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

After the first Arab-Israeli War in 1948, the initial Israeli governments sought to fortify the state through conventional means. The Haganah, the most prominent of all Zionist militias in Mandatory Palestine, was re-organized as the Israel Defense Forces. The philosophy of the army itself, however, would mutate over time, as Israel remained under the authority of the HaAvoda (Labour) coalition of socialist parties headed by David Ben-Gurion and his disciples. In 1977, Menachem Begin’s Likud coalition of nationalist right-wing parties won by a landslide, thereby ending HaAvoda’s long-standing hegemony in the parliamentary democratic system.

Begin was a veteran of the 1948 war who had fought on the side of the nationalist Irgun, which followed a far more radical and accelerationist approach to Zionist irredentism. In particular, the Irgun espoused Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s Revisionist Zionism thesis and its romantic and irredentist construction of the Iron Wall separating Judaic Israel from Arab states. However, this does not mean that the first Likud government would perform in an overtly antagonistic fashion toward its neighbors. In the first major diplomatic success in Israel’s history, Menachem Begin signed the Camp David Accords in 1978 along with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, thereby returning the Sinai peninsula to Egyptian sovereignty after Israel had conquered it as a result of the Six-Day War of 1967.

In 1981, Begin proclaimed the basis for the doctrine as a means to prevent potential enemies of Israel in the Middle East from acquiring weapons of mass destruction. During the final decade of the Cold War, such an aggressive deterrence policy, willing to strike first rather than to counterattack, proved to be very daring and also successful. During Ytzhak Rabin’s first government, still under the Labour Party’s control, Israel conducted sabotage operations against Iraq’s attempts to develop a nuclear program. Begin himself would destroy the Osirak reactor during Operation Opera in 1981.

With regard to Begin’s government, the Camp David Accords can historically be considered one of Israel’s most triumphant and effective diplomatic measures in the nation-state’s history. It managed to freeze Egypt’s animosity against Israel, while turning it into a relatively neutral actor in the geopolitics of the Levant. However, from a strategic point of view, this event entails more than one success. Not long after Operation Opera, Egypt’s attempts to develop its own national nuclear deterrence program were thwarted in a similar way as Iraq’s.

The political cost of these operations, which had no objective claims to self-defense, caused the Israeli electorate to support the Likud’s program and discard Labour, turning the country increasingly more radical and prone to accelerationist security policies. As such, the hegemony of the right-wing coalition would continue to hold and re-shape the Israeli political system to this day. As part of the process, Begin doctrine came to re-define Israeli geopolitical strategy and national interests. As the gray zone and fourth generation warfare models began to take hold, Israel would choose to attack first whenever possible, blurring the line between conventional and unconventional warfare repeatedly.

The Iranian Revolution’s Forward Defense Containment

In 1979, Ali Khomeini’s traditionalist Shiite revolution brought an end to the Shah’s secular monarchy. As a result, Iran’s geopolitical position shifted, gradually adopting a directly confrontational stance against Israel as a pivot of the West. After the Camp David Accords, Israel’s position amid Arab states grew stronger and more stable, with a relative hope for normalization which Israel itself would harm with its security policies. In the face of what looked like Zionism’s eventual assimilation within the Middle East, the Iranian government established the growing Axis of Resistance, a geo-strategic containment policy made up of paramilitary armies and organizations. Although not all of the groups involved in this effort belong to Shiism, they are in some form dependent on Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, and therefore compliant with its overall vision.

After Khomeini’s death in 1989, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei made his ascent to power. After the Iran-Iraq War of the 1990s, Khamenei’s principle of defense took full shape in the form of the Forward Defense Doctrine adopted by Iran, which states that the Revolution must actively become involved in foreign operational theaters, effectively becoming a regional power with imperialist motivations. Iran’s multidomain containment approach involves the Quds Force, asymmetric warfare tactics as well as cyber and hybrid warfare. It also focuses particularly in the Syria-Lebanon Corridor, a regional theater that first broke out during the 1982 Lebanon War, where Iran armed and supported Hezbollah against Bashir Gemayel’s Falangist government. Now the Begin doctrine, rather than a contingency, became the strategic groundwork for containing Iran’s Pan-Shiite vision and pushing back against it.

