Israel has long excelled at winning battles. What it has struggled to do is win the future.
Geopolitical risk expert and Senior Fellow at the Henry Jackson Society Barak Seener has spent years diagnosing that gap. His recently published report, “Israel 2048: A Blueprint for a Rising Asymmetric Geopolitical Power” co-authored with Dr. David Wurmser, US Vice President Dick Cheney’s former Middle East advisor, examines Israel’s evolving role in the regional and international order and asks a question that cuts deeper than policy: does Israel actually know what it wants?
Seener’s answer is that it doesn’t, and he traces that deficit not to any failure of military or diplomatic capability, but to something foundational. Israel never resolved its identity. Torah, he argues, is not merely the key to that resolution; it is a living framework that can actively transform the tools of statecraft.
The most powerful form of outreach, Seener says, is relevance. “It is not the warm gestalt of chicken soup and a Shabbat meal, but a demonstration that the Torah has something concrete to say about how a state organizes its economy, projects its power, and treats its citizens.” Western political economy has long been trapped in a binary between capitalism, which centers the individual, and socialism, which centers the collective leading to revolution and counter-revolution. “Torah offers a third way,” he asserts. “The first six years of the sabbatical cycle are capitalistic, whereas the actual sabbatical year, when the land lies fallow and may be harvested by anyone, is socialistic. This allows for evolution rather than revolution, for recalibration rather than rupture,” he maintains. That kind of framework, properly articulated in the language of modern policy, could inform state decisions in ways that are both practically grounded and distinctively Jewish.
Seener argues that what is needed is for rabbis and Torah scholars to become genuinely interdisciplinary; capable of translating the wisdom of Jewish law into the language of contemporary governance, economics, and security. According to the Gemara, an ox goring a cow or a person is not just an agricultural scenario. It is a metaphor for liability, proportionality, and the ethics of harm that carries direct implications for modern legal and economic systems. Sharia finance provides a parallel worth taking seriously: Muslim scholars undertook sustained intellectual work to render Islamic law applicable to modern financial instruments. Every major bank in London now offers Sharia-compliant options.” He counters that “Judaism has not yet done the equivalent for the tools of statecraft.” The resources are there. The interdisciplinary ambition has been missing. “Torah does not need secular disciplines to complement it. Rather Torah articulated in an interdisciplinary manner with unique policies has the ability to inform and transform secular disciplines,” Seener affirms
This is not an abstract cultural argument. For Seener, the failure to root Israeli identity in a coherent theological, philosophical and civilisational framework has produced measurable strategic consequences. Identity informs what vision you have for your state as well as how you want to shape the regional landscape. Israel lacks this and remains in a purely reactive posture.
Against this backdrop, Seener identified a dramatic shift in Israel’s military posture since the outbreak of war on October 7. “Where it once responded to threats on its borders, it now projects power across the region, such as striking Houthi targets thousands of kilometers away, eliminating senior Hezbollah leadership in their Beirut stronghold, and neutralizing Iranian assets. Operationally, these have been stunning achievements. Strategically, they remain incomplete.” The Iranian adversary and its proxies have shown a capacity to reconstitute faster than Israel can degrade them. Brilliant strikes produce headlines, not outcomes. “When you don’t have a strategy, how do you cement your wins?” Seener asks rhetorically.
Iran, by contrast, spent decades patiently executing its Ring of Fire strategy, building a network of proxies, encircling Israel, reshaping the region according to its vision. It had a doctrine. Israel merely reacted to the one set by Iran. The same pattern has appeared in negotiations. Former Ambassadors Dennis Ross and Dore Gold among others across the political spectrum have noted that “Palestinian representatives typically arrived at talks with concrete objectives, while Israeli counterparts spoke in broad terms about seeking peace. The adversary kept seizing the initiative, because Israel could only articulate what it opposed far more clearly than what it actually sought.”
Seener traces this back to Israel’s founding. Ben Gurion was a pragmatist responding to catastrophic circumstances. “The ingathering of the exiles in the aftermath of the Holocaust left no time for the kind of national self-examination that gives a state its coherent identity. America had two oceans and a civil war to work out who it was. Israel went to war on the day it was born. Ben Gurion, an atheist who drew culturally from the Bible without being theologically informed by it, never defined what Judaism would mean for the state, nor how democracy and Jewish tradition would complement one another. The Declaration of Independence reflected that ambiguity.”
Decades later, the consequences are visible everywhere. Israeli society is polarized between competing constituencies with no common centripetal force drawing them together. The country’s enemies have done more to define Israeli identity than Israelis themselves. “Were it not for Yom HaShoah and Yom Hazikaron, for Hitler and Arafat respectively, for the succession of existential threats, what would anchor the Israeli sense of self? Israel has been reactive doctrinally and reactive in its identity. The two are not coincidental. They reflect the same underlying deficit,” Seener claims.
Yet this moment may be different. States tend to undergo identity overhauls at roughly 80 to 100-year intervals; periods when accumulated pressures force a society to re-examine who it is and what it stands for. “Israel is approaching its 80th year. October 7 may have been the rupture that accelerates that reckoning. This is not a political question about which party or leader will deliver. It is systemic and societal, the kind of transformation that unfolds across a generation.” This can also have an effect upon the State of Israel’s policy tool kit enabling it to marshall an array of mechanisms in different configurations that it never did before. Theologically, Seener notes, you might call it teshuva.
What gives this moment particular weight is that it coincides with Israel’s emergence as a genuinely independent strategic power. For decades, Israel was a supplicant; dependent on American weapons systems and vulnerable to political pressure from Washington. That is changing. “The Pentagon’s most recent security strategy document refers to Israel, for the first time, as a ‘military partner’. The 12-day war against Iran, in which America joined an Israeli-led strike, foreshadowed what future cooperation may look like: Israel taking the initiative, the United States following,” Seener asserts.
Israel has also transformed itself from a high-tech nation into a defense-tech nation. It now manufactures its own munitions, is in the process of onshoring its lines of production, develops its own weapons platforms, and exports military and infrastructural systems sought by countries across Europe and Asia. This can counter aims at delegitimising Israel. Spain may attempt to sanction Israel in public while quietly purchasing Israeli-developed systems through Germany to save face. European defense establishments increasingly depend on Israeli components they cannot easily replace. “The IMEC trade corridor—connecting India, the Gulf, and Europe—adds another dimension, positioning Israel as a node linking continents and competing with both China’s Belt and Road Initiative and Turkey’s regional ambitions. Israel’s growing military independence also means it will no longer be held hostage to the ideological positions of any particular administration in Washington. That is a profound shift,” Seener identifies.
But all of this strategic repositioning still leaves unanswered the foundational question: toward what end?
Wurmser and Seener’s report suggests the answer lies where it always has. Israel’s enemies have long understood that identity and strategy are inseparable. “A state that draws on Torah not as a relic to be preserved but as a living framework to be applied, one that informs economic policy, shapes security doctrine, and gives its citizens a common language, would possess something no weapons system can provide. It would know what it is fighting for and be a light unto the nations,” he concluded.
That is the shift Israel still needs to make. October 7 may have finally made it unavoidable.
