David Ben-Gurion ruminated over the issue of Israel’s strategic depth constantly, formulating Israel’s fundamental defense doctrine around it.
At various points in its history, Israel has faced the acute and unacceptable lack of geographic strategic depth: on October 6, 1973, on two fronts with different realities; and again, more devastatingly for the civilian population, on October 7, 2023.
During the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Israel’s presence and control of the Sinai Peninsula provided the country with hundreds of square kilometers on a southern front, as the IDF battled invading Egyptian forces far from Israel’s population centers and critical infrastructure.
The Sinai’s over 200 km. geographic width allowed Israel time and distance to mobilize reserves and launch a counterattack before enemy forces could significantly advance beyond the peninsula’s western edge.
Decades earlier, during the 1948 War of Independence, the Egyptians, having preexisting control of the Sinai, had succeeded in penetrating southwestern Israel, until eventually being pushed back.
The strategic depth that Israel gained on its southern flank from the 1967 Six Day War onward (the Sinai was previously conquered by the IDF in 1956, only to be returned to the Egyptians) proved itself before, during, and after the Yom Kippur War.
It prevented the Negev and Israel’s coastal plain from becoming the starting point of an enemy invasion or infiltration. The peninsula was once more handed over to Egypt as a central pillar of the peace treaty signed between Jerusalem and Cairo in 1979, again shrinking Israel’s defensive geography.
When the Yom Kippur War broke out, in the North, Israel’s geographic situation – while vastly improved from the situation prior to the Six Day War – was more perilous than in the South. The Golan Heights, which Israel had liberated during the ’67 war, is a vastly smaller geographic area than Sinai.
The distances from the Golan to major Israeli population centers and critical infrastructure in the Galilee are short; once Syrian forces launched their surprise offensive, time and distance were not on the IDF’s side. The strategic depth was minimal, and once Syrian forces were on the high ground, much of the Golan’s topographic advantages were negated.
Outnumbered and outgunned in the first hours of the war, it was otherworldly Israeli bravery, fighting skill, and sheer grit that stopped the enemy advance on the Golan.
If the advance had not been blocked, the Galilee would quickly have been cut in two, Syrian and Arab expeditionary forces would have besieged major northern Israeli cities, and the Sea of Galilee, Israel’s main source of freshwater at the time, would have been in enemy hands.
Such an outcome would have been met with an Israel forced to deploy strategic forces that, according to foreign sources, it had developed years earlier – forces that would have changed the face of the modern world.
Two fronts, two different strategic realities, during the same war, that accentuate the critical advantage that strategic depth provides – an advantage, in fact a necessity, which is central to the State of Israel’s long-term security, prosperity, and stability.
Strategic depth is a precept precisely the opposite of one of the proverbial “misconceptions-conceptzia” dominating the public discourse in Israel since the Hamas-led invasion and massacres on October 7, 2023.
Specifically, it serves as the polar opposite of the misconception known as “land for peace” – the ceding of territory to enemy entities unilaterally, across the breadth and width of the Land of Israel.
For 30 years, Jerusalem has been dealing with the catastrophic consequences of the Oslo Accords signed in 1993, and the misguided principle behind them: turning territory over to enemy hands for the ostensible promise of peace.
Successive Israeli governments, including those that were ideologically opposed to the Oslo agreements, felt obligated to maintain its basic constructs, given its status as an internationally recognized agreement to which Israel was bound.
The IDF’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000, under the government of prime minister Ehud Barak, exacerbated the country’s territorial shallowness and provided Iran with a critical piece in its geostrategic play to surround Israel with a ring of fire.
The geostrategic situation would deteriorate even further with the forced removal of Israeli civilians and the withdrawal of IDF forces from Gaza in 2005.
On the eve of Hamas’s October 7 invasion, Israel’s enemies were within spitting distance of its communities and military installations in both the South and North of the country.
Those enemies, led by Iran, also had tens of thousands of short-, medium-, and long-range projectiles that could metaphorically, as described in ancient lore, block out the sun. It was a capability that served as a force multiplier for Iran’s proxies and its overall strategy, as well as complemented the geographic advantages the enemy had attained over the past decades.
The speed, intensity, and most of all, surprise of the Hamas attack on October 7 made technology and physical barriers irrelevant in the defense of the western Negev. In a matter of minutes, the attack undercut the idea that less manpower and more tech-heavy solutions were the future of Israel’s defense and overall military strategy.
The best it's ever been
Now, three years into the war, in stark contrast to the situation beforehand, Israel’s strategic depth is the greatest it has been since the 1980s. It is a complete reversal of the last 30 years of Israel’s geographic contraction.
The government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and much of the current defense establishment, understand that the IDF’s control of large swaths of southern Lebanon; both sides of the Golan Heights, including the tip of Mount Hermon, along with an aligned and semi-autonomous Druze region in southern Syria; plus 70% of the Gaza Strip, creates a strategic depth critical to Israel’s defense and viability in the face of existing and emerging threats.
These areas cannot be relinquished again in a repeat of past deadly mistakes, regardless of the empty promises or hollow rhetoric of friend and foe alike. In geopolitics, nothing is guaranteed or forever; only strength and mutual interest dictate the course of events.
The Sinai Peninsula is an ominous illustration of this dictum. The Egyptians have continued to militarize the area; its military’s central planning regimen is for a war against a power to their northeast – Israel.
It is important to remember that Islamist forces in the form of the Muslim Brotherhood succeeded in taking control of Egypt for a period starting in 2012, as a result of the “Arab Spring” and the chaos it sowed across the Middle East.
Mohammed Morsi’s Islamist government proceeded to dismantle relations with Israel in a calculated manner. If not for a military coup that eventually removed him and his government from power, Cairo and Jerusalem could again have been at war. In such a scenario, Israel would not have had the Sinai, or the Gaza Strip for that matter, to buffer the blow.
The invasion and subsequent savagery of October 7, 2023, brought Israel back to a pre-1967 consciousness and geo-strategic reality: a precarious existence coupled with a sense of besiegement.
Israel’s stunning victories at this point in the war, as it continues, along with its territorial gains, translate to strategic depth and a changed Middle East. This is similar to what occurred during and immediately after the Six Day War.
Going forward, it is critical that Israel fully applies the bitter lessons learned from relinquishing the hard-gained and historically justified territorial and military advantages and safeguards in the decades that followed the monumental victory of 1967.
The writer is an Israeli hi-tech entrepreneur and a member of the Israel Leadership Forum. He is involved with various Israel advocacy causes, including working with Christian Zionists as well as pro-Israel Noahide groups.