JERUSALEM — Nine days before Israel’s October 27 election, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu put his security record into a three-page document and asked voters to read it as strategy. Two opposition leaders read it as slogans.
The paper, titled “Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Security Doctrine,” went up Sunday on the Israeli government’s website, prepared with help from the National Security Council, according to Anadolu Agency. Its ten principles put preemptive strikes ahead of containment and call for buffer zones along Israel’s borders when deemed necessary.
It does not say where those zones would sit or which neighbouring territory they would touch, and Anadolu noted that it offers no detailed operational plan for confronting Iran or building them. What it does offer is a claim: that Israeli operations from Gaza and Lebanon to Yemen and Iran removed an imminent threat of nuclear annihilation. The Prime Minister’s official X account repeated the framing, quoting the text as saying the October 7, 2023 attack “compelled Israel to wage a fierce war.”
Opposition leader Yair Lapid called the document “superficial” and “bizarre” and said it looked as though the free version of an AI chatbot had written it, Anadolu Agency reported. He also pointed to contradictions between its principles and Netanyahu’s policies, including military service exemptions for ultra-Orthodox Jews and the refusal to set up an official commission of inquiry into the failures surrounding the October 2023 attack.
Gadi Eisenkot, the former army chief who leads the opposition Yashar party, called it “empty pages filled with slogans” and said it exposed a “strategic vacuum.” He argued that Hamas still maintains armed forces in Gaza and that Hezbollah is rebuilding in Lebanon, which challenges Netanyahu’s account of Israel’s military achievements. An opposition-led government, he pledged, would approve a formal national security strategy within 150 days of taking office.
The presentation that accompanied the paper carried its own message. One map, bearing the logo of Germany’s Friedrich Ebert Foundation, grouped Türkiye, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Pakistan under the label “Sunni Diamond Alliance,” Anadolu reported, while Iran and allied groups sat under “Axis of Resistance” and Israel was grouped with the United Arab Emirates. Netanyahu did not make clear whether he regards every country shown as an adversary, and the labels do not establish that any formal military alliance exists among them.
TEH could not open the document on the government’s website from its own systems, so this account of its contents rests on Anadolu’s reading and the Prime Minister’s Office post. Anadolu does not say whether the cabinet has voted on the paper, and nothing TEH read says whether it would bind any government formed after October 27.
