The Rise of a Doctrine of Preventive Violence For decades, Israel’s security doctrine rested on an assumption that seemed both reasonable and workable, namely that the intentions of an enemy could change. If an adversary was building military capabilities, there was not necessarily a need to attack immediately. Israel could deter, monitor, gather intelligence, maintain its military superiority and wait. That assumption worked reasonably well when dealing with states such as Egypt, which signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1979 and maintained it through wars and regional crises. Yet the assumption began to collapse with the rise of Iran’s proxy network, whose organizations were not simply states pursuing changing interests, but ideological movements committed to Israel’s destruction. The distinction between intention and capability became crucial, because while their intention might remain constant, their ability to act on it could change dramatically. This is the central lesson that Dan Schueftan draws from October 7. The problem was not that Israel failed to understand that Hamas was dangerous, nor was it unaware that Hamas was building tunnels, producing rockets and developing military capabilities. The deeper problem was that Israel continued to operate according to a model in which an enemy would be confronted primarily when its intentions to attack became sufficiently clear. Against an ideological enemy that does not need a change of heart before going to war, that approach can become a trap. The enemy can simply wait, build, prepare and choose the moment when it believes it is ready. Schueftan describes the emerging Israeli response as a doctrine of preventive violence, or what he calls violent maintenance. The concept does not mean permanent war for its own sake. It means continuously preventing an enemy from rebuilding the military capabilities that would allow it to launch a major war under conditions of its own choosing. If the enemy is building missiles, those capabilities must be degraded. If it is constructing military infrastructure, that infrastructure must be disrupted. If it is rebuilding a military force, Israel must prevent that force from returning to the level at which it can threaten Israel strategically. The objective is not to fight a larger war later, when the enemy is fully prepared, but to prevent that war by keeping the enemy’s capabilities below the threshold required to wage it. The source describes this explicitly as destroying an enemy’s capacity to make war before it is ready, regardless of the diplomatic cost.