In a December 2024 article in The Hill, a US media outlet aimed at politicians, congressional aides, and lobbyists, Eric Mandel, the director of the Middle East Political Information Network (MEPIN), argued that it was time to reconsider the borders of Middle Eastern nations. According to Mandel, the Syrian war (2011–2024) demonstrated that the current border lines were no longer sustainable or legitimate. The colonial reasoning behind the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreements, which had been in place for over a century and had drawn the borders of Middle Eastern nations according to European strategic interests, had not fostered peace. Instead, it had been responsible for ethnic and religious conflicts and persecutions throughout the region. The main mistake was not giving preference to indigenous peoples and not building nation-states based on clear ethnic and religious groups but rather on diverse minorities and ethnicities that were unable to live and prosper together. Mandel claims that the agreements’ original sin was promising the Jewish people – one of the region’s main indigenous groups – Erez Israel, an area stretching from the Mediterranean to present-day Jordan, still ultimately delivered only 20% of the original pledge. Israel could have served as a model for regional stability as a nation-state based on a single people with a shared history, tradition, indigeneity, and religion. Unlike Jordan, an artificial country ruled by a Hashemite king from the Arabian Peninsula, and Lebanon, a fragmented, multireligious failed state, Israel was presented to American congressmen as a stabilizing factor. It was described as having a cohesive society with a clear historical pattern and a clean-cut future.
Seizing, buffering, redrawing
Putting aside the practical feasibility of such an overall view and the applicability of precise criteria to the rather complex Arab world, this general perspective tends to encourage and justify strongly revisionist impulses.
Israel was already on a revisionist path when October 7th came about. Afterwards, the situation escalated and took a different turn. The attack prompted Israel to abandon any form of restraint and deploy its military power to the fullest extent to establish a new regional balance. The fall of the Assad regime in Syria in December 2024 reinforced this Israeli approach. Jerusalem viewed the overthrow of the regime by Ahmed al-Sharaa as a threat because it identified it with the creation of a Turkish proxy state along its borders. Against this backdrop, Israel expanded its military presence and de facto control lines, shifting dramatically through the largest expansion of occupied territory since 1967.
Israel created new buffer zones all along its borders with Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria, demolishing local housing and displacing inhabitants in the process. In Gaza, Israel “officially” seized 53% and de facto almost 70% of the Strip, took control of the Philadelphi Corridor on the Egypt–Gaza border, and built the Netzarim Corridor, which cuts the Strip in half. Satellite imagery shows the construction of a barrier more than 23km long. In addition, Israel Katz, Minister of Foreign Affairs, has recently announced the plan to establish three permanent military-community outposts in the northern part of the Strip. In Lebanon, it carved out a security area extending up to 10 kilometres deep into the country to the Litani River. In Syria, it moved beyond the 1974 disengagement line, occupying parts of the former UN-monitored demilitarised zone in Quneitra and expanding its control into official Syrian territory adjacent to the Golan Heights. In the West Bank, it approved thousands of housing units for new settlers, established 185 new outposts, and built at least 223 kilometres of new bypass roads for settlers. Finance minister Bezalel Smotrich had in fact allocated 1.3 billion shekel (£318m) in funding for dozens of new Israeli settlements.
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Israel also seized 3,800 hectares of land, designating some of it as state land and allocating the rest to settlers. This was passed off as the creation of a new security area. While new settlements are not the same as establishing a buffer zone, they serve the same function: occupying the land de facto by establishing a permanent presence and isolating Palestinian cities from each other. This particularly seals off East Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank. It is no coincidence that this trend has accelerated rapidly in the last two years, with 62 new outposts established in 2024 and 86 in 2025 compared to an average of 8 per year between 2012 and 2023. Ultimately, the creation of security and military areas by the IDF only paves the way for new ‘land reserves’ for settlements in the ‘ethnic struggle’ between Jews and Palestinians.
