The Weaknesses of Israel in War: From Darius's Mirror to Netanyahu's Fire - by Dr. Babak Shafiee

 

The Weaknesses of Israel in War

Dr. Babak Shafiee

PhD in Geopolitics, Kharazmi University, Tehran, Iran

Introduction 

More than two thousand and five hundred years ago, Darius the Great inscribed at Behistun that he ruled not by the sword but by wisdom. This brief sentence is the most concentrated expression of ancient Iran's grand strategy; a philosophy that regarded military power as an instrument in service of political purpose and never as an end in itself. The Achaemenids built the greatest empire in human history not through slaughter but through the art of combining power with magnanimity. Today, in the recent crises of the Middle East, Israel has walked the opposite path, precisely, the sword without wisdom. An army equipped with technology that Darius himself might have called miraculous, yet guided by a strategy that fails to match even the commanders of the Achaemenid age. 

This article draws on the concepts and strategies of ancient Iran to analyze the structural weaknesses of Israel in its recent wars. The central question is this: if the commanders of the Achaemenids and the thinkers of ancient Iran were to look upon today's Middle Eastern battlefield, where would they see Israel's fatal errors?

Farrah and the Crisis of Legitimacy.

In the political philosophy and sacred tradition of ancient Iran, the concept of Farrah (or Khvarenah) held a central place. Farrah signified divine radiance; charisma and the legitimacy of rule; an invisible force that made the king acceptable to his people and his governance worth obeying. The Avesta and Pahlavi texts are explicit; Farrah belongs only to the one who upholds Asha (truth and cosmic order). When a king departed from Asha, Farrah fled from him, and his rule declined toward ruin. Israel once possessed political Farrah, a legitimacy nourished by broad Western support; the historical sympathy born of the Holocaust and the narrative of the only democracy among dictatorships. But recent operations, especially in Gaza, have severely eroded this Farrah. The images of ruin, the casualty figures among civilians, and the policies placed under scrutiny by the International Criminal Court are all signs of Farrah departing from Israel. This erosion of legitimacy is in the long run more dangerous than any missile fired from southern Lebanon; for once Farrah departs, its return takes generations. 

The Strategy of a Thousand Peoples 

The Achaemenids produced the greatest experiment in multicultural governance in ancient history. Cyrus the Great, after conquering Babylon, not only refrained from massacre but freed the Jews from captivity, restored local temples, and permitted every people to live according to their own language and tradition. This policy is enshrined in the Cyrus Cylinder, recognized today as one of the earliest documents of human rights. Achaemenid strategy rested on a foundational principle: conquest is not complete until the vanquished is transformed into an ally. They understood that military occupation without political integration is always costly and impermanent. Herodotus writes that even in the face of Greek uprisings, Darius first tried diplomacy before resorting to force. Israel, in its recent wars, has disregarded precisely this ancient wisdom. The policy in Gaza, economic siege, destruction of infrastructure, and the absence of any serious political proposal have transformed the vanquished not into an ally but into an ever-harder enemy. The generation coming of age today in Gaza and the West Bank carries the deepest resentment within it, and that resentment will write a harsher future than the present. 

The Arteshtaran and the Trap of Asymmetric War in ancient Iran

The Arteshtaran were the elite military class trained not only in the arts of combat but in philosophy, geometry, and the thorough study of the enemy. Achaemenid commanders knew that every adversary possesses its own structure and logic and that to defeat it, one must first understand it. One of the foundational principles of ancient Iranian warfare was this: what you think is the enemy's weakness may be his primary weapon. The Scythians whom Darius pursued across the northern steppes had no fortress, no defined kingdom, and no standing army. Yet this apparent weakness was their greatest strength; an army with nothing to lose is undefeatable. Israel today confronts precisely this same dilemma; Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis are not conventional armies defeatable by classical operational planning. They are rooted within civilian populations; they possess decentralized structures, and they wield the psychological weapon of images of civilian suffering. The Israeli army was built for conventional warfare, but the war it faces grows more asymmetric with each passing day, and no Iron Dome can intercept the weapon of perception. 

Daraz-Dasti and the Warning Against Overreach 

In the Avestan texts, the concept of Daraz-Dasti (overreach, or transgressing the proper measure) is counted among the gravest of offenses. Zarathustra taught that whoever exceeds the proper measure departs from Asha; meaning that justice and cosmic order reside in balance and transgression beyond one's due; even in self-defense, opens the door to Ahriman (the principle of destruction). This ancient warning is a precise description of one of Israel's most fundamental strategic weaknesses: the absence of proportionality. When the response to an attack becomes so sweeping that it lays cities to waste and displaces hundreds of thousands, it can no longer be called defense. In such a moment, even allies fall silent; new enemies are born, and the moral stage of the conflict is reversed entirely. Throughout military history, armies that have abandoned the principle of proportionality have won in the short term but lost in the long term; Rome at Carthage, the Mongols at Baghdad, and France in Algeria; all were military victories that carried within them the seeds of historical defeat. Daraz-Dasti always collects its debt, and it collects it with interest. 

Conclusion 

Darius the Great inscribed at Naqsh-e Rostam that whoever takes falsehood as his companion will in the end stand alone, and whoever wields force without wisdom will in the end destroy himself. These words read as though written to describe the great contradiction of contemporary Israel. Israel possesses an army with which it can win any tactical engagement but it lacks a strategy with which it can build peace. Its Farrah of legitimacy is in flight; it has disregarded the Achaemenid wisdom of a thousand peoples and transformed the vanquished into ever fiercer enemies. It has fallen into the trap of asymmetric warfare against which the ancient Arteshtaran gave warning and it has departed so far from Zarathustra's principle of measure that its overreach has become the seedbed of future crises. The wisdom of ancient Iran held that true power is not the killing of the enemy; true power is the transformation of the enemy into a friend. Cyrus did this, and his name endures through history. Israel has walked the opposite path; and if that path does not change, every future military victory will be no more than a moment of calm before the next storm.