A Likud MK admits, "the IDF has failed" and a public intellectual asks "how will we know when it's time to leave?"

Two very different columns, each by an Israeli public figure, each with its own deep-seated fears. They express very different concerns, but on this they agree: this war is going to a very bad place.

As Israeli TV broadcast the national Yom Ha-Atzma’ut Ceremony on Monday night, there was a sight quite unusual for the showing of a national ceremony:

Photo: Haley Weinischke

The broadcast cut to a split screen, the half on the right showing the official national ceremony of the “lighting of the torches,” while the left side showed an unofficial ceremony, attended by some 1400 people and broadcast around the country, called the “extinguishing of the torches.”

In the coming week, we’ll share some clips of the unofficial ceremony, translated into English, to show how it was a clever, if heartbreaking, riff on what Israelis are used to seeing.

That national TV would actually take time to show the unofficial ceremony even as the national one was still unfolding spoke volumes about where this country’s heart was (or wasn’t) on Independence Day. David Horovitz, founding editor of the Times of Israel, summed it up with his OpEd:

The divisions in Israeli society rapidly coming back to life are now focused on the newest crisis, the question of what to do “the day after” in Gaza. PM Netanyahu just announced that he would not allow any discussion of that question until Hamas was destroyed; Gantz and Gallant shot back that without a plan for the day after, Hamas cannot be destroyed. As long as no one else takes responsibility for Gaza on “the day after,” they say, Hamas will keep filling the void. Which is precisely why, they said, the IDF is now fighting Hamas in parts of Gaza that had ostensibly been cleansed of Hamas.

It’s far from clear what will happen, and the political maelstrom is likely far from over. All that will be covered in standard news sources. What those sources will likely not reflect, though, is the bubbling degree of desperation about how this war is unfolding—and the fact that, if one is honest, it is not going well. At all.

Were a person critical of the coalition to say that the war is being mismanaged, we’d likely say “to be expected.” But when a Likud MK responds to the Netanyahu—Gallant/Gantz kerfuffle in a lengthy Facebook post, demanding that we start getting honest about the fact that we’re not winning this war (his piece is meant as a defense of Netanyahu), it’s clear that sands are shifting.

So, to try to capture the deep division which that split screen above represents, we point today to two pieces by Israeli public figures that appeared within days of each other.

What divides them is what those worries are, and their thoughts about how we should address them.

What they share is deep-seated misgivings about what is happening here.

---

We begin with MK Amit Halevi’s post (he should not be confused with Herzi Halevi, the IDF Chief of Staff), translated from the Hebrew. Halevi’s FB page has this image at the top:

It says: “We will not live next to the Nazi Satan.”

---

---

Here is the text of Amit Halevi’s post:

My response to Defense Minister Yoav Galant's harsh words:

1. The facts he said are not true.

2. The conclusions that ought to be drawn are the opposite. Precisely the opposite.

3. The military failure in the war must be corrected by changing the operational concept, not by hiding it with political ideas,

As they, too, are doomed to the same failure.

Some more detail for those with the stamina:

First the facts:

1. Your statement that “Hamas is not functioning as a military organization in the Gaza Strip and most of its battalions have been destroyed” is not true. As someone who hears in the committee the reports from the senior officials in the IDF, the facts are that all Hamas battalions without exception and even all Islamic Jihad battalions are still active.

   No battalion has ceased operation, no battalion lacks for a general or company commanders. Some of them have suffered some damage, much, much smaller than what is falsely advertised to the public, but certainly none of them are destroyed as you said.

2. Contrary to your statements, which are also untrue on this point, Hamas is functioning exceptionally well as a military organization in the entire strip from north to south, including firing dozens of rockets at whatever time it chooses and at the places it wants to launch them (note as an example yesterday in Sderot during the [Independence Day] march), dozens of launches and explosives, all according to Hamas’ military plan, and the ongoing enormous arms smuggling enterprise from the Philadelphi axis, which has continued from the first day of the war until today, even more so than in the past.

3. Hamas is also fully functioning as a civic body.. You said that the elimination of its governmental capabilities is the responsibility of the IDF, but the IDF and the security agencies have done almost nothing in this regard! All 25 Hamas mayors, the heads of the religious, economic and social governing systems of Hamas move around unhindered and and control civil life with impunity. There is no operational plan to harm them, there are no procedures to indict or remove them. This, despite repeated demands in the foreign affairs committee on the matter.

4. The operational plan submitted by the IDF under the leadership of the Chief of Staff and under your leadership, to the Cabinet and presented to us in the Foreign Affairs and Security Committee, was and still is a very poor plan from an operational point of view, in relation to the tasks that the IDF is required to perform. We all see the results today, seven months after the terrible massacre: every child in Sderot or farmer in the Gaza envelope, knows that there is no substantial change on the ground and the IDF is not close to achieving any of the war’s goals.

