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Israel in the Storm: Ambitions and Vulnerabilities
Flashmag! Issue 171 April 2026
In this recomposed landscape, Israel plays a central and ambiguous role that deserves analysis free of both complacency and demonization. The Israeli state has, since its founding, built its security on three pillars: conventional military superiority over all its neighbors, an undeclared but universally recognized nuclear arsenal, and unconditional American support. These three pillars operated in concert for seventy years. But the context in which they function has profoundly changed. A nuclear Iran represents for a significant portion of Israel’ s political spectrum an existential threat— not so much operational as architectural. An Iran armed with nuclear weapons would irreversibly alter regional balances, extend a deterrent umbrella over its proxies, and erode the absolute strategic superiority Israel has maintained since 1948. This is why successive Israeli governments— from Sharon to Netanyahu— have made neutralizing the Iranian nuclear program an absolute strategic priority, to the point of conducting sabotage operations, targeted assassinations of scientists, and repeated military strikes against Iranian targets in Syria. But there exists within current Israeli politics another logic, more contested and more troubling for regional stability: a maximalist territorial recomposition, championed by political formations that openly advocate annexation of the West Bank, rejection of any Palestinian state, and an expansionist vision of“ Greater Israel” grounded in biblical references. This vision, a minority position in Israeli society but dominant within the governing coalition formed in 2022, implicitly presupposes the disintegration or permanent neutralization of neighboring states. And it generates, around Israel, a growing regional hostility that in turn fuels Iranian proxy networks.
Venezuela, Cuba, the Sahel: The Living Ghosts of Resistance
It would be an analytical error to reduce the anti-hegemonic bloc to its major actors— China, Russia, Iran. Its strength also derives from its periphery: states that were presumed dying and yet
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