In recent years, a new strategic reality has been forming around Israel: Beyond most of its borders lie terrorist entities, not sovereign states. The more entrenched this situation becomes, the more we need to reassess the nature of the threats to us and the methods we need to use to defend ourselves.
In the past, the main threat to Israel was the possibility of a combined attack by neighboring armies. But in the past few decades, Arab states have become considerably weakened, sometimes even breaking down entirely, and the vacuum left behind is filled by powerful terrorist organizations – from Hezbollah to the north to Hamas and the satellites of Islamic State in Sinai to the south.
Terrorist organizations already existed in the time of the British Mandate as "gangs" that operated against the Jewish population. Since the state was founded, terrorist organizations have mainly taken action against us from inside sovereign Arab states: the fedayeen (guerillas) in the 1950s, which operated out of the Gaza Strip with the encouragement of Egypt; Fatah in the 1960s, from Jordan; and the various "popular fronts" that were active in Syria in the 1970s. In these cases, the terrorist groups were working under the auspices of the countries in which they were based, so Israel saw those nations as responsible for the terrorist activity.
The change came in the 1970s, when a civil war caused Lebanon to disintegrate and allowed the Palestine Liberation Organization to establish "Fatahland" – which answered to PLO founder Yasser Arafat, not the government in Beirut – in southern Lebanon. In the 1982 Lebanon War, we caused the PLO to leave Lebanon for Tunisia, but weren't smart enough to fill the space it left behind, thereby paving the way for bigger troubles. In the past decade, the process has accelerated because most of the Arab governments are weakening and falling apart and because of Israel's policy of hasty withdrawals and lack of strategy.
The first two terrorist entities appeared as a direct result of Israeli withdrawals. The quick retreat from South Lebanon – which was not conditioned on the Lebanese army taking over after the IDF left – gave the territory to Hezbollah, which turned from a bothersome terrorist group to the possessor of a large stock of missiles. Not long after that came the disengagement and hurried withdrawal from Gaza, which contributed to the collapse of the Palestinian Authority rule in the Gaza Strip and to Hamas taking control of what would turn into yet another anti-Israeli terrorist entity.
In light of the destabilization of the governments in Egypt and Syria following the Arab Spring, a local branch of the Islamic State based in the Sinai Desert used the shaky Cairo regime to build an active popular resistance that the Egyptian military cannot manage to quash. In Syria, what started as a civil war and the collapse of the regime of President Bashar Assad in the country's south led to regions of Syria that face the Golan Heights falling into the hands of jihadi and Iranian militias.
Yes, other than the border with Jordan, Israel is surrounded by terrorist entities rather than sovereign governments of those same states. Luckily for us, we have not given up our control of defense and security in Judea and Samaria. Without the responsibility of a sovereign state, the embers of anti-Israel sentiment could flare up into a full-scale conflict at any moment.
The rules of the game have changed. Israel must insist that if countries leave sovereign territories to others, the result will be no man's land, where any actions – by Israel or anyone cooperating with it – do not count as invading a sovereign country. This stance will make it clear that Israel has the tools to fight the new kinds of threat, as well.
