Despite seventy-five years since its establishment, and reaching advanced levels of economic and military power, Israel continues to live in a state of existential security anxiety unmatched by any other country. This obsession comes at a time when Tel Aviv enjoys strategic protection from the United States, possesses a nuclear arsenal estimated at hundreds of warheads, in addition to a national income exceeding 400 billion dollars, which makes its security justifications deeply questionable.
Israel has long invested in claims of an existential threat from neighboring countries, but this wall practically collapsed after peace and normalization agreements with several Arab countries, and the decline of the traditional military threat from the region's armies. Nevertheless, Israeli circles quickly invented new enemies or exaggerated regional rivals like Iran, to push major powers towards military confrontations that serve its expansionist interests and ensure its qualitative superiority.
In the Iranian file, Israeli contradiction is clear; while Israel possesses immense nuclear capabilities, it launches international campaigns to prevent Tehran from acquiring a peaceful program, and previously succeeded in pushing the US administration to withdraw from the nuclear agreement. This behavior reflects a desire to keep the region in a state of instability, ensuring the continuation of Israeli military intervention in the regional depth under the pretext of 'self-defense'.
On the ground, Israel exercises direct occupation of the West Bank, supported by militias of armed settlers numbering over half a million, facing an unarmed people besieged behind hundreds of military checkpoints. This reality proves that the security Israel seeks is not merely border protection, but a tool to perpetuate control over Palestinian land and prevent the establishment of an independent state, by turning cities and villages into isolated 'islands'.
Israeli security reports constantly speak of the erosion of deterrence power, pointing to five active fronts including Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank, and Iran, in an attempt to justify repeated military operations. Its sources resort to exaggerating the capabilities of the resistance in Gaza or claiming that Hezbollah possesses chemical weapons, to create international cover that allows it to use tons of explosives in its swift and continuous wars.
This behavior, stemming from the 'psychological illness of security obsession,' has two main motives; the first is to continue politically and militarily blackmailing the Western world to achieve the dream of a regional 'superpower'. The second is an attempt to convince the international community of the impossibility of withdrawing from the occupied territories in the Golan and Palestine, by portraying the surrounding areas as permanent threats that can only be contained by military control or by turning them into buffer zones.
Ultimately, Israel remains an unnatural state in its own eyes before others, because it refuses to integrate into its surroundings by ending the occupation and adhering to international legitimacy resolutions. Instead of living as a peaceful state like its neighbors, Tel Aviv chooses to remain in a spiral of security obsession, trying to combine two irreconcilable opposites: the continued occupation of others' lands, and the expectation of achieving permanent security and peace.
Israel is trying to do the impossible by combining two opposites: continued occupation and achieving absolute security.
שתף את דעתך
Israel and the Security Complex: An Existential Obsession Beyond Military and Nuclear Power