2024 saw the end of over five decades of Assad family rule, creating the greatest strategic opportunity and danger since the Arab Spring.
The old doctrine would have seen this as a crisis. A failed state. A breeding ground for jihadists. A quagmire. The new doctrine sees it as a laboratory for building a new reality.
Israel’s response was swift and decisive. Within 48 hours, Israeli forces had destroyed 70-80 percent of Syria’s military infrastructure. Not as conquest—the age of territorial expansion ended long ago—but as preventive architecture. Every destroyed weapons depot was one that couldn’t fall into jihadi hands.
Israel sent its drones. The Druze of southern Syria suddenly found Israeli aircraft overhead providing protective cover.
More significantly, Israel moved to fill the security vacuum before others could. When the remnants of ISIS and Bedouin militias began to encroach on the Druze heartland of Jabal al-Druze, the world did nothing. The UN issued a statement. Washington expressed “deep concern.”
Israel sent its drones. The Druze of southern Syria suddenly found Israeli aircraft overhead providing protective cover. Kurdish forces in the northeast received intelligence that helped them preempt ISIS resurgence attempts. Christian villages discovered that their calls for help were answered not by the UN or the EU, but by the IDF.
This was not altruism. It was strategy. Every minority group protected was a potential ally gained and a certain enemy denied. A stable, friendly, and grateful Druze entity on the Golan frontier is a far greater strategic asset than a thousand kilometers of smart fence.
The Guarantor Doctrine
What emerges from these transformations is nothing less than a new regional order—Pax Israeliana. But this requires careful definition. It is not a blueprint for empire. Empires extract; guarantors protect. Empires impose uniformity; guarantors preserve diversity. Empires inevitably decline; guarantor systems can endure.
Consider the precedent of Pax Britannica. For a century, the Royal Navy suppressed piracy, protected trade routes, and maintained a general peace that allowed global commerce to flourish. Britain profited, certainly, but so did everyone else. The system’s genius lay not in British dominance but in British indispensability.
Pax Israeliana operates on similar principles but with crucial differences. Where Britain had the luxury of geographic distance, Israel must create strategic depth through relationships. Where Britain could retreat to splendid isolation, Israel must remain perpetually engaged. Where Britain exported power, Israel must export security.
This new architecture rests on four pillars:
Imagine a regional security architecture including Israel, the Gulf states, Jordan, Egypt, Morocco, potentially a post-Islamist Turkey, and a post-military-ruled Algeria.
First, military supremacy—not merely defensive capability but offensive dominance that can strike anywhere in the region within hours. As Efraim Inbar notes, “Fear remains the most effective political currency in the Middle East.” When enemies know that aggression guarantees swift and devastating response, aggression becomes irrational.
Second, alliance networks that transform bilateral peace agreements into multilateral security arrangements. The Abraham Alliance represents just the beginning. Imagine a regional security architecture including Israel, the Gulf states, Jordan, Egypt, Morocco, potentially a post-Islamist Turkey, and a post-military-ruled Algeria—a Middle Eastern NATO united not by ideology but by shared interests in stability and prosperity.
Third, minority protection that provides security guarantees for the region’s vulnerable populations. For centuries, the Middle East has been a graveyard for its minorities. The Christians, the Druze, the Kurds, the Yazidis, Berbers, Alawites —all have been victims of the same intolerance that targets the Jewish state. As Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar declared, these communities are Israel’s “natural allies.” Israel’s emergence as their explicit guarantor creates not just moral capital but strategic depth.
Fourth, economic integration that makes conflict economically irrational where countries, not like Russia and Iran, have previously not engaged in direct kinetic conflict with Israel. The planned India-Middle East-Europe Corridor, with Israel as a crucial node represents this logic. When breaking relations means breaking supply chains, when war means economic suicide, peace becomes not an aspiration but a necessity.
The Kurdish Paradigm
No element of Pax Israeliana generates more controversy than the Kurdish dimension. Forty million people, divided among four states, denied self-determination for a century—the Kurds represent the Middle East’s greatest unresolved question. They also represent Israel’s greatest strategic opportunity.
As Loqman Radpey has written, the Israeli-Kurdish relationship represents an “asymmetrical alliance,” a nation-to-nation relationship that transcends traditional state boundaries. The relationship dates to the 1960s when Mossad trained Mustafa Barzani’s peshmerga. But nostalgia is not strategy. What matters is the present convergence of interests.
Critics warn of the Turks’ fury. Let them fume. Erdoğan’s Turkey has chosen the path of Islamist revisionism, supporting Hamas and hosting its leadership.
Kurdish forces control 40 percent of Syrian territory. They have proven themselves the region’s most effective fighters against ISIS. Most importantly, they share with Israel the experience of being a minority under perpetual threat. Israeli support for Kurdish autonomy serves multiple strategic purposes. It creates a buffer against both Iranian expansion and Turkish neo-Ottoman ambitions. It shows that alliance with Israel brings tangible benefits.
