Former Israeli Intelligence Chief Says Military Doctrine Treats US as a 'Declining Power' and War as Permanent

A paper published this week by Tel Aviv's Institute for National Security Studies lays out what its author calls an unwritten security doctrine that has governed Israeli decision-making since October 7, 2023. The author is Major General (res.) Tamir Hayman, who ran Israeli military intelligence until 2021 and now heads INSS.

According to Hayman, the doctrine has never been formally adopted or announced. It operates, in his words, as a concept "revealed through practice, rather than as a government's declared policy." He argues it now shapes not just military planning but Israel's sense of its own national identity.

The centerpiece is a judgment about the United States. The doctrine, as Hayman describes it, treats Washington as a declining power whose restrictions on Israel are dangerous to heed. It assumes the US will eventually abandon Israel regardless of what Israel does, driven by what the doctrine calls America's own "social and political shifts." Dependence on Washington, in this framing, exposes Israel to a "progressive American value system" seen as incompatible with the state's Jewish character.

"Excessive adherence to restrictions imposed on Israel by a US administration is dangerous."

Hayman disputes this view rather than endorses it. He notes that Israel has limited natural resources and a defense industry that cannot function in isolation, and that its security establishment has long assumed it needs backing from a major power. He raises the possibility that cutting ties to American and European partnerships, including the EU's Horizon research program, would leave Israel technologically stagnant and diplomatically isolated.

The paper lays out four further principles Hayman says sit alongside the US judgment. One subordinates Israeli democracy to the state's Jewish character, accepting erosion of civil rights as a cost worth paying. A second treats any peace agreement as structurally unattainable, describing arrangements with Arab governments as inherently temporary and deceptive, and dismissing peace itself as a left-wing concept opposed to "security." A third regards neighboring Arab states as artificial groupings rather than genuine nations, whose collapse Israel should manage or even encourage. A fourth holds that war is Israel's normal condition rather than an exception, with preventive war preferred and constant armed readiness treated as a security asset.

The doctrine's territorial component, as summarized in the paper, calls for "forward defence" zones and civilian settlements inside the occupied West Bank and in buffer areas carved out of Syria, Lebanon, and Gaza. It rules out a Palestinian state outright.

Hayman's account does not change policy on its own. It is one former official's reading of an unwritten posture, published by a think tank, not a government directive. But it comes from a man who oversaw Israeli military intelligence through years of operations in Gaza and the West Bank, describing a framework that has operated underneath public Israeli statements about seeking peace and valuing the US alliance, statements that have accompanied continued American arms transfers and diplomatic cover at the UN throughout the Gaza campaign.