Israel is throwing a trillion shekels at a ‘hysterical army’ that can’t defend its borders
IDF forces in the demilitarized zone in Syria.
Meirav Arlosoroff reports in Haaretz on 18 February 2025:
Col. Yair Peli, who commanded the Golani infantry brigade on October 7, lost the most soldiers of any Israel Defense Forces’ commander that day. Subsequently he was promoted and is now, as a brigadier general, commanding the 210th Bashan Division, which is currently holding the territory that Israel has conquered in Syria.
Peli was interviewed a few weeks ago by Channel 13’s military analyst, Alon Ben David, while touring that new security zone. “Our mission is defense,” Peli asserted, explaining his doctrine concerning the necessity of the IDF’s presence on the eastern side of the border with Syria. “You can’t defend communities from the border fence, as we saw on October 7.”
Peli showed viewers the broad, new trench Israel is digging along the border with Syria, and didn’t hide the fact that, even better than using tanks, the trench itself will allow Israel to successfully block even an assault by Toyota pickups and motorcycles, like those we witnessed on that fateful Saturday. “I am not the one that makes the decisions,” he told Ben David. “I will defend any area I’m asked to defend, but trying to do that from the [Israeli side of the] fence is less effective.” The IDF, he added, is preparing to remain in Syria for at least a year; to that end, the army is already building bases and outposts there.
The new standard
Early last month, the government-appointed Nagel Commission on Evaluating the Security Budget and Force Building recommended increasing the defense budget by 275 billion shekels (about $77.25 billion) by 2034, thus setting the total defense budget at the end of that period to a trillion shekels. Let that figure trip carelessly off your tongue, a trillion shekels, and ask yourself what return we can expect to get on that vast investment, if in exchange the army is focusing on creating some sort of huge anti-Toyota barrier, even as it asserts that it is no longer capable of defending Israel solely from within its borders.
“We have a bad and hysterical army, which has lost all its self-confidence,” says Uri Bar-Joseph, one of Israel’s leading military historians. “What do you mean you are unable to defend the border? So deploy two more tank brigades there and make sure the soldiers are vigilant every morning during the dawn alert. After all, if there had been two battalions at the [Gaza] border fence on October 7, everything that happened there would not have happened.”
It’s worth listening to Prof. Bar-Joseph when he uses words like “bad” and “hysterical” to describe the army. In his 2005 book “The Watchman Fell Asleep: The Surprise of the Yom Kippur War and Its Sources,” he declared that after that war, over 50 years ago, the IDF was the best army in the world, as evidenced by what he describes as its rapid recovery after the debacle of October 6, 1973. However, his opinion of the army’s recovery after the debacle of October 7, 2023, is far less flattering – not least because Hamas’ army of pickup trucks and motorbikes cannot be considered to be in the same league as the Egyptian 3rd Army.
“Hamas is a weak player, equipped with Toyotas and machine guns,” the University of Haifa scholar observes. “The great IDF should be capable of coping with a player like that. The problem on October 7 was that we forgot to defend ourselves and left the goal [the Hebrew word also means “gate”] unattended. Even a weak player will succeed in scoring against an empty goal.”
Still, our conclusion is not that the IDF can’t handle Hamas and that it must double or triple its order of battle in the face of a Hamas or Hezbollah threat – as the IDF told members of the Nagel Commission, which recommended providing the sought-after budget. The conclusion is that the preparedness and proficiency of the army as it exists today must be upgraded, even without enlarging it. And, of course, the conclusion shouldn’t be that the army doesn’t have the skill to defend Israel’s borders and that it needs a demilitarized zone – aka security zone or perimeter – on the other side of its borders order to do the job.
The fact is that insistence on a demilitarized zone has become standard. Residents of Israel’s north are refusing to return home, because the agreement struck with Lebanon includes a withdrawal by IDF forces to the international border and will allow inhabitants of the villages across that border to return home. In the south, Israel continues to insist on setting up and maintaining a demilitarized zone along the border with Gaza, although that demand may have to be relinquished in exchange for a future, comprehensive deal for the return of the hostages. And the epitome of this general trend is Israel’s decision to invade Syria and establish a security zone on the eastern side of the border, without any provocation from Syria.
‘Worst of worlds’
“What we are doing now in Syria is a violation of all the international rules,” Bar-Joseph warns. “Without any instigation and without our having been attacked, we went in and conquered territory on Syrian soil. That’s the sign of a country that thinks it’s permitted to do everything, and of an army that thinks it doesn’t know how to do anything.”
It’s an issue worth pondering – how Israel fell in love with a concept of territorial conquest as a defensive tactic, despite the experience it has accumulated that shows that it is a problematic notion. In the past, Israel withdrew from the Bar-Lev Line in Sinai and from the security zone in southern Lebanon, after realizing that maintaining the areas in question exacted a very steep price in terms of Israeli soldiers’ lives. When it came to preserving the zone in Lebanon, Israel suffered long-term military damage: Anger at the Israeli occupation there led to Hezbollah’s aggrandizement.
A similar concern exists if Israel becomes enamored of the security zone in Syria, too, and doesn’t exit it in time. “An army is required to maintain a balance between its defensive capability and whatever it is that increases the motivation on the other side to take aggressive action against it. Conquering territory leads almost certainly to greater aggression by the conquered side, so this must be considered very carefully,” Bar-Joseph says. Moreover, a barrier against pickups and motorbikes can be erected on the Israeli side of the border without provoking the Syrians and without entangling Israel any further in possible violations of international norms.
Even conquest of the West Bank as a defensive concept hasn’t really proved itself. Israel has controlled the West Bank for 58 years but hasn’t succeeded in eradicating terrorism or in eliminating enemies like Hamas there.
The conclusion some people draw, to the effect that the withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005 is what led to October 7, ignores the flaws in the IDF’s conduct over the years: notably, its policy of accommodating Hamas as it became more powerful and the fact that Israel left the “goal” unattended on October 7.
In any event, all the security zones in the world won’t be of any use against the major strategic threat facing Israel: missile attacks. The only thing such zones might prevent is a ground incursion, “but the great IDF should be capable of preventing any such incursion, certainly in the case of an army that’s transported in Toyota pickups,” Bar-Joseph notes.
Recent years have seen a global shift in security conceptions, he adds. Today defensive tactics are thought to have precedence over offensive ones, thanks to remotely manned means. The proof is that Ukraine has successfully defended itself for three years despite a clear numerical disadvantage vis-à-vis Russia in terms of technology, manpower and equipment. For the IDF, which had been accustomed to maintaining an offensive conception, that demands a significant strategic change.
On top of all these considerations there is the question of cost. Occupying parts of Syria, Lebanon and Gaza simultaneously, and maintaining an enormous army tasked with overseeing such potentially endless processes, will exact a very steep price, both economically and in terms of soldiers’ lives.
“What we’re doing now is the worst of all worlds,” Bar-Joseph asserts. “We’re not striving for a [diplomatic] agreement, our army lacks confidence and is exaggerating in its use of munitions and conquest, and we are also creating motivation for aggression against us. Maybe instead of that, we’ll give an agreement a chance and prepare the army with sufficient defense capabilities in case the settlement is violated? After all, the Gaza border could have been successfully defended [on October 7] by two trained and vigilant battalions.”
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