Israel’s Security, Legitimacy and Narrative

Israel’s Security Challenge: Calibrating Vulnerability, Power, and Legitimacy

For decades, the central narrative underpinning the legitimacy of the State of Israel was that of a necessary refuge in a world historically hostile to Jews. That narrative was understandable and, for a long time, faithful to reality: millennia of slavery, massacres, persecution and expulsion, pogroms, structural exclusion, and ultimately the Holocaust demonstrated that integration did not guarantee collective security.

Today, however, that narrative no longer adequately describes either the world or Israel’s position within it.

The Jewish people carry a history of persecution exceptional in duration, intensity, and scope. This memory is not a rhetorical device; it is a historical fact that continues to shape perceptions of risk. Yet when memory replaces contextual analysis, it becomes an exclusive explanatory framework—one that tends to amplify present threats and justify automatic responses.

Israel today is a relatively powerful state, technologically advanced and possessing unquestionable regional deterrence. At the same time, it remains a very small country, with a limited population, no strategic depth, and surrounded by hostile actors, some of them religious fanatics who do not operate according to classical cost-benefit logic. Power and vulnerability coexist. Denying either leads to strategic error.

The world in which Israel exists today is also not the Europe of the interwar period. Never before have there been so many countries with civil liberties, legal protections, institutional safeguards for minorities, and multilateral mechanisms of oversight. Jews today live with high levels of security and prosperity in many democratic countries.

This does not mean that risk has disappeared. It means that the nature of risk has changed.

Persisting in reading the present as a direct repetition of the past produces structural overreaction: prolonged states of exception, continual expansion of security measures, and increasing difficulty in calibrating proportionality.

This misalignment generates a deep perceptual gap. Israel acts from a memory of vulnerability, while the world observes a strong state exercising prolonged control over another people. Internal fear is not externally visible, and visible hardness is not interpreted as defensive. The result is a gradual erosion of legitimacy and growing political isolation.

This perceptual gap fuels a vicious cycle: the state perceives extreme existential threats, adopts exceptional measures and strict control; the world sees aggression and questions legitimacy; and Israel interprets that criticism as confirmation that it is neither understood nor supported.

This sense of isolation reinforces the narrative of vulnerability and justifies even deeper defensive measures. In this way, defense itself becomes a factor that reinforces the perception of threat, generating a self-fulfilling prophecy.

None of this implies naivety. Israel faces real threats from actors who cannot easily be deterred. Exceptional measures may be necessary. But permanent exceptionalism becomes counterproductive. Security requires contextual calibration: neither denial of risk, which would endanger existence, nor absolutization of fear, which fuels excess and reinforces the self-fulfilling prophecy.

Israel’s legitimacy does not need to rest on the idea of an absolute refuge. Jews can today live safely in many countries and still legitimately claim the right to a state of their own. Legitimate self-determination is not justified by constant threat, but by the political decision to exist as a sovereign collective.

An additional, often underestimated factor is Israel’s internal demographic evolution. The rapid growth of the Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) Jewish population poses strategic and symbolic challenges. A significant portion of this sector participates only marginally in income generation and national defense. This not only increases the fiscal burden and reduces the effective base for mobilization, but—through its growing demographic and coalition weight—also expands its political influence, gradually shifting the justification of strategic decisions from the political sphere toward a religious one.

The external consequence is clear: Israel’s relationship with the West is based on political, not religious, identification. The West, though secular and liberal, retains a predominantly Christian cultural matrix. It can understand difficult political decisions taken by a small and threatened state and can even tolerate religious exceptions within its own tradition, but it does not emotionally or symbolically identify with policies justified primarily on religious grounds belonging to another faith. If religious justification comes to dominate Israeli politics due to the strong demographic growth of this group, there is a real risk of losing Western identification, reducing the relationship to a fragile and purely instrumental one.

The West’s relationship with countries such as Saudi Arabia is illustrative: it is strategic and transactional, not identitarian. There is no shared narrative or value-based identification. Should Israel move toward an increasingly religious justification of its policies—particularly a Jewish one—it risks sliding into a similar position, with one decisive difference: Judaism lacks a bloc of religiously aligned states capable of offsetting a loss of Western identification.

The Haredi decision to pursue exponential demographic growth cannot be questioned within a liberal democracy. Therefore, the solution cannot be to restrict birth rates. What is essential is that Israel maintain the primacy of political and strategic justification over religious justification. Religion can add legitimacy and cohesion, but it cannot become the core rationale of state decision-making or public narrative. When political decisions are justified primarily through theology rather than civic reasoning, the Western anchor inevitably weakens.

From this perspective, the Haredi demographic and political challenge is not merely an internal cultural debate, but a long-term security issue. It affects economic sustainability, civic cohesion, national defense, and—crucially—Israel’s international political legitimacy.

For this reason, it is essential to pursue policies that minimize this risk, such as civic and economic integration, agreements among secular parties to ensure that state justification does not become primarily religious, and strategic external communication.

In summary, to ensure Israel’s democratic continuity and legitimacy—a very small state with no shared religious identity with most of the world—it is crucial to maintain strong alliances. This requires carefully calibrating the narrative of vulnerability, avoiding overreaction, and confronting the growing tendency to justify decisions on religious grounds. Doing so helps prevent an identity rooted in historical trauma, reinforced by excessive religious legitimization, from evolving into a self-fulfilling prophecy that unnecessarily increases risk for the State of Israel.