This significant territorial expansion occurred without the government admitting pursuing a policy of revising existing borders. Instead, the government portrayed the expansion as a security response to the vulnerability it experienced on October 7. Although Israel has internationally recognized borders, they have never been considered final or stable. Furthermore, they have never been enshrined in the country’s founding charter, the Declaration of Independence (1948). In practice, Israel’s sovereignty has extended well beyond these borders since 1967. Therefore, the debate about Israel’s “just” borders, which had been on hold since 1967, has been recently reignited by the territorial changes that occurred in October 2023. The successful multifront wars waged since then have paved the way for a new debate on Israel’s desired borders, which appeared in a study dedicated to rethinking collective security published in June 2026.
The matter of defense after October 7
The volume Defensible Borders for Israel, published jointly by the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs (JCFA) and the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security (JISS) – two right-wing Israeli think tanks close to the current government – displays a collection of essays written by former senior Israel Defense Forces (IDF) officers, government officials, diplomats, and scholars of strategic studies. The book’s main goal is to emphasize the paradigm shift that occurred in Israel’s security doctrine following Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack, and to advocate for a thorough reevaluation of the concept of defensible borders. Throughout the book, multiple contributors – including Brig. Gen. Yossi Kuperwasser, Maj. Gen. Ya’akov Amidror, Maj. Gen. Giora Eiland, Ambassador Alan Baker, and several retired U.S. generals – argue that the strategic paradigm guiding Israeli security policy should be revised based on a new doctrine of strategic depth, permanent military presence, prevention of hostile military buildups, and establishment of buffer zones along Israel’s borders. The authors view their proposal as fully in line with the Zionist tradition. According to them, before 1967 Israel used to face severe geographical vulnerabilities.
The country’s narrow coastal plain, where most of its population, economic infrastructure, and major urban centers were concentrated, was considered highly vulnerable to a potential military offensive from the West Bank. Capturing the Jordan Valley and the Golan Heights fundamentally altered this strategic reality by providing Israel with greater territorial depth and control over the main routes through which the enemy could enter the country. Then-Labour politician and general Yigal Allon authored a new strategic doctrine, later known as the “Allon Plan,” which identified continued Israeli control of the Jordan Valley as the key element of the country’s long-term security concept. This concept remained valid for decades till nowadays.
In their view, the October 7 attacks demonstrated the need to expand the Allon Plan beyond the Jordan Valley and the eastern border to include the southern and northern borders of Israel. Before October 7, Israel’s security doctrine rested on three main pillars: early warning, deterrence, and border defense. However, Israeli decision-makers developed excessive confidence in the ability of intelligence services to detect hostile preparations in advance, assuming that technological superiority alone would prevent a large-scale attack. October 7 thus revealed the simultaneous failure of intelligence and technological superiority in border defense, when only territorial control and strategic depth would have provided the IDF with enough time to react and evacuate the communities (Kibbutzim) at risk near the Gaza Strip.
Former IDF Major General and Likud MK Uzi Dayan points to the 2005 unilateral disengagement from Gaza as the main culprit. He argues that insufficient attention has been paid to geography since then. Israeli kibbutzim along the Gaza border were too close to the Gaza Strip to efficiently defend against falling rockets and potential ground attacks, which intelligence evaluations had incorrectly deemed impossible. Along with many other Likud supporters, Dayan emphasizes the necessity of retaining territorial control of “areas at risk,” especially the Philadelphi Corridor along the border with Egypt, a critical route for weapon smuggling. Ideally, Israel would be surrounded by a series of demilitarized buffer zones, giving it unrestricted freedom of military action. Yet, unlike other extreme right-wing movements, such as Nachala – a settler movement campaigning to restore Jewish communities in Gaza – he believes civilian infrastructure would be a liability to Israel’s defense.
How to manage a border
Amos Yadlin, the former head of Israeli Military Intelligence, too claims that in order to confront hybrid armed organizations such as Hamas and Hezbollah, which are capable of operating across multiple domains – including conventional ground operations, underground warfare, missile attacks, and information campaigns – while exploiting densely populated urban environments, Israel, beside expanding its ground forces and strengthening cooperation with the U.S, must multiply buffer zones around Gaza, southern Lebanon, southern Syria, and select areas of the West Bank.
On the contrary, Gershon Hacohen – a retired IDF major general known for his role in the 2005 withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, his strategic analyses, and his public statements on security policy – argues that security depends not only on geography, but also on how borders are defended. While he acknowledges the historical importance of strategic depth, he contends that continuous military readiness alone is insufficient and must be supplemented by a heightened military presence and close cooperation between military forces and civilian border communities. Thus, Israeli communities located near the borders should be regarded as integral components of the country’s new defensive system, not merely as civilian liabilities requiring protection.