During the same period in which Iran’s Forward Defense doctrine took shape, Benjamin Netanyahu published his first book presenting his case for a Greater Israel strategy, A Place Among the Nations. This work served not only as a manifesto of a personal geopolitical interpretation of Israel’s position in the Middle East, but also as a justification of a course of aggression against Iran. It has been argued many times that, while Sunni countries such as the Arab monarchies appear to have entered a thaw period with Israel, Iran remains as the bastion of the Muslim faith’s anti-Zionism. The ‘shadow war’ between Iran and Israel would evolve, per Netanyahu’s own policy upon his tenure and first Israeli government in 1996, to the point of becoming one of the main catalysts for regional security in the Middle East.

For years, risks of a direct, regular confrontation between Iran and Israel seemed unlikely, due to Iran’s doctrine and Axis of Resistance focused on paramilitary actors engaging with Israel’s regular maneuvers. However, this has recently changed in an alarming way. Iran launched an initial onslaught of ballistic missiles against Israel in 2024, a consequence of the escalation following the Gaza War that began on October 7, 2023. In June 2025, this confrontation became a full regular war between the two states, since Netanyahu launched Operation Rising Lion and performed surgical air raids on Iran’s Natanz, Isfahan and Tehran nuclear facilities. As a retaliation, Iran carried out vast missile attacks across Israel. The gray zone in this confrontation, understood as a blurred line between war and peace, has become a thing of the past, and conventional war between two nation-states of relatively equal power seems to have taken over.

That being said, Iran’s geo-strategic imperatives have evolved since the Forward Defense doctrine was established. In 2020, there were reports that Iran had shifted its security focus toward the Persian Gulf and the Sea of Oman, seeking to establish itself as a competitive naval power in the region. Since Syria is no longer a safe haven for Iran’s Shiite proxies, this change in strategy makes sense. This would mean that Israel’s own strategy of regional consolidation seems to have succeeded, at least partially, as recent political changes in Syria and Lebanon, with the assassination of Hezbollah’s chief Hasan Nasrallah, have shown. Nonetheless, the Begin doctrine continues to inform Israeli defense policy, and this means that, regardless of temporary strategic shifts, Iran’s position as a regional power continues to pose a considerable threat for Israeli concerns.

Netanyahu’s Fatalism as a Revision of the Begin Doctrine

There are many factors to consider as to why Netanyahu’s own accelerationism toward Iran is itself a paradigm shift, if not a doctrine altogether. For one, his own ideological upbringing as a follower of Revisionist Zionism means that he is possibly more of an adherent to Jabotinsky’s ideas than Begin was. Netanyahu’s father, Benzion, was not only a scholar of the Jewish diaspora, but himself Jabotinsky’s personal secretary during his youth. That being said, there are other key elements to consider besides the ideological, such as his experience as a military reconnaissance commander in the Sayeret Matkal unit of the IDF. This stealth unit specializes in incursions and counter-intelligence, and it could be argued that his more radical take on the Begin doctrine symbolizes an extension of this tactical maneuver principle to foreign and defense policy.

Another cause of concern when examining this shift is the presence of ideological fatalism. The theological argument that Zionism has its own eschatology, on the other hand, may not necessarily apply to Netanyahu’s geopolitical vision, since Likud is based more on technocratic and secular nationalism. Where it may be possible to establish a similar case, however, is that Netanyahu’s rhetoric towards Israeli citizens over the last three decades has consistently revolved around Iran, with a sort of impending doom and predestination that has met vocal opponents in Israeli civil society.

Even if Iran were never to acquire nuclear warheads and establish its own conventional deterrence doctrine, there is no reason to believe this realpolitik-based fatalism would abandon Israel’s current geopolitical codes, if Netanyahu and the Likud continue to shape the Israeli political system at the domestic level.