Israel’s failure on 7 October 2023 was followed by an extraordinary display of military force across the Middle East. Yet no clear political endgame is in sight. How to translate battlefield successes into lasting security remains an open question, while international criticism of Israel’s military actions continues to mount. In an interview given to Diplomaatia, Maj-Gen (retired) Nimrod Aloni and Brig-Gen (reserve) Guy Hazoot examine the shortcomings of Israel’s pre-war defence doctrine and the challenges of confronting Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran.
Merili Arjakas (MA): In simple terms, before 7 October, Israel’s security strategy was largely based on containment: using the ‘mowing the grass’ approach and keeping the different theatres—Gaza, the West Bank, the northern front, and Iran—separate. Since then, Israel has shifted towards weakening its adversaries’ capabilities across all fronts to prevent future attacks and push threats further away. What did 7 October reveal about the limits of the previous strategy?
Guy Hazoot (GH): For more than 10 years, Israel chose to contain a situation in which Iran, the head of the octopus, had encircled it with a ring of fire on seven fronts. Iran built militias with plans to invade Israel from the Galilee, the Golan Heights, the Gaza envelope, and even from Iraq through the Jordan Valley. This threatened Israel’s survival.
Five years before the 7 October attack, Hamas and Hezbollah had already built division-sized forces, well-equipped and trained. As the attack showed, they could move from routine operations to combat in just six hours.
This was a casus belli. In such a situation, you need to launch a pre-emptive attack. We did not. This is why we suffered the catastrophe.
The lesson of 7 October is not that we must destroy every threat in the Middle East immediately. That would destroy Israel before it destroyed those threats. But if an enemy develops a capability that threatens Israel’s national defence, that is different. The capabilities Hamas and Hezbollah had built over those 10 years under Iran’s protection were the threat we should have addressed.
The lesson of 7 October is not that we must destroy every threat in the Middle East immediately.
My book describes how, over more than three decades, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) split into two. The first is the high-tech force—the Air Force, the Navy, and the Intelligence Corps—where every Israeli child wants to serve because, after such service, they can go on to work in the high-tech companies. The second is the ground forces. When Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion established the IDF, the ground forces—armour, infantry, engineers, and artillery—were Israel’s insurance policy for survival. In the early days, they were the IDF’s elite.
Over the last decade, however, the ground forces have become second-best. Under the new operational concept, we destroy the enemy through precision strikes against targets identified by the Intelligence Corps and passed on to the Air Force and the Navy. As a result, ground-force readiness became shallow, and the forces suffered: poor readiness, poor professionalism, poor operational culture, and poor discipline.
MA: How has Israeli society changed during these three years of wars?
GH: Israeli society changed in the aftermath of previous wars, too. The price it paid during the Yom Kippur War (1973) was enormous: more than 3 000 Israelis died in a population of just 3 million. After the war, Egypt signed a peace agreement with Israel, while Syria changed its military planning and stopped building forces with operational plans to invade Israel. As a result, Israel’s survival no longer seemed to be an immediate concern.
Because of that price and because of the peace agreement with Egypt, Israeli society allowed itself to open up and become more like liberal democratic countries in the west. We no longer wanted to have to pay the price of surviving in the Middle East. Israeli society came to place greater value on a soldier’s life than on a civilian life. It should be the opposite. This is why the military and political leadership avoided using ground forces or engaging in open warfare, despite the continuous rocket fire towards Israeli villages, preferring instead to contain the threats from Hamas and Hezbollah.
When this war ends, Israeli society will need to ask what went wrong and what must change for us to survive in the Middle East.
This brought us to 7 October. Suddenly, Israeli society paid a price that we had never paid before. In a single day, over 800 civilians were murdered; 251 persons were kidnapped, and over 300 soldiers died.
When this war ends, Israeli society will need to ask what went wrong and what must change for us to survive in the Middle East. We need to reshape our ethos from the ground up. That process began on 7 October and has continued afterwards, but society is still traumatised.
