In the annals of military history, few stories rival what a nation the size of Manipal has accomplished against enemies that have outnumbered, encircled, and repeatedly sworn to annihilate it.
Israel is approximately 22,000 square kilometres, shares borders with Lebanon to the north, Syria to the northeast, Jordan to the east, Egypt to the southwest, and is flanked by the Mediterranean Sea to the west. At its narrowest point near Netanya, it is nine miles wide, which is a stretch a determined army could theoretically cross in hours. This is the geography of a nation that should not, by any military logic, have survived. And yet it has. And how.
Before there were borders, before there was a flag, before there was a state, there was a story. And the story begins with a man standing barefoot before a burning bush in the Sinai desert, told by a divine voice to go back to the most powerful empire on earth and demand the liberation of an enslaved people. He was Moses aka Moshe Rabbeinu or Moses our Teacher; one of the most extraordinary figures in human history, and not merely in the religious sense.
Raised as an Egyptian prince in the household of Pharaoh Ramesses II, Moses had every reason to live the luxurious life. Instead, he identified with the enslaved, rejecting moral inconvenience over material ease. That insistence on standing with the oppressed against the powerful, even at enormous personal cost, embedded itself into the Jewish psyche as its foundational instruction.
It is not incidental that the Torah commands the Jewish people to remember their experience as slaves in Egypt over thirty times. The architecture of Jewish ethics is built on the memory of suffering, and on the consequent obligation to resist oppression in all its forms. Moses did not merely free a people, he gave them law.
The Ten Commandments, delivered at Sinai, represent humanity's first recorded constitutional moment with the idea that a people are governed not by the arbitrary will of a king but by transcendent moral principles binding on everyone, including the ruler. Scholars from Montesquieu to John Adams have acknowledged that the Mosaic legal code was foundational to modern democratic theory. The American Founding Fathers were soaked in it. The Liberty Bell in Philadelphia bears a quotation from Leviticus: "Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof." The Jewish story begins not with conquest, not with imperial ambition, but with liberation. And that origin story has never stopped shaping the character of the people Moses led.
If Moses represents the moral and legal DNA of the Jewish people, King David represents its martial and psychological DNA which is the template for how a small nation surrounded by hostile powers not only survives but prevails, and then transcends the act of survival to produce something of enduring beauty. David's biography reads like mythology precisely because it is almost too instructive to be true.
A shepherd boy—the youngest, the smallest, the one his own father had not even bothered to summon when the prophet Samuel came looking for a king—steps forward when the whole Israelite army was paralyzed by fear before Goliath of Gath. Goliath was a professional warrior, a giant in full bronze armor, carrying a spear whose iron point weighed six hundred shekels.
The Israelite soldiers who had been watching him parade back and forth for forty days were not cowards. They were rational actors calculating impossible odds. David changed the calculation. He refused Saul's armor since it didn't fit him, and instead chose five smooth stones and a slingshot which he knew how to use. He ran toward Goliath. The stone struck the giant in the forehead and he fell face-down. The battle was over before it started.
There is something in this story that has never stopped resonating because it encodes a truth about asymmetric warfare that military theorists have been rediscovering ever since: that the smaller combatant who refuses the larger combatant's terms of engagement, who chooses the weapon suited to his own abilities rather than the conventional arms of his enemy. The one who attacks from unexpected angles at unexpected speed gets extraordinary advantages.
David did not try to out-giant the giant. He killed him on his own terms. This is, almost precisely, the doctrine of the modern Israeli Defense Forces. When Arab armies in 1967 expected a prolonged war of attrition they could win through mass and numbers, Israel launched a blitzkrieg air strike before breakfast that destroyed the Egyptian Air Force on the ground. When Hezbollah built its deterrence around thousands of rockets and tunnel networks, Israel developed Iron Dome and precision strike capabilities that turned Hezbollah's mass-fire doctrine into an expensive failure. The five smooth stones keep changing form. The principle remains.
David was also, remarkably, a poet. The Psalms attributed to him including the achingly beautiful 23rd Psalm, "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want" represent some of the most emotionally honest religious poetry in human history. A man who had killed his thousands, who had sinned enormously and repented genuinely, who had known the ecstasy of triumph and the desolation of exile, wrote of fear and faith and the unbearable weight of being human with a rawness that strikes readers three thousand years later as startlingly contemporary.
He is the warrior who weeps, the king who dances in the streets and the man after God's own heart who was also unmistakably, fallibly, achingly human. Jerusalem, the city David conquered and made his capital, the city that has never stopped being contested since was his greatest monument. Though he was not permitted to build the Temple he laid the groundwork for it by making the city holy.
