Israel’s Intelligence Overreach Is Becoming a Problem for Everyone

Reports that U.S. officials are increasingly concerned about Israeli intelligence activity inside the United States should not be dismissed as a minor diplomatic embarrassment. If accurate, they point to a deeper strategic problem: Israel’s security doctrine is now pressing so aggressively outward that it is beginning to step on the toes of nearly everyone around it, including Washington.

What has been going on for some time now is not ordinary alliance management. Allies spy on allies, certainly, and Washington itself has long practiced that art. But when a close military partner is reportedly treated as a critical counterintelligence concern during delicate Iran negotiations, the relationship is no longer operating inside normal diplomatic boundaries. The recent TASS report also cited NBC reporting that the Pentagon’s intelligence directorate had raised the threat level from Israel to “critical.” From a geopolitical standpoint, given US support for the Israeli state, this is unprecedented.

Israel’s precarious position is often explained almost entirely through the actions of outsiders: Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, hostile international institutions, European critics, or shifting American politics. Those pressures are real, but they are not the whole story. A growing part of Israel’s vulnerability is now self-generated. Its security doctrine has become so expansive, so preemptive, and so suspicious of even allied diplomacy that it risks turning tactical superiority into strategic isolation. This is nothing new, as this Hudson Institute report by Lee Smith warned us as far back as 2011. The report recalled damning evidence the Netanyahu government was off the rails as far back as the Obama and Biden administrations.

A country can win almost every immediate confrontation and still lose the larger political environment in which those confrontations occur. That is the danger Israel now faces. Its intelligence reach, military assertiveness, and diplomatic pressure campaigns may continue producing short-term gains,........

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