In recent days, Ansar Allah has said that a clash with Israel is inevitable. From the Houthis’ perspective, the situation is critical: on the one hand, Saudi Arabian troops are preparing to attack them directly from Yemen, and on the other, they are attempting to block arms supplies from Sudan given the Mossad-Sudan connection. The Mossad’s presence in South Sudan, based on Ben-Gurion’s peripheral doctrine, began 56 years ago with the dispatch of the first Mossad agent, David Ben Uziel, in 1969 to assist the separatist rebel group in South Sudan. In 2011, following independence, he was appointed South Sudan’s representative in Israel.
David Ben-Gurion founded the Israeli security doctrine when he was elected Prime Minister of the newly formed State of Israel in the 1950s.
The circumstances surrounding the state’s founding, the lack of strategic depth, and the disparity in population and military power forced the young state’s leaders, especially Ben-Gurion, to rely more on the military apparatus than on treaties and alliances. This mentality shaped a defensive security policy aimed at preventing damage to Israel’s internal front and the need to take the fight into enemy territory—in other words, adopting an offensive military doctrine and conducting preemptive strikes. This vision led its proponents to build a small army based on a large and highly trained reserve force to compensate for the numerical disadvantage compared to the Arabs. It was based on a security triangle: deterrence, early warning, and decisive victory.
This political and operational line was used against all countries in the region, particularly against Iran, as well as in Sudan, applying that part of Ben-Gurion’s doctrine known as the peripheral security doctrine. In his eighteen-point document, “The Army and the State,” approved by the government in 1953, Ben-Gurion explained that defending the population required quickly stopping enemy attacks and taking the fight into enemy territory by mobilizing reserves and launching counterattacks, as the state lacked both early warning and strategic depth.
While emphasizing economic development, self-sufficiency, and the distribution of the population along the borders to strengthen the defense of the country’s heartland—the center of industrial and economic power—he believed that in any war, the army must begin with defense and then go on the offensive, relying on reserves. Military documents of the time repeatedly discussed the types of war expected: surprise or otherwise, and preemptive or preemptive responses. It is worth noting that the foundation of military doctrine in the 1950s was “defense,” hence the name “Israel Defense Forces.” Then, in the 1960s and 1970s, the concepts of deterrence and early warning were developed.
Israel was involved in several wars against its neighboring enemies, the first of which was the Sinai Campaign against Egypt in 1956.
After the 1973 October War and the expansion of Israel’s borders, Tel Aviv began to rely more heavily on deterrence and early warning. Furthermore, peace agreements with Arab states, Egypt’s withdrawal from the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the strategic alliance with the United States contributed to the absence of existential threats to the state. However, the rise of regimes and organizations such as Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah forced Israel, since the turn of the millennium, to adopt a “campaign between wars” strategy. This strategy relies on the execution of small, repeated operations to destroy specific enemy capabilities, while remaining below the threshold of a full-scale war.
The Begin-Sadat Report explains that this approach emerged as an alternative to a preemptive war against Hezbollah after 2006, but its limited scope has not prevented the enemy (the resistance factions) from continuing to strengthen their capabilities.
Israel, in collaboration with the United Arab Emirates and the military government of Sudan, is currently using the Sudanese port to circumvent Ansar Allah’s blockade of the Red Sea. This port has become the main route for the transfer of goods destined for Israel.
A closer look at the RSF’s movements and success after 18 months of stalemate and fighting with the Sudanese government suggests: detailed information for the RSF, funding, and weapons flowing from old and new allies who currently share a common goal with the RSF: controlling Sudan, obtaining cheap gold, and controlling the flow of weapons to the Houthi rebels.
Antonio Albanese e Graziella Giangiulio
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