If the State of Israel were a publishing house, it would be selling a range of new war and espionage books at Hebrew Book Week 2026. Opposite the Israeli tales of miracles and wonders, the Turkish-Qatari booth would display just one book: an atlas of the Middle East in a new and updated edition.
Sometimes one has to go as far as Hebrew Book Week to understand the size of the gap between Israel's focus of effort and that of its enemies in the Middle East. We once liked telling ourselves that we were the smartest people in the market. Today, doubt is beginning to creep in.
Israel has recently changed its face. The events of Oct. 7 changed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's way of thinking, and with it the thinking patterns of the military and media systems. Instead of a national strategy devoid of skepticism, based on passivity and procrastination, Israel adopted a policy of friction and proactivity. The shift began with the night of the pagers and reached its peak with strikes in Iran. What Netanyahu should have done from 2014 onward, he did a decade late and at terrible, horrifying prices that neither he nor others in the military system foresaw.
The achievements produced by friction and offensive initiative should have served as the "silver platter" for adopting and implementing a geo-strategic concept befitting a regional power. Israel should have focused on the only thing that matters in our region: what the updated atlases of the region will look like. That is the only real competition taking place. It is the only thing that will remain after the dust of battle settles.
In that competition, Israel is losing, despite the excellent starting conditions it had: a consensual determination within Israeli society, technological superiority, virtuoso tactical victories and unprecedented American backing.
US President Donald Trump's latest proposal, that Ahmed al-Sharaa deal with Hezbollah in Lebanon, is a direct and ironic product of Israel's failure to write atlases. The new Syria is the current Israeli leadership's "Noah spelled with seven mistakes": Israel failed to understand deeply the significance of creating a Turkish proxy on the Golan border, backed by American support.
Israel did not understand in real time that Syria as a unified and stable state would mean a strategic threat to it, and allowed the new Syrian regime to entrench itself without conditions, and in particular without a categorical demand that it relinquish the Golan Heights. It held no discussion with the Americans about including this condition as part of recognition of the new regime.
Israel did not imagine that a stable regime in Syria meant the possibility of thwarting the "peace railway" that is supposed to carry energy and communications goods from India to Europe via Israel, and it did not create a land corridor to the Druze Mountain region that would allow a Druze autonomy to be established in Syria.
For us, the Syrian window of opportunity was exhausted with the seizure of the Mount Hermon summit and the buffer zone, a temporary seizure managed through a tactical military lens, and one that, according to the latest developments, will still be placed on the negotiating table. No one dared think beyond the tank sight.
Hezbollah's achievement
Above all, Israel does not understand even now that the Turkish-Qatari tsunami will not pass over the Golan Heights. Israel made no effort to bring additional countries, such as Argentina and Hungary, into recognizing the Israeli Golan, alongside recognition of the new Syrian regime.
We will not be surprised if the Americans "turn on us" and, sooner or later, return the Golan Heights to the negotiating table, while the Turks, Qataris and Saudis prepare in the back kitchen the dish we will be asked to eat. By the way, only then will the Israeli leadership understand that it should have doubled and tripled settlement in the Golan Heights while it still could, in order to prevent any possibility of withdrawal. Let us hope it will not be too late.
In Lebanon, too, Israel has yet to internalize the significance of Hezbollah's strategic achievement, despite the thousands of casualties the organization has sustained. The terrorist organization is the only force in Israel's history that has succeeded in thinning out the population of an entire region and emptying border towns of their residents.
Hezbollah turned Metula, Kiryat Shmona and Shlomi into Israeli ghost towns. It may not have won on the battlefield, but the terrorist organization placed a real question mark over Israel's ability to hold on to the northern frontier. It is the only Arab force that has succeeded in rewriting Israel's demographic atlas.
Such an enemy achievement cannot be answered only with kinetic strikes. It must be answered by changing the rules of the game. Hezbollah, and especially Israel's next enemies in line, should have understood that aggression against an Israeli civilian population exacts a permanent territorial price, not a temporary one. This is the only accounting understood in the Middle East, and the only tool that creates deterrence on the one hand and respect on the other. Not bringing down towers in Dahiyeh, and not eliminating leaderships.
More than anything, Israel refuses to internalize that it cannot protect its residents along the existing border line. It conducts "consciousness and influence operations" against its own citizens, as if the situation in the north is under control. It tells a story in which peace with Lebanon is achievable, including the dismantling of Hezbollah by the Lebanese government. Since Oct. 6, the Israeli public has not been told fantasy stories so detached from the frustrating reality, as if we learned nothing from the days before the Gaza War.
Israel failed from the outset to conduct a discussion with the Americans about minimal and essential border adjustments in southern Lebanon: controlling ridges, observation points, topographical spaces and lines of control without which the term "security for the residents of the north" has no real meaning.
At next year's Hebrew Book Week, Israel must present an atlas of its own.
