On Sept. 17, 2026, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told an overflowing hall bursting with supporters that, regarding Israel’s enemies, “from now on, we take land instead of giving it.” In an instant, Netanyahu’s declaration upended the “Land for Peace” paradigm and signaled a seismic shift in Israeli security policy that has gone largely unreported.
For over half a century, Israelis were told that if they handed land to enemies, the Jewish state would win peace in exchange. This optimistic, if naive, view has anchored the so-called “two-state solution,” which was peddled as the only viable way for the Jewish state to survive.
Setting aside the fact that Israel’s entire land mass is approximately 10,700 square miles, including the disputed territories — smaller than New Jersey — some security experts were convinced that in an era of missile defense and technology, territory is less relevant.
Many European leaders continue to parrot these misguided talking points. A recent poll among Israelis demonstrated that the conception of Israel’s trading land for Arab, Palestinian, and Islamic peace died on Oct. 7, 2023, when thousands of terrorists crashed through the Gaza border into Israel and perpetrated the biggest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.
The Oct. 7 Hamas invasion and massacre would have resulted in thousands more fatalities had the Iranian regime-backed Hezbollah executed its plan to invade Israel’s northern border with Lebanon.
Both Hezbollah and Hamas were acting from territories from which Israel had unilaterally conceded as goodwill gestures for peace. On Oct. 7, Southern Lebanon and Gaza didn’t house a single Jew or Israeli.
Since that fateful day, Israel has achieved many remarkable military successes. Many will point to the daring airstrikes thousands of miles away in Iran, Iraq, and Yemen, simultaneous targeted assassinations, and the infamous beeper operation that eliminated several thousand Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon.
Israel’s success in creating territorial security zones to protect each of its frontiers is lesser known. Israel established buffer and demilitarization areas on every land border that it controls. These buffer zones may ensure that Israelis sleep peacefully for years, if not generations to come.
THE WORLD OF OCT. 8: WHERE ANTISEMITISM DIDN’T JUST RETURN — IT BECAME TRENDY
In Southern Lebanon, Israel now maintains a six-mile buffer zone. On the Syrian side of the Golan Heights, the Israeli military has now secured a 12-mile demilitarized buffer area. On the eastern border with Jordan, Israel maintains both strategic depth and topographical superiority from the Jordan Rift Valley (10,000 feet below sea level) rising 3,200 feet to the top of the Judea-Samaria hill ridge, providing Israel a strategic view to Jordan and Syria to the east and monitoring its own Mediterranean coastal towns and cities to the west. In Gaza, Israel has established a several-mile-wide security zone and today secures approximately 65% of the Strip, with an additional buffer zone in the Philadelphi corridor along the Gaza-Egyptian border.
Since 1967, Israel’s leaders have referred to the Defensible Borders Security doctrine as exclusively safeguarding Israel from threats emanating from the east. Today, the doctrine has morphed into “Beyond Israel’s Border Security” across all of Israel’s borders as essential for a viable and defensible peace. After Hamas’s Oct. 7 invasion and massacre, Israel can only secure its tiny, porous, curtailed frontiers by keeping more land for a real peace with its neighbors, and to secure a more stable and sustainable region.
Dr. Dan Diker is president of the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs.