The IDF’s Failure of Imagination

And why Yoav Gallant and Herzi Halevi must face criminal prosecution.

In 2023, Israel’s most senior defense officials sounded the alarm. Defense Minister Yoav Gallant warned that Israel’s enemies “believe, mistakenly, that they have the opportunity to take advantage of what they perceive as a weakness.” Weeks later he added, chillingly, “Our enemies, all too clearly, still smell weakness.”
At the same time, IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi cautioned Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Israel’s adversaries were growing more daring because of the country’s internal strife: “The current situation leads to dilemmas among our enemies — whether to take advantage of what is happening and launch an attack on Israel, or to wait for the internal process to continue.”

These were not the warnings of distant observers. They were the assessments of the men charged with defending the nation. They understood that Israel’s political turmoil — the protests, the calls for refusal, the acrimony over judicial reform — was projecting weakness across the region. They knew the stakes. And yet, as the Times of Israel reported, the external panel led by Maj. Gen. (res.) Sami Turgeman found that while senior military officials warned of this perception of weakness, “the military did not adjust its level of alert or deployments in light of the warnings.”

That sentence will haunt Israel for the rest of time.

For all the speeches, press briefings, and dire pronouncements, nothing changed. The generals who claimed that division was endangering Israel did nothing to mitigate that danger. They did not heighten readiness. They did not reposition forces. They did not strengthen deterrence. They watched a fracture widen — and treated it as a talking point rather than an operational reality.

If Gallant and Halevi truly believed that Israel’s enemies were emboldened by internal weakness, then their failure to act was not mere negligence; it was an abdication of duty. And if they did not believe it — if those statements were made to exert political pressure on the elected government — then they abused their authority and destabilized the very state they were sworn to defend. In either case, both men must face full criminal investigation.

Retirement and rhetoric are not accountability. It is not enough for these officials to leave office, collect their pensions, and issue reflective statements about “lessons learned.” If they authentically believed that Israel faced a grave strategic risk and yet failed to take meaningful action, their dereliction is nearly unforgivable. Soldiers died. Civilians were slaughtered. Families were destroyed. Accountability cannot end with a press release.

The Turgeman panel found that most of the army’s internal probes into October 7 were “inadequate,” with some “unacceptable.” That bureaucratic language conceals something far more damning: a culture of self-preservation at the top of Israel’s defense establishment. It was not a lack of data or intelligence that doomed Israel that morning — it was the absence of seriousness among those who had the power to act.

The IDF’s mission is not to interpret Israel’s democracy but to defend it. When the defense minister and the chief of staff concluded that political turmoil was eroding deterrence, they had one sacred obligation: to ensure that Israel’s enemies never mistook debate for weakness. They failed. They spoke as prophets but acted as spectators. The enemy crossed the fence — and found almost no one waiting.

Gallant and Halevi will one day write memoirs and appear on panels to explain how no one could have known. But they did know. They said so, on the record, with unmistakable clarity. They identified the danger — and then did nothing to stop it. Their failure to lead unleashed devastation on a scale Israel has not known in its modern history: entire communities burned, thousands murdered, hundreds taken captive, and an entire region destabilized. The blood of those lost and the ruins left behind are not abstractions of “systemic failure.” They are the living cost of personal failure at the highest levels of command.

And now, as if to mock that suffering, Gallant has already begun his rehabilitation tour — giving softball interviews on podcasts and appearing in polished discussions hosted by sympathetic nonprofits. The idea that he can show his face in public as some sort of hero is sickening. There is nothing heroic about recognizing a threat, failing to confront it, and presiding over the deadliest day in Israel’s history. The moral obscenity lies not only in the failure itself but in the pretense that it deserves redemption without justice.

Justice must now take the place of deference. These men cannot simply fade into the comforts of retirement, speaking in vague terms of lessons learned while the nation buries its dead. Their warnings were correct. Their inaction was catastrophic. If Israel is to rebuild moral and strategic clarity, it must begin with accountability. Real accountability. That means investigation, judgment, and if the evidence supports it, criminal prosecution.

Because a country that allows those who foresaw its tragedy to escape judgment for failing to prevent it is not defending democracy. It is betraying the dead.