There are many reasons that Israel needs a state inquiry into the failures of October 7, 2023.
Many have to do with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the political echelon, who, to date, have escaped any scrutiny.
But many have nothing to do with them.
IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Zamir’s blockbuster decisions on Sunday about who in the IDF was personally at fault and how they would be penalized came as the long-delayed end of a chapter in the October 7 story in many ways.
To Zamir’s credit, he finally did what his predecessor Herzi Halevi had not; he determined individual responsibility so that top IDF commanders could not escape in the collective “everyone failed” message.
This took too long – some top IDF officials should have been fired within six months or so of October 7 and not after they voluntarily resigned a year or more later. But it was imperatively necessary.
Also, to his credit, Zamir tried to deftly balance the needs of punishing those with personal responsibility with the needs of keeping the current IDF running and humming with Israel as busy as ever in defending its various fronts.
Put simply, if everyone got fired, there would be no one left to defend the country.
Zamir's decision is still not enough
But there are major missing pieces and inequalities in Zamir’s decisions.
For example, on October 7, 2023, the IDF Southern Command chief was Yaron Finkleman, who resigned his post, while remaining in the army, in February, and was expelled from the IDF by Zamir for his personal command failures.
However, Finkleman only took over the Southern Command on July 9, 2023, less than three months before the invasion.
No one who studies modern warfare and the size and complexity of large military commands, such as the IDF’s Southern Command, thinks that any commander, whether his name be Finkleman or another name, can fix 10 to 20 years of broken thinking and defensive strategy in less than three months.
What about the prior Southern Command chiefs, who were more deeply involved in establishing the Southern Command’s thinking and defensive strategy?
Zamir said that only a state inquiry could address prior commanders, and that he would keep his probe limited to those who were in office on October 7, 2023.
Who were these prior commanders? None other than: Maj.-Gen. Eliezer Toledano (2021 to July 2023), Lt.-Gen. Halevi, who preceded Zamir as IDF chief from 2018 to 2021, and none other than Zamir himself, from 2015 to 2018.
The truth is that very few observers would put much blame on Zamir for the 2015-2018 period for something that happened in 2023.
But he was not only Southern Command chief then, he was also deputy IDF chief from 2018 to 2021, which gets quite close to the 2023 date.
It is frequent for strategies developed in the military to only kick into motion around two years later.
And Halevi would certainly be on the hook, having served as Southern Command chief until 2021 and being IDF chief on October 7 itself.
Either Zamir felt he could not make a finding against another IDF chief because he did not outrank him; or he did not want to make a finding against Halevi lest his predecessor point the finger back at him; or he did not want to go after Halevi because Halevi had beat him in a head-to-head race for the post of military chief in 2023 and any criticism might be viewed as personal vengeance.
Therefore, a state inquiry is needed to probe Halevi and Zamir’s responsibility.
Beyond Halevi and Zamir’s responsibility, Toledano may be the single person most responsible for the IDF’s failures of the southern defense, other than Aharon Haliva, the – formerly resigned and now expelled – IDF intelligence chief from 2021 to 2024.
Toledano was not only the Southern Command chief for nearly the entire period leading up to October 7, he was also in charge during an infamous incident on June 3, 2023, when three IDF soldiers who were guarding the Egyptian border were killed by a rogue Egyptian policeman.
Three senior commanders received a mix of reprimands and command transfers, but these were not substantial punishments, and Toledano himself was not even probed.
A probe at the time, managed by Toledano, into his subordinates indicated that the two central failures that led to the IDF soldiers’ deaths were a gap in the security fence between Israel and Egypt and an imbalance in preparing the relevant IDF units for terror situations vs for the more common criminal smuggling situations.
However, Toledano admitted that the existence of this gap, along with keeping it secret even from almost all IDF border guards was a significant conceptual failure.
His admission led to no consequences at the time.
More importantly, the failures of allowing the Egyptian border guard to invade sounded hauntingly similar to the October 7 failures – with seemingly no major changes made, despite this early and lethal warning.
The Egyptian and Gaza borders are very different cases.
Nevertheless, top IDF officials such as Toledano championed maintaining secrecy about gaps in the border fence from their own soldiers for intelligence purposes over considering that the enemy might – and did – take advantage of such border defense gaps.
He admitted that the IDF’s troops on the Egyptian border were trained to prevent smuggling, not an invasion, which they were not trained for and was not considered a usual event.
There is little smuggling from Gaza, but the rationale that IDF troops did not need to be prepared for an invasion because it usually does not happen is exactly why an embarrassingly mere 600 IDF soldiers, also not expecting an invasion, were overwhelmed by 5,600 Gazan invaders on October 7.
Toledano is a decorated officer with many heroic exploits along his career, including serving as a highly successful military secretary to Netanyahu during key Mossad operations against Iran. His is one of many cases that deserve in-depth analysis.
But dumping all of the personal responsibility on Finkleman and leaving Toledano, Halevi, and even Zamir out of the conversation defies basic logic and fairness.
And why did Halevi need to quit when there had been no consequences for former IDF chiefs Aviv Kohavi (2019 to 2023), Gadi Eisenkot (2015 to 2019), and Benny Gantz (2011 to 2015)?
Each of those chiefs may have their own defenses, accomplishments, and faults, but no one has even analyzed the issue.
The same is true for all former Shin Bet chiefs prior to Ronen Bar, who was forced to resign early.
Some of this might have been prevented had Netanyahu not blocked Halevi from commissioning Shaul Mofaz, a former IDF chief and defense minister (1998 to 2006), from carrying out a probe with a wider mandate, beginning in January 2024.
Netanyahu wanted as narrow a mandate as possible so that there would be no chance that his actions would even indirectly implicate him.
Haliva, who has taken full responsibility, asked why he should be blamed without a state inquiry, including probing Netanyahu.
Zamir possibly did the best he could under the circumstances to provide some greater accountability to the public, but there is still far more work to do.