Critics warn of the Turks’ fury. Let them fume. Erdoğan’s Turkey has chosen the path of Islamist revisionism, supporting Hamas and hosting its leadership. A Turkey that threatens Israeli interests deserves Israeli opposition.
The American Question
No discussion of Pax Israeliana can ignore the American dimension. For three-quarters of a century, Israeli strategy has assumed American support. But assumptions are dangerous things.
America in 2025 faces its own reckonings. Washington’s overstretch manifests in simultaneous commitments to NATO expansion, Asian pivot strategy, and Middle Eastern entanglements—all while the national debt exceeds $35 trillion. Domestic division runs deeper than at any time since the 1960s, with fundamental disagreements about America’s role in the world cutting across traditional party lines. The pivot to Asia represents a fundamental reallocation of military assets, diplomatic attention, and strategic planning away from the Middle East toward containing China.
The rise of isolationist sentiment in both parties represents a tectonic shift. On the right, some supporters of President Trump’s “America First” movement questions why American tax dollars should underwrite the security of prosperous allies. On the left, progressive activists frame Israel through the lens of settler colonialism, apartheid, and systemic oppression. A young generation that came of age during the Iraq War’s failures views Middle Eastern involvement as inherently suspect. The campus protests of 2024, which saw elite universities become hotbeds of anti-Israel activism, revealed how thoroughly the old bipartisan consensus on Israel has fractured.
This reality demands not despair but adaptation. Pax Israeliana represents Israel’s evolution from security consumer to security provider—a transformation that actually serves American interests better than the old dependency model. Consider the concrete manifestations of this shift:
Pax Israeliana represents Israel’s evolution from security consumer to security provider—a transformation that actually serves American interests better than the old dependency model.
When Israel destroyed Syria’s military infrastructure in 48 hours, it eliminated weapons stockpiles that might have required American intervention to secure. When Israeli intelligence networks provide early warning of Iranian nuclear activities, they save American lives and resources. When Israeli technology secures critical infrastructure in Abraham Accord states, it reduces the need for American military presence. The successful defense against Iran’s missile barrage demonstrated that Israeli systems can protect not just Israel but American assets and allies throughout the region.
Every Israeli military action that degrades Iranian capabilities is one less threat that American forces must confront. Every minority group that Israel protects is one less humanitarian crisis demanding American intervention. Every stable zone that Israeli power guarantees is one less failed state that could become a terrorist haven.
The message to Washington is clear: Israel is not requesting charity but offering strategic value. The annual American military aid to Israel—approximately $3.8 billion—represents less than what the United States once spent in Afghanistan every two weeks. In return, America gains a regional stabilizer that requires no American boots on the ground, no American casualties, and no American occupation forces. Israel provides intelligence that American agencies cannot gather, tests American weapons systems in actual combat conditions, and serves as an unsinkable aircraft carrier in a critical region.
More fundamentally, Pax Israeliana offers America something it desperately needs: a way to maintain regional influence while reducing regional presence. As American forces withdraw from Syria and Iraq, Israeli power fills the vacuum in ways that serve American interests. When Washington seeks to counter Iranian influence without direct military involvement, Israeli action provides the solution. When American policymakers need to demonstrate commitment to allies while avoiding new military entanglements, Israeli security guarantees offer the perfect mechanism.
The Price of Leadership
The critics are already screaming. They call this vision neo-colonialism, warning of imperial overreach and lamenting the death of the two-state solution. Their arguments deserve examination, if only to demonstrate their fundamental disconnection from Middle Eastern realities.
The charge of neo-colonialism fundamentally misunderstands the nature of Pax Israeliana. Colonial powers extract resources and impose foreign rule. Israel seeks neither. The minerals of Syria hold no attraction; the oil of Iraq is not the objective. Israel offers security partnerships to minorities who request them, not colonial administration to subjects who resist it. When Druze leaders appeal for protection against jihadist massacres, when Kurdish forces seek intelligence sharing to prevent ISIS resurgence, when Christian communities request assistance in maintaining their ancient presence—these are not colonial relationships but survival partnerships among Middle Eastern peoples facing common threats.
Israel’s interventions are precisely calibrated: air power not ground occupation, intelligence sharing not direct administration, security guarantees not territorial annexation.
The imperial overreach argument fails on empirical grounds. Israel’s interventions are precisely calibrated: air power not ground occupation, intelligence sharing not direct administration, security guarantees not territorial annexation. The destruction of Syrian military assets was accomplished without a single Israeli soldier occupying on Syria’s coast. The protection of Druze communities requires no Israeli governance structures. This is not empire-building but threat elimination.
