https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/israel-forgotten-army (Archive is down)
“It was absolutely abysmal. I mean, it was shocking the equipment that we were given.”
Eitan was 27 years old on Oct. 7 when he got the alert. (Soldiers who are identified by their first names only have had their names changed.) He had finished his active military time in 2022 after serving in one of the IDF’s elite commando units. Out of the army, Eitan was studying for a master’s in business. Like most able-bodied Israelis of fighting age, he continued his military service as a reservist. In his part-time unit, he joined what is known in Hebrew as miluim, the term used for the IDF’s reserve forces that have historically functioned as the backbone of Israel’s people’s army. Miluimniks, who have already gone through training and served in a regular unit, provide a standing reserve that can be called on to plug gaps in the nation’s defense or rapidly built out to augment the army’s order of battle in the event of war. That, in any case, was the longstanding theory of Israel’s strategic concept as a small country surrounded by hostile powers.
The IDF’s problem was that its leaders had spent decades under the illusion that ground wars requiring mass mobilizations, which are the miluim’s raison d’être, were a thing of the past. In ideal circumstances, a reserve force will still operate at a level of funding and equipment below its active-duty counterparts. But in Israel, where the reserves were no longer seen as vital to the military’s offensive capabilities, the situation had moved past nonideal to dangerously unprepared.
Eitan, serving in the reserve component of a special operations unit, should have had better gear than most. Yet, even for the elite commandos of miluim, the initial supply situation was dismal. “It was vests and helmets that we wouldn’t have been given in basic training, let alone when we were combat soldiers. Uniforms falling apart, all of the Velcro ripped and destroyed. The zippers didn’t work. Helmets from the 1980s when my dad was in the army. The guns were mostly old surplus and we didn’t have ceramic vests.” To the best of his knowledge, Eitan told me, no one in his battalion had ceramic vests when the war started.
By the time night fell on Oct. 7, 2023, Eitan had joined up with his reserve unit and was fighting the remnants of the Hamas raiding party that had infiltrated into southern Israel that morning, breaching the security fence, overwhelming border defenses, and killing nearly 1,200 people, including women and children sheltering in their homes, before carrying some 250 hostages back into Gaza. For three days Eitan and the other special operations veterans in his unit engaged in nearly continuous battle. The first real rest he remembers getting came on Oct. 10 when his battalion took over an evacuated school.
Meanwhile, Israeli officials were insisting that they had everything under control. “The Yamachim were ready,” Maj. Gen. Michel Yanko, head of the IDF’s Technological and Logistics Directorate, told a group of journalists only days after Oct. 7, using the Hebrew name for the army’s logistics division. “Does everyone get our best equipment like the recon units? No, we didn’t intend for that,” said Yanko. “We did not intend to give all 300,000 [reserve] soldiers ceramic vests.” Nevertheless, the general assured reporters that front-line soldiers performing specialized reconnaissance missions or maneuvering in Gaza would get what they needed. “Everyone who will be in combat has a ceramic vest.”
More than a dozen active and reserve members of the IDF spoke to Tablet for this story, and in these and other countless testimonies, Israeli soldiers attest that this was not the case. Soldiers deployed into both Gaza and Lebanon without the vests containing bulletproof ceramic plates, which are designed to stop high-velocity rounds. Recon soldiers who belonged to precisely the high-need units that Yanko singled out, were forced to conduct combat missions without critical gear. They entered an army that was totally unprepared for the war it encountered on Oct. 7.
As Eitan battled Hamas forces in the south, Moshe, an officer in a special reconnaissance team of the Alexandroni Brigade, one of the main infantry forces of the miluim, was on Israel’s northern border with Lebanon getting into firefights with the elite shock troops of Hezbollah’s terrorist army, known as the Radwan Force. “We were on combat missions the night of Oct. 7 fighting Radwan who had already started to open fire and we’re missing everything,” Moshe told me. “I’m getting shot at. I’m personally on a mission with outdated broken helmets and missing stuff.”
Yossi, in his mid 20s, belonged to a different reconnaissance team in another miluim infantry brigade and faced the same issues. “We opened the equipment lockers, and it was ancient flak jackets, ancient helmets. There were maybe two pieces of night vision” for a platoon with more than 20 soldiers. The lack of night vision is particularly crippling to recon units whose mission is to spot critical openings and vulnerabilities on the battlefield before the enemy does. In 2006 when I served in Iraq as a U.S. Army officer, the idea of a recon team operating without night vision would have been unimaginable. In the American army, even the lowest ranking noncombat administrative clerks had night vision goggles, as of two decades ago. It was armywide policy then that no American soldier was allowed to go outside the wire on a mission without them.
“In Lebanon we were doing purely urban operations,” said Yossi. “You’re clearing buildings at night, and you need night vision for that.” To make up for their shortages, his unit would decrease the number of soldiers operating on an objective. That is a dangerous decision to make in a treacherous urban environment, where standard infantry tactics call for increasing the size of an attacking force to make up for the large advantage held by the defenders. Without enough night vision pieces, also known as “nods,” Yossi’s unit and others like it were forced to operate below their full strength. “Guys with nods would be sent to the front, and the guys without them pretty much trailed behind or waited outside for the house to be cleared.”
Avraham, a 42-year-old reserve officer in a combat engineering unit and the father of nine children, has now completed more than 400 days of active combat duty since Oct. 7 over five separate deployments. He describes a familiar scene when he first reported for duty. “We didn’t have any ceramic plates. Our helmets were from the ’80s and ’90s. I don’t think anybody who wasn’t an officer had night vision.”
All the soldiers I spoke to for this piece described an initial supply crisis that was only gradually and somewhat improved through their own personal initiative combined with the efforts undertaken by a patchwork of volunteer organizations that assumed a role as the IDF’s unofficial second logistics division. But why? How had a reasonably wealthy country like Israel, widely acknowledged to have one of the best militaries in the world allowed itself to become so deficient in the basic essentials of land warfare?
Israelis have a term for the dominant strategic concept that colors how its ruling elites view their place in the world and the threats to their country: the konceptsia. More than simply a security doctrine, the konceptsia refers to a unifying gestalt that includes both the underlying cultural attitudes that shape a particular generation’s worldview and the blind spots that it inevitably overlooks. Israel has cycled through various konceptsias throughout its history, with a critical change occurring in the 1990s, around and in the wake of the Oslo Accords—which rested on the assumption that by giving away land to form a Palestinian rump state, the Israelis could achieve both peace and international legitimacy. Oslo was upheld by the liberal cosmopolitans of the international community, most importantly including Israel’s main ally, the U.S., as the ultimate totem of ethical achievement—one which happened to resemble the classic approach employed by great powers in the Middle East, which is to carve the region up into beholden client states.
As a result, the IDF—taking cues from the U.S.—embraced a conception of war as a theater of technological effects that could neutralize distant enemies while using routine counterterrorism operations to police a hostile local population. In short, they believed that armies no longer needed to take and hold territory to defeat their enemies. Some members of the IDF may have seen the pivot as a way of currying favor with their superpower patron. But many of Israel’s generals viewed the West as the benchmark of all prestige and power, even in the eastern Mediterranean. Insofar as their delusions mirrored those held in Washington, they regarded them as a mark of sophistication. Those misapprehensions created problems both within the IDF, as well as in an American charity that now faces a series of high-profile allegations about its fundraising for Israeli soldiers, and why much of it didn’t actually get to those who ostensibly needed it.
Understanding the effects of this misbegotten ideological framework reveals that the Oct. 7 armament crisis, which may still be costing soldiers their lives and certainly led to preventable injuries, is not the result of tragic misfortune or regrettable oversights. The IDF’s lack of preparation was a deliberate policy choice, made year after year for the past two decades, reflecting the mistaken beliefs of the country’s leadership class—beliefs that many of them still hold.
On Oct. 7, 19-year-old Sgt. Guy Bazak was serving in the Golani Infantry Brigade in a base on the Gaza border directly next to a kibbutz called Kissufim. A few kilometers away, on the other side of Israel’s high-tech security fence sat the city of Deir al-Balah in Gaza. The exact unit he served in, B Company of the 51st Battalion, had been commanded in the 1990s by Guy’s father, Brig. Gen. Yuval Bazak. On the day that he completed his initial training and graduated into the Golani, Guy wrote in his journal.
“I’m ready to say that today was one of the most exciting and meaningful days of my life—to see my proud family, my supportive friends and above all to get Dad’s beret. A feeling that will always be engraved in my heart. Today, every drop of sweat, every muscle cramp, every tiring day, turned into steps that brought me to my goal.”
Illusions that had become pervasive among Israel’s ruling class—that Hamas was pacified in Gaza and no longer interested in large-scale conflict, that major land wars were no longer a threat—ramified throughout the society, including the military, where they affected the composition of forces at the Golani base on the Gaza border. On the morning of Saturday, Oct. 7, many of the soldiers who would ordinarily be guarding the base were home on passes for Shabbat and the Simchat Torah holiday, reducing its defending force by something like half. The standard IDF protocol of dawn alert, known as “stand-to” in American military parlance, and that requires all soldiers on base to pull 100% security in the early hours of first light, when an enemy is most likely to attack, had ceased to be enforced, and was not in effect that morning.
Despite being one of the IDF’s premier infantry forces located on a contested border in close proximity to a hostile enemy, Bazak’s unit did not have enough ceramic vests for every soldier. Soldiers who did not receive a vest with ceramic plates capable of stopping bullets, instead received flak vests that are ineffective against small arms rounds but can repel shrapnel.
At 6:30 a.m., the alarms began to sound on Kissufim base. By 7 a.m., the soldiers were mobilizing to defend the adjacent kibbutz full of civilian families. Guy Bazak grabbed his weapon and flak vest along with the rest of his gear and moved out. Guy’s father, Gen. Bazak, later described to Haaretz what he imagined his son and his comrades must have been thinking: “What’s in their head was: finally, at long last, action. At most it’s a squad of seven, eight terrorists, because that’s what we prepared for. We’ll go, we’ll thwart them and we’ll return. He knew he didn’t have a ceramic vest, but he didn’t pass up going into battle.”
into battle.”