He established that there is a place on earth that a people call home with a depth of attachment that transcends politics; one that reaches all the way down to the roots of identity itself as an attachment has never broken. Not through the Babylonian exile, or through Roman destruction and through two thousand years of diaspora, Jews have been praying toward Jerusalem from every corner of the earth for twenty centuries, ending the Passover Seder every year with the same four words: "Next year in Jerusalem."
For most of those centuries, it was a prayer. In 1967, after paratroopers of the Israeli Defense Forces reached the Western Wall for the first time since 1948, it became in one of the most staggering fulfillments of any historical longing a reality. Between the ancient world of David and the modern state of Israel lies the Haganah — the underground army that arguably represents the most extraordinary act of collective self-organization in modern political history. The word Haganah means "defense" in Hebrew.
Its origins were modest: a few thousand Jewish settlers in Ottoman-era Palestine, organizing to protect their agricultural communities against raids in the early twentieth century. But by the time the British Mandate of Palestine was drawing toward its chaotic close in the late 1940s, the Haganah had transformed into something the world had rarely seen as a a clandestine military force built from almost nothing, operating in secret, acquiring weapons through underground networks, and training a population of shopkeepers, farmers, teachers, and refugees to fight a war for survival that everyone around them said they could not win.
The context matters enormously. The British, who held the Mandate, had by the late 1930s issued the White Paper, catastrophically limiting Jewish immigration to Palestine at precisely the moment that European Jews were being systematically murdered and needed somewhere to go. The Haganah responded by running an illegal immigration named Aliyah Bet that smuggled tens of thousands of Holocaust survivors and refugees past British naval blockades in overcrowded, barely seaworthy ships.
When the British intercepted the SS Exodus in 1947 — a ship carrying 4,500 Holocaust survivors — and forcibly returned its passengers to displaced persons camps in Germany, the moral scandal reverberated around the world and accelerated the UN decision to partition Palestine and establish a Jewish state. The Haganah meanwhile ran weapons from Czechoslovakia in crates labeled as agricultural equipment. It trained fighters in pre-dawn field exercises that had to be hidden from British patrols. It maintained a shadow logistics and intelligence structure across a population that was simultaneously exhausted by years of conflict and driven by a survival instinct that had been sharpened to a razor edge by what had just happened in Europe.
Many Haganah fighters were Holocaust survivors who had arrived in Palestine after losing their entire families and everything they had ever known. They did not need to be told why they were fighting.
On May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion declared Israeli independence. Within hours, the armies of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq invaded. The Haganah, which almost immediately became the Israel Defense Forces, was the institution that stood between a newborn nation and its extinction. It was outnumbered, outgunned in conventional terms, and fighting on multiple fronts simultaneously. But it won.
The Haganah's legacy is more than military. It established a culture within the IDF that persists to this day: a flat command structure in which junior officers are expected to exercise judgment and initiative rather than wait for orders, a culture of improvisation and adaptation that has driven Israeli military innovation ever since, and an ethical code called the Tohar HaNeshek, the purity of arms that insists military force must be used only when necessary and with proportionality, even in existential conflict. This code is debated, contested, sometimes violated, and always consequential.
No other military in the region operates under remotely comparable ethical constraints. In 1973, Egypt and Syria launched a surprise assault on the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, Yom Kippur, catching Israel off guard. Within days, Israel had reversed catastrophic early losses and was advancing on Cairo. Each war was, on paper, unwinnable. Each was won. More recently, Israel dismantled Iranian proxy networks with extraordinary precision by eliminating top Hezbollah commanders in Beirut using exploding pagers, striking weapons convoys in Syria, and reportedly penetrating Iranian nuclear infrastructure with cyber tools that security experts are still decoding. The country operates in a permanent state of siege and has built an intelligence apparatus — the Mossad, the Shin Bet and Unit 8200 — all consistently ranked among the most capable spy outfits on earth. The story of a tiny nation vanquishing, again and again, enemies many times its size is not merely inspiring. It is one of the most remarkable geopolitical phenomena of the modern era.
The darkness that follows the flag
The profound contradiction of the Jewish story is that military victory has not translated into safety for the world’s Jews. If anything, Israel's strength has intensified the hatred directed at diaspora communities which had nothing to do with military decisions. Antisemitic incidents have surged across the Western world in waves that defy explanation by conventional political frameworks. Jewish cemeteries have been vandalized in France, the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom. Synagogues have been firebombed.
