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This is a guest essay by Nachum Kaplan, a longtime journalist and commentator who writes the newsletter, “Moral Clarity.”
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
Given its international profile, you would think that Israel were a continental power with several thousand kilometers of strategic depth to squander.
It is, in reality, a tiny country conducting an extraordinarily large argument about survival.
Anyone who wants to understand its politics, wars, borders, settlements, military doctrine, or reluctance to entrust its security to international promises should begin with something embarrassingly unfashionable: a map.
Pundits galore claim to know Israel’s history, politics, and what its government should do next Tuesday, but very few are meaningfully familiar with its geography and topography.
Israel covers about 22,000 square kilometers (or about 8,700 square miles), which Americans tell us is the size of New Jersey. Not being an American, I have no idea what that means. New Jersey to me is the taxi ride past the giant IKEA store from Newark into Manhattan. For non-Americans, Israel is about the size of Wales, or the South American tax haven of Belize, or half of the Netherlands.
Israel is long, narrow, and strategically awkward, with much of its population and economic infrastructure concentrated along the Mediterranean coastal plain. This matters more than the mandarins in London, Washington, and New York discussing Israel realize or can even fully conceptualize.
Countries exist in physical space. Armies move through physical space. Rockets cross physical space. Tanks, terrorists, artillery, drones, and ballistic missiles do not respect political scientists’ abstractions.
Israel does not have much physical space. This explains much about Israeli behavior that is lazily attributed to nationalism, paranoia, militarism, religious fanaticism, or congenital Jewish unpleasantness.
Western foreign policy pundits tend to treat geography as something humanity outgrew. They talk instead about international norms, confidence-building measures, multilateral mechanisms, and diplomatic frameworks. Yet even high-tech armies remain distressingly old-fashioned. Logistics and the territory they need to cross still matter.
Israel’s geography is unforgiving because the country combines smallness with high population concentration, difficult borders, and proximity to real and potential enemies.
Before 1967, at its narrowest central point, Israel was roughly 14.5 kilometers (nine miles) wide. Forget strategic depth; that is a respectable morning jog. Yet around that narrow waist sits the country’s demographic and economic heartland. Tel Aviv and the coastal plain contain an extraordinary concentration of Israelis, businesses, infrastructure, transport links, and economic activity.
The rocky Judean and Samarian hills rise immediately to the east. To illustrate their strategic importance, you can stand on Judean peaks and see about 80 percent of the Israeli population on a clear day. Any peace deal, regardless of shape or form, must reckon realistically with this geographic reality or it will be a non-starter.
That is precisely the problem. Imagine the U.S. facing a hostile force just 24 kilometers from Manhattan, or hostile artillery overlooking central London. How about rockets being launched toward Paris from just beyond the périphérique? Large countries have the space in which to make mistakes or to recover when things go wrong.
The U.S. has enormous strategic depth. Russia has historically converted geography into military doctrine, retreating across immense distances while exhausting invading armies. China possesses vast hinterlands. Even relatively small European states frequently enjoy greater distance between hostile borders and their principal population centers.
Israel is so small that it often has only minutes to respond to an attack. This produces a different strategic psychology.
When an American policymaker proposes that Israel accept additional security risk in exchange for a potential diplomatic benefit, that risk is experienced asymmetrically. Washington may suffer a policy failure. Israelis may suffer terrorists coming through their bedroom windows and butchering people.
A failed peace experiment involving a distant American ally may produce congressional hearings, memoirs, and a panel at the Council on Foreign Relations. In Israel it can put armed lunatics inside Israeli communities before breakfast.
October 7th provided the most horrifying demonstration imaginable.
Israel withdrew every settlement and military installation from Gaza in 2005. What followed matters enormously to Israeli strategic thinking. Hamas established military control in Gaza, constructed vast terrorist infrastructure, accumulated rockets, and committed the October 7th massacre.
Many Israelis concluded from this that territorial withdrawal is inherently impossible. Others drew the lesson that territorial withdrawal without reliable security arrangements can become irreversible geography combined with reversible promises. That distinction should dominate any serious discussion of future Israeli withdrawals.
Foreigners sometimes find Israeli arguments about particular hills, ridges, valleys, and settlement blocs baffling. Why all this obsession with a few kilometers? Simply, it is because there are not many kilometers available. Judea and Samaria (also known as the West Bank) are not a remote colonial possession several thousand kilometers from metropolitan Israel. It sits beside Israel’s primary population centers, so Israel’s fixation on terrain is hardly mysterious.
Military geography has always cared about elevation, observation, access routes, chokepoints, and defensible boundaries. Alexander cared about terrain. So did Rome and Napoleon. NATO does, too, when it is not busy doing nothing about Russian aggression.
It explains why benighted slogans such as “end the occupation” sound very different in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv than they do at demonstrations in Melbourne. In a functioning state, a border on a map is not just a line but a military fact.
The framers of United Nations Security Council Resolution 242, which was passed at the end of the 1967 Six-Day War, understood at least part of this problem. The resolution called for every state in the region to possess the right to live within “secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force.”
The word “secure” was not decorative.
Israel’s smallness shapes its entire military culture. A country without much space and with a small population cannot casually absorb prolonged wars of attrition. The Israel Defense Forces are already feeling the strain of the current war, which although successful, is the longest Israel has ever fought.