MA: When will the war end? What needs to be achieved for that?
GH: I think we can address this question only after the Israeli election, as it will depend on the government we will have then. Furthermore, the situation in Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran is not only in our hands, given the involvement of the Trump administration.
MA: What mistakes has the current Israeli government made in setting its war aims?
Nimrod Aloni (NA): The end of a war ultimately depends on its goals. The problem is that politicians are not brave enough to change war aims during the war itself, thinking it will make them look weak. But if national interests require a change, then change them.
In Gaza, the goal was to dismantle Hamas and remove it from power. The problem is that, without a diplomatic path to bring in an alternative governing authority, there is no plan for what comes next. The Israeli government does not allow the Palestinian Authority to govern Gaza. The IDF’s rule was rejected by the international community and by Israel itself. So, who will govern the Strip?
Even if Israel kills all the Hamas insurgents, new ones will emerge. Hamas is a social movement before it is a military force. It is embedded in society and spreads through families, neighbourhoods, cities, and villages. It will rise again. Israel cannot dismantle Hamas as a social movement. If there is nobody to replace it, it will regain power.
Israel should therefore change the goal: not take responsibility for Gaza, but to prevent Hamas from being able to carry out another 7 October. In that sense, the goal has been achieved: we have destroyed most of Hamas’s military capabilities and improved our border defences, both tactically and preventively. We can continue fighting Hamas to keep it weak and limit its ability to cause damage.
The same applies to Lebanon. Until May 2024, our initial goal was to keep Hezbollah out of the war. We then aimed to destroy its weapons and military infrastructure in southern Lebanon. Once we had made progress towards that goal, we became more ambitious and sought to dismantle Hezbollah altogether.
Israel should therefore change the goal: not take responsibility for Gaza, but to prevent Hamas from being able to carry out another 7 October.
But that brings us back to the same problem: who will dismantle Hezbollah? Will it be the Lebanese army? They will not fight their own countrymen for the benefit of Israel. Perhaps they might do it in their own interests, but not for Israel’s benefit. And even if they had an interest in doing so, the Lebanese army is a joke — they don’t have the capability. Hezbollah is far too strong.
The Americans, the French, and the Syrians are not willing to fight Hezbollah. Only Israel can do it, and it would take years. Even if we succeeded, the Lebanese army would be too weak to control the territory by force, and the Shia population would rise again.
Defining achievable, lasting goals is a strategic issue. For example, we captured the Beaufort fortress in Lebanon, but what strategic objective did that achieve? Nobody really knows.
We should defend our borders better and keep our enemies as weak as possible. That means continuing to fight, but at a much lower intensity than in major wars that damage the economy and exhaust the reserves.
MA: Why aren’t the Israeli government and military currently doing that?
NA: As Henry Kissinger once said, Israel does not have a foreign policy—everything is about domestic politics. There is no long-term horizon these days. Politicians focus on announcements and catering to their political base.
There is no long-term horizon these days.
In Israel, it has become fashionable to speak confidently about decisive victory. Netanyahu has also used the term “total victory.” But what does it mean? Nobody knows. The Palestinians will not disappear. They are here to stay.
Talk of a decisive victory sounds powerful. But strategy is about manoeuvring, not following a predetermined path to a desired outcome. We need to be able to change course along the way.
MA: What is the biggest change the next government should make to Israeli security policy?
GH: The biggest issue is Iran. We succeeded at the operational and tactical levels in operations Rising Lion and Epic Fury. But strategically, these operations were a major failure because the Iranian regime survived. We failed to destroy all its enrichment capability, and most importantly, Tehran retained 440 kilograms of enriched uranium.
This is a catastrophic scenario for Israel because we do not know what Iran will do next. One morning, it could announce that it has produced a nuclear weapon. We must prevent that.
MA: What can Israel do with Iran?
