From 1948 onward, nearly every major war Israel fought began with the same underlying refusal: the refusal to accept a sovereign Jewish state in its ancestral homeland.

Israel did not emerge into a peaceful neighborhood and then somehow stumble into conflict. It was declared on May 14, 1948, after the UN voted in 1947 for partition into a Jewish state and an Arab state, a plan the Jewish leadership accepted and the Arab side rejected. Israel’s Declaration of Independence explicitly called on the Arab inhabitants of the land to preserve peace and invited neighboring states to extend the hand of peace, but within hours of independence, armies from Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq joined the war. That is the first truth of Israel’s history: the Jewish state was not born from conquest after peace; it was born under invasion after compromise was rejected. 

That pattern matters because it explains something many people still refuse to understand about Israel. The country did not spend its first decades choosing between comfort and caution. It spent them choosing between survival and destruction. The 1948 War of Independence was existential. Israel ended it not by erasing its enemies, but by surviving them and then signing armistice agreements in 1949. That became an enduring Israeli pattern: fight when attacked, try to restore deterrence, accept ceasefires or agreements when possible, and then prepare for the next round because the deeper rejection often remained alive.

The Sinai Campaign of 1956 followed the same logic. Israel did not wake up one morning looking for an adventure in Sinai. The conflict grew out of Egyptian hostility, fedayeen attacks, and the worsening strategic environment around the Straits of Tiran and Sinai. Israel struck, together with Britain and France in a larger crisis over Suez, and achieved a rapid military victory in Sinai. But again, what did Israel do at the end? It withdrew under international arrangements rather than annexing or endlessly occupying Sinai. The point was not empire. The point was to stop attacks and reopen a strategic lifeline.

Then came 1967, the Six-Day War, perhaps the clearest historical example of how Israel’s wars were often forced upon it by the buildup of regional threats. In the weeks before the war, Egypt moved forces into Sinai, the UN Emergency Force was withdrawn, the Straits of Tiran were closed to Israeli shipping, and Arab leaders rhetoric intensified. Israel struck first because waiting under those conditions looked like strategic suicide. In six days, Israel defeated the surrounding armies and took control of........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)