Analysis | A ’Generation of Failure’ in Virtual Reality: New Documentary Asks, ’What Happened to the Israeli Army?’ - Israel News
▻https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2025-10-06/ty-article/.premium/generation-of-failure-in-virtual-reality-new-documentary-asks-what-happened-to-the-idf/00000199-b821-db47-a1fd-ff7962650000
Herzi Halevi, right, with Aviv Kohavi, left, as Halevi takes command as IDF Chief of Staff at a ceremony at the Western Wall, Jerusalem, January 2023.
Credit: Oren Ben Hakoon
A new Israeli series has interviewed those who led the IDF before Hamas’ October 7 attack. With no remorse, the immediate former IDF chief before the war cites ’an excellent army’ that fought off Israel’s enemies, while another former top officer admits ’we became somewhat similar to our enemies’ by living in a fantasy world
Omri Assenheim’s documentary series “What Happened to the IDF?” broadcast on Israel’s Channel 13 chalked up a significant achievement this week in the form of an interview with former IDF Chief of Staff Aviv Kochavi.
This is the first time since the start of the war that Kochavi, whose tour ended less than nine months before it erupted, has given an interview.
Two former top-ranking security figures, Kochavi and ex-Mossad chief Yossi Cohen, were perceived for years as being likely to enter politics and perhaps even seek the premiership.
Both were described as golden boys, and both had good reasons to keep a low public profile after the October 7 massacre. As subordinates to Netanyahu, both Kochavi and Cohen had foundational shares in the conception that underlay the failure: the choice to manage the Palestinian conflict and effectively freeze it without movement, the prolonged coming to terms with Hamas, the notion that the organization was deterred and weakened after every round of fighting and the turn to Qatari money as an analgesic that would calm the seething violence in the Gaza Strip.
When the war broke out, Cohen, who lived in a glass house, chose not to disappear but to try to reshape his image. He frequently appeared on television, where he dissociated himself from the transfer of the Qatari money (even though he was one of the architects of the system and attacked it only after concluding his tour in an interview with Ilana Dayan). Lately, he’s been back on the small screen to promote his autobiography.
Kochavi disappeared under the radar until he was persuaded to sit in front of Assenheim’s camera recently. This isn’t the first time Assenheim has been able to get to declared interview refusers: His style, which isn’t roughshod, is probably a contributing factor.
Throughout the interview, Kochavi didn’t mention his successor, Halevi. Among those involved in the blunder, Halevi is a tragic figure. “Herzi Prince of Denmark,” as one of his subordinates called him. Halevi, who resigned in March, has defended his views and his considerations ardently, but carries a heavy load of responsibility, which is apparent in every feature of his face. He often talks about t the war.
Looking back, part of the tragedy is related to the circumstances in which Halevi took over. He went to war with the army that Kochavi left him, for good and for bad. And he wasted most of the months preceding the war in attempts to defend the IDF from Netanyahu’s demolition efforts, against the background of the regime overhaul and the protest of the reservists.
As for Kochavi, anyone who expected expressions of remorse doesn’t know the man. The interview starts with a mild reprimand of the interviewer because of the title he chose for the series. (In 2008, when I co-authored a book with Avi Issacharoff about the 2006 Lebanon war, Kochavi recommended at the last minute that we change the title we chose in Hebrew, “Spider’s Web,” because it was liable to gladden the heart of then-Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah.)
In Kochavi’s view, the IDF is “an excellent army”: the army that recovered and launched a counterattack after October 7 in Gaza, and then reached decisive results both in Lebanon and in Iran, achievements for which he takes (justified) credit, thanks to his part in the preparations. The massacre itself is “a jolting matter, which needs to be investigated.”
When Assenheim presses Kochavi and asks whether perhaps too much attention and too many efforts were invested in the “campaign between the wars” (which focused on attacks in Syria and other distant places), Kochavi answers with a question: Should we have forgone the effort to thwart Hezbollah’s “precision project” for upgrading its own and Hamas’ arsenal of rockets?
He vehemently rejects two of the criticisms often voiced against the military during his tenure: the focus on the use of technology and the neglect of ground-maneuver capabilities. In his view, technology made the achievements on the battlefield possible, and the ground forces weren’t neglected – there was a concrete intention to use them deep in enemy territory, as was eventually the case during the war in Gaza and in Lebanon.