GH: The Iranian nuclear programme is a major issue for every future Israeli government. Our main mistake during Operation Epic Fury was squandering the opportunity created by American involvement. We should have sent special forces and combat engineers to the sites holding the enriched uranium, reached the underground facilities, and brought the material back to Israel or destroyed it in Iran. We did not do so because we still clung to the idea of a ‘clean’ war and were unwilling to risk putting boots on the ground.
I don’t know if we can do it today. I don’t have the intelligence, and I don’t see what is happening in Iran today. I believe the Iranians have taken measures to prevent Israel from trying.
MA: What is Israel’s solution to the war in Gaza?
GH: It is a major disaster that Hamas still controls the Gaza Strip. The regime responsible for the atrocities of 7 October should not survive. We cannot destroy a movement — the same way the western world was unable to destroy the Nazi ideology. Some people still regard Hitler as a genius and Mein Kampf as a doctrine to be fulfilled. But as a regime controlling a strip in the southern part of Israel, Hamas must be destroyed. If the international community does not force them to disarm, we should.
If the international community does not force them to disarm, we should.
NA: Since the first day of the manoeuvre, on 29 October 2023, I have believed that the only military and strategic solution for Gaza is full Israeli occupation, down to the last inch. Initially, the hostages in the tunnels prevented us from doing so, but that is no longer the obstacle. Israel has not occupied Gaza fully for two reasons. First, we neglected the time factor: we only have a limited window to address threats before international legitimacy for our actions runs out. Second, US political pressure has not allowed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to do whatever he wants.
Unlike Guy, I do not think the threats posed by Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran differ in nature or level. If Hezbollah had invaded Israel, we would have witnessed the same scenes, because hatred of Jews and of Israel is deeply rooted across the Muslim world.
We saw these atrocities back in 1921 and 1929. We saw them throughout the 1948 war. These regimes hate Israel to the bone. Can we live with such neighbours? We chose to live here. We chose to return to our homeland. And I truly believe that these will be our neighbours for the next thousand years. In that regard, if we destroy one enemy, we will have another.
I think we should govern the Gaza Strip. We shouldn’t govern Lebanon; instead, we should defend our northern border much better. Hezbollah will continue to exist beyond the security zone. It will still be a fierce enemy that wants to invade Israel and destroy it, and to rape our women and burn our children. We must keep fighting to deter it and let the world know that we will not tolerate enemies that threaten us.
We are not striking Egypt, nor do we plan to. Egypt has declared and demonstrated that it accepts Israel. That does not mean that the people in Egypt love us. We can live with neighbours who don’t like us. We can live with Hamas, too, as long as we keep hitting it on the head and do not allow ourselves to be pushed back into periods of containment in the hope that it will bring us quiet. Nevertheless, the only solution for Gaza is for it to be fully occupied by Israel.
MA: You mentioned that Israel wanted to do more, but there was American pressure. Is Israel too dependent on the United States?
NA: I wouldn’t describe it as being too dependent. One of Ben-Gurion’s pillars of defence was support from a superpower, and there is no other superpower we can rely on today. China is not an option, neither morally nor in terms of shared values.
We should rely on ourselves diplomatically, economically, and for equipment. But Americans have the right to dictate according to their own interests. Will that limit our freedom of action? It will. But it should not surprise us.
MA: There are two competing views on Netanyahu’s relationship with Trump and Israel’s actions. One is that Israel is threatening this relationship to gain tactical victories in Gaza and Lebanon. In a few years, this will bring in a new, very anti-Israel generation in American politics. The other view is that Israel has already lost the bipartisan support, so it now has two more years to create as many facts on the ground as possible that would be very difficult to reverse. How do you see this issue?
GH: Well, the future does not look good. US public opinion is changing, especially among the new generation—not only among Democrats but also Republicans. We need to make a stronger case to the American public and both parties that Israel is an asset to the United States in the Middle East.
We need to make a stronger case to the American public and both parties that Israel is an asset to the United States in the Middle East.