Jewish students on American and European university campuses describe environments so hostile they avoid wearing visible Jewish symbols. In Argentina, the 1994 AMIA bombing killed 85 people and remains the deadliest antisemitic attack in Latin American history. In Pittsburgh in 2018, a gunman walked into the Tree of Life synagogue and murdered eleven worshippers: the deadliest attack on Jewish people in American history.
Antisemitism is a virus that mutates. On the far right, it wears the face of the old Nazi, reflecting the eternal claim that Jewish people control the world's finances, governments, and media. The Left has found new cloaks: the targeted demonization of Israel and the deliberate blurring of the line between legitimate criticism of Israeli policy and the hatred of Jews as a people. In the Islamic world, certain state-sponsored media continue to broadcast material that would have been at home in Nazi Germany. The global Jew-hatred that was supposed to have died in the ash heaps of Auschwitz is not dead. It has merely been reorganized.
The strategic case: Why the west needs Israel
In the cold language of realpolitik, the question is why does the civilized world comprising democracies and open societies need Israel to exist and to be strong?
The first reason is intelligence gathering. Israel is positioned at the exact crossroads where Europe, Asia, and Africa meet which is the most strategically significant real estate on the planet. Israeli intelligence services have penetrated Iranian nuclear programs, infiltrated Hezbollah's leadership structure, and neutralized Al-Qaeda cells in operations that American and European agencies could not accomplish unilaterally.
After every major Islamic terrorist attack on Western soil, Israeli intelligence has invariably provided crucial leads. When a hostile state or non-state actor threatens global aviation, energy infrastructure, or Western cities, Israel's warning signals have, on multiple occasions, been the difference between a plot foiled and a catastrophe realized.
The second reason is Israel's military technology. The Iron Dome, David's Sling, and the Arrow missile systems represent the most advanced and battle-tested anti-missile architecture in existence, intercepting 90 percent of Iranian missiles launched at Israeli cities. These technologies born of existential necessity are now being integrated into NATO defensive frameworks and deployed to protect allies.
Israel has freely shared its drone technology, cyber capabilities, battlefield medicine, and counterterrorism doctrine with Western allies. The United States military trains with and alongside the Israeli Defense Forces regularly, and the knowledge transfer moves in one direction: from a nation that fights for survival every decade, to nations that have been sheltered from existential warfare for eighty years.
The third reason, paradoxically, is regional stability. Without a strong Israel, the Middle East vacuum would not have moderate Arab democracies. It would be filled by Iran. The Abraham Accords which normalized relations between Israel, the UAE, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco represent something that would have been considered fantasy since a generation ago: now Sunni Arab states are publicly aligning with Israel because they recognize Israeli military strength is the most powerful check on Persian imperial expansion. A weakened or eliminated Israel does not produce Palestinian statehood. It produces a Hezbollah-Hamas-Iranian arc from Tehran to the Mediterranean, with nuclear ambitions and a declared ideological commitment to the destruction of Western liberal civilization.
Fourth? The democratic anchor. Israel remains the only functioning liberal democracy in a region characterized by theocracy, monarchism, and authoritarian nationalism. Its Supreme Court has ruled against its own government. Its Arab citizens sit in its parliament. Its press is ferociously free. In a region where the alternative models are the Islamic Republic of Iran, Hamas governance in Gaza, and 'reformed' ISIS in Syria, Israel represents proof of concept that a functional, innovative, pluralistic democracy can take root and thrive in the Middle East. That matters enormously to believers in liberal values as a universal model and not merely a Western artifact.
The moral case: Why the world owes a debt it cannot repay
The Jewish people did not choose to need a state. They were driven to it. Two millennia of diaspora, punctuated by pogroms, expulsions, forced conversions, and culminating in the most systematic industrialized murder in human history by the Nazis—the Holocaust in which six million lives were extinguished not for any crime but of being born a Jew—left a people with the singular conclusion that safety and sovereignty are inseparable. Existing at the mercy of others' goodwill is to not truly exist at all.
The world did not protect the Jews when it had the chance. Britain, which controlled Palestine during the World War, closed its ports to desperate Jewish families fleeing Nazi Germany—their ships were turned back to Europe, to Nazi ovens. The United States, under FDR, refused to bomb the rail lines to Auschwitz despite possessing the capability and the knowledge. The world knew of the vast pogrom, and turned away.