Assenheim had to dredge up the old rivalry between the paratroops and the Golani infantry brigade from the 1990s to present a different hypothesis. Two Golani brigadier generals who served as commanders of the Gaza Division before and after Kochavi (between 2004 and 2008), Shmuel Zakai and Moshe “Chico” Tamir, were summoned to offer an opposing argument. The ground forces, they maintain, were pushed to the end of the line, and neither the government nor the IDF high command intended to use them in the campaign.
Only the October 7 disaster changed this situation. Zakai could barely conceal his anger. “It’s all nonsense, babble,” he says about the sophisticated deterrence moves the military implemented during those periods of coming to terms with Hamas. “The enemy doesn’t even understand what you’re talking about with them.”
It’s very difficult to argue with Kochavi, given his more than 25 years of experience. He’s articulate, brilliant and charismatic, always the smartest guy in the room, regardless of how many people are there. His contribution to the military is immense. Many of the changes that he introduced in his different capacities in the military upgraded the army’s capabilities; other ideas of his apparently were ahead of their time.
But without the power and authority that the uniform and the ranks project, and after the disaster we experienced, it’s hard to buy part of what he was marketing in the interview with Assenheim.
The IDF is not an excellent army; it was exposed in all its weakness when it was taken by surprise by Hamas, even if it later displayed impressive abilities. It’s not by chance that some of the survivors on the morning of the massacre felt they had been defended over the years by a cardboard army. When Kochavi says he “isn’t familiar with that notion – ’coming to terms,’” there are dozens of officers who served under him who remember things differently.
The remains of the home of Manny and Ayelet Godard who were killed by the deadly October 7, 2023 attack by Hamas, in Kibbutz Beeri, southern Israel. The couple were killed in their home and Manny’s body was later taken to Gaza. Credit: Amir Cohen/ REUTERS
Some of them also presented a more persuasive approach in the case of bombing the “Metro” – Hamas’ network of tunnels – during Operation Guardian of the Walls in May 2021. The military, under Kochavi’s leadership, tried for months to present that event as a resounding victory over Hamas that would wean the organization, once and for all, from all hopes regarding the tunnels.
In practice, the army’s insistence on believing in a virtual reality – a victory that didn’t happen – apparently spurred Yahya Sinwar and Mohammed Deif to realize that the Israelis were living in a fantasy world, and to accelerate the planning of the attack that was launched two and a half years later. “We became somewhat similar to our enemies,” says another former Golani man, Brig. Gen. (res.) Yuval Bazak, whose son, Guy, was killed defending Kibbutz Kissufim on the first day of the war.
“The IDF is my family,” Kochavi says. “It’s as precious to me as a beloved son.” What’s needed now, he says, is “a deep clarification of what happened to us and to me amid that.”
Assenheim didn’t have time to confront him with a few more critical questions: the group thinking in the IDF’s top ranks, the fear of officers expressing an independent opinion, the cocktail of narcissistic figures who sprang up under Kochavi during his stint in Military Intelligence, the inferior operational norms on the Gaza border, the intolerable discrepancy between declarations and deeds throughout the army.
What mainly resonates from this episode, the last in the series, is what Zakai, and, by his side, another former paratrooper, Brig. Gen. (res.) Guy Hazut, say. “When I’m asked, ’maybe you’ll go back to the army,’ I say: We are part of the generation of failure,” Hazut says. “All my friends are today part of the General Staff. And all of us, all the generals, led the IDF to where we led it. We need to go home and pass the baton to the next watch.”
Zakai, who reveals courageously that he is coping with post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of his experiences on the battlefield, adds: "There are wounds in life from which you can’t heal. A wound in the psyche – you can live with it, but it’s impossible to be cured of it. The loss I live with day after day, all day: with the faces [of those who fell], with the mistakes I made, with the costs of those mistakes, with the responsibility that I didn’t stand up to it – you can’t be healed from that.
“The start of every correction lies in understanding where we failed along the way. It is simply forbidden to us to make do with saying: ’There was a specific failure here; we’ll investigate it and move on.’”