The transfer of Mossad’s leadership from David Barnea to Roman Gofman on June 2, 2026 occurred during a broader revision of Israeli security policy. Gofman entered the position after serving as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s military secretary and without having previously built his career inside Mossad. His appointment therefore represented more than a personnel change. It introduced a director whose professional formation was primarily military, whose relationship with the prime minister was unusually direct, and whose mandate was publicly associated with the continuation of Israel’s campaign against Iran. During the inauguration ceremony, Netanyahu presented the removal of the Iranian political system as a legitimate strategic objective, while Barnea described regime change as both possible and achievable. The official Prime Minister’s Office statement placed Mossad at the forefront of the continuing struggle against Iran.
The significance of these declarations lies in the movement of regime transformation from the speculative margins of Israeli strategic debate into the publicly articulated horizon of the foreign intelligence service. Israeli intelligence operations against Iran had previously been justified principally in terms of counter-proliferation, the disruption of missile and nuclear programmes, the collection of strategic intelligence and the weakening of Iranian regional capabilities. Under the doctrine emerging at the end of Barnea’s tenure and the beginning of Gofman’s, Mossad is being assigned a more comprehensive political function that includes the internal weakening of adversarial states, the manipulation of their information environments, the cultivation of opposition networks and the reconfiguration of the regional balance of power.
The reported establishment of an external think tank to examine Mossad’s future belongs to this process. Its publicly proposed agenda includes hostile influence networks, technological platforms, international funding systems, universities, algorithms and campaigns that challenge Israel’s legitimacy. The underlying conception extends the object of intelligence beyond states, armed organizations and military programmes towards a dispersed social and informational environment in which political mobilization itself may be classified as a security concern.
Mossad within the historical structure of Israeli security doctrine
Israeli security doctrine developed under conditions of territorial narrowness, demographic asymmetry, limited strategic depth and dependence upon rapid reserve mobilization. The conventional formulation associated with the Ben-Gurion era combined deterrence, intelligence warning and operational decision, to which civil and military defence was later added. Intelligence occupied an exceptional position because Israeli planners assumed that the state could not maintain permanent mass mobilization and would therefore require sufficient warning to assemble its forces before a major war. Air power supplied rapid concentration of force, while intelligence supplied the information necessary for pre-emption, mobilization and the identification of enemy vulnerabilities.
The doctrine also contained a political dimension. Israeli strategy has historically depended upon association with a major external power, the fragmentation of opposing coalitions and the construction of selective relations with states or sub-state actors located beyond the immediate circle of confrontation. Earlier versions of this approach involved cooperation with Iran, Turkey and Kurdish movements against Arab nationalist governments. More recent versions have sought cooperation with conservative Arab governments against Iran and its regional allies. A contemporary Israeli doctrinal study accordingly identifies reliance on the United States, regional coalition-building, exceptional investment in intelligence and long-range air power as enduring components of the national-security framework.
Preventive action gradually acquired a position alongside the traditional security principles. The Begin Doctrine established that states regarded as existentially hostile should not be permitted to obtain nuclear weapons. The campaign-between-wars doctrine subsequently generalized preventive logic by authorizing a continuous sequence of limited operations intended to obstruct military construction, weaken adversarial organizations and improve the conditions under which Israel would enter a future war. Its purpose was not to produce a final settlement, but to manage the balance of capabilities through repeated intervention.
Mossad became particularly valuable within this framework because clandestine operations allowed Israel to act beyond its borders while managing attribution, diplomatic exposure and escalation. Intelligence collection, sabotage, targeted killings, cyber operations, covert diplomacy and liaison with foreign services constituted different instruments of the same strategic function: the production of depth for a state whose geography provided little of it. The agency’s role therefore cannot be understood solely as the acquisition of information. It has long served as one of the principal institutions through which Israel alters the strategic environment before conventional military force is employed.
The crisis of October 7, 2023 placed this model under severe pressure. Deterrence failed to prevent a major attack, warning mechanisms failed to produce an adequate response, and technological surveillance did not compensate for conceptual error. An internal IDF study published in 2024 acknowledged a persistent gap between Israel’s security concept and the absence of a coherent national strategy capable of coordinating the relevant institutions under a common political logic. The same study stated that the war had initiated a renewed examination of the foundations of Israeli security doctrine.
