Returning from the ceremony in which the IDF bade farewell to its second chief of General Staff, David Ben-Gurion was crying.
“The ceremony in December 1952 was sad,” his assistant, future president Yitzhak Navon, wrote in his journal. “Ben-Gurion didn’t say a word, but was visibly sad, and tears ran from his eyes.” (Tom Segev, David Ben-Gurion: A State at All Costs, p. 476).
The relationship between Ben-Gurion and Lt.-Gen. Yigael Yadin was the closest ever between any of Israel’s 22 defense ministers and the IDF’s 24 chiefs of General Staff. Yadin, who had worked daily with Ben-Gurion throughout the 1948 War of Independence, was like a son to him. A warrior and intellectual, he embodied the “New Jew” that Ben-Gurion was out to mold.
That was the best of those relationships. The worst was between Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Lt.-Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi, 15 years ago. The worst, that is, until Israel Katz landed in Ben-Gurion’s seat one year ago this month.
Connection between heads of IDF and the Defense Ministry
No pair in Israel’s public system is as burdened with responsibility as the duo who head the Defense Ministry and the IDF. Harmony between them is a matter of life and death. They must work together on a daily basis to ensure that the army meets any challenge this neighborhood’s many bad guys might pose any day, any moment.
Some such couples were perfect fits. Yitzhak Rabin and Levi Eshkol respected and understood each other without ever stepping on each other’s toes. The same was true for Golda Meir and Haim Bar-Lev, for Ezer Weizman and Raphael Eitan, for Yitzhak Mordecai and Shaul Mofaz. The list goes on.
Most notably, Rabin – as defense minister – harmonized with Moshe Levi even though Levi had been appointed by Rabin’s political adversary, Moshe Arens. Rabin and Levi jointly executed the massive budget cuts that helped prevent Israel’s economic collapse in 1985.
Not that there weren’t any power struggles. In 2005, Moshe Yaalon opposed the disengagement plan that defense minister Shaul Mofaz backed. In 1953, defense minister Pinhas Lavon, who thought the US should be the IDF’s main supplier, clashed with Moshe Dayan, who wanted France. Before that, Ben-Gurion demanded massive spending cuts, which Yadin refused to perform. That’s why Yadin resigned, and Ben-Gurion cried.
Still, most defense ministers, most of the time, harmonized with the generals. The big exception was Ehud Barak’s treatment of Ashkenazi. Barak meddled in Ashkenazi’s work, ultimately failing to talk to him, refusing to confirm his appointments of generals and colonels, and sinking into a public cockfight over the appointment of Ashkenazi’s successor.
Katz's conduct as defense minister worse than predec
Now, a similar dynamic is unfolding between Israel Katz and Lt.-Gen. Eyal Zamir. Katz just froze Zamir’s appointments, and while at it, lost the ability to properly dialogue with him, so much so that he wouldn’t even sit with Zamir for a reconciliation meeting with the prime minister.
Despite these similarities, and as bad as the Barak-Ashkenazi precedent was, Katz’s conduct is a thousand times worse. Happening while Israel reels from the longest and most exhausting war in its history, Katz’s inability to work with the IDF commander whom he himself appointed makes Katz a strategic liability that this country cannot afford.
The job of the defense minister is not to run the army – that’s the generals’ job. The minister’s job is to give the IDF long-term resources, structural priorities, and strategic direction.
That is what Eshkol did in the 1960s, when he supplied the hardware that won the 1967 Six Day War; that is what Shimon Peres did in the 1970s, when he redoubled the IDF’s hardware after the 1973 Yom Kippur War; and that is what Arens did in the 1980s, when he created the Ground Forces’ Command, and in the 1990s, when he created the National Defense Council.
To follow in their footsteps, Katz should have now been focusing on filling the gap created by the IDF’s loss of 20,000 troops who were wounded, killed, or otherwise incapacitated in the wake of the recent war. But that would mean enlisting ultra-Orthodox men, which Katz will not do because he benefits politically from the corrupt deal that, besides remaining the moral scandal it always was, is now also a social powder keg and a strategic time bomb.
Unable to admit this, but still eager to appear as the master of the defense establishment, Katz froze Zamir’s appointments, claiming that he, the defense minister, must first “thoroughly study” the IDF’s newly concluded investigation of its failures on October 7, 2023.
Wow. This comes from the man who was a member of the security cabinet that cultivated Hamas, and now opposes the creation of a judicial commission of inquiry to probe his and the rest of the politicians’ roles in the October 7 fiasco.
Talk about hypocrisy. If it’s up to Katz, the politicians will never be investigated, but the army’s self-initiated inquiry will be used by him to obstruct the army’s work. The man entrusted with cultivating our defense is actually undermining it.
Why does Katz do this? For two reasons, one is about gain, and the other is about skills.
The gain is twofold. First, quarreling with Zamir makes Katz appear as the macho that voters in Likud’s approaching primaries might appreciate. And second, confronting the generals helps the canard that October 7 was someone else’s fault, not the government’s.
Yet these cunning aims are besides the bigger problem, which is that Katz does not have the skills that his job demands. The kind of strategizing that Ben-Gurion, Eshkol, and Arens did in their jobs is beyond Katz’s abilities. What he knows to do is quarrel with subordinates and tweet bravados with several words before and after “I ordered” and “I instructed.”
It rained here this week, while Ben-Gurion watched all this from above. The raindrops, thick, transparent, and warm, were his tears.
www.MiddleIsrael.net
The writer, a Hartman Institute fellow, is the author of Ha’Sfar Ha’Yehudi Ha’Aharon (The Last Jewish Frontier, Yediot Sefarim 2025), a sequel to Theodor Herzl’s The Old New Land.