The IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir sat across from a general he had known for a long time. The man’s voice broke. His eyes got full.
A career spent defending the country, with long nights in command centers, daring missions, and the kind of trust built only through fire, was suddenly reduced to this: a private conversation about failure. About October 7. About being responsible.
The general, whose voice was hoarse, begged him not to be mentioned in the report. “Please,” he said, “don’t end my service like this.”
Zamir not only knew the man but also his family. He had worked with him, been in charge of him, and suggested he get a promotion.
He remembered the battles this man had fought and the funerals he had gone to. As chief of staff, he now had to decide if that chapter was over. That scene has happened more than once in the last few months.
Zamir was no longer in the IDF. He came back to lead the military through one of its most difficult times, not to win a single battle, but to guide the entire organization through its worst crisis.
We can keep making committees, starting investigations, and putting out reports. We probably will. But what Zamir is facing, and what we as a society are facing, is not just a flaw in a system or a hole in an intelligence picture.
It is a failure of military knowledge that has lasted for generations.
The same generation that built one of the world’s strongest armies didn’t fully understand what happened on October 7 until it was too late.
Not just one commander missed the signs. It was a culture, an idea, and a way of thinking that people had shared and built on for years. That generation also did some of the most amazing things in Israel’s history at the same time.
It is a big mistake that terrorists were able to get into Israel from the air on October 7, when the current air force commander was in charge.
But he is also the person who was in charge of the long-range strike deep inside Iran, which foreign media have already called historic and military colleges will study for years to come.
How do you make that balance sheet? Is he the officer who failed or the one who did the kind of mission that Israel has wanted to do for decades?
This is the equation that Zamir is trying to solve. If we get rid of everyone who is at least partly to blame, like every commander who “should have seen it coming,” who will be left to rebuild the army?
The IDF will be led by young captains and majors in 15 or 20 years. They are still in training. We will keep relying on the commanders who are now under the most fire, both from outside and inside, until they grow up.
The issue is that many of those commanders aren’t sure they want to stay anymore. The IDF is having a lot of trouble with its people and leaders. According to reports, about 500 majors have already left the army since mid-2024, in the middle of a war.
This month’s internal manpower survey showed just how tired people are.
They are sick of the war and sick of feeling like punching bags. They see a political system that can’t stop fighting with itself and that sometimes seems more interested in showing “toughness” on the backs of the generals than in helping them.
A good example is the recent fight between Defense Minister Israel Katz and Zamir over the October 7 debriefings. Katz put a 30-day stop to senior promotions and told the IDF to review its internal exams again.
In a formal statement, Zamir said that the move “harms the IDF’s capability and its readiness process for upcoming challenges.”
He also reminded the public that the IDF “is the only body in the country that has thoroughly investigated its own failures and taken responsibility for them.”
No matter what people think of the details, the message that many officers heard was clear: a minister can still come in, press pause, and question their integrity, even if they are honest about their own mistakes and recommend personal sanctions.
It’s one more reason for commanders who are already tired to ask if this is worth it.
We also don’t talk enough about what is going on at home. People don’t talk about the divorce rate among senior officers very often, but you can see the stress.
We do have hard data on reservist families that helps us understand how hard it is.
A survey done by the Central Bureau of Statistics this spring that was shown to the Knesset found that about half of the spouses of reservists said the war had hurt their relationship.
About a third said they had thought about breaking up or getting a divorce. More than half said their children’s mental health got worse while their partner was on reserve duty, and 35% of families sought psychological help.
The numbers got worse the longer the reserve duty lasted. Fifty-seven percent of spouses of people who served more than 200 days said their relationship was hurt.
If this is true for reservists – whose service has a start and an end – think about what is going on in the homes of permanent officers, including those who are sitting in front of Zamir with tears in their eyes.
When a general begs not to be named in a report, they are afraid for their life, not just their job. It’s about who you are, your dignity, your family, and how people will remember your life of service.
We should still demand accountability though; none of this means we should stop. In fact, there is no way to rebuild trust without real personal responsibility.
Zamir is doing something that is almost unheard of in Israeli public life. He is naming the failures instead of hiding behind vague ideas about “the system.”
It’s harder for him to do this to people he knows well, people he has worked with for years. It would have been easier to say that “everyone failed” and then move on together.
Instead, he is going into each of those rooms and telling people that their military careers are over. He is also trying not to make this a purge at the same time.
The chief of staff thought that some current commanders who are partly to blame should finish their terms, for example, because getting rid of them now cause “enormous damage” to the army’s ability to function in the middle of a war.
That is not soft. People know that the IDF is not just an idea. It is a living organization with a culture and a memory, and only a few people know how to run it. I know some people will say this sounds too nice.
That we should “clean house,” send everyone home, and start over. But that’s not how armies or countries work. We can’t shoot our way out of a failure that has lasted for generations.
We need some of the same people who messed up on October 7 to help fix what they broke, because they know where the cracks are.
This column does not try to make excuses for failure. It tries to show how things really are, not how we want them to be. The truth is that the IDF’s leaders are people. They did some very bad things, some of which can’t be forgiven.
But they are also the ones who fought in wars that have kept this country alive. They are tired, their families are stressed out, and the school they love is being attacked from both inside and outside. I can feel the tension between my roles even as I write this.
As a journalist, my gut tells me to ask for more information, more names, and more secrets. As a citizen and a father of children who will one day serve in this army, I feel it is my duty to protect the people who are still standing between our enemies and us.
Those instincts don’t always work together. But being honest about your mistakes means more than just yelling. It takes context, perspective, and the ability to see everyone in that uncomfortable room as a whole person, both figuratively and literally.
That is what Zamir is up to right now. He is trying to keep the army’s back straight without breaking it. We need to give him and the commanders sitting across from him the room to make the IDF stronger – not just better armed, but also smarter.