By 2026, influential Israeli strategic writing was moving towards a more explicitly proactive framework. A study published by the Misgav Institute proposed replacing parts of the inherited doctrine with a “geopolitical-power framework” centred on prevention, decisive victory, cumulative deterrence, strategic partnership with the United States and the continuous development of technological superiority. Although such publications do not constitute formal government doctrine, they provide an indication of the conceptual environment in which Mossad’s new mandate is being developed.
Within this emerging outlook, security is produced through the continuous removal of capabilities, the penetration of hostile political systems and the prevention of unfavourable balances before they mature. The distinction between peace and war consequently becomes less useful. Israel remains engaged in a permanent campaign whose intensity varies, while Mossad supplies the covert infrastructure through which that campaign can be conducted across several jurisdictions.
The organizational transformation under David Barnea
The present orientation was prepared during Barnea’s directorship. Israeli reporting based on serving and former intelligence personnel describes a substantial reorganization initiated after he assumed office in 2021. The traditional Tzomet department, historically responsible for recruiting and handling human sources, was divided and replaced by several more specialized branches. One of these concentrated on recruiting and operating non-Israeli agents, while another expanded Mossad’s influence and psychological-operations capabilities.
The organizational purpose of the reform was to replace a relatively compartmentalized intelligence service with an institution capable of combining human sources, cyber operations, data analysis, influence activity and physical operations within a single campaign. Israeli accounts of the 2025 and 2026 operations against Iran claim that foreign-agent cells were used inside Iranian territory to attack air-defence systems and missile infrastructure in coordination with Israeli air operations. These reports should be treated as agency-influenced accounts rather than independently verifiable descriptions, although they reveal how Mossad itself wishes its institutional development to be understood.
The influence branch represented a more consequential development. According to the same reporting, Mossad constructed networks of online personalities, maintained relations with influencers inside and outside Iran and created artificial online identities intended to intervene in Iranian political discourse. The branch reportedly sought to widen the distance between the Iranian population and the state, identify social constituencies susceptible to anti-government messaging and integrate psychological operations with kinetic pressure. Plans attributed to Mossad also included contact with and possible support for Kurdish forces inside Iran and along its borders.
This organizational model modifies the traditional meaning of intelligence. Collection is integrated with intervention, while the boundary separating assessment from policy implementation becomes increasingly indistinct. Information concerning social divisions is valuable because it can be used operationally; an intelligence estimate concerning institutional weakness may become the basis for a programme intended to deepen that weakness. Mossad consequently assumes some of the characteristics of a political-warfare organization.
Barnea’s reform also increased institutional integration between Mossad and the military. Intelligence gathered or generated through covert networks could support air campaigns, while military pressure could enlarge the political effects of influence operations. This model treats sabotage, precision strikes, psychological activity and diplomatic isolation as mutually reinforcing components. Its governing assumption is that the cumulative interaction of these instruments can produce effects exceeding those of each instrument used independently.
Gofman inherited this structure and moved rapidly to establish authority over it. Within days of taking office, he dismissed the deputy director who had been regarded as Barnea’s preferred successor. Israeli reporting subsequently described the new director as examining additional methods for promoting the overthrow of the Iranian political system. The replacement of a senior internal figure by a director drawn from the prime minister’s immediate military staff has intensified concerns regarding organizational autonomy, although disruptive personnel changes have also accompanied previous Mossad leadership transitions.
Iran and the expansion of the intelligence objective
Iran remains the organizing adversary of contemporary Israeli grand strategy. The Iranian nuclear programme, ballistic-missile capacity, drone production, maritime capabilities and relations with armed organizations across the region are treated in Israeli planning as parts of an integrated strategic system. Mossad’s earlier task was to slow the development of that system. Its emerging objective is to prevent its reconstruction while altering the political authority responsible for it.
This change can be expressed as a movement through three levels of intervention. The first concerns capabilities and includes attacks on nuclear infrastructure, missile production, air defence, supply routes and scientific personnel. The second concerns networks and includes the financial, logistical and institutional relations connecting Iran with organizations in Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq and Yemen. The third concerns the political system itself, including its elite cohesion, security institutions, social legitimacy and ability to manage internal opposition.