Small states must place an extraordinary emphasis on intelligence, mobilization, air superiority, technological advantage, early warning, and rapid offensive action.
This approach is sometimes presented as evidence of Israeli aggression when it is really the product of arithmetic. A large country can trade territory for time. Israel has little territory to trade. Big countries can absorb an initial military disaster and regroup deep inside their own territory. The United States’ response after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor is an example.
Israel may not receive that opportunity to regroup. It takes only 10 minutes for a ballistic missile from Iran to reach Israel. Hence the traditional Israeli preference for taking wars rapidly into enemy territory — a doctrine Israel has sharpened since October 7th — maintaining overwhelming qualitative military superiority and treating warning time as an existential commodity.
This brings us to the great paradox of the Arab-Israeli conflict, one that is rarely articulated clearly in foreign discourse: Israel’s smallness makes peace more necessary and more dangerous.
It makes peace more necessary because it is difficult for a tiny nation to flourish indefinitely while surrounded by enemies committed to its destruction. Yet it also makes peace more dangerous because the territorial concessions required for peace may reduce already limited strategic depth.
Differing views on this paradox explain much of the opinion differences on security policy among Israelis and between the Israeli right and left. This is why Israeli governments, often recklessly, have been willing to surrender enormous quantities of territory when they believed the strategic exchange justified it.
Israel returned the Sinai to Egypt after the 1967 war. The Sinai is enormous compared to Israel itself. Israel relinquished settlements, military bases, oil fields, and strategic territory because the prize was a peace treaty with the most powerful Arab state. That agreement has survived assassinations, wars, revolutions, Islamism, political upheaval, and profound mutual suspicion.
The notion that Israel is expansionist and refuses to surrender territory in negotiations is factual nonsense. It is just that Israeli distinguishes between territory exchanged for something tangible and territory exchanged for hopes and prayers. This distinction becomes especially important with regard to Judea and Samaria, a place about which one rarely hears even a semi-intelligent discussion.
An Israeli withdrawal from Judea and Samaria creating a peaceful Palestinian state would represent one strategic reality. A withdrawal creating another Hamas-controlled enclave overlooking the country’s center would represent something entirely different. Anyone advocating the former must explain convincingly how to prevent the latter.
One objection is obvious: We live in the age of ballistic missiles, drones, satellites, and cyberwarfare. Surely 15.4 kilometers here or 12 kilometers there no longer matters.
It still matters, just differently.
Long-range weapons have indeed reduced some traditional advantages of strategic depth. Iran does not require divisions on Israel’s border to attack Israel. It can do so from home. However, as America is discovering in its war with Iran, there are limits to what even the most advanced air power can achieve.
Modern technology has also made proximity extraordinarily dangerous. Short-range rockets provide little warning. Drones can exploit tiny distances. Anti-tank missiles can strike across borders. Small armed groups can move quickly through breached defenses.
October 7th demonstrated that fences, sensors, surveillance systems, and sophisticated intelligence cannot substitute perfectly for distance. Technology can compress geography but cannot repeal it.
There is also a psychological consequence to living in such a small state. Everything is close: the wars, the borders, the degrees of separation between people. Terrorism is not something happening in an obscure province. In Israel, national security intrudes into personal life in every way. The soldier killed yesterday may be your colleague’s son. The reservist called up tomorrow may be your dentist.
A missile aimed at “Israel” is rarely aimed at some remote desert military facility hundreds of kilometers from civilization. Even Israel’s southern Negev desert, which makes up half the country, is not particularly remote. This helps explain Israel’s remarkable social resilience and its periodic collective panic.
Israel can mobilize with astonishing speed because the distinction between civilian society and national defense is unusually thin. After October 7th, Israel assembled an immense 550,000-strong army in under two weeks, a feat nost nations with much bigger armies could not match.
This geographic reality must be factored into any analysis of Israel. You cannot seriously discuss Israeli settlements without understanding distances, or Palestinian statehood prospects without understanding topography, or military doctrine without understanding strategic depth. What happens if Israel withdraws and the territory relinquished subsequently becomes hostile, as happened in Gaza?
You cannot seriously demand that Israelis take risks for peace without understanding the scale of the risks you are asking them to take.
Israel needs peace precisely because it is small and fears failed peace for the same reason. It seeks defensible borders because it is small. Israel responds rapidly and overwhelmingly because it is small. It developed extraordinary military capabilities partly because it is small.
It is obsessed with what happens immediately beyond its borders because almost everything beyond its borders is immediately nearby. This is why drawing Israel’s borders is so difficult.
For decades, diplomats have attempted to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with principles, formulas, parameters, road maps, and declarations. Most have been little more than converting wishful thinking into diplomatic stationery.
Yet every proposal eventually encounters the stubborn geographic reality of the land itself: a narrow strip containing an entire country, including its parliament, airports, universities, technology companies, power stations, military bases, highways, families, and children.
Perhaps before the next pundit announces what Israel must surrender, where it must withdraw from, and what risks its citizens should reasonably be expected to tolerate, we might impose one modest qualification: Give them a map, then a ruler.
Anyone who wants to really understand (or criticize) Israel should sit in a mamad or a miklat for a month while Iran, Hezbollah, and Houthis lob missiles. Everyone else is just offering BS opinions and pretense.
Your piece only underlines how cognitively deficient and morally corrupt western leaders are.