by Boaz Lieberman, Strategic Crisis Management Advisor, translated by Hillel Fendel.
There are singular occasions in history when a particular reality is totally, and abruptly, replaced by another. This is precisely what happened to Israel during the current war with Iran and its underlings such as Hizbullah. Not only has there been a military change, but also a 30-year-old deception has collapsed before our very eyes.
For decades the Israeli public has been inculcated with the fear of regional war. Every time the possibility of war with Iran was even raised, the TV studios were immediately inundated with the same commentators and experts who explained why we simply could not even entertain such a scenario. They warned us that it would bring destruction upon us, including financial collapse and thousands of rockets that would wipe out entire cities. Nothing short of an apocalypse.
This conception of fear became an axiom of our beliefs. The message was drilled in repeatedly for three decades: Israel can fight only limited wars, whereas a full-scale regional war was a red line we could simply not cross, because its price would be, literally, unbearable.
And then reality arrived:
Israel strikes deep inside Iran. Hizbullah joins the campaign. Iran launches missiles. And the Israeli home front, with all the difficulties and tensions, continues to function! The economy does not collapse. Israeli society does not fall apart. The public does not panic – and actually shows strong resilience.
Businesses continue to operate. People go out to work. Children laugh and play in the streets between sirens. And it's not because of apathy. It is rather a deep Israeli trait of standing firm under pressure.
The gap between reality and that which we were so dramatically warned of is tremendous. We were taught that if Israel dared to confront Iran directly, a regional catastrophe would erupt. But the current reality teaches us something quite different. Israel is far from a fragile state. It is a regional power with a strong army and advanced defense systems, as well as a society with exceptional resilience.
Of course, war is always difficult. There are casualties, fear, and disruptions. But that is truly a far cry from the scenes of calamity that were sold to the public for years.
This is precisely where the great lie of the past thirty years is revealed. It is not necessarily a deliberate lie. It could be simply a worldview that hardened and became an accepted truth. An entire system of security, media, and academia began to believe in it itself. And this is how "conception" - or more precisely, "misconception" – is created.
It did not influence only our public opinion. It affected policy as well. It encouraged overcautiousness, putting off conflicts, and unending attempts to "contain" threats instead of definitively neutralizing them.
And another thing that this war has revealed is something no less disconcerting. It revealed the failure of the security-commentating industry in Israel. For years, the same analysts, many of whom are retired generals and the like, have been appearing almost every night on our TV screens. They dissected every movement made by the IDF and our enemies – and it turns out that they are wrong almost every step of the way in their main prognoses.
They warned of hundreds of missiles a day; the reality is much lower. They warned of economic collapse; actually, the economy continues to function. They spoke of panic on the home front; in practice, public resilience is the name of the game.
It's not that we can gloat. Mistakes happen. But when the same mistakes repeat themselves again and again, over the course of many years, we are obliged to ask: Who determines the security discourse in Israel? Is it the army? The Mossad? The Shabak?
Sadly, no. In recent decades, the Israeli media has become an almost exclusive platform for a small group of commentators – and they set the tone. Most of them come from the same social networks and the same worldview. Instead of representing and inviting intellectual diversity, they formed a closed club. Predictably, with everyone thinking the same way, the mistakes that they invariably make in direction and conception find no one left to correct them.
The result, then, is a public that has been fed extreme and chilling forecasts. The "pre-conceptions" had become set too deeply. Only when actual reality happens differently than had been predicted, do we wake up to see that we were wrong all along. Inner Israeli strength is greater than we were told, our military prowess is better than we thought, and even the Iranian threat, as grave as it was, turned out not to be the end of the world.
This also provides an important lesson for the future: Israel cannot afford to continue to wage its security policies based on fear. A country surrounded by enemies cannot base its strategies on reticence to fight when necessary. Our history actually teaches the exact opposite: True deterrence happens not when we try to "contain" the enemy, but when he understands, on his own flesh, that we are not afraid to wage even the largest-scale conflicts.
The current war is far from over, and we can't yet give out grades. But one thing we do know already, and that is that a long-standing myth has been broken. We are no longer afraid of a regional war – not because war is easy, but because both our military and our society are much stronger than we have been told for too many years.
And perhaps the most important lesson is simply an intellectual one: A country must be wary of its own "conceptions." These are liable to take over the public discourse, our national security thinking, and then our actual decisions. Doing so through warped glasses is very dangerous indeed.
Thirty years of media defense commentary have taught the Israeli public to fear a regional war. But we are now learning something completely different. Sometimes the greatest threat is not the enemy before you, but the stories they tell you on television.