David Bastardo Martínez
The ongoing war between Israel and Iran, which effectively began in June 2025, is not an isolated incident that escalated from the Gaza War, nor is the United States’ involvement the result of unforeseen escalation. It is also more than merely a goal pursued by Benjamin Netanyahu’s accelerationist government,
but rather the culmination of a grand strategy to consolidate Israel as the main regional power in the Levant, a premise first conceived by the original founder of the Likud Party, Prime Minister Menachem Begin, in 1981.
Begin’s principle of pre-emptive defense, informally called the Begin doctrine, seeks to prevent any potential enemy state from developing weapons of mass destruction, primarily nuclear weapons.
Rather than becoming a marginal strategy confined to the years following the Camp David Accords, the Begin doctrine informed Israeli defense policy to such a degree that no other state actor in the region would be allowed to potentially experiment with nuclear strategic interests.
During the 1990s, then Likud politician and former Sayeret Matkal commander, and system outsider, Benjamin Netanyahu, developed the idea that Iran posed the most significant threat to Israel’s national security if it acquired nuclear weapons. This thesis emerged as a result of the Shiite revolution of 1979 that overthrew Shah Reza Pahlevi,
and it allowed Netanyahu political capital within Israel to oust more prominent politicians at the time, as well as a looming and escathological motivation for contemporary forms of Zionism to radicalize. At the same time, however, his own theory co-exists with the doctrine established by Menachem Begin, which had yielded tangible results in the past against Iraq and Egypt. As a result, Israel’s attitude toward Iran, and particularly during the escalating regular war that broke out in 2025, is far from aimless.
Begin Doctrine: How Israel Decided to Attack First
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