Unlike in the U.S., where the White House is required to produce, regularly, an official document outlining its national-security strategy, the Jewish state has never released any such statement, although one or two reports have come close. Yaakov Amidror has thus attempted to articulate the unwritten doctrines that have long guided Israeli strategists. Underlying his vision are certain basic, and unchanging, facts about the country’s situation:

Israel . . . will forever face a yawning gap between the size of its resident population and that of neighboring countries. The latter all have been hostile to Israel’s existence in the past, and some remain so. Israel always will be a small country in size, and hence hypersensitive to any loss of territory and to high-trajectory (artillery and rocket) fire—unlike most of her neighbors.

Israel can never reach a “fall of Berlin” moment in the Middle East, i.e., it cannot attain a decisive victory in war, such as that of the allies in World War II—a moment that would radically transform the political culture of the region [and] the desire of neighboring nations and organizations to annihilate of the state of Israel. This means that no victory in any war would ensure, once and for all, that Israel again will not face threats to its existence. Moreover, Israel’s first defeat may well be its last, certainly so if its territory ends up being conquered by Arab or Islamic forces. This is not the case for any Arab country which Israel might defeat or whose territory it might occupy.

These realities lead to many important conclusions, among them:

Israel . . . must aspire to defensible borders, i.e., lines of defense that enable the IDF . . . to parry an offensive by any hostile coalition until the reserves are called-up. Contrary to the claim that “territory has no value in the age of missiles,” the geographic dimension of Israel’s national-security concept is extremely important, and even more so in the missile era.

In the past few days, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the al-Qaeda offshoot that led the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad, has consolidated its rule in the core parts of Syria. Its leader, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, has made a series of public statements, sat for a CNN interview, and discarded his nomme de guerre for his birth name, Ahmad al-Shara—trying to present an image of moderation. But to what extent is this simply a ruse? And what sort of relationship does he envision with Israel?

In an interview with John Haltiwanger, Aaron Zelin gives an overview of Shara’s career, explains why HTS and Islamic State are deeply hostile to each other, and tries to answer these questions:

As we know, Hamas has had a base in Damascus going back years. The question is: would HTS provide an office for Hamas there, especially as it’s now been beaten up in Gaza and been discredited in many ways, with rumors about its office leaving Doha? That’s one of the bigger questions, especially since, pre-October 7, 2023, HTS would support any Hamas rocket attacks across the border. And then HTS cheered on the October 7 attacks and eulogized [the Hamas leaders] Ismail Haniyeh and Yahya Sinwar when they were killed. They’re very pro-Palestinian.

Nonetheless, Zelin believes HTS’s split with al-Qaeda is substantive, even if “we need to be cognizant that they also aren’t these liberal democrats.”

If so, how should Western powers consider their relations with the new Syrian government? Kyle Orton, who likewise thinks the changes to HTS are “not solely a public-relations gambit,” considers whether the UK should take HTS off its list of terrorist groups:

The better approach for now is probably to keep HTS on the proscribed list and engage the group covertly through the intelligence services. That way, the UK can reach a clearer picture of what is being dealt with and test how amenable the group is to following through on promises relating to security and human rights. Israel is known to be following this course, and so, it seems, is the U.S. In this scenario, HTS would receive the political benefit of overt contact as the endpoint of engagement, not the start.