Spotting a group of terrorists trying to breach the southern perimeter of Kibbutz Kissufim, Bazak killed the first one he saw with a shot from 150 meters. When a close friend was wounded, he moved him to safety and continued fighting. After nearly four hours of battle Guy Bazak was killed by enemy machine-gun fire when a bullet penetrated through his flak vest and into his chest. Five more soldiers of the IDF would be killed that day in the same location.
Some 360,000 reservists would answer the call to duty after the Hamas invasion. It was more than the IDF knew what to do with. Facing critical shortages in their units and aware that the IDF was overwhelmed, those soldiers then took the very Israeli step of organizing on their own to fill those needs through fundraising efforts and other makeshift supply channels. Eager to assist, diaspora communities in the U.S. and elsewhere sprang into action. A volunteer army was formed.
Officially, the military insisted that there were no equipment shortfalls and discouraged volunteers from donating military supplies directly to units, while simultaneously endorsing donations made to a private New York-based organization called Friends of the IDF. FIDF, as the group is widely known, was founded in 1981. It has earned a public profile by hosting gala dinners in Los Angeles with celebrities like Ashton Kutcher, Barbra Streisand, and Sylvester Stallone. Those events established its reputation as a fundraising juggernaut and the official/unofficial face of pro-IDF advocacy.
But as would later come to light, the FIDF, which employs hundreds of people and has 25 chapters across the U.S., was neither equipped nor willing to meet the IDF’s most pressing needs. Instead, this face of pro-Israel advocacy, which raised hundreds of millions of dollars since Oct. 7, appeared more interested in burnishing the lucrative institution of the U.S.-Israel relationship and giving donors the impression they were doing something, than in advocating for the needs of ordinary Israeli soldiers.
Over the past two decades, the IDF has undergone a profound transformation, moving away from its origins and toward what critics call a postmodern military.
On May 14, 1948, Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, declared the nation’s independence. With his next order he established the Israel Defense Forces. Aside from founding the army, Israel’s greatest statesman also devised Israel’s enduring security concept. The doctrine rested on three pillars: deterrence, early warning, and offensive power. A small nation surrounded by enemies, Israel would never achieve total security and instead would have to rely on deterring threats by raising the cost of war to a point higher than they were willing to pay. To protect itself, it would rely on advanced intelligence capabilities to detect enemy plans and preempt attacks. Though it is not formally included, one can add a fourth unofficial principle to Ben-Gurion’s national security framework, which is that the nascent Jewish state would have to rely on external support from more powerful allies. Acutely aware that the early Zionist project had depended on financing from foreign philanthropists, Ben-Gurion institutionalized this model. To survive, Ben-Gurion believed, Israel needed international support. This meant both the patronage of great powers, which eventually included the U.S., and continued financing from the Jewish diaspora.
Ben-Gurion’s blueprint for a “strategically defensive and operationally offensive” IDF dictated its force structure. This was described in a 2018 monograph written for Israel’s Begin-Sadat Center by an American military analyst named Kenneth S. Brower as one that could “rapidly mobilize a very high readiness and large order of battle designed to quickly achieve decisive military results.” For a small and initially undercapitalized country, this meant universal conscription followed by an extended period of mandatory service in the reserves. A nation with a large professional military like the U.S., can use its reserve components as an auxiliary backup force, but for a people’s army like the IDF, the miluim are essential to war-fighting capacity.
The first major break with Ben-Gurion’s principles of warfare and the birth of the modern konceptsia took place in 1985 at the end of the First Lebanon War. That war finished without a decisive victory when Israel withdrew its forces to a security zone along the northern border with Lebanon, which the IDF attempted to control without occupying the territory.
Two years after the withdrawal from Lebanon and establishment of the security zone, the Palestinians launched the popular revolt that came to be known as the First Intifada, which consisted of mass protests and other disruptions, political pressure tactics, and terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians. Two days after the launch of the First Intifada, Hamas was founded as an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood. “Israel, Judaism and Jews challenge Islam and the Moslem people. ‘May the cowards never sleep,’” the group wrote in its founding charter. “Jihad is its path and death for the sake of Allah is the loftiest of its wishes,” proclaimed its slogan.
Israel’s response to the twin events of the 1980s in Lebanon and the intifada, marked the beginning of a new era and the birth of a new konceptsia in the country’s politics and military affairs. Politically, it led directly to the Oslo process. What united Oslo’s diplomatic track with the new military doctrines of counterterrorism and “Effects-Based Operations,” was the underlying belief that control over land was no longer vital to the nation’s sovereignty or its security. For some military strategists, this was seen as the inevitable consequence of the “Revolution in Military Affairs” triggered by the explosion of information technologies. The age of close combat and grueling tank battles was thought to be over. With dominant air power and precision-targeting by missile strikes, an advanced technological power would be able to defeat its enemies from a safe standoff distance.
Amiad Cohen, who heads Israel’s Herut Center think tank and serves as a major in the IDF, in which capacity he has been repeatedly deployed as a miluimnik over the past two years, summarizes the IDF’s changing strategic doctrine: “What has happened since the ’80s when they decided to stop occupying territory is that they decided they don’t need infantry. Put that together with airstrikes and the chip revolution that allows you to pinpoint a missile in the right place. They thought, ‘we have special operations, cyber intelligence, and precision rockets and missiles so we don’t need infantry and tanks anymore.’ This, in turn, impacted the role assigned to the reserves.”
“Right from the start, the IDF were established as a reserves-centered military force,” wrote Edward Luttwak and his co-author, Eitan Shamir, in their recent book The Art of Military Innovation: Lessons from the Israel Defense Forces. If the strength of that approach is that it allows a country to maintain a large army without paying for the full expense of its daily upkeep, its weakness is that it depends on accurate advance warning to mobilize its ranks out of their civilian lives and back into military formation. That sets up a vulnerability that canny enemies can exploit. By faking an attack, an adversary can force Israel to go through the costly and resource-intensive process of mobilization. “Repeated instances of crying wolf can blind the intelligence system,” noted Luttwak and Shamir, “improving the enemy’s ability to achieve surprise on the next occasion.” But in the IDF’s new doctrine, this risk appeared to be mitigated because the army assumed that the kind of mass ground offensives that would require a full-scale call up were increasingly rare. According to the emerging security doctrine, the reserves would only have to defend Israel’s borders, instead of carrying out independent maneuvers, while specialized units would conduct raids into enemy territory.
The IDF’s shift toward a technocratic approach to warfare paralleled transformations taking place at the same time in other armies, including in the U.S. military. U.S. military planners began to elevate technological solutions over the classical principles of warfare during the Cold War as they relied on systems of precise control to manage the conflict between nuclear superpowers. The trend in warfare was becoming evident as far as back as the 1960s, when, in the midst of the Vietnam War, U.S. Army Gen. William Westmoreland offered a fateful vision of the future at an army luncheon: “I see battlefields that are under 24-hour real or near-real time surveillance of all types. I see an Army built into and around an integrated area control system that exploits the advanced technology of communications, sensors, fire direction, and the required automatic data processing.”
In Israel, the pivot came a few decades later and reflected its ruling establishment’s growing alliance with Washington. IDF generals did not only view the U.S. partnership as essential to their country’s security. Many of them passed through American credentialing institutions like Harvard, where they picked up the prevailing cultural assumptions of their American counterparts, including their attitudes toward strategy and war.
It was during the Second Lebanon war in 2006 when this new ideology of military force matured into an institutional imperative. Its core belief was summed up by Gen. Gadi Eisenkot, who at the time was in charge of formulating the military’s operational plans as the head of the IDF’s Operations Directorate. Instead of using ground forces to control territory, Eisenkot favored the use of airpower combined with special, limited ground operations designed for symbolic effect to break the enemy’s will. He explained his way of thinking: “For me, land is a burden. Therefore, the operational pattern is—raids. You go in and out.”
In 2014, the IDF fought a short and inconclusive war in Gaza. It relied on airpower and precision strikes to target the group’s leadership and batter its infrastructure, while conducting only very limited ground operations. The following year, the head of the IDF, Gen. Benny Gantz implemented a new policy called the Gideon plan to further reduce the size of the military’s conventional ground forces while prioritizing funding to special operations units and technological platforms. The plan affected all components of the IDF, with active-duty forces ordered to cut their officer corps by 10% and reduce the length of mandatory conscription terms by four months. However, as a report published in 2021 by the U.S. Naval War College Review, noted: “The reserve forces were affected most by the [plan], which suggested cutting 30 percent of the reserve army, which meant releasing one hundred thousand out of three hundred thousand active reservists.” Shrinking the IDF’s conventional forces fulfilled what had become the consensus among Israel’s security elite, which held that its “missions no longer were to occupy vast adversary-state territory but, instead, to gain operational control over geographically limited hostile areas and eliminate localized threats such as missile capabilities and arms-smuggling tunnels.”
Gantz, who envisioned and led the IDF’s transformation, was not shy about explaining his rationale, which he described to an interviewer in 2018: “I am saying, unambiguously, that I prioritized cyber and intelligence over infantry and armor …[;] unlike the threat of ground invasion, the threat of cyber is realistic.” Gantz was hardly alone in his views, which were shared among most members of the IDF’s upper echelons. His successor as IDF chief of staff, Gadi Eisenkot, maintained and built on the vision of the Gideon plan. In 2015 Eisenkot introduced his own five-year “efficiency plan” that called for further downsizing the IDF, including cutting an additional 100,000 reserve soldiers mostly from combat brigades in the artillery and infantry.
