THE ONLY EXISTENTIAL THREAT IS INTERNAL:

Shortly before Gadi Eisenkot became the IDF's chief of staff in February 2015, he met with Dan Meridor, a former member of Netanyahu's security cabinet. "You're going to command an exceptional army," Meridor told me he told Eisenkot. "You only have one problem: there are no serious enemies left to fight." Meridor was exaggerating, but he had a point. Israel's traditional foes no longer pose the threat they once did.

For most of the past few decades, the IDF's nightmare scenario was a repeat of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when Syrian tanks stormed the Golan Heights and Syrian commandos captured Mount Hermon in a surprise attack. Today, after more than five years of civil war, Syria has disintegrated, and the risk of a conventional conflict with Israel has nearly vanished. In April, Israeli soldiers on Mount Hermon told me that their Syrian counterparts on the other side of the border, unable to obtain supplies, had deserted their positions more than a year earlier. Most of Syria's tank units and artillery batteries have disbanded, and much of the country's massive arsenal of chemical weapons, which Damascus began stockpiling in the 1970s to deter Israel, has been dismantled under international supervision.

As for the Arab countries still con­trolled by the authoritarian old guard, they have grown ever more interested in cooperating with Israel, albeit quietly. Egypt, Jordan, and, to a lesser extent, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have abandoned their past fixation on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and have mostly recognized that the problems they share with Israel are bigger than those that divide them: Iran and its proxies, on the one hand, and ISIS and al Qaeda, on the other. As did Israeli leaders, Saudi officials crit­icized the Obama administration over the nuclear deal with Iran; in recent years, Saudi Arabia has also stepped up its intelligence sharing with Israel.

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