Cédric Debernard
Since October 7, 2023, Israel has been living under a logic that its Western observers struggle to fully grasp: that of a state which knows, with clinical precision, that several of its neighbors and their backers are organized around a single objective, its disappearance. This is not paranoia. It is written on the walls, literally. In the north, Hezbollah — armed, financed and directed by Tehran — spent two decades building an arsenal of over 150,000 rockets pointed south. To the northeast, in Tehran, a countdown clock installed in 2020 displays the date by which the Islamic Republic has promised Israel will cease to exist. To the southwest, in Gaza, Hamas carried out the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. And further south still, from Yemen, Houthi missiles reach Tel Aviv. The geography of threat is total.
How should a state respond to this? That question — deceptively simple — is where international relations theory stops being abstract and becomes existential. Two schools of thought have long shaped the debate: liberalism and realism. In most capitals, they are competing frameworks. In Israel, they are competing survival strategies. And the gap between them has never been wider.
No comments:
Post a Comment