In his newly released book The Sword of Freedom, former Mossad chief Yossi Cohen offers a candid, and at times unsettling, window into Israel’s unpreparedness during the war in Gaza. While much of the public conversation has centered on intelligence failures or political paralysis, Cohen’s reflections expose a more basic, painful truth: Israeli soldiers, those tasked with defending the nation, lacked the equipment they needed to fight.
Cohen describes how, amid the chaos of war, “critical shortages of equipment were only met by the generosity of Jewish communities in Israel and abroad, and by several NGOs.” This was not a bureaucrat’s detached observation. It was the assessment of a man who had spent decades at the highest levels of Israel’s defense establishment, and who found himself forced to act personally when the system failed. “I personally purchased helmets, vests, and other military kit for the troops,” he writes. “This has been an ongoing commitment on my part; later in the conflict progress was stalled by a lack of armaments and ammunition.”
That sentence alone should stop every Israeli and anyone who cares about Israel in their tracks. When a former head of the Mossad, one of the most powerful intelligence agencies in the world, admits he was buying helmets and vests with his own money to supply soldiers on the front lines, it reveals something deeply broken. This is not about politics or ideology, it is about the foundational duty of a nation to equip those it sends into battle.
Cohen’s account also underscores the gap between the courage of Israel’s fighters and the competence of the institutions meant to support them. While the war demanded unity, agility, and logistical excellence, Cohen portrays a defense establishment scrambling to compensate for years of complacency and mismanagement. The result, unnervingly, was an army dependent not only on private citizens and global Jewish generosity, but on the personal intervention of the former Mossad chief himself.
And despite the endless spin, the fake news, and more than two years of carefully crafted narratives meant to obscure the truth, here we have the former head of the Mossad himself putting it in black and white: he personally bought equipment for IDF soldiers because the army did not have enough. No propaganda, no talking points, just a stark admission from one of Israel’s most trusted security professionals. That single revelation cuts through the fog of disinformation more powerfully than any press conference or headline ever could.
His book is an awesome read. In the middle of it right now. Glad you wrote about this as it shocked me too when I read that!
I may have to read this one. Thanks for the heads up on a necessary topic.