Wars are Won Not Only by Shooting

by Prof. Elisha Hass, member of Professors for a Strong Israel, translated by Hillel Fendel.

President Trump announced last week that he is prepared to accept “only unconditional surrender.” This is because he wants a traditional, decisive victory. Most wars, in fact, end when one side reaches the conclusion that he has lost and that there is no point in continuing, and surrenders unconditionally.

To achieve this, both sides, and especially the winning one, work to strike the enemy’s symbols of rule and national sites with cultural and other importance. The goal is to bring the enemy to a psychological state that will lead to his surrender.

Let us consider the intense, though not particularly well-known, war that is taking place in Judea and Samaria. Many IDF fighter battalions have been dispatched to these areas. The question is: Do these battalions understand their mission? Is it clear to the IDF who exactly the enemy is? Do the IDF leaders understand the importance of hitting symbolic and nationally important targets in a military campaign? Are the battalions being sent to the front striving for victory – or for stalemate?

We know very well that the IDF is not the only army in the field. A well-trained and suitably-equipped Palestinian army shares the space with us, having received its war training in the framework of the Oslo Accords from the U.S. Army's General Dayton. This is an army with improved abilities that is located, as the saying goes, "just five minutes away from Kfar Saba." It takes encouragement and motivation from the Oct. 7^th massacre, and is an army with clear awareness of its goal to destroy the State of Israel. The motivational weapons it uses include symbols such as monuments of its leaders, such as the PA father of Oslo - none other than arch-terrorist Yasser Arafat, may his name be blotted out.

The Disappointing News from Shomron

And yet, just this week we have learned that an IDF reserves soldier from the Menashe Brigade (responsible for the northern Shomron, including PA cities such as Tulkarem and Jenin) has been suspended, after it was learned that he defaced a monument in honor of Arafat in the village of Zababida. The IDF quickly decided to remove him from active service, announcing that smashing Arafat's likeness with a hammer was "against the regulations."

We are, of course, at war. The government, with public support, calls upon its loyal citizens to leave their homes and families and report for duty for unknown durations. The army's values are, clearly and primarily, to strive to engage with the enemy and aspire to victory. In light of what we have said regarding the value of destroying his national symbols, this decision by the army raises some strong question marks:

Non-Comprehension?

Does the IDF understand its objective and how to achieve it? Does it not understand that while the enemy strives to wear us down with terrorism, our goal must be clear victory? Does the IDF not realize that young terrorist gangs are our enemy?

The IDF appears to be still living under the misconception of the Oslo generation that brought upon us the tragic disgrace of 10/7. Instead of sending the reservists to totally destroy the military threat to central Israel, it continues to nurture the enemy and its symbols. Instead of wiping it out, it continues to preserve the capabilities of the threat to the heart of our country, under the illusion that this enemy can be turned into a friend. This was a reckless illusion from the day Oslo began, and especially after the morning of Simchat Torah 5784.

Hegseth Got it Right

It is worth studying the clear and straight-on speech of U.S. War Secretary Pete Hegseth last week. He announced that the United States is fighting without the principles of political correctness and progressivism: an enemy is an enemy. We, too, must apply these rules of combat not only to Iran, but also to the West Bank. Any enemy focused on the destruction of the Zionist enterprise, whether openly or under camouflage, must know that it faces the singular fate of destruction. It’s either us – or them. 

It’s high time to erase the infamous “Spirit of the IDF” document that emasculates our army and endangers all of us. We must cultivate the combat mindset of the soldier and encourage him to take combat actions even vis-à-vis the enemy’s motivation. We the citizens must demand that the military command provide soldiers with the full tools of combat and make it clear, once and for all, who the enemy is.

And of course, the smart soldier from the Menashe Brigade, who knows how to defeat the enemy by striking directly at what makes him tick, must be immediately returned to service and given words of encouragement so that all his comrades - and commanders - understand. Enemy symbols are targets for attack no less, and even more, than physical positions or other ground targets chosen “according to regulations.”

Translator's Note: Public Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir criticized the censure of the soldier, but even he could have done so more strongly: "Arafat's hands were filled with the blood of very many Jews… The reservist [in question] is in the midst of a war, which began with the slaughter of his brothers and sisters; fighting for Am Yisrael, he expressed his pain, fury, and sense of justice. The army's decision [to dismiss him] went a step too far, and should be reconsidered."

Waking Up from a Scary 30-Year-Old Dream

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.