Israel is the civilized world's monument to that failure, and its ongoing existence is the ongoing repayment of a debt that can never truly be settled. To allow Israel's destruction now—whether through military conquest, economic strangulation, or the slow erosion of its legitimacy by relentless demonization—would not merely be a strategic error. It would be a moral catastrophe of the first order. It would signal to every minority, every small nation, every vulnerable people on earth that the promises of the international order mean nothing, and that sovereignty and safety are luxuries reserved for the powerful and that the memory of the Holocaust is only good for speechmaking.
Israel's role in the world of 2035–2050
Looking forward, the case for Israel's centrality only intensifies. The defining conflicts of the coming decades will not primarily be fought between conventional armies over physical territory. They will be fought in cyberspace, in the domain of artificial intelligence, in biological research, and control over who controls critical energy and water infrastructure. In every one of these domains, Israel is already operating at the frontier.
Israel's tech sector called "Silicon Wadi", concentrated in Tel Aviv, produces more startup companies per capita than any nation on earth. Its research in desalination technology has turned a water-scarce desert nation into an exporter of water solutions to drought-afflicted countries across Africa and Asia. Its agricultural innovation feeds populations that climate change is rendering increasingly food insecure. Its cybersecurity firms protect infrastructure across Europe and North America. And its military AI research, developed under the pressure of real conflict, is decades ahead of academic equivalents developed in peacetime.
In a future where climate stress, resource competition, and state fragility accelerate the conditions for conflict, Israel's synthesis of technological innovation with battle-hardened pragmatism will be not merely an asset but a necessity for the liberal democratic world. The countries that maintain close alliances with Israel—the United States, Germany, India, France—will have structural advantages over those that do not.
There is also the civilizational argument for supporting Israel. The values embedded in the Judeo-Christian tradition—the dignity of the individual, the rule of law, the obligation to question, the sanctity of human life are not incidental to Western civilization. They are its operating code. Judaism gave the world monotheism, the concept of ethical law, and the revolutionary idea that history has a direction and a moral meaning.
The Jewish people, against every historical pressure to be assimilated, erased, or destroyed, have survived as the world's most improbable and most consequential civilization. Their state, imperfect like all states, is the physical guarantee of that survival. A world in which Israel no longer exists would not be a world of peace. It would be a world that had proved the antisemites right—that Jewish existence is inherently provisional, that the promises of liberal civilization that in reality support extremist Islam are hollow, and that might, in the end, really is right.
Why India must support Israel
The question is not really whether Israel can endure. The question is whether the civilized world is worthy of the ally it has in Israel which it must have the wisdom to recognize before it is too late, what it stands to lose. The lesson is consistent: threats do not wait for consensus; survival cannot depend on it. Trump's argument, in that sense, was less about burden-sharing percentages and more about strategic posture. Adversaries probe not just military strength, but political will, too. That aspect sharpens when viewed through Iran’s trajectory: its nuclear ambitions, its proxy networks, and its long-standing ideological hostility toward Israel.
For India, this is not a distant debate. India's own experience with Pakistani nuclear threats, cross-border terrorism, proxy warfare, and prolonged security threats creates a natural strategic overlap with Israel. Both states have faced actors who do not seek incremental concessions but structural disruption. Both have learned that deterrence, once eroded, is difficult to rebuild. India's partnership with Israel in intelligence sharing, defense technology, agriculture, and cyber capability has grown precisely because it is rooted in realism, not rhetoric.
Israeli systems have strengthened India's defense preparedness; Modiplomacy has increasingly recognized Israel as a reliable partner in a volatile region. Supporting Israel diplomatically, and in the arena of global opinion, aligns with India’s broader strategic interests for three reasons. It reinforces the principle that states confronting sustained, organized violence retain the right to respond decisively. It strengthens a partnership that delivers tangible security and technological benefits. And it signals strategic autonomy—India choosing positions based on interest and experience, not external pressure.
This does not require abandoning humanitarian concern. Civilian suffering in conflict zones is real and must be acknowledged. But acknowledging suffering does not require strategic blindness. It does not negate causality, nor does it eliminate the necessity of deterrence against actors that initiate large-scale violence. Israel’s survival, then, is not only about Israel. It is about whether the international system still recognizes thresholds of lines that, once crossed, trigger consequences that are not endlessly negotiable.
The West stands at a familiar crossroads: continue speaking in two voices, or choose clarity. India faces a parallel choice, not between morality and strategy, but between abstraction and experience. History offers a quiet warning. Ambiguity, when tested repeatedly, does not produce stability. It produces escalation on terms set by those least constrained. Israel has learned that lesson across centuries. India, in its own way, already has. The question is whether the rest of the world is willing to act on it.