Not only because we are the only democratic country in the Middle East, but also because we have capabilities that the United States, despite its enormous budget, cannot develop in the same way. We are a start-up nation, and we can develop these capabilities and use them on the battlefield. The F-35 is an American platform, but no American pilot can operate an F-35 quite like an Israeli pilot.
Of course, it will be more challenging than ever, but this is not the end of the era of the unique relationship with America.
NA: I agree with Guy. Israel’s biggest advantage and contribution to the United States has become clearer over the past few years: it has demonstrated a new model of warfare that is highly appealing to Washington. Neither Trump nor the Democrats want the US to be the policeman of the world or fight every war itself.
This is evident in the lack of public support for US actions in Hormuz, including among the American right. Despite the economic and fuel problems caused by disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz and even considering the relatively few American casualties compared with Iraq or Afghanistan, the public still does not want war.
Israel, like Ukraine, offers an alternative: US partners do the fighting while America provides support. Apart from Ukraine, European armies are either too small or unwilling to fight. Some sent troops to Afghanistan, but Israel and Ukraine have demonstrated a different model: support us, while we do the fighting.
That’s what the US is trying to do with the Saudis, the Emiratis, and other Gulf states, and perhaps in Europe as well. Israel has demonstrated the model exceptionally well. Our intelligence capabilities and penetration of Iran are far greater than those of the US, despite its much larger intelligence community. That is an asset Washington cannot afford to ignore.
The US also has limited resources because it must operate globally, particularly in relation to China and Taiwan. Israel contributes what it can do in Iran, Iraq, and the wider Middle East, while doing much of the fighting on behalf of the west. That is our major advantage.
I do not see any competing political approaches. Israel should continue trying to shape the Middle East to its advantage while Trump is in power, recognising that no arrangement will last forever.
Take Gaza. If Israel does not take control of it, we will not allow the money and reconstruction to flow in, fearing that Hamas will use them to rebuild its capabilities. But if Israel governs Gaza as it does the West Bank, we can bring in Western funding and assistance for reconstruction. If we stabilise the situation, we could even meet some of the most left-wing demands of the Democratic Party’s agenda, at least when it comes to rehabilitating and rebuilding Gaza.
But first, Israel must restore bipartisan support. Regardless of who was in power, Israel used to address both parties’ needs. It is out of my league and above my pay grade, but it seems Israel has neglected that approach. We cannot afford to do so: the US has only two major parties, unlike Israel where 40 parties may compete in an election. We cannot keep one party at arm’s length or ignore what it has to say.
MA: What should other armies learn from Israel’s experience over the last three years of war?
GH: First of all, if you want peace, prepare for war.
Second, there is what I call the “zero-multiplier paradox”: any number multiplied by zero equals zero. Any technological force multiplier is rendered useless if the strategic assumptions are wrong.
The nature of war has not changed since biblical times; technology has, bringing new concepts of military operations. In WWI, artillery and machine guns produced static warfare. In WWII, tanks and aircraft enabled the German Blitzkrieg. Anti-tank missiles and air-defence systems shaped the fighting in the Yom Kippur War. Now, we have drones.
Any technological force multiplier is rendered useless if the strategic assumptions are wrong.
We had the opportunity to watch and learn. Hamas’s Toyota-and-motorcycle Blitzkrieg on 7 October drew on tactics used by ISIS in the Sinai Peninsula. We saw what happened during the conflicts in Iraq and Syria in the 2010s and what drones had made possible in Ukraine.
We had the lessons available, but we didn’t take note. The price we paid for this was huge.
NA: No military can deny the enemy the ability to surprise entirely. Instead, it should build the muscles to overcome the first blow. That requires the right mentality. In peacetime, armies tend to promote commanders who are pleasant and easy to work with, rather than mavericks who challenge authority. Yet those are often the people who recognise when circumstances have changed and something must be done differently.