The third level is qualitatively different from the first two because it replaces a relatively measurable objective with an open-ended political project. The delay of a nuclear programme can be evaluated through technical indicators. The degradation of a missile force can be estimated through production rates, inventories and operational performance. The transformation of a political system depends upon social coalitions, institutional defections, opposition legitimacy and the distribution of coercive power. These variables cannot be manufactured reliably by an external intelligence service, particularly when the service belongs to a state that has publicly associated itself with military attacks and regime change.
Foreign support may also weaken the domestic legitimacy of the actors it seeks to assist. Opposition organizations can be presented by the targeted government as instruments of an external adversary, while military pressure may generate national solidarity even among constituencies dissatisfied with the existing political order. Coercion and influence activity can therefore widen political fractures under some conditions and reinforce the security state under others. The outcome depends less on the technical quality of the covert operation than on the political context in which it is received.
The declared pursuit of regime change also alters the adversary’s calculations. A government that interprets the conflict as a dispute over specific capabilities may accept negotiated restrictions when the costs become sufficiently high. A government that believes its institutional survival is the opposing side’s objective has stronger incentives to preserve strategic ambiguity, maintain dispersed retaliatory assets and avoid concessions that might expose further vulnerabilities. Mossad’s expanded mandate may consequently strengthen the security rationale behind the very Iranian capabilities that Israel seeks to eliminate.
The regional network and the limitations of the proxy framework
Israel’s strategy towards Iran is closely connected to its approach towards the collection of organizations commonly described as the Iranian “proxy network.” Iranian funding, weapons transfers, training and political support have been essential to the development of several of these actors. The use of the proxy category nevertheless creates analytical difficulties because it suggests a degree of hierarchy and operational control that varies substantially between organizations.
Research on the network emphasizes that Iranian-aligned groups pursue domestic interests, maintain local constituencies and possess different levels of autonomy. Hezbollah has operated simultaneously as an Iranian strategic partner, a Lebanese political movement, an armed organization and a provider of social institutions. Iraqi armed groups are integrated to varying degrees into the state and compete among themselves for political and economic authority. Ansar Allah’s relationship with Iran has developed alongside its own state-building project in Yemen. Palestinian organizations emerged from a national conflict whose origins cannot be reduced to Iranian intervention.
A doctrine that interprets these organizations primarily as external extensions of Tehran is likely to privilege the disruption of command networks, financing and weapons supply. Such operations can impose substantial costs, although they do not remove the domestic structures that reproduce armed mobilization. Where an organization is embedded in a social constituency, a territorial conflict or a weak state system, the destruction of its senior leadership does not necessarily eliminate its political function.
The resistance framework also derives legitimacy from the continued presence of foreign military power, unresolved occupation, restrictions on sovereignty and the weakness of formal diplomatic processes. Iranian support enlarges the operational capacity of the associated movements, while the regional conditions that produced them provide the social and political basis for their persistence. An Israeli strategy concentrated on the Iranian component may therefore reduce capabilities without resolving the conflicts from which those capabilities draw legitimacy.
This limitation has direct implications for Mossad. Intelligence organizations tend to conceptualize adversaries as networks of identifiable individuals, financial flows, communications links and logistical nodes. Regional political movements contain such networks, although they also represent historical narratives, communal institutions and local struggles over authority. The first set of characteristics is susceptible to clandestine disruption. The second requires a political settlement, state reconstruction or a transformation in the distribution of rights and power.
Influence, legitimacy and the securitization of political opposition
The proposed enlargement of Mossad’s responsibilities into the field of international legitimacy introduces an additional doctrinal problem. The argument presented in the source text treats universities, international organizations, technology companies, influencers, funding networks and digital platforms as components of an environment that may undermine Israel’s capacity to defend itself. The suggested response involves identifying operators, exposing networks and disrupting their activities.
Foreign information manipulation, concealed state financing and coordinated disinformation are established intelligence concerns. The difficulty lies in the absence of a stable boundary separating clandestine interference from political criticism, advocacy and social mobilization. Campaigns opposing Israeli policy may contain coordinated foreign activity, although they may also reflect reactions to conditions in Gaza, settlement expansion, military occupation, civilian harm or the absence of a credible Palestinian political process.
