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The and the Islamic World 2

Israel and Grand Strategy?

Grand strategy, as defined byEncyclopaedia Britannica, is “a country’s most complex form of planning toward the fulfillment of a long-term objective . . . ​[whose] formulation and implementation . . . ​require the identification of a national goal, a thorough assessment of the state’s resources, and, ultimately, the marshaling of those resources in a highly organized manner to achieve the goal.”1

Israel’s strategic culture and political-bureaucratic habits do not readily lend themselves to the analysis of its grand strategy as a structured planning process, or even a crystallized text. Despite the issue of a multitude of academic and occasionally semiofficial proposals, an official document titled “Israel’s Grand Strategy” or even a national security strategy has never been approved by its government.2 Accordingly, rather than presuming to provide an official, let alone exhaustive, statement of this “most complex form of planning,” this essay offers an impressionistic view of Israel’s grand strategy, as reflected in its choices and behaviors over generations, proposing a contextualized broad-picture view with a special focus