As for the two-state solution, its death certificate was signed not by Israel but by Palestinian leadership—in 1947, 1967, 1993, 2000, 2008, and every moment in between. Palestinian political culture remains saturated with eliminationist ideology. School textbooks deny Jewish history, television programs celebrate martyrdom, and political leaders promise not statehood alongside Israel but statehood instead of Israel.
The only viable future for Palestinians requires what Germany and Japan experienced after 1945: complete ideological defeat followed by comprehensive transformation. This means dismantling the entire infrastructure of hatred—the prisoner payments, the posters glorifying martyrdom, the terror tunnels, the educational incitement, the religious glorification of genocide. It means accepting that Jewish sovereignty in the ancient Jewish homeland is permanent and irreversible. It means building a political culture based on construction rather than destruction.
Pax Israeliana is not a promise of a quiet life. It is the acceptance of a heavy burden. The burden of power means making decisions that determine the fate of millions—decisions that will be condemned by comfortable observers who never face the consequences of failure. It means accepting that every action will be scrutinized through a microscope while enemies’ atrocities pass unnoticed. It means knowing that restraint will be interpreted as weakness, while strength will be condemned as aggression.
The burden of clarity requires abandoning the comfortable ambiguities that have long characterized Israeli policy. No more strategic ambiguity about nuclear capabilities—enemies must know that existential threats will meet existential responses. No more apologetic language about security measures—a nation surrounded by those seeking its destruction need not justify its vigilance. No more defensive crouch in international forums—a democracy protecting minorities from genocide need not bow to dictatorships that sponsor terror.
The burden of being the only adult in a room of arsonists manifests daily. When the United Nations condemns Israeli defensive actions while ignoring Syrian chemical weapons, Iranian nuclear programs, and Turkish occupation of Kurdish lands, Israel must proceed regardless. When European diplomats propose “peace processes” that would create terror states on Israel’s borders, Israel must say no without apology. When American progressives demand concessions to those who seek genocide, Israel must resist without concern for popularity.
A guarantor power must possess the psychological strength to act decisively, to ignore international condemnation when necessary, and to prioritize strategic objectives over global popularity.
This requires a steeling of the national will that goes beyond military preparedness. It demands an end to the moral confusion that has plagued Israeli discourse—the endless self-questioning, the disproportionate concern for enemy casualties, the apologetic tone when discussing legitimate security needs. A guarantor power cannot afford the luxury of self-doubt. When protecting Druze villagers from massacre, there is no moral ambiguity. When preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, there is no room for hesitation. When ensuring that October 7 never happens again, there is no space for equivocation.
The psychological transformation may be the hardest burden of all. For decades, Israeli culture celebrated its moral superiority through restraint, its enlightenment through self-criticism, its sophistication through acknowledging enemy narratives. This luxury is no longer affordable. A guarantor power must possess the psychological strength to act decisively, to ignore international condemnation when necessary, and to prioritize strategic objectives over global popularity.
This is not a call for brutality or abandonment of moral principles. It is recognition that true morality sometimes requires hard choices, that protecting the innocent may require defeating the guilty, that building peace may require winning war. The Middle East respects strength and exploits weakness. Pax Israeliana represents the choice to be authoritative rather than loved, to be secure rather than applauded, to be effective rather than popular.
The Choice
History presents certain moments when the possible expands, when the constraints of the past loosen, when new orders can be born: the Peace of Westphalia in 1648; the American victory in the Revolutionary War in 1783; the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989; the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The Middle East in 2025 is such a moment. The old order—built on Arab nationalism, sustained by petrodollars, defined by hostility to Israel—is dying. What replaces it remains unwritten.
Great powers are not born; they are forged in the crucible of crisis. October 7 was Israel’s crucible. From it emerged not just survival but transformation. The path forward requires three forms of courage: physical courage to confront enemies directly, moral courage to accept the responsibilities of regional leadership, and intellectual courage to abandon outdated paradigms.
The old Middle East is dead. The new one is being born. Israel can be its midwife or its victim. The choice, as always, is Israel’s.
In 1923, Jabotinsky wrote that “the only way to reach an agreement in the future is to abandon all idea of seeking an agreement at present.” A century later, his insight takes new form. The only way to achieve peace in the future is to abandon the illusions of the peace process and create the conditions—through strength, through protection, through leadership—that make peace not a dream but an inevitability.
This is Pax Israeliana. Not perfect peace—perfection is not a Middle Eastern virtue. But a practical peace, a possible peace, a peace that emerges not from documents but from facts on the ground. The peace of the victor. The only peace that matters is the peace of the defeated.
The wire has been restrung. The sirens have new meaning. The world has been remade. The old Middle East is dead. The new one is being born. Israel can be its midwife or its victim. The choice, as always, is Israel’s.
But some choices are clearer than others. And this one is crystalline in its clarity. The age of the defender has ended. The age of the guarantor has arrived. Israel must rise to meet it.
