No one on any end of the political spectrum will agree with this, but Herzi Halevi is a tragic unsung hero.
Tragic because he was the IDF chief of staff when the October 7 massacre took place in 2023. It happened on his watch, leading to the worst Israeli defeat since the 1973 Yom Kippur War. He resigned in March 2025, about a year earlier than the standard three-year term.
A hero because he was a senior special forces commando for years, then a commander of the special forces, then a frontline commander during the 2008-09 invasion who was prevented from dealing Hamas a larger blow in Rafah by political-diplomatic considerations, then head of the Military Intelligence Directorate and Southern Command, then deputy chief of staff, and then the IDF chief of staff who beat Hamas in northern Gaza, Khan Yunis, and Rafah in three successive invasions from October 2023 until the summer of 2024.
During those periods, he played keyed roles when the IDF killed Yahya Sinwar and Mohammed Deif, bludgeoned Hezbollah from September-November 2024, killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, destroyed Iran’s most advanced Russian S-300 antiaircraft missile systems in October 2024, and planned the Rising Lion operation from October 2024-March 2025, including rebuilding much of the IAF’s strike capabilities prior to October 2023.
Unsung because that long list of accomplishments will forever – or at least for the coming years – be overshadowed by the horrible stain of the October 7 massacre.
All of this has been true for more than a year, but it is time to write about it now for a few reasons.
First, Halevi has now gone more than a year since resigning without making his own case publicly. This was probably an error on his part, but he has always been a better general than a public-relations manager.
'In The War Room' on shelves this September
Second, I have a new book coming out in September called In The War Room, with The Wall Street Journal’s Elliot Kaufman, in which a complex, detailed, and nuanced portrayal of Halevi and other top Israeli and US decision-makers is given.
But it has already become clear to me that various people and media outlets may cherry-pick portions of the book that are critical, while ignoring the larger portions that are positive, to present him in a selective negative light.
Some of those who will do this will do so because they will fail to read the whole book or understand all of the nuances that the book unpacks.
Others, and this is the third point, will do so because of the upcoming Israeli election.
Once election season starts, everything becomes black and white. A leader was a success or a failure. And anyone else who was around who shares in your success takes away from your credit, so better to label them a complete, unmitigated failure.
Many participants in the upcoming election have been blaming Halevi for the October 7 massacre for years in no small part to avoid their own contributory responsibility.
Let there be no doubt: Halevi shares responsible for October 7 – along with all of the other senior defense chiefs, and all of the political chiefs, over a period of many years – some say going back a decade and some say two decades – in which there was a “conceptica” (conceptual framework) that incorrectly assumed Hamas as it was constituted could easily be contained and deterred and did not need to be treated as an invasion threat.
This conceptual framework also avoided even limited diplomatic initiatives for an extended period, hoping Hamas, and the Palestinians more broadly, could just be ignored.
And since I have gotten to know Halevi – military reporters get periodic group access to most of the IDF’s senior officers at one point or another – I know that he truly takes responsibility for his role regarding October 7. He does not just say he has contributory responsibility generically; he makes sure to add: “I personally am among those responsible” – which was why he resigned early.
But it is profoundly simplistic to think that one man, even the IDF chief of staff at the time, was solely or primarily responsible.
When Halevi assumed his role in January 2023, he did not just adopt everything that his predecessors had done; he certainly had new initiatives and ideas. But there were certain built-in limits and rules of the game.
Definitely during the terms of Gabi Ashkenazi (2007-2011), Benny Gantz (2011-2015), Gadi Eisenkot (2015-2019), and Aviv Kohavi (2019-2023), the determination by both the Israeli political – Ehud Olmert (2006-2009), Benjamin Netanyahu (for most of 2009-2021), Naftali Bennett (2021-2022), and Netanyahu again (since 2022) – and defense senior echelons, including the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency and the Mossad, was that larger conflict with Hamas was to be avoided in an effort to “manage” the conflict.
This misplaced thinking was so deep that mid-level Israeli intelligence officers never even passed on to Halevi and other IDF senior staff the Walls of Jericho plan that the IDF Intelligence Corps intercepted more than a year before the October 7 massacre.
It was so deep that in a moment of impressive and haunted honesty, Halevi has admitted that if he had been shown the plan, it might have made him a bit more concerned when he was warned about Hamas making trouble around 3-5 a.m. hours before the invasion.
But he probably would have made the same basic decisions. He has explained that this was because it was ingrained among all of Israel that Hamas simply would not dare to be crazy enough to invade. Any contrary information then was reflexively explained away.
Halevi was among the first to take public responsibility for October 7, when many Israeli officials delayed doing so, or did so with so many qualifications that it is hard to say whether they ever took responsibility.
