On the third anniversary of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led terror attacks on Israel, the Jewish state’s borders are more secure, but there are still dangers looming and lessons to be learned, according to military and national security analysts.
Dan Diker, president of the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs, told Jewish Insider on Tuesday that Israel “is in a better place in terms of its security.”
“Kinetically, militarily, in counterterrorism and on the battlefield, we are in a much better place,” he said. “We have defensible borders. That’s an important point. It’s not only in Judea and Samaria [the West Bank], but we have them 10 kilometers deep into Lebanon, security zones in [Syria] up to 20 kilometers, and some strategic depth in Gaza. We have multi-border strategic depth that we need to survive, and a consensus that we’re not going anywhere.”
“We are safer and more secure than we were three years ago,” said Yaakov Katz, author of While Israel Slept: How Hamas Surprised the Most Powerful Military in the Middle East. “Iran is significantly weaker, and its nuclear program is significantly weaker. Hezbollah is a fraction of what it was and Hamas is a fraction of what it was.”
The wars of the last three years “created amazing opportunities on all fronts,” Katz said. “We can create new alignments, agreements and security arrangements like never before. But that requires political will and courage. … It could be that this will go to waste.”
Katz expressed concern that there has been “no resolution” to any of the conflicts that emerged since Oct. 7.
Israel’s enemies “are weaker today, but they will rebuild, like they always do,” he said, “and the threat will return and emerge stronger and bigger if there isn’t some kind of end strategy.”
Diker argued that “the shock and awe of the intelligence collapse on Oct. 7 has shaken Israel’s political, military, intelligence and security echelons to their core. It intuitively created a greater sense of modesty and self-criticism about the ‘conceptzia,’” the Hebrew term for groupthink in the defense establishment ahead of the attacks.
One of the misconceptions that allowed the Oct. 7 attacks to take place, Diker said, was an overreliance on technology, for which Israel’s current, multi-front military presence is correcting.
“We can withdraw to international lines once [Iranian] terror proxies are disarmed, but … we are the only ones who can disarm them. They will never do it on their own and no one else will do it. The thought that we didn’t need to have a division or many brigades of soldiers in Gaza was false,” he added.
Diker said that Israel’s concept of national security relied in recent decades on deterrence, early warning, decisive victory and defense, but that since Oct. 7, it has added a new pillar: prevention.
“We are crouched and ready to pounce and destroy any sign of enemy movement, as opposed to waiting to respond to enemy fire or malign action. I think that prevention pillar is evident in Israel’s massive use of force against Tehran, its courage in initiating very daring counterterrorism strategies, like the beeper strategy [against Hezbollah], which was very high-risk and high-value,” he said.
Katz, however, said that the government has not learned some of the important lessons of Oct. 7.
“The refusal to properly investigate and study what went wrong puts us in a bad position, because we can repeat these mistakes,” he said. “Example in point, the FlyDubai [near-hijacking] had similar contours to how [the Oct. 7 attacks] happened. There was a belief that everything will be OK, and some other guy is in charge. In the end, no one was in charge and something that could have been prevented was not.”
Ksenia Svetlova, a former Knesset member and executive director of the Regional Organization for Peace, Economics and Security, said that “tactically, [Israel is] in a better situation, because we mostly took care of Hamas and Hezbollah. They’re not at the gates anymore.”
However, she warned that Israel’s strategic position has declined because of regional weaknesses.
“Oct. 7 and the Iran war showed [Arab allies’] weaknesses,” she said. “The Gulf states couldn’t defend themselves [against Iran] and America is not rushing to defend them. The only one defending itself and them is Israel, and there are some things the Emiratis are doing. Overall, we see the Arab Middle East’s weakness, and two non-Arab countries are setting the tone, Iran and Turkey. And our alliances are with the Arab states, not Iran and Turkey.”
Those countries saw how Gulf states behaved in the last year, and are factoring that in. Svetlova said, “We’re in a worse situation because they were exposed.”
At the same time, she noted that no Arab state with which Israel has diplomatic relations cut off those relations or closed its embassy in Israel, which some did in past conflicts.