Interpreting deteriorating legitimacy primarily as the product of hostile networks relocates the explanation from state policy to external manipulation. This framework is institutionally attractive because it converts a political problem into an intelligence mission. It also produces a potentially unlimited field of activity, since universities, media organizations, human-rights groups, financial institutions and digital communities can all be incorporated into a map of hostile influence.
The enlargement of clandestine authority into this sphere would require unusually strong oversight. Mossad reports directly to the prime minister, while its operational expenditure and internal distribution of resources remain classified. Parliamentary supervision exists through restricted Knesset mechanisms, but public scrutiny of particular programmes is necessarily limited. Israeli analysts and former legislators have repeatedly argued that the legal and parliamentary structures governing the secret services require clearer definition and more effective supervision.
The institutional relationship between Gofman and Netanyahu is consequently relevant beyond questions of personal loyalty. A foreign intelligence organization engaged in politically sensitive influence operations requires the capacity to distinguish the long-term interests of the state from the immediate preferences of the governing coalition. The rapid removal of senior internal personnel, the direct public assignment of regime change and the expansion of Mossad’s potential field of activity create conditions in which professional intelligence judgments may become increasingly difficult to separate from political strategy.
The fiscal infrastructure of permanent security competition
Mossad’s individual budget is classified and cannot be isolated reliably from the published state accounts. The absence of a transparent figure should prevent the use of speculative estimates as established data. It remains possible, however, to place the organization within the wider expansion of Israel’s security economy.
The Knesset approved a total 2026 expenditure framework of approximately NIS 850.6 billion. Following additional allocations associated with the war against Iran, the direct defence budget reached approximately NIS 143 billion. The Israel Democracy Institute, using a broader definition that includes the Ministry of Defence, other defence expenditures and wartime reserves, estimated total security spending at approximately NIS 175 billion. This represented almost 8 per cent of GDP and approximately one quarter of the state budget, compared with defence expenditure of around 4.2 per cent of GDP in 2022. The institute identified the intelligence services as the largest component within the category of additional defence expenditure outside the headline Ministry of Defence budget.
The fiscal expansion is no longer being treated as a temporary emergency. Israel’s security establishment is planning for sustained expenditure on air defence, munitions, long-range strike capabilities, intelligence, cyber systems, autonomous platforms and domestic military production. The original 2026 defence framework of NIS 112 billion had already been NIS 47 billion higher than the 2023 pre-war allocation before the subsequent wartime increase.
The macroeconomic implications are substantial. The approved budget incorporated a deficit target of 4.9 per cent of GDP, while the Bank of Israel projected a deficit of approximately 5.3 per cent and a debt-to-GDP ratio of around 70.5 per cent at the end of 2026. The government added NIS 32 billion to the defence allocation and created an additional NIS 13 billion reserve for prolonged military and civilian requirements. The Bank of Israel warned that persistently elevated security expenditure would constrain investment in education, infrastructure and other sources of long-term economic growth.
These figures do not establish the size of Mossad’s budget, but they clarify the environment in which its expansion is occurring. Intelligence institutions are receiving greater strategic responsibility within a security system whose expenditure has increased faster than the civilian state’s capacity. The secrecy surrounding intelligence appropriations further limits the possibility of assessing whether resources are being allocated towards defined threats or towards missions whose objectives have become progressively broader.
Israel continues to receive $3.8 billion in annual American security assistance under the 2019–2028 memorandum of understanding, including $3.3 billion in foreign military financing and $500 million for missile defence. This assistance remains significant, although the expansion of Israeli defence expenditure has reduced its proportional weight. Strategic reliance on the United States persists through weapons supply, diplomatic protection, intelligence cooperation and operational coordination, even as Israeli doctrine places greater emphasis on independent action.
The tension between operational autonomy and structural dependence constitutes one of the central contradictions of the current grand strategy. Israel seeks freedom to conduct preventive operations throughout the region while relying on American military supply, diplomatic support and escalation management. Mossad contributes to Israeli autonomy by providing capabilities that do not require large conventional deployments, although the political consequences of those operations may increase Israel’s need for external protection.
