On Feb. 25, the Israeli Defense Ministry announced a successful test of its upgraded Arrow interceptor system conceived to target long range ballistic missiles, in all likelihood from Iran. According to its proponents, the Arrow system had already proved a success in up to 90% of previous tests. The February test is the latest illustration of Israel’s new passion for missile defense, a topic that may have become one of the few topics left to bring consensus in Israeli politics.

The story of Israel’s missile defense enterprise dates back to the early eighties when the US administration of Ronald Reagan was looking for allies interested to cooperate on its ambitious Strategic Defense Initiative. In 1983, the Israeli government expressed its initial interest and three years later was signed a Memorandum of Understanding that led to the co-financing of the Arrow system. But contrary to the Reagan dream to build missile defense to render nuclear weapons obsolete, the Israeli calculus was driven by a mix of opportunism and pragmatism: all along the government faced tremendous scepticism from its military establishment that saw missile defense as strategically misleading.

Since the birth of Israel, its armed forces have relied on offensive doctrines rather than defensive ones. Starting in the late '40s, Israel’s strategic culture has been shaped by constraints such as the absence of strategic depth and scarce manpower that left the country at the mercy of protracted conflicts that would put the existence of the state at stake. To bypass these elements, Israeli leaders opted for offensive doctrines enabling the launching of pre-emptive campaigns that would swiftly move the battles to the territory of the enemies. Even though the reality of an existential threat coming from Arab conventional armies vanished after the 1967 war, this scenario still remained a key driver of Israeli military planning process in the mid-eighties. This explains the initial scepticism toward a weapon system presumed to rebalance resources from offensive to defensive means.

The first wake-up call happened in 1988 with the so-called ‘war of the cities’ between Iran and Iraq, when Israeli analysts realised that Saddam Hussein was using Scud missiles striking Tehran as new means of compellence (i.e., encouragement through application of punishment]. The Iraqi missile threat got even more concrete to the Israelis three years later when, in the midst of the second Gulf War, Saddam Hussein launched 42 Scud missiles on Tel Aviv, Haifa and Dimona. Although the damages inflicted were relatively low, the psychological effect revealed a urgent need for reassessing the Israeli offensive-defensive equilibrium.