Israel has produced no formal document articulating a grand strategy. The study by Charles Freilich on Israel's national security begins with the views of David Ben- Gurion, the country's first prime minister and minister of defense. Major components of foreign policy and socio-economic practice comprised his concept of security, the ‘Ben-Gurion doctrine’, incorporating factors such as the projected duration of the conflict with the Arab world, geographic considerations, the nation-in-arms, and the elements of Israel's deterrence. Yet that doctrine was not an all-encompassing ‘blueprint.’ The new state did not formulate a comprehensive national security doctrine to deal with both basic existential and current security concerns. Even in the third decade of the 21st century there is no embracive Israeli grand strategy.

Nevertheless, it is possible to identify both the principal features and evolution of Israel's strategic doctrine even as it remains opaque. The present study elucidates the main objectives that Israel pursued in the absence of an all-encompassing conception of strategy, examining the first 25 years that followed independence in 1948. Israeli leaders considered the attainment of the goals enumerated below as imperative for the survival of the Jewish state, perceiving them in the broadest terms and by no means confining their purview to the military sphere. Defense matters, always an immediate concern and overriding preoccupation, did not obviate an understanding of the long-term requisites of national security. These were the precepts that guided Israel's leaders, and while those policy makers never brought these elements together in the form of a grand strategy as defined in the introduction to this volume, this chapter describes the country's equivalent of such a doctrine. According to Art's definition, grand strategy concentrates primarily on how a state employs the military instrument to achieve its goals. Yet, Israel's leaders viewed as their principal objective, even without a “grand plan,” implementation of a strategy in which the military protected a new state engaged in a state-building enterprise that encompassed the economic component, social institutions, and even ideological imperatives.