Operational effectiveness and the problem of political conversion
Mossad’s record demonstrates a high capacity for penetration, technical innovation, recruitment and operational coordination. These capabilities can produce strategic effects when the objective is limited, the target is identifiable and the desired result can be measured. The theft of documents, the disruption of a weapons programme, the interception of financial transfers or the removal of a particular operational commander belong to this category.
The agency’s new objectives are considerably more diffuse. Regime transformation, the restructuring of political attitudes, the dismantling of transnational resistance networks and the protection of international legitimacy are not discrete intelligence problems. They are long-term political projects involving societies, institutions and competing conceptions of regional order.
The expansion from preventive intelligence to political engineering may generate a means–ends imbalance. Israel possesses increasingly sophisticated instruments for producing disruption, while the political order intended to follow that disruption remains insufficiently specified. The weakening of Iranian institutions does not determine which forces would replace them. The degradation of Hezbollah does not establish a legitimate and capable Lebanese state. The elimination of Palestinian commanders does not provide a political framework for Palestinian representation. The obstruction of international criticism does not restore the legitimacy lost through policy and military conduct.
This imbalance is reinforced by the temporal structure of covert action. Operational institutions are rewarded for demonstrable and relatively immediate results. Political stabilization develops over longer periods and frequently requires compromise with actors that security organizations have spent years defining as illegitimate. The operational success of an intelligence service may therefore encourage the continuation of a strategy whose cumulative political consequences remain uncertain.
Publicity introduces a further complication. Mossad’s historical utility depended partly upon ambiguity. The increasingly explicit association of the organization with assassinations, influence campaigns and regime change weakens that ambiguity and assists adversarial governments in presenting internal dissent as foreign-directed subversion. Operational achievements may retain their material value while losing some of their political effectiveness once they are incorporated into public narratives of Israeli power.
Mossad’s position in the emerging Israeli grand strategy
The strategic model taking shape in 2026 contains several interconnected elements: the permanent prevention of Iranian nuclear and missile reconstruction; the weakening or transformation of the Iranian political system; the fragmentation of Iran’s regional partnerships; the maintenance of Israeli military access across neighbouring territories; the construction of technological and intelligence superiority; deeper integration with the United States; and the development of selective relations with Arab states that share concerns regarding Iran and regional instability.
Mossad occupies a central position because it connects these components. It collects the intelligence required for long-range military operations, conducts clandestine action inside adversarial states, maintains relations with foreign governments, participates in indirect negotiations, develops influence capabilities and supports the disruption of financial and logistical systems. Its activities create continuity between diplomacy, intelligence and military coercion.
The model nonetheless remains incomplete as a grand strategy. It defines the regional order principally through the removal of threats rather than through an institutional settlement accepted by the principal societies involved. Iranian influence is treated as an architecture to be dismantled, Palestinian resistance as a security system to be neutralized, Lebanese sovereignty as conditional upon the disarmament of Hezbollah, and normalization with Arab governments as a mechanism for isolating adversaries. These policies may alter the regional distribution of power, although they provide limited answers to the political conflicts that sustain recurring mobilization.
A durable regional order would require arrangements concerning Palestinian political rights, Lebanese sovereignty, Iranian security concerns, Gulf-state autonomy and the role of external powers. An intelligence-centred strategy can shape the bargaining environment surrounding these questions, but its methods tend to privilege vulnerability, coercion and fragmentation. Where political accommodation remains absent, the same methods may contribute to the reproduction of the resistance structures they are intended to eliminate.
The principal strategic issue surrounding Gofman’s Mossad therefore concerns the institutionalization of an expansive theory of preventive power. The agency is being prepared to operate against military programmes, political systems, regional networks and international narratives within a unified conception of security. Such integration offers the Israeli leadership an extensive range of instruments, while also reducing the distinctions between intelligence collection, covert intervention, information management and political warfare.
Israel’s current doctrine assigns increasing importance to the ability to act early, continuously and across multiple domains. Mossad is likely to receive additional resources and political authority because it embodies this preference more effectively than any other Israeli institution. The long-term consequences will depend upon whether Israeli policy can connect clandestine disruption to a defined and attainable regional settlement. In the absence of that connection, Mossad’s enlarged mandate may sustain a permanent security campaign whose operational sophistication coexists with strategic instability, rising fiscal costs and the continued regeneration of adversarial movements across the region.