The report’s main goal is to demonstrate that Israel’s claim to maintain borders different from those established in 1967 is justified and should be recognized as a legitimate aspiration under international law. The authors examine UNSC Resolution 242, adopted after the Six-Day War. They emphasize the citation about the right of every state in the region to live within “secure and recognized boundaries” while arguing that these borders no longer coincide with the 1949 Armistice Lines. In an attempt to reconnect with the long-standing Labour Zionist tradition, the authors quote Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s 1995 speech to the Knesset. In that speech, Rabin defended the principle of maintaining Israeli control over the Jordan Valley, a united Jerusalem, and the settlement blocs, arguing that it was fully compatible with the Oslo Accords. Through these references, the authors aim at highlighting the profound continuity in Israeli strategic thinking throughout its Zionist history to justify the current push for revising Israel’s borders after October 7.
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In line with the claims of fringe right-wing groups such as Uri Tsafon’s “Awaken, O North -The Movement for the Settlement of Southern Lebanon,” former generals and security advisers close to the current government assert that Israel requires significantly greater territorial control for its security than in previous decades. The October 7 events have irreversibly transformed Israel’s security paradigm by making geography, territorial depth, and direct territorial control central again. They argue that long-term security of Israel and a stable regional order will only be ensured if the international community recognizes Israel’s legitimate and necessary aspirations.
Indeed, this controversial stance and understanding has reached the mainstream Israeli public and is no longer limited to fringe groups. According to a nationwide public opinion survey carried out by Lazar Research under Dr. Menachem Lazar and released by the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs (JCFA) in 2026, 54% of respondents believe that Israel’s borders are not secure after October 7. Quite the opposite is true: this broad bipartisan consensus ends up emboldening the fringe groups that want to provoke clashes with the Palestinians.
Rush to the West Bank
Organizations such as the “David Achi Kam hikes” are responsible for the latest clash with Palestinians at the illegal Havat Gilad outpost in the West Bank. Established in 2008, the group was formed after three Israeli settlers were killed by Palestinians while hiking in Areas A and B of the West Bank. The group claims that the whole land belongs to the Jews and that Israel should move beyond the categories outlined in the Oslo Accords. They do not recognize any distinction between Areas A, B, and C, nor do they attribute any sovereignty to the Palestinians living there, and are therefore already pushing for an active revisionist approach in the West Bank. Their motto is “Where Jewish hikers go, this is where our border will be.” (Times of Israel podcast, 26 July 2026). This slogan conceals an expansionist settler attitude behind a love of nature and exploits disadvantaged and dropout youth as the first line of attack against Palestinians.
This aligns with the government’s intention, as journalist Jeremy Sharon of the Times of Israel portrays it, to support illegal settlements to “kill the idea of a Palestinian state,” as Minister Smotrich posed it. It is no mystery that the Settlements Administration established within the Defense Ministry under Smotrich’s authority and the National Missions Ministry – with authority over West Bank settlements, national service, pre-military academies, and departments dealing with Jewish identity and Jewish culture -both actively support the creation of illegal outposts in Area B. There are already twenty of them, built under the current government. The administration provides destitute hilltop youth with pocket money to cover living expenses, such as clothing and food, to establish remote outposts close to Palestinian areas and exert more pressure on their inhabitants.
Israel’s revisionist border vision is being applied to all fronts, but the West Bank is the most critical one due to its population density and the prolonged nature of the conflict. All observers, including IDF generals, agree that it is on the verge of boiling over. In the face of the international community’s indifference and its turning a blind eye to Israel’s revisionist approach, a new intifada is creeping. Meanwhile, Gaza remains shackled and in ruins, Lebanon and Syria have occupied territories, and the Iran-Israel war has yet to find a stable solution. After October 7, Israel has fully transitioned from a stabilizing factor to a consistent threat to the Middle Eastern order, likely to usher in new confrontations with its old internal enemies, as well as with new regional ones, such as the Turkish-Pakistani-Saudi alliance, eagerly aligning against its expansionism.