Taking responsibility and resigning was a contribution in an age when public officials worldwide, not just in Israel, have started to treat taking responsibility as a disease and prefer to redirect, change the subject, or “double down” on blaming someone else.
And with all we know today, maybe he could have been more aggressive in calling up much larger reinforcements – a small number of reinforcements were called up – just in case there was some horror scenario that no one expected, instead of worrying so much about exposing the identity of Israeli intelligence assets to Hamas. That was one reason – it turned out to be grossly mistaken – why he wanted to avoid too many large Israeli moves.
And that is only part of Halevi’s legacy.
Those who criticize him personally the harshest for October 7 also seem to create a bizarre dichotomy in which he is only responsible for any IDF failures but not its successes.
This is not how responsibility works. He is responsible for the successes as well as the failures.
His invasions of Gaza did not just beat Hamas; some of his new tactics led to a stunningly low number of casualties among soldiers.
It did not take several months to beat Hamas in northern Gaza, and thousands of Israeli soldiers were not killed. Most of the big battles were over with a few weeks, and Israeli casualties were in the hundreds, compared with more than 10,000 Hamas terrorists killed in a relatively short time.
There were similar results in Khan Yunis and in Rafah.
Rafah was a stunning success. The IDF managed to evacuate 900,000 or more Gazans in around a week, with limited civilian casualties in relative terms during the initial major evacuation. Later on, there were steady civilian casualties in Gaza before and after that push as the war dragged on.
Netanyahu, defense minister Yoav Gallant, and the Shin Bet all deserve tremendous credit as well, but not to the exclusion of the IDF chief of staff.
Legitimate criticism can be given to Halevi, Netanyahu, Gallant, Gantz, and others about the decision to parse the war into more drawn-out pieces, and he and the others explain in my book why – especially with regard to the Hezbollah threat – they believed this was necessary.
Less thoughtful critics have also said he opposed Mossad Director David Barnea’s beepers operation. This is false.
There is a highly nuanced debate covered in the book about the timing of the beepers, killing Nasrallah, and about whether it would have made sense to let the Biden administration know beforehand, as Israel did in many other instances.
One can agree or disagree with Halevi’s nuanced position on those issues, which are covered in my book, but both his position and those of the others on those issues were serious and well thought-out.
In any event, the bottom line was that once the Mossad exploded its beepers, the IDF under Halevi took full advantage and hit so hard that Hezbollah lost around 70% of its giant missile arsenal and many of its senior commanders.
Netanyahu, Gallant, Barnea, and others all deserve tremendous credit as well, but not to the exclusion of the IDF chief of staff.
Hezbollah remains a real threat today, but it is a shadow of its former self.
Likewise, many say Halevi should get no credit for the success against Iran since he was no longer the chief of staff when Operation Rising Lion took place in June 2025.
IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Eyal Zamir deserves tremendous credit for managing the operation and the immediate lead-up to it, as well as Netanyahu, Barnea, and others. But Halevi’s October 2024 attacks on Iran and five months of preparation, including with critical meetings in Washington, set the stage for much of what was to occur.
There will be an endless debate, which my book does explore, about whether Halevi, Barnea, Netanyahu, Gallant, Benny Gantz earlier in the war, and others could have gotten the Israeli hostages back earlier or whether returning them in October 2025 was the best option.
But at least two rounds of hostage deals happened on Halevi’s watch, along with those other senior officials.
There are legitimate debates, which Halevi took part in, about whether the war should have been ended sooner to jump on Saudi normalization or whether the price for that would have been too high.
So, why is Halevi so quiet and so attacked?
He comes off as a philosopher
Part of it is that he does not fit into the classic Israeli general: super loud, chest-beating, alpha-male mold.
In person, Halevi comes off more as a giant – he is one of the tallest Israeli defense chiefs – relatively slow-talking philosopher, alternatively sprinkling in quotes from the Bible, the Talmud (he is religious), and broader world thinkers like Carl Von Clausewitz.
In his seemingly bizarre but later prophetic inaugural speech, Halevi said he hoped to live up to the standard of IDF chief of staff David Elazar, who resigned in disgrace after the Yom Kippur War.
Halevi’s reasoning was powerful but uniquely his own, since few people would pick an IDF chief who was forced to resign early: that Elazar faced horrible odds and choices but lifted himself and the country out from the depths of despair to achieve a lasting victory.
In this, Halevi was referring to the point that however badly the Yom Kippur War started, Israel ultimately had completely routed Egypt and Syria, eventually also partially setting up the peace treaty with Cairo.
Add that together with his general silent and understated public demeanor, and the benefit for many public officials of transferring all the nationwide blame on him, and Halevi is the perfect scapegoat.
In an age when nuance, honor, and truth are sometimes ignored, though I will gain essentially nothing by putting out this true and complex story, it is important that Halevi be recognized not just for areas where he failed, but also for his contributions to Israeli security and national integrity.