We saw this ourselves. On 7 October, our Chief of Staff issued bad orders down the chain of command because the leadership did not understand the situation clearly. Mavericks might have questioned these orders and cast them aside. But if you never promote such people, they will be far from positions of influence.
Second, how do you physically prepare for the surprise? On 7 October, we had far greater forces than Hamas. Yet for six hours, the IDF could not deploy the troops where they were needed. Our command-and-control system had collapsed from the tactical to the strategic level. The forces themselves did not know where to go.
At 8 am, a thousand soldiers were waiting around the police headquarters in Sderot, where insurgents were holding hostages, while the killing continued in nearby kibbutzim until noon. The IDF believed troops needed all their gear and tanks. Instead, we should have sent small squads with rifles and light equipment to the villages. Surprise is inevitable, but we must respond immediately, not wait 36–72 hours to prepare for war.
MA: How did Israel come back from the failure of 7 October?
GH: 7 October was the worst failure the IDF had ever suffered, yet we managed to recover. Within two weeks, we took the IDF from a state of low readiness to manoeuvring in one of the largest urban fortresses ever built, both above and below ground.
If there is one thing militaries around the world should learn from us, it is how to deal with failure. You must make troops and commanders fail during exercises; otherwise, they will never learn how to respond when things go wrong.
By 9 am on 7 October, we had lost the Gaza envelope. Hamas controlled the area: the main roads and junctions, the Israeli settlements, kibbutzim and moshavim, the border, and the military bases.
If there is one thing militaries around the world should learn from us, it is how to deal with failure.
Many militaries, faced with this scenario, would probably withdraw, evacuate the surviving civilians and soldiers, build a new defensive line, mobilise the reserves, and spend 12 weeks preparing before trying to retake the lost territory. We did it on the same day. Why? Because it’s in our DNA.
NA: I must say, I totally disagree with Guy’s perspective. Imagine that citizens of the US, Germany, or Estonia had been treated as brutally as Israelis were that day by a few thousand insurgents—not a million-strong army invading the country. I believe those nations, like many others, would have rushed to stop the horrific attacks on their civilians.
We did not go in on 7 October to conquer territory by launching massive attacks with battalions, brigades, and divisions. No. We went in as infantrymen, as riflemen, to fight wherever we heard shots or cries for help. We rushed to the villages and settlements to rescue our people. The enemy either fled or was killed.
The main lesson is that we are not unique and can learn from others
Israelis tend to see themselves as unique, different from other nations. Guy talks about the DNA of camaraderie and familyhood among Israeli Jews. We hate and love each other at the same time—aggressively, I would say. But I hope Estonians and Germans feel the same way towards their fellow citizens, that they too see them, in some sense, as family.
I think of the British standing together as a nation during WWII. If they faced a similar situation today, I believe they would stand together again. They would not withdraw from London and let the enemy occupy it.
GH: I did not make up this argument. The Chief of the General Staff of the British Army admitted to General Herzi Halevi that if an enemy took over a border area, the British Army would establish a new defensive line, mobilise its forces, and perhaps return to retake the area only after a week.
NA: I think the reality is much simpler. The IDF was not ready to launch the offensive, and the Prime Minister even wanted to postpone it. But Israel felt humiliated on 7 October. It was not just the horrific images or the element of surprise, but also the collapse of the Gaza Division and the IDF’s wider command structure. Government institutions were irrelevant. Civil society and volunteers had to step in to help people who had lost their homes. Hence, public pressure after the massacre was enormous. No democratic government in the world could have withstood it.
The main lesson is that we are not unique and can learn from others, too.
GH: The main lesson is to prepare yourself, because you will fail. If you’re not prepared for the pathology of failure, you will surrender as soon as you encounter it on the battlefield. Even if everything I’ve said is wrong, that does not matter. What matters is how you deal with failure on the battlefield, how you respond to it as a nation, and how you rise from it.
This article was written for ICDS Diplomaatia magazine. Views expressed in ICDS publications are those of the author(s).