A tipping point was passed. Until the 1990s, IDF “senior commanders held a balanced approach,” according to the Israeli military analyst Avi Kober, “which reflected prudence regarding the impact of technology.” The loss of that balance opened a space for the growth of dangerous illusions, such as the idea that Hamas, now deterred by Israel’s military-technological supremacy, could be placated with money and induced to give up on its existential aims. “Technology depoliticized the conflict,” writes the Israeli scholar Ran Heilbrunn, “allowing it to be perceived as an issue that could be ‘managed’ with the right technological tools, rather than a problem that must be resolved through policymaking and public contestation.” Perhaps the starkest symbol of this folly was the inordinately expensive high-tech fence constructed on Israel’s border with Gaza. Prior to Oct. 7, what the fence symbolized to Israel’s enemies was not the country’s technological invulnerability, but its retreat. Rather than deterring Hamas, the perceived weakness signaled by the fence emboldened the plans of a determined invader who then easily breached the sparsely manned barrier.
In the early 1990s Israeli reservists conducted nearly 10 million man-days of annual service. By 2022, that had been cut by more than two-thirds to an estimated 2.4 million service days. Over the same period, Israel steadily reduced its armored divisions. Currently, the number of tanks in the IDF sits at roughly one-third of where it was in the mid 1980s. On paper it appears that the IDF has four mobilizable maneuver divisions—down from 12 during the First Lebanon War—but Amiad Cohen dismisses this as an accounting trick.
“It looks like we have four maneuver divisions, 162, 36, 98, and 99. But it’s wrong because 98 and 99 are not maneuvering. They’re special ops. They’re for raids.”
Cohen draws a critical distinction here that can be lost in news reports and PowerPoint presentations but makes a great deal of difference to an army in the field. A maneuver division is one that is capable of moving troops into the enemy’s terrain and then conducting independent offensive operations. Special operations units, by contrast, are designed for quick and limited missions like raids, where the goal is to maximize stealth and precision while minimizing time spent on the objective. They lack the assets needed to conduct conventional infantry tasks like clearing an area of enemy fighters and holding the terrain to prevent reinfiltration. “The 98th division has proved during this war that it cannot maneuver,” said Cohen. “The commando division, which is four special units together, has no ability to maneuver as a brigade, let alone as a maneuvering division.”
“Why is this important? Because two divisions is bullshit.” Simply put, Cohen is saying, the army that the IDF’s leaders built over the past two decades was not equipped to fight the war that arrived on its doorstep.
It is not accurate to say that no one in a position of influence in Israel warned about the dangers of downsizing the army or pointed out the flawed premises on which it rested. Rather, the few people who did so were either ignored or marginalized as cranks. The dangers were evident to people who did not buy into the konceptsia or did not stand to advance their careers and social standing by repeating its dogmas.
As early as 2007, for instance, the Israeli public intellectual Ran Baratz wrote a long essay criticizing the IDF’s lack of preparedness for ground wars. The military was falling prey to an ideological delusion that Baratz would later term postmodern war. Describing its symptoms nearly two decades ago he called Israel “a state with a strategic concept not of active defense, but of [passive] protection.” The country, he wrote, “speaks of winning without waging war and of a sterile victory, achieved by intelligence and firepower entrusted to a well-armed security guard. All seems well until the moment the enemy’s forces simultaneously infiltrate the penetrated border at several locations, [entering] directly into villages and military bases—and then it turns out there is no significant, sufficiently trained force that can oppose them and fight like an army.”
In 2018, the American analyst Kenneth S. Brower warned that mistakes by Israel’s general staff and civilian leaders had led them “to construct expensive, brittle, border fences” of limited strategic utility. The nation would have been better served, he wrote, “by increasing the readiness of its reserve ground forces, more rapidly deploying advanced force multiplier technologies such as the Trophy active defense system, and increasing the mobilizable reserve order of battle.” In an analysis that still bears heeding, Bowers wrote that a highly capable offensive ground force could serve as a “far better deterrent than almost militarily useless fences and air defense systems that can be easily saturated and which are catastrophically vulnerable to stealthy future weapons.”
To see how Israel’s national security establishment and ruling political class responded to such warnings, it is instructive to look at the case of the retired general turned Defense Ministry ombudsman, Yitzhak Brik. In 2018, media across Israel carried headlines touting a report written by Brik that slammed the IDF’s falling standards in training and decried its lack of preparedness. Brik, according to an article in the Times of Israel, had “repeatedly warned lawmakers and the public over the past year that the army is unprepared for war” and had “criticized the state of military vehicles and its emergency storage units, crucial for arming and supplying reserve troops during war.” Brik claimed that the state of the army of the late 2010s was “worse than it was at the time of the Yom Kippur War” in 1973. He accused senior IDF officers of deceiving the public by deliberately covering up the army’s shortfalls. A short time later, a committee of Israel’s lawmaking body, the Knesset, countered with its own far more positive assessment. The Knesset report acknowledged some gaps in the IDF’s preparedness but concluded that the IDF had steadily improved since its 2014 war in Gaza, showing “a dramatic increase in readiness by almost every indicator—whether in the number of training drills, whether in munitions stocks, spare parts inventory and more.” Effectively, the latter report served as a public rebuke of Brik, who would not infrequently be portrayed in Israeli media coverage as an embittered crank.
On Oct. 7, an enemy believed to be pacified and relegated to the margins of history launched the kind of war believed to be extinct. With its surprise attack, Hamas summoned an Israeli mass mobilization that placed an operational emphasis on the kinds of miluim combat units that had been downsized because they were seen as increasingly obsolete. It would later come to light that the IDF had ceased to maintain operational plans for a full-scale invasion of the Gaza strip.
With the IDF overwhelmed, members of those overlooked and underresourced units, along with their families and supporters, then scrambled to procure them equipment. That process, which continues to this day, has been simultaneously inspiring and infuriating. While there is no question that the volunteers got critical gear into the hands of soldiers who desperately needed it, there remains an open question of whether, by doing so, they inadvertently outsourced the solution to a problem that the IDF will remain incapable of fixing on its own in the next war.
Still working from antiquated logistics and procurement systems, the IDF had no way to attain an accurate snapshot of its own shortages. A volunteer with experience in the nonprofit world who worked closely with the IDF on equipment issues in the early months of the war described “a complete lack of understanding. We could not tell how much was missing and how much was needed.” Solving that equation was further complicated by the fact that a significant percentage of the equipment in the IDF’s stockpiles was decades old, with some undetermined percentage of it no longer fit for use.
Within just a few months, thousands of different volunteer initiatives sprang up in Israel and across the diaspora, with much of the support coming from Jewish communities in the U.S. Some consisted of no more than a few people raising money for family members and quickly deactivated as the volunteers went back to work. But out of the network, a number of organizations formed that continue to operate as an unofficial logistics back channel for the IDF.
The IDF’s response to the volunteers was confused and contradictory. Publicly, Israeli officials denied the shortages while admonishing concerned citizens to ignore soldiers’ requests for tactical gear, like helmets and vests.
Meanwhile, however, the Israeli military’s premier partner organization, the FIDF, had begun aggressively fundraising. Multiple posts on the organization’s Facebook account for Oct. 7 encouraged people to “show your support—GIVE now” and “support Israel’s defenders” by donating to the FIDF. An “emergency campaign” fundraising flyer sent out by the group on Oct. 25, 2023, referred to FIDF as the Israeli military’s “true and only partner” and urged potential donors to support “the IDF’s greatest needs” alongside a list of medical equipment to be purchased for the war effort.
A Jewish American in Burbank or Pittsburgh who donated to the FIDF based on those appeals likely believed that their money was going to buy the kind of critical military equipment, like helmets and vests, that Israeli soldiers were loudly asking for in public appeals. Indeed, that is the kind of gear that was being purchased and distributed by hundreds of volunteer initiatives in the early months of the war. Yet the FIDF did not use its massive coffers and fundraising drives to purchase military supplies. It did not, however, clarify this point. Instead, it allowed the public to believe that money given to the FIDF was going directly to urgent needs, when in reality much of it would sit unused in American bank accounts or would go to purchasing nonessentials like watches and hygiene kits.
It did not help to clarify the matter any that IDF generals, both recently retired and still serving, frequently appeared in FIDF promotional materials. For instance, in a private video shown at an FIDF gala in early 2024 that was leaked to a journalist, the IDF’s then-Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi, personally thanked the organization and its donors and credited them for directly contributing to Israel’s military success.
Rather than acting as an independent charity serving Israeli soldiers, the FIDF at times appeared to operate more like an extension of the IDF bureaucracy. As it put out urgent appeals for donations to help the war effort, the FIDF was repeating the army’s official line telling the public to ignore the pleas for helmets and other gear coming from IDF units. Posted on an anonymously run website critiquing decisions made by the FIDF’s former national director IDF Maj. Gen. (Res.) Nadav Padan is what appears to be a screenshot of a message that Padan sent to FIDF supporters on Oct. 11, 2023. In the screenshot, which was purportedly leaked by an internal source at the FIDF, the IDF insists “there is no shortage of protective equipment.” Well-meaning supporters in the diaspora who were trying to purchase helmets, vests, and other equipment were getting ahead of themselves, the message cautioned. “All required equipmet [sic] is on its way south—patience.” In a live video briefing to supporters on Jan. 10, 2024, Padan claimed that the FIDF’s assistance was so crucial it “enables Israel and the IDF to win this war.” Giving to the FIDF and rallying behind the American nonprofit, Padan called a form of “spiritual support” that was “the best ammunition you can send to Israel, better than any helmet, any drone or whatever.”
The FIDF’s decision not to provide tactical gear was one thing. It was not the organization’s area of expertise and it claimed that legal restrictions prevented it from getting involved, though critics questioned whether that was the case. What bothered many people was that the FIDF, seemingly driven by the IDF’s own mistaken priorities, appeared to mislead the public while deliberately taking funding away from other groups. Soliciting money from donors based on the false pretense that it was providing for front-line needs, the FIDF diverted funds from organizations that were actually buying protective gear to send to soldiers.
In a briefing to FIDF donors on Dec. 27, 2023, Padan continued to dismiss the claims of widespread shortages. Despite a few remaining gaps that were soon to be closed, the army had all the gear it needed, Padan insisted. If soldiers had not yet received everything, that was simply the reality of logistics in wartime. In a comment that would reverberate across the small and intimate world of IDF-related nonprofits and Israel advocacy, Padan compared some of the soldiers requesting new tactical helmets to “a college son that asks for a new car.”
It is undoubtedly true that some of the requests from Israeli soldiers were for gear they wanted but did not absolutely need. It takes nothing away from their honor to point out this fact, which would be trivially obvious to anyone who has ever been a soldier themselves. Soldiers always want better gear, whether it is to look cool, be more comfortable, or more deadly. Comparing cutting-edge tactical helmets to luxury items overstates the case, but it is true that they are not equally essential for all units. Grunts doing urban house clearing unequivocally need them while rear echelon supply clerks do not, and military police units fall somewhere in-between depending on where they are operating and in what capacity. Yet it is equally obvious that FIDF leaders were denying shortages while front-line soldiers especially in miluim units were still missing essential protective and tactical gear. Moreover, with the IDF struggling to even get an accurate accounting of its equipment status, it was hardly in a position to definitively deny the deficiencies being reported by soldiers on the ground. In that context, critics of the FIDF pointed out, wasn’t it better to give too much and ensure that soldiers had the best equipment available, even if it meant spending money on some things that were good to have but not technically essential, rather than to leave them without gear on which their lives might depend?
As a number of people involved in donating tactical equipment to Israeli soldiers pointed out to me, FIDF did not have to weigh in on the issue at all. Instead of actively discouraging people from donating helmets, for instance, the organization could have said nothing and continued its traditional fundraising drives while allowing other groups to fill the growing need for tactical gear. But to do so would have meant sidelining itself and allowing donor dollars to go to other charities. Instead, the FIDF reaped a windfall, raising some $280 million in 2023, nearly triple the amount that the group had anticipated collecting that year, according to an internal budget document reported on by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
As the Israeli military’s “designated American partner,” according to its own marketing language, the FIDF was actively enforcing the same failed konceptsia that allowed Israel’s ground forces to atrophy and left them unprepared for the current war. As the IDF’s cat’s-paw, the FIDF provided high-profile positions for retired generals and feel-good moments for wealthy philanthropists who received thank you videos from young Israelis. Yet it utterly failed to foresee or to respond to the most dire needs of the Israeli army. The reality of the relationship called into question the very dependence on diaspora Jews that Ben-Gurion had seen as indispensable. Paying into the strategic fantasies sold to them by IDF generals, wealthy Americans were not shoring up Israel’s strength but fortifying a corrupt establishment that had led it to the brink of ruin.
In April of 2024, a miluim paratrooper named Aaron Moshe Shalman posted an open notice on a Facebook group asking for help for his unit: “We are in dire need of equipment: tactical helmets, tactical uniforms, tactical boots (in all sizes), tactical eyeglasses, knee pads, leathermans, good gun straps, and decent tactical gloves.” That July a group of sergeants in the Alexandroni Brigade, which had already conducted extended combat operations in Gaza, published their own public appeal. More than 150 days into their deployment, the soldiers described still needing basics like observation equipment, uniforms, and armor. “The shortages of equipment have us collecting donations, which is a shameful situation,” they wrote.
Meanwhile, the Israeli military’s official policy toward equipment donations continued to blatantly contradict the observable reality on the ground. In July 2024, the IDF commander of the ground forces, Maj. Tamir Yadai, ordered a crackdown on volunteer efforts. He warned that donated gear could endanger the army and threatened soldiers who accepted it with severe disciplinary actions. Yet not a single one out of more than a dozen people I spoke with who were involved in coordinating donating gear said they ever saw the policy enforced or were affected by it in the slightest. The army openly relied on donated equipment. Soldiers across the IDF made slow but steady progress, acquiring the gear they needed, with the tacit support of their own commanders but in the face of public, yet meaningless, threats from the higher-ups.
As one officer who was involved in coordinating equipment donations to his unit explained to me: “it was a joke for a long time in the donor community that pretty much every picture coming out on the IDF Twitter, most of the gear we could identify as donated gear, because the helmets have a specific look. It got so bad that there were pictures of [then head of the IDF, Gen. Yoav Gallant] and Bibi in Gaza wearing donated gear. It became an open secret and everyone knew it was happening. People involved in the volunteer efforts would be on the WhatsApp group cracking up, trying to figure out, ‘whose helmet is that?’ Like which one of us had donated it.”
By the middle of 2024, the open secret was a massive business. Conservative estimates put the total value of all donated equipment given to the IDF at point from both individuals and organizations at $1.5 billion. It was a business that the FIDF clearly profited from, even if most of the people involved in the organization did so with noble intentions. In a way, the FIDF, acting as a cat’s-paw for the IDF and thus driven by the same errors in ideology, found itself raising money it couldn’t actually spend as many of its donors imagined it would. As the hypocrisy of the situation became more apparent and more public, the FIDF faced mounting pressures. Longtime board members publicly resigned and denounced the group’s leadership. Leakers fed documents to outside critics who exposed the group’s internal rifts.
Much of the reporting on the scandals at the FIDF, as well as some of the most scathing criticism of the group, came from an entrepreneur and independent journalist named Daniel Mael. In addition to running his own nonprofit group out of Florida called Unit 11741 to donate tactical gear to the IDF, Mael also posted regular articles on his muckraking Substack called The Mael Review. He was relentless, cranking out multiple articles a month reporting on the FIDF. He could also be intemperate in coverage that sometimes veered toward scolding diatribes. Even some of Mael’s peers in the volunteer world who shared his criticisms of the FIDF objected to tactics they saw as unnecessarily personal and counterproductive. But if he overstepped at times, there is no doubt that Mael aired things that other critics felt in private but would not say publicly. Several IDF soldiers who received donated gear from Mael’s organization spoke highly of the experience.
Mael accused the FIDF of perpetrating a “grave case of false advertising, misleading well-intentioned contributors who believed their money would provide meaningful, direct assistance to soldiers in active combat situations.” In reality, he wrote, “FIDF is a massively bureaucratic organization far removed from immediate battlefield effectiveness. Its claims to urgent action starkly contrast with its sluggish, administrative-heavy structure and minimal direct impact on actual military outcomes.”
The conflict came to a head on July 2, 2025 when the Israeli newspaper Ynet obtained and published a damning internal report from the organization. The result of a three-month internal investigation instigated by FIDF’s board, the report found the organization’s finances were mismanaged and that it was run tyrannically by its chairman, Morey Levovitz, who rewarded his cronies while inspiring fear in the rest of the staff. The scandal placed renewed attention on the group’s fundraising activities, including the fact that the majority of the hundreds of millions of dollars that FIDF had raised since Oct. 7, remained unspent in its coffers. By the end of the month, both Levovitz and FIDF CEO Steve Weil had resigned. They were replaced by a new CEO to head the organization, Nadav Padan.
Afull, honest accounting of the post-Oct. 7 period would highlight the extraordinary accomplishments of the modern Israeli security forces as well as critiquing its failures and weaknesses. The dismantling of Iran’s regional proxy network, including Hezbollah, as well as the crippling of Tehran’s nuclear program both relied on the application of long-term deception plans and strategic power projection that would have made Ben-Gurion proud. In Gaza, the fusion of tactical early warning systems and advanced intelligence capabilities has accomplished a targeting and maneuver capability not seen before in modern wars.
Yet, despite the sacrifices and devastation of the past two years, the IDF has not yet achieved the total victory that Prime Minister Netanyahu has promised since the start of the war. Nor has it managed to fully evict Hamas as a ruling power in Gaza. Many IDF commanders have displayed the characteristic aversion to territorial control, routinely spending blood to conquer areas of Gaza only to relinquish them weeks or months later, dooming soldiers to repeat costly clearing operations.
Moreover, the IDF has not yet demonstrated the capacity, nor the will, to fully sustain its own operations. Instead, it continues to rely on the network of volunteer groups that it can neither fully deputize nor live without.
This in turn enables what has become a toxic relationship between the U.S. and Israel. Aryeh Leib Shapiro, a milluimnik born in the U.S. and a member of an Israeli organization called the Vision Movement, dedicated to what it calls the cause of Jewish liberation, spoke with me about how American Jews influence Israeli security. “The way that many American Jews want to contribute to the IDF’s success is by remaking them in their image. Just like in general Israeli politics, the Reform movement wants Israeli religious law and immigration law to reflect American Jewish sensibilities.The IDF is no different, except that these diaspora Jewish orgs no longer have much influence over the Knesset anymore so they’ve been putting more funding into education and the army.”
Much of that influence is exerted through what appears to be philanthropy. The way it works, said Shapiro, is “by sending our top and most promising commanders in the IDF to learn what it means to be a Jewish leader in the 21st century from the Wexner Foundation or at the Harvard Kennedy School.”
The IDF, greatly influenced by fashionable but disastrously misguided ideas that have been popular among the American ruling class, has turned its official partner in the American diaspora into a piggy bank to subsidize those ideas. The shiniest monument of this failed two-way konceptsia is the FIDF. The organization gives American Jews an illusion of helping that actually handicaps Israel.
The best scenario for Israel would be one in which it acts like an independent and sovereign nation by taking full responsibility for its military supply needs. Instead of relying on logistical backup from unregulated volunteers, it could then funnel diaspora support into less sensitive areas. That will require wisely analyzing the current political and security situation in its own region and at large, separate from the interests of its patrons. Having done so, Israel can then make plans that are founded on a realistic vision of the future, which would be one that does not assume that land will no longer be important in warfare or rest on other similarly dangerous hallucinations.
“It was absolutely abysmal. I mean, it was shocking the equipment that we were given.”
Eitan was 27 years old on Oct. 7 when he got the alert. (Soldiers who are identified by their first names only have had their names changed.) He had finished his active military time in 2022 after serving in one of the IDF’s elite commando units. Out of the army, Eitan was studying for a master’s in business. Like most able-bodied Israelis of fighting age, he continued his military service as a reservist. In his part-time unit, he joined what is known in Hebrew as miluim, the term used for the IDF’s reserve forces that have historically functioned as the backbone of Israel’s people’s army. Miluimniks, who have already gone through training and served in a regular unit, provide a standing reserve that can be called on to plug gaps in the nation’s defense or rapidly built out to augment the army’s order of battle in the event of war. That, in any case, was the longstanding theory of Israel’s strategic concept as a small country surrounded by hostile powers.
The IDF’s problem was that its leaders had spent decades under the illusion that ground wars requiring mass mobilizations, which are the miluim’s raison d’être, were a thing of the past. In ideal circumstances, a reserve force will still operate at a level of funding and equipment below its active-duty counterparts. But in Israel, where the reserves were no longer seen as vital to the military’s offensive capabilities, the situation had moved past nonideal to dangerously unprepared.
Eitan, serving in the reserve component of a special operations unit, should have had better gear than most. Yet, even for the elite commandos of miluim, the initial supply situation was dismal. “It was vests and helmets that we wouldn’t have been given in basic training, let alone when we were combat soldiers. Uniforms falling apart, all of the Velcro ripped and destroyed. The zippers didn’t work. Helmets from the 1980s when my dad was in the army. The guns were mostly old surplus and we didn’t have ceramic vests.” To the best of his knowledge, Eitan told me, no one in his battalion had ceramic vests when the war started.
By the time night fell on Oct. 7, 2023, Eitan had joined up with his reserve unit and was fighting the remnants of the Hamas raiding party that had infiltrated into southern Israel that morning, breaching the security fence, overwhelming border defenses, and killing nearly 1,200 people, including women and children sheltering in their homes, before carrying some 250 hostages back into Gaza. For three days Eitan and the other special operations veterans in his unit engaged in nearly continuous battle. The first real rest he remembers getting came on Oct. 10 when his battalion took over an evacuated school.
Meanwhile, Israeli officials were insisting that they had everything under control. “The Yamachim were ready,” Maj. Gen. Michel Yanko, head of the IDF’s Technological and Logistics Directorate, told a group of journalists only days after Oct. 7, using the Hebrew name for the army’s logistics division. “Does everyone get our best equipment like the recon units? No, we didn’t intend for that,” said Yanko. “We did not intend to give all 300,000 [reserve] soldiers ceramic vests.” Nevertheless, the general assured reporters that front-line soldiers performing specialized reconnaissance missions or maneuvering in Gaza would get what they needed. “Everyone who will be in combat has a ceramic vest.”
More than a dozen active and reserve members of the IDF spoke to Tablet for this story, and in these and other countless testimonies, Israeli soldiers attest that this was not the case. Soldiers deployed into both Gaza and Lebanon without the vests containing bulletproof ceramic plates, which are designed to stop high-velocity rounds. Recon soldiers who belonged to precisely the high-need units that Yanko singled out, were forced to conduct combat missions without critical gear. They entered an army that was totally unprepared for the war it encountered on Oct. 7.
As Eitan battled Hamas forces in the south, Moshe, an officer in a special reconnaissance team of the Alexandroni Brigade, one of the main infantry forces of the miluim, was on Israel’s northern border with Lebanon getting into firefights with the elite shock troops of Hezbollah’s terrorist army, known as the Radwan Force. “We were on combat missions the night of Oct. 7 fighting Radwan who had already started to open fire and we’re missing everything,” Moshe told me. “I’m getting shot at. I’m personally on a mission with outdated broken helmets and missing stuff.”
Yossi, in his mid 20s, belonged to a different reconnaissance team in another miluim infantry brigade and faced the same issues. “We opened the equipment lockers, and it was ancient flak jackets, ancient helmets. There were maybe two pieces of night vision” for a platoon with more than 20 soldiers. The lack of night vision is particularly crippling to recon units whose mission is to spot critical openings and vulnerabilities on the battlefield before the enemy does. In 2006 when I served in Iraq as a U.S. Army officer, the idea of a recon team operating without night vision would have been unimaginable. In the American army, even the lowest ranking noncombat administrative clerks had night vision goggles, as of two decades ago. It was armywide policy then that no American soldier was allowed to go outside the wire on a mission without them.
“In Lebanon we were doing purely urban operations,” said Yossi. “You’re clearing buildings at night, and you need night vision for that.” To make up for their shortages, his unit would decrease the number of soldiers operating on an objective. That is a dangerous decision to make in a treacherous urban environment, where standard infantry tactics call for increasing the size of an attacking force to make up for the large advantage held by the defenders. Without enough night vision pieces, also known as “nods,” Yossi’s unit and others like it were forced to operate below their full strength. “Guys with nods would be sent to the front, and the guys without them pretty much trailed behind or waited outside for the house to be cleared.”
Avraham, a 42-year-old reserve officer in a combat engineering unit and the father of nine children, has now completed more than 400 days of active combat duty since Oct. 7 over five separate deployments. He describes a familiar scene when he first reported for duty. “We didn’t have any ceramic plates. Our helmets were from the ’80s and ’90s. I don’t think anybody who wasn’t an officer had night vision.”
All the soldiers I spoke to for this piece described an initial supply crisis that was only gradually and somewhat improved through their own personal initiative combined with the efforts undertaken by a patchwork of volunteer organizations that assumed a role as the IDF’s unofficial second logistics division. But why? How had a reasonably wealthy country like Israel, widely acknowledged to have one of the best militaries in the world allowed itself to become so deficient in the basic essentials of land warfare?
Israelis have a term for the dominant strategic concept that colors how its ruling elites view their place in the world and the threats to their country: the konceptsia. More than simply a security doctrine, the konceptsia refers to a unifying gestalt that includes both the underlying cultural attitudes that shape a particular generation’s worldview and the blind spots that it inevitably overlooks. Israel has cycled through various konceptsias throughout its history, with a critical change occurring in the 1990s, around and in the wake of the Oslo Accords—which rested on the assumption that by giving away land to form a Palestinian rump state, the Israelis could achieve both peace and international legitimacy. Oslo was upheld by the liberal cosmopolitans of the international community, most importantly including Israel’s main ally, the U.S., as the ultimate totem of ethical achievement—one which happened to resemble the classic approach employed by great powers in the Middle East, which is to carve the region up into beholden client states.
As a result, the IDF—taking cues from the U.S.—embraced a conception of war as a theater of technological effects that could neutralize distant enemies while using routine counterterrorism operations to police a hostile local population. In short, they believed that armies no longer needed to take and hold territory to defeat their enemies. Some members of the IDF may have seen the pivot as a way of currying favor with their superpower patron. But many of Israel’s generals viewed the West as the benchmark of all prestige and power, even in the eastern Mediterranean. Insofar as their delusions mirrored those held in Washington, they regarded them as a mark of sophistication. Those misapprehensions created problems both within the IDF, as well as in an American charity that now faces a series of high-profile allegations about its fundraising for Israeli soldiers, and why much of it didn’t actually get to those who ostensibly needed it.
Understanding the effects of this misbegotten ideological framework reveals that the Oct. 7 armament crisis, which may still be costing soldiers their lives and certainly led to preventable injuries, is not the result of tragic misfortune or regrettable oversights. The IDF’s lack of preparation was a deliberate policy choice, made year after year for the past two decades, reflecting the mistaken beliefs of the country’s leadership class—beliefs that many of them still hold.
On Oct. 7, 19-year-old Sgt. Guy Bazak was serving in the Golani Infantry Brigade in a base on the Gaza border directly next to a kibbutz called Kissufim. A few kilometers away, on the other side of Israel’s high-tech security fence sat the city of Deir al-Balah in Gaza. The exact unit he served in, B Company of the 51st Battalion, had been commanded in the 1990s by Guy’s father, Brig. Gen. Yuval Bazak. On the day that he completed his initial training and graduated into the Golani, Guy wrote in his journal.
“I’m ready to say that today was one of the most exciting and meaningful days of my life—to see my proud family, my supportive friends and above all to get Dad’s beret. A feeling that will always be engraved in my heart. Today, every drop of sweat, every muscle cramp, every tiring day, turned into steps that brought me to my goal.”
Illusions that had become pervasive among Israel’s ruling class—that Hamas was pacified in Gaza and no longer interested in large-scale conflict, that major land wars were no longer a threat—ramified throughout the society, including the military, where they affected the composition of forces at the Golani base on the Gaza border. On the morning of Saturday, Oct. 7, many of the soldiers who would ordinarily be guarding the base were home on passes for Shabbat and the Simchat Torah holiday, reducing its defending force by something like half. The standard IDF protocol of dawn alert, known as “stand-to” in American military parlance, and that requires all soldiers on base to pull 100% security in the early hours of first light, when an enemy is most likely to attack, had ceased to be enforced, and was not in effect that morning.
Despite being one of the IDF’s premier infantry forces located on a contested border in close proximity to a hostile enemy, Bazak’s unit did not have enough ceramic vests for every soldier. Soldiers who did not receive a vest with ceramic plates capable of stopping bullets, instead received flak vests that are ineffective against small arms rounds but can repel shrapnel.
At 6:30 a.m., the alarms began to sound on Kissufim base. By 7 a.m., the soldiers were mobilizing to defend the adjacent kibbutz full of civilian families. Guy Bazak grabbed his weapon and flak vest along with the rest of his gear and moved out. Guy’s father, Gen. Bazak, later described to Haaretz what he imagined his son and his comrades must have been thinking: “What’s in their head was: finally, at long last, action. At most it’s a squad of seven, eight terrorists, because that’s what we prepared for. We’ll go, we’ll thwart them and we’ll return. He knew he didn’t have a ceramic vest, but he didn’t pass up going into battle.”
into battle.”
Spotting a group of terrorists trying to breach the southern perimeter of Kibbutz Kissufim, Bazak killed the first one he saw with a shot from 150 meters. When a close friend was wounded, he moved him to safety and continued fighting. After nearly four hours of battle Guy Bazak was killed by enemy machine-gun fire when a bullet penetrated through his flak vest and into his chest. Five more soldiers of the IDF would be killed that day in the same location.
Some 360,000 reservists would answer the call to duty after the Hamas invasion. It was more than the IDF knew what to do with. Facing critical shortages in their units and aware that the IDF was overwhelmed, those soldiers then took the very Israeli step of organizing on their own to fill those needs through fundraising efforts and other makeshift supply channels. Eager to assist, diaspora communities in the U.S. and elsewhere sprang into action. A volunteer army was formed.
Officially, the military insisted that there were no equipment shortfalls and discouraged volunteers from donating military supplies directly to units, while simultaneously endorsing donations made to a private New York-based organization called Friends of the IDF. FIDF, as the group is widely known, was founded in 1981. It has earned a public profile by hosting gala dinners in Los Angeles with celebrities like Ashton Kutcher, Barbra Streisand, and Sylvester Stallone. Those events established its reputation as a fundraising juggernaut and the official/unofficial face of pro-IDF advocacy.
But as would later come to light, the FIDF, which employs hundreds of people and has 25 chapters across the U.S., was neither equipped nor willing to meet the IDF’s most pressing needs. Instead, this face of pro-Israel advocacy, which raised hundreds of millions of dollars since Oct. 7, appeared more interested in burnishing the lucrative institution of the U.S.-Israel relationship and giving donors the impression they were doing something, than in advocating for the needs of ordinary Israeli soldiers.
Over the past two decades, the IDF has undergone a profound transformation, moving away from its origins and toward what critics call a postmodern military.
On May 14, 1948, Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, declared the nation’s independence. With his next order he established the Israel Defense Forces. Aside from founding the army, Israel’s greatest statesman also devised Israel’s enduring security concept. The doctrine rested on three pillars: deterrence, early warning, and offensive power. A small nation surrounded by enemies, Israel would never achieve total security and instead would have to rely on deterring threats by raising the cost of war to a point higher than they were willing to pay. To protect itself, it would rely on advanced intelligence capabilities to detect enemy plans and preempt attacks. Though it is not formally included, one can add a fourth unofficial principle to Ben-Gurion’s national security framework, which is that the nascent Jewish state would have to rely on external support from more powerful allies. Acutely aware that the early Zionist project had depended on financing from foreign philanthropists, Ben-Gurion institutionalized this model. To survive, Ben-Gurion believed, Israel needed international support. This meant both the patronage of great powers, which eventually included the U.S., and continued financing from the Jewish diaspora.
Ben-Gurion’s blueprint for a “strategically defensive and operationally offensive” IDF dictated its force structure. This was described in a 2018 monograph written for Israel’s Begin-Sadat Center by an American military analyst named Kenneth S. Brower as one that could “rapidly mobilize a very high readiness and large order of battle designed to quickly achieve decisive military results.” For a small and initially undercapitalized country, this meant universal conscription followed by an extended period of mandatory service in the reserves. A nation with a large professional military like the U.S., can use its reserve components as an auxiliary backup force, but for a people’s army like the IDF, the miluim are essential to war-fighting capacity.
The first major break with Ben-Gurion’s principles of warfare and the birth of the modern konceptsia took place in 1985 at the end of the First Lebanon War. That war finished without a decisive victory when Israel withdrew its forces to a security zone along the northern border with Lebanon, which the IDF attempted to control without occupying the territory.
Two years after the withdrawal from Lebanon and establishment of the security zone, the Palestinians launched the popular revolt that came to be known as the First Intifada, which consisted of mass protests and other disruptions, political pressure tactics, and terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians. Two days after the launch of the First Intifada, Hamas was founded as an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood. “Israel, Judaism and Jews challenge Islam and the Moslem people. ‘May the cowards never sleep,’” the group wrote in its founding charter. “Jihad is its path and death for the sake of Allah is the loftiest of its wishes,” proclaimed its slogan.
Israel’s response to the twin events of the 1980s in Lebanon and the intifada, marked the beginning of a new era and the birth of a new konceptsia in the country’s politics and military affairs. Politically, it led directly to the Oslo process. What united Oslo’s diplomatic track with the new military doctrines of counterterrorism and “Effects-Based Operations,” was the underlying belief that control over land was no longer vital to the nation’s sovereignty or its security. For some military strategists, this was seen as the inevitable consequence of the “Revolution in Military Affairs” triggered by the explosion of information technologies. The age of close combat and grueling tank battles was thought to be over. With dominant air power and precision-targeting by missile strikes, an advanced technological power would be able to defeat its enemies from a safe standoff distance.
Amiad Cohen, who heads Israel’s Herut Center think tank and serves as a major in the IDF, in which capacity he has been repeatedly deployed as a miluimnik over the past two years, summarizes the IDF’s changing strategic doctrine: “What has happened since the ’80s when they decided to stop occupying territory is that they decided they don’t need infantry. Put that together with airstrikes and the chip revolution that allows you to pinpoint a missile in the right place. They thought, ‘we have special operations, cyber intelligence, and precision rockets and missiles so we don’t need infantry and tanks anymore.’ This, in turn, impacted the role assigned to the reserves.”
“Right from the start, the IDF were established as a reserves-centered military force,” wrote Edward Luttwak and his co-author, Eitan Shamir, in their recent book The Art of Military Innovation: Lessons from the Israel Defense Forces. If the strength of that approach is that it allows a country to maintain a large army without paying for the full expense of its daily upkeep, its weakness is that it depends on accurate advance warning to mobilize its ranks out of their civilian lives and back into military formation. That sets up a vulnerability that canny enemies can exploit. By faking an attack, an adversary can force Israel to go through the costly and resource-intensive process of mobilization. “Repeated instances of crying wolf can blind the intelligence system,” noted Luttwak and Shamir, “improving the enemy’s ability to achieve surprise on the next occasion.” But in the IDF’s new doctrine, this risk appeared to be mitigated because the army assumed that the kind of mass ground offensives that would require a full-scale call up were increasingly rare. According to the emerging security doctrine, the reserves would only have to defend Israel’s borders, instead of carrying out independent maneuvers, while specialized units would conduct raids into enemy territory.
The IDF’s shift toward a technocratic approach to warfare paralleled transformations taking place at the same time in other armies, including in the U.S. military. U.S. military planners began to elevate technological solutions over the classical principles of warfare during the Cold War as they relied on systems of precise control to manage the conflict between nuclear superpowers. The trend in warfare was becoming evident as far as back as the 1960s, when, in the midst of the Vietnam War, U.S. Army Gen. William Westmoreland offered a fateful vision of the future at an army luncheon: “I see battlefields that are under 24-hour real or near-real time surveillance of all types. I see an Army built into and around an integrated area control system that exploits the advanced technology of communications, sensors, fire direction, and the required automatic data processing.”
In Israel, the pivot came a few decades later and reflected its ruling establishment’s growing alliance with Washington. IDF generals did not only view the U.S. partnership as essential to their country’s security. Many of them passed through American credentialing institutions like Harvard, where they picked up the prevailing cultural assumptions of their American counterparts, including their attitudes toward strategy and war.
It was during the Second Lebanon war in 2006 when this new ideology of military force matured into an institutional imperative. Its core belief was summed up by Gen. Gadi Eisenkot, who at the time was in charge of formulating the military’s operational plans as the head of the IDF’s Operations Directorate. Instead of using ground forces to control territory, Eisenkot favored the use of airpower combined with special, limited ground operations designed for symbolic effect to break the enemy’s will. He explained his way of thinking: “For me, land is a burden. Therefore, the operational pattern is—raids. You go in and out.”
In 2014, the IDF fought a short and inconclusive war in Gaza. It relied on airpower and precision strikes to target the group’s leadership and batter its infrastructure, while conducting only very limited ground operations. The following year, the head of the IDF, Gen. Benny Gantz implemented a new policy called the Gideon plan to further reduce the size of the military’s conventional ground forces while prioritizing funding to special operations units and technological platforms. The plan affected all components of the IDF, with active-duty forces ordered to cut their officer corps by 10% and reduce the length of mandatory conscription terms by four months. However, as a report published in 2021 by the U.S. Naval War College Review, noted: “The reserve forces were affected most by the [plan], which suggested cutting 30 percent of the reserve army, which meant releasing one hundred thousand out of three hundred thousand active reservists.” Shrinking the IDF’s conventional forces fulfilled what had become the consensus among Israel’s security elite, which held that its “missions no longer were to occupy vast adversary-state territory but, instead, to gain operational control over geographically limited hostile areas and eliminate localized threats such as missile capabilities and arms-smuggling tunnels.”
Gantz, who envisioned and led the IDF’s transformation, was not shy about explaining his rationale, which he described to an interviewer in 2018: “I am saying, unambiguously, that I prioritized cyber and intelligence over infantry and armor …[;] unlike the threat of ground invasion, the threat of cyber is realistic.” Gantz was hardly alone in his views, which were shared among most members of the IDF’s upper echelons. His successor as IDF chief of staff, Gadi Eisenkot, maintained and built on the vision of the Gideon plan. In 2015 Eisenkot introduced his own five-year “efficiency plan” that called for further downsizing the IDF, including cutting an additional 100,000 reserve soldiers mostly from combat brigades in the artillery and infantry.
A tipping point was passed. Until the 1990s, IDF “senior commanders held a balanced approach,” according to the Israeli military analyst Avi Kober, “which reflected prudence regarding the impact of technology.” The loss of that balance opened a space for the growth of dangerous illusions, such as the idea that Hamas, now deterred by Israel’s military-technological supremacy, could be placated with money and induced to give up on its existential aims. “Technology depoliticized the conflict,” writes the Israeli scholar Ran Heilbrunn, “allowing it to be perceived as an issue that could be ‘managed’ with the right technological tools, rather than a problem that must be resolved through policymaking and public contestation.” Perhaps the starkest symbol of this folly was the inordinately expensive high-tech fence constructed on Israel’s border with Gaza. Prior to Oct. 7, what the fence symbolized to Israel’s enemies was not the country’s technological invulnerability, but its retreat. Rather than deterring Hamas, the perceived weakness signaled by the fence emboldened the plans of a determined invader who then easily breached the sparsely manned barrier.
In the early 1990s Israeli reservists conducted nearly 10 million man-days of annual service. By 2022, that had been cut by more than two-thirds to an estimated 2.4 million service days. Over the same period, Israel steadily reduced its armored divisions. Currently, the number of tanks in the IDF sits at roughly one-third of where it was in the mid 1980s. On paper it appears that the IDF has four mobilizable maneuver divisions—down from 12 during the First Lebanon War—but Amiad Cohen dismisses this as an accounting trick.
“It looks like we have four maneuver divisions, 162, 36, 98, and 99. But it’s wrong because 98 and 99 are not maneuvering. They’re special ops. They’re for raids.”
Cohen draws a critical distinction here that can be lost in news reports and PowerPoint presentations but makes a great deal of difference to an army in the field. A maneuver division is one that is capable of moving troops into the enemy’s terrain and then conducting independent offensive operations. Special operations units, by contrast, are designed for quick and limited missions like raids, where the goal is to maximize stealth and precision while minimizing time spent on the objective. They lack the assets needed to conduct conventional infantry tasks like clearing an area of enemy fighters and holding the terrain to prevent reinfiltration. “The 98th division has proved during this war that it cannot maneuver,” said Cohen. “The commando division, which is four special units together, has no ability to maneuver as a brigade, let alone as a maneuvering division.”
“Why is this important? Because two divisions is bullshit.” Simply put, Cohen is saying, the army that the IDF’s leaders built over the past two decades was not equipped to fight the war that arrived on its doorstep.
It is not accurate to say that no one in a position of influence in Israel warned about the dangers of downsizing the army or pointed out the flawed premises on which it rested. Rather, the few people who did so were either ignored or marginalized as cranks. The dangers were evident to people who did not buy into the konceptsia or did not stand to advance their careers and social standing by repeating its dogmas.
As early as 2007, for instance, the Israeli public intellectual Ran Baratz wrote a long essay criticizing the IDF’s lack of preparedness for ground wars. The military was falling prey to an ideological delusion that Baratz would later term postmodern war. Describing its symptoms nearly two decades ago he called Israel “a state with a strategic concept not of active defense, but of [passive] protection.” The country, he wrote, “speaks of winning without waging war and of a sterile victory, achieved by intelligence and firepower entrusted to a well-armed security guard. All seems well until the moment the enemy’s forces simultaneously infiltrate the penetrated border at several locations, [entering] directly into villages and military bases—and then it turns out there is no significant, sufficiently trained force that can oppose them and fight like an army.”
In 2018, the American analyst Kenneth S. Brower warned that mistakes by Israel’s general staff and civilian leaders had led them “to construct expensive, brittle, border fences” of limited strategic utility. The nation would have been better served, he wrote, “by increasing the readiness of its reserve ground forces, more rapidly deploying advanced force multiplier technologies such as the Trophy active defense system, and increasing the mobilizable reserve order of battle.” In an analysis that still bears heeding, Bowers wrote that a highly capable offensive ground force could serve as a “far better deterrent than almost militarily useless fences and air defense systems that can be easily saturated and which are catastrophically vulnerable to stealthy future weapons.”
To see how Israel’s national security establishment and ruling political class responded to such warnings, it is instructive to look at the case of the retired general turned Defense Ministry ombudsman, Yitzhak Brik. In 2018, media across Israel carried headlines touting a report written by Brik that slammed the IDF’s falling standards in training and decried its lack of preparedness. Brik, according to an article in the Times of Israel, had “repeatedly warned lawmakers and the public over the past year that the army is unprepared for war” and had “criticized the state of military vehicles and its emergency storage units, crucial for arming and supplying reserve troops during war.” Brik claimed that the state of the army of the late 2010s was “worse than it was at the time of the Yom Kippur War” in 1973. He accused senior IDF officers of deceiving the public by deliberately covering up the army’s shortfalls. A short time later, a committee of Israel’s lawmaking body, the Knesset, countered with its own far more positive assessment. The Knesset report acknowledged some gaps in the IDF’s preparedness but concluded that the IDF had steadily improved since its 2014 war in Gaza, showing “a dramatic increase in readiness by almost every indicator—whether in the number of training drills, whether in munitions stocks, spare parts inventory and more.” Effectively, the latter report served as a public rebuke of Brik, who would not infrequently be portrayed in Israeli media coverage as an embittered crank.
On Oct. 7, an enemy believed to be pacified and relegated to the margins of history launched the kind of war believed to be extinct. With its surprise attack, Hamas summoned an Israeli mass mobilization that placed an operational emphasis on the kinds of miluim combat units that had been downsized because they were seen as increasingly obsolete. It would later come to light that the IDF had ceased to maintain operational plans for a full-scale invasion of the Gaza strip.
With the IDF overwhelmed, members of those overlooked and underresourced units, along with their families and supporters, then scrambled to procure them equipment. That process, which continues to this day, has been simultaneously inspiring and infuriating. While there is no question that the volunteers got critical gear into the hands of soldiers who desperately needed it, there remains an open question of whether, by doing so, they inadvertently outsourced the solution to a problem that the IDF will remain incapable of fixing on its own in the next war.
Still working from antiquated logistics and procurement systems, the IDF had no way to attain an accurate snapshot of its own shortages. A volunteer with experience in the nonprofit world who worked closely with the IDF on equipment issues in the early months of the war described “a complete lack of understanding. We could not tell how much was missing and how much was needed.” Solving that equation was further complicated by the fact that a significant percentage of the equipment in the IDF’s stockpiles was decades old, with some undetermined percentage of it no longer fit for use.
Within just a few months, thousands of different volunteer initiatives sprang up in Israel and across the diaspora, with much of the support coming from Jewish communities in the U.S. Some consisted of no more than a few people raising money for family members and quickly deactivated as the volunteers went back to work. But out of the network, a number of organizations formed that continue to operate as an unofficial logistics back channel for the IDF.
The IDF’s response to the volunteers was confused and contradictory. Publicly, Israeli officials denied the shortages while admonishing concerned citizens to ignore soldiers’ requests for tactical gear, like helmets and vests.
Meanwhile, however, the Israeli military’s premier partner organization, the FIDF, had begun aggressively fundraising. Multiple posts on the organization’s Facebook account for Oct. 7 encouraged people to “show your support—GIVE now” and “support Israel’s defenders” by donating to the FIDF. An “emergency campaign” fundraising flyer sent out by the group on Oct. 25, 2023, referred to FIDF as the Israeli military’s “true and only partner” and urged potential donors to support “the IDF’s greatest needs” alongside a list of medical equipment to be purchased for the war effort.
A Jewish American in Burbank or Pittsburgh who donated to the FIDF based on those appeals likely believed that their money was going to buy the kind of critical military equipment, like helmets and vests, that Israeli soldiers were loudly asking for in public appeals. Indeed, that is the kind of gear that was being purchased and distributed by hundreds of volunteer initiatives in the early months of the war. Yet the FIDF did not use its massive coffers and fundraising drives to purchase military supplies. It did not, however, clarify this point. Instead, it allowed the public to believe that money given to the FIDF was going directly to urgent needs, when in reality much of it would sit unused in American bank accounts or would go to purchasing nonessentials like watches and hygiene kits.
It did not help to clarify the matter any that IDF generals, both recently retired and still serving, frequently appeared in FIDF promotional materials. For instance, in a private video shown at an FIDF gala in early 2024 that was leaked to a journalist, the IDF’s then-Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi, personally thanked the organization and its donors and credited them for directly contributing to Israel’s military success.
Rather than acting as an independent charity serving Israeli soldiers, the FIDF at times appeared to operate more like an extension of the IDF bureaucracy. As it put out urgent appeals for donations to help the war effort, the FIDF was repeating the army’s official line telling the public to ignore the pleas for helmets and other gear coming from IDF units. Posted on an anonymously run website critiquing decisions made by the FIDF’s former national director IDF Maj. Gen. (Res.) Nadav Padan is what appears to be a screenshot of a message that Padan sent to FIDF supporters on Oct. 11, 2023. In the screenshot, which was purportedly leaked by an internal source at the FIDF, the IDF insists “there is no shortage of protective equipment.” Well-meaning supporters in the diaspora who were trying to purchase helmets, vests, and other equipment were getting ahead of themselves, the message cautioned. “All required equipmet [sic] is on its way south—patience.” In a live video briefing to supporters on Jan. 10, 2024, Padan claimed that the FIDF’s assistance was so crucial it “enables Israel and the IDF to win this war.” Giving to the FIDF and rallying behind the American nonprofit, Padan called a form of “spiritual support” that was “the best ammunition you can send to Israel, better than any helmet, any drone or whatever.”
The FIDF’s decision not to provide tactical gear was one thing. It was not the organization’s area of expertise and it claimed that legal restrictions prevented it from getting involved, though critics questioned whether that was the case. What bothered many people was that the FIDF, seemingly driven by the IDF’s own mistaken priorities, appeared to mislead the public while deliberately taking funding away from other groups. Soliciting money from donors based on the false pretense that it was providing for front-line needs, the FIDF diverted funds from organizations that were actually buying protective gear to send to soldiers.
In a briefing to FIDF donors on Dec. 27, 2023, Padan continued to dismiss the claims of widespread shortages. Despite a few remaining gaps that were soon to be closed, the army had all the gear it needed, Padan insisted. If soldiers had not yet received everything, that was simply the reality of logistics in wartime. In a comment that would reverberate across the small and intimate world of IDF-related nonprofits and Israel advocacy, Padan compared some of the soldiers requesting new tactical helmets to “a college son that asks for a new car.”
It is undoubtedly true that some of the requests from Israeli soldiers were for gear they wanted but did not absolutely need. It takes nothing away from their honor to point out this fact, which would be trivially obvious to anyone who has ever been a soldier themselves. Soldiers always want better gear, whether it is to look cool, be more comfortable, or more deadly. Comparing cutting-edge tactical helmets to luxury items overstates the case, but it is true that they are not equally essential for all units. Grunts doing urban house clearing unequivocally need them while rear echelon supply clerks do not, and military police units fall somewhere in-between depending on where they are operating and in what capacity. Yet it is equally obvious that FIDF leaders were denying shortages while front-line soldiers especially in miluim units were still missing essential protective and tactical gear. Moreover, with the IDF struggling to even get an accurate accounting of its equipment status, it was hardly in a position to definitively deny the deficiencies being reported by soldiers on the ground. In that context, critics of the FIDF pointed out, wasn’t it better to give too much and ensure that soldiers had the best equipment available, even if it meant spending money on some things that were good to have but not technically essential, rather than to leave them without gear on which their lives might depend?
As a number of people involved in donating tactical equipment to Israeli soldiers pointed out to me, FIDF did not have to weigh in on the issue at all. Instead of actively discouraging people from donating helmets, for instance, the organization could have said nothing and continued its traditional fundraising drives while allowing other groups to fill the growing need for tactical gear. But to do so would have meant sidelining itself and allowing donor dollars to go to other charities. Instead, the FIDF reaped a windfall, raising some $280 million in 2023, nearly triple the amount that the group had anticipated collecting that year, according to an internal budget document reported on by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
As the Israeli military’s “designated American partner,” according to its own marketing language, the FIDF was actively enforcing the same failed konceptsia that allowed Israel’s ground forces to atrophy and left them unprepared for the current war. As the IDF’s cat’s-paw, the FIDF provided high-profile positions for retired generals and feel-good moments for wealthy philanthropists who received thank you videos from young Israelis. Yet it utterly failed to foresee or to respond to the most dire needs of the Israeli army. The reality of the relationship called into question the very dependence on diaspora Jews that Ben-Gurion had seen as indispensable. Paying into the strategic fantasies sold to them by IDF generals, wealthy Americans were not shoring up Israel’s strength but fortifying a corrupt establishment that had led it to the brink of ruin.
In April of 2024, a miluim paratrooper named Aaron Moshe Shalman posted an open notice on a Facebook group asking for help for his unit: “We are in dire need of equipment: tactical helmets, tactical uniforms, tactical boots (in all sizes), tactical eyeglasses, knee pads, leathermans, good gun straps, and decent tactical gloves.” That July a group of sergeants in the Alexandroni Brigade, which had already conducted extended combat operations in Gaza, published their own public appeal. More than 150 days into their deployment, the soldiers described still needing basics like observation equipment, uniforms, and armor. “The shortages of equipment have us collecting donations, which is a shameful situation,” they wrote.
Meanwhile, the Israeli military’s official policy toward equipment donations continued to blatantly contradict the observable reality on the ground. In July 2024, the IDF commander of the ground forces, Maj. Tamir Yadai, ordered a crackdown on volunteer efforts. He warned that donated gear could endanger the army and threatened soldiers who accepted it with severe disciplinary actions. Yet not a single one out of more than a dozen people I spoke with who were involved in coordinating donating gear said they ever saw the policy enforced or were affected by it in the slightest. The army openly relied on donated equipment. Soldiers across the IDF made slow but steady progress, acquiring the gear they needed, with the tacit support of their own commanders but in the face of public, yet meaningless, threats from the higher-ups.
As one officer who was involved in coordinating equipment donations to his unit explained to me: “it was a joke for a long time in the donor community that pretty much every picture coming out on the IDF Twitter, most of the gear we could identify as donated gear, because the helmets have a specific look. It got so bad that there were pictures of [then head of the IDF, Gen. Yoav Gallant] and Bibi in Gaza wearing donated gear. It became an open secret and everyone knew it was happening. People involved in the volunteer efforts would be on the WhatsApp group cracking up, trying to figure out, ‘whose helmet is that?’ Like which one of us had donated it.”
By the middle of 2024, the open secret was a massive business. Conservative estimates put the total value of all donated equipment given to the IDF at point from both individuals and organizations at $1.5 billion. It was a business that the FIDF clearly profited from, even if most of the people involved in the organization did so with noble intentions. In a way, the FIDF, acting as a cat’s-paw for the IDF and thus driven by the same errors in ideology, found itself raising money it couldn’t actually spend as many of its donors imagined it would. As the hypocrisy of the situation became more apparent and more public, the FIDF faced mounting pressures. Longtime board members publicly resigned and denounced the group’s leadership. Leakers fed documents to outside critics who exposed the group’s internal rifts.
Much of the reporting on the scandals at the FIDF, as well as some of the most scathing criticism of the group, came from an entrepreneur and independent journalist named Daniel Mael. In addition to running his own nonprofit group out of Florida called Unit 11741 to donate tactical gear to the IDF, Mael also posted regular articles on his muckraking Substack called The Mael Review. He was relentless, cranking out multiple articles a month reporting on the FIDF. He could also be intemperate in coverage that sometimes veered toward scolding diatribes. Even some of Mael’s peers in the volunteer world who shared his criticisms of the FIDF objected to tactics they saw as unnecessarily personal and counterproductive. But if he overstepped at times, there is no doubt that Mael aired things that other critics felt in private but would not say publicly. Several IDF soldiers who received donated gear from Mael’s organization spoke highly of the experience.
Mael accused the FIDF of perpetrating a “grave case of false advertising, misleading well-intentioned contributors who believed their money would provide meaningful, direct assistance to soldiers in active combat situations.” In reality, he wrote, “FIDF is a massively bureaucratic organization far removed from immediate battlefield effectiveness. Its claims to urgent action starkly contrast with its sluggish, administrative-heavy structure and minimal direct impact on actual military outcomes.”
The conflict came to a head on July 2, 2025 when the Israeli newspaper Ynet obtained and published a damning internal report from the organization. The result of a three-month internal investigation instigated by FIDF’s board, the report found the organization’s finances were mismanaged and that it was run tyrannically by its chairman, Morey Levovitz, who rewarded his cronies while inspiring fear in the rest of the staff. The scandal placed renewed attention on the group’s fundraising activities, including the fact that the majority of the hundreds of millions of dollars that FIDF had raised since Oct. 7, remained unspent in its coffers. By the end of the month, both Levovitz and FIDF CEO Steve Weil had resigned. They were replaced by a new CEO to head the organization, Nadav Padan.
Afull, honest accounting of the post-Oct. 7 period would highlight the extraordinary accomplishments of the modern Israeli security forces as well as critiquing its failures and weaknesses. The dismantling of Iran’s regional proxy network, including Hezbollah, as well as the crippling of Tehran’s nuclear program both relied on the application of long-term deception plans and strategic power projection that would have made Ben-Gurion proud. In Gaza, the fusion of tactical early warning systems and advanced intelligence capabilities has accomplished a targeting and maneuver capability not seen before in modern wars.
Yet, despite the sacrifices and devastation of the past two years, the IDF has not yet achieved the total victory that Prime Minister Netanyahu has promised since the start of the war. Nor has it managed to fully evict Hamas as a ruling power in Gaza. Many IDF commanders have displayed the characteristic aversion to territorial control, routinely spending blood to conquer areas of Gaza only to relinquish them weeks or months later, dooming soldiers to repeat costly clearing operations.
Moreover, the IDF has not yet demonstrated the capacity, nor the will, to fully sustain its own operations. Instead, it continues to rely on the network of volunteer groups that it can neither fully deputize nor live without.
This in turn enables what has become a toxic relationship between the U.S. and Israel. Aryeh Leib Shapiro, a milluimnik born in the U.S. and a member of an Israeli organization called the Vision Movement, dedicated to what it calls the cause of Jewish liberation, spoke with me about how American Jews influence Israeli security. “The way that many American Jews want to contribute to the IDF’s success is by remaking them in their image. Just like in general Israeli politics, the Reform movement wants Israeli religious law and immigration law to reflect American Jewish sensibilities.The IDF is no different, except that these diaspora Jewish orgs no longer have much influence over the Knesset anymore so they’ve been putting more funding into education and the army.”
Much of that influence is exerted through what appears to be philanthropy. The way it works, said Shapiro, is “by sending our top and most promising commanders in the IDF to learn what it means to be a Jewish leader in the 21st century from the Wexner Foundation or at the Harvard Kennedy School.”
The IDF, greatly influenced by fashionable but disastrously misguided ideas that have been popular among the American ruling class, has turned its official partner in the American diaspora into a piggy bank to subsidize those ideas. The shiniest monument of this failed two-way konceptsia is the FIDF. The organization gives American Jews an illusion of helping that actually handicaps Israel.
The best scenario for Israel would be one in which it acts like an independent and sovereign nation by taking full responsibility for its military supply needs. Instead of relying on logistical backup from unregulated volunteers, it could then funnel diaspora support into less sensitive areas. That will require wisely analyzing the current political and security situation in its own region and at large, separate from the interests of its patrons. Having done so, Israel can then make plans that are founded on a realistic vision of the future, which would be one that does not assume that land will no longer be important in warfare or rest on other similarly dangerous hallucinations.