5. In fact, the plan presented by the IDF itself has not been implemented either. I don't know if this is the result of an explicit American directive, but starting in mid-January, the IDF abandoned, without any plausible explanation, its plan which included occupation and control as preliminary steps in all the cities of the Gaza Strip. Instead, the IDF went straight to “raids” and firing, even in places where, according to the original plan, it was supposed to have conquered and controlled.

6. If this was the intention of the IDF, then there was no justification for combat that lead to the deaths of many dozens of soldiers, and the IDF should have used the “raids” method from the very outset of the war. As several members of the Knesset brought up at the meeting of the Foreign Affairs and Security Committee in your participation even before the maneuver began. As I recall, you refused.

****

And now for the horrible conclusion you drew -

There are many more inaccuracies in your words, but the main thing is the conceptual error in your conclusion, which brings us back to October 6—”Israel must not control the Gaza Strip”

The main reason for the terrible failure of the IDF in this war (a failure that is no less than the failure of October 7) is one—the lack of a clear primary goal of full Israeli control over the Gaza Strip.

There is no possibility of eliminating Hamas in the Gaza Strip without Israel controlling it. Because in the Gaza Strip the population gives birth to Hamas and not Hamas that gives birth to the population.

The thought that someone will do the work for us is a fantasy, by the way, since in the one case there there was a group that tried to act, it was immediately eliminated by Hamas and this will happen to everyone.

Only strong Israeli control of the territory, aid, population, border and energy sources can lead to the elimination of Hamas, the creation of separate and rule, and educational and social processes that will allow other social forces to grow.

Today, after 17 years of Hamas rule and education, there is no possibility that surgical military operations of the type that the IDF has been doing since October 7 will lead to the emergence of another government. These are empty words that have no basis in reality.

*****

Israel's control of the Gaza Strip is the necessary conclusion from October 7 for anyone who understands security and terrorism, and it is also the necessary realization of the fundamental national values of liberating the homeland and the realization of the Zionist vision of being a free people in our country.

From those ideals, too, it seems that the security establishment and the senior command in the IDF have retreated in a most worrying way.

---

---

From Halevi’s point of view, having Israel fully control Gaza is the only way to eradicate Hamas, and eradicating Hamas is the only way to ensure that we can live here. To return to the image at the top of his FB page, “We will not live next to the Nazi Satan.”

Halevi is worried that the IDF and the security establishment have retreated from a commitment to our being a “free people in our land.”

Others, though, have different worries.

We recently posted an English translation of Mishael Zion’s Facebook post outlining the ways in which he felt that people should—and should not—celebrate Yom Ha-Atzm’aut. His post got a lot of play.

But then, on Yom HaAtzma’ut itself, Zion posted another piece, this time in English, this time in the blogs of the Times of Israel. This piece, too, is generating a lot of response, include other columns reaching different conclusions.

We highlight this piece along with Halevi’s FB column as an indication of the radically different worries that different people have—even if they share a love of this country, have no illusions about Hamas and want us to win.

Here is how Mishael Zion beings his column, which I urge you to read in its entirety.

It happens every few weeks, or days. Sitting on the couch, or in bed, we dig ourselves a pit of Israel despair. We obsess about how bad things are and wonder how much worse they are going to get. Invariably, the question arises: Is there a point where we get up and go? If the worst happens, where do we go? Who would take care of us? Should we move some savings to a bank account overseas? What would “the worst” look like – and how would we know that it’s time?

It’s a long, powerful, heartbreaking piece, but further down, Mishael does actually point to what some of his and his wife’s red lines might be:

In bed one night, after we dug a particularly deep pit of despair (the news did most of the work), a clear red line emerged: If Itamar Ben Gvir, the Kahanist race-baiting minister, ever becomes Minister of Defense, we will leave. We will not let our four daughters serve in an IDF under his rule. But if Trump wins, would we move to America? It doesn’t seem any better there for democracy or for Jews. Since that night I’ve been playing this dark mind game when I can’t fall asleep most nights: When is it time to go? If Israel builds settlements on the outskirts of Khan Younis again? If the police turn a blind eye as protestors burn Gaza aid trucks? If the Israeli government no longer cares that its scientists cannot take part in international research grants with their colleagues?

One can agree with Zion, or disagree, or more likely resonate to many of the concerns without (yet?) being able to speak aloud about leaving. But if there was one line to which I fully resonated, it was his suggestion that if XX happens, then “then my life’s project has failed … it is the destruction of “Bayit Shlishi,” the Third Jewish Commonwealth …”

That worry, I increasingly share. And that, too, ironically, Halevi and Zion have in common. Each in his own way, they are grappling with their foundational fear that is Israel is abandoning the sacred principles to which they thought the country was committed, principles without which it cannot survive.

---

In today’s Israel, even as you’re in the midst of all these heady arguments, when you least expect it, you read the unspeakably horrible headlines from just a couple of hours ago:

Times of Israel Screenshot

And then you understand that makes the Halevi and Zion columns so important is that they have the courage to mention aloud the worries that many thousands upon thousands of Israelis are feeling but are still keeping to themselves these days:

Does anyone have a vision of what this country needs to become?

And does anyone at all have a plan for how we might get there?

---