“There are deep interests that these relationships are based on, and they are the best and only way to build the relations,” Svetlova said. “Hamas and Islamic fundamentalist extremists are a shared enemy. … We have a lot to offer and [Arab allies] have a lot to offer.”
However, she warned against taking those relationships for granted.
“We have the strongest, broadest and most significant relations with the UAE,” Svetlova said, but pointed out that Abu Dhabi did not celebrate the anniversary of the Abraham Accords this year. “It’s not because they don’t value the accords … but everything this government does in the West Bank creates tensions.”
Svetlova noted that Israel’s consistently peaceful borders in the past three years were the ones with Egypt and Jordan, countries with which Israel has peace agreements.
But those countries were destabilized by the war, she said, pointing to weekly demonstrations in Jordan for nearly two years. She said that Jerusalem’s handling of the war in Gaza, such as its calls for residents of Gaza to be able to emigrate via Egypt, harmed the relationship.
“It will take years to rehabilitate relations with our neighbors,” Svetlova said. “We could have taken advantage of the opportunity to bring those around us closer. Instead, we are eating away at the security of our friends, countries like Jordan that shot down Iranian missiles and cooperate with the U.S., and weakening our own security.”
Israel’s international standing has shifted dramatically in the West, as well.
“There’s no question that three years after Oct. 7, Israel finds itself more isolated than before,” Katz said. “Any of the sympathy or solidarity that it benefited from and enjoyed in the immediate aftermath of the Oct. 7 attack has long disappeared.”
Katz said Israel may face unprecedented challenges as a result, in terms of economic sanctions, isolation, resolutions in international institutions and charges in international courts.
“This is a whole new front that Israel today is currently completely unprepared for. If, for example, European countries as well as the United States start to sanction banks, financial institutions and construction companies, this could start to impact every person who lives in Israel,” he added.
Diker warned that Israel must do more to counter nonmilitary attacks, lest they further damage Israel’s national security.
“The major challenge now is fighting the weaponization of genocide against our people. That hasn’t been solved [and] that is really hurting us,” he said. “The notion that Israel is an apartheid genocidal state means something far-reaching and very dangerous … [that] anybody who is amenable to Israel or supports Israel is all of a sudden a supporter of genocide, which means the enemies of Israel go after [them].”
Diker said that while there is a widespread public consensus that there is a major nonmilitary element to the war — “economic, political, social, academic and in the media, not just public diplomacy or PR problems” — the government has not taken that aspect seriously enough.
“We are in a better situation because we understand, and I think we are trying to convince our allies, that this is part and parcel of an Islamic war on the West,” he said. “This is such an important part of our national security.”
However, he added, “Israel has yet to publicly declare that the non-military multidimensional Iranian, Russian, Chinese, Turkish, Qatari ideological warfare and political warfare is officially a national security threat. Until that happens, the budget and prioritization that Israel must assign to this war won’t be there. That’s why we keep getting it wrong.”
Diker suggested that Israel adopt hybrid warfare, a phrase often used to refer to Russian influence campaigns.
“All versions of nonmilitary warfare have to be embraced, collected and mobilized against our enemies,” Diker said.
With an acrimonious election set for the end of the month, politicians have been placing blame on each other, the security establishment and beyond for the failures of Oct. 7, but no state commission of inquiry has been formed to investigate.
“The same leaders responsible for the greatest failure are still in their position,” Katz lamented. “There’s no culture of accountability in Israel. You can say it doesn’t make a difference, but I think it does.”
Katz noted that the societal and political issues that divided Israel before Oct. 7 have not been resolved, and that poses an additional danger to Israel.
“Oct. 7 was the clearest example that when you have no social cohesion, you are going to pay a real price on a national security level,” he said. “Oct. 7 happened after five elections in 3.5 years, and a year of judicial reform that ripped the country apart. … All those fissures in society, all those issues remain and have gotten even bigger: Haredi [conscription in the IDF], judicial reform, ‘yes Bibi,’ ‘no Bibi,’ left, right, the Palestinian question. Everything is still there.”