Hertzi Halevy: The Power of Honesty

Some of you may know about Hertzi Halevy. A taciturn Israeli in the old school mold, he was, until March, the army chief of staff. For seventeen months, he led the war in Gaza. His successor, Eyal Zamir, took office at his resignation.

I’m not sure he qualifies as an Israeli hero. My guess is that he will be ruthlessly critiqued, at least when the war itself is evaluated. He was the man in charge on October 7, meaning that the Great Failure of Intelligence happened on his watch. Whatever information the IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) had, it was dismissed by those in a position to act. That seems partly the result of general complacency and a condescending view of the female look-outs who alerted the higher-ups that a Hamas mobilization was underway. The result was the slaughter that has traumatized the Jewish State and altered the course of contemporary Jewish history. It is no exaggeration to say that things will never be the same.

In Halevy’s defense, he has been honest with himself. Almost alone among the power elite, he took responsibility for his failures and their consequences, owning up to the fact that Israel was bested by commandos who swarmed over the border to slaughter old people and children. In the post-Holocaust world, that was not supposed to happen. For decades Israel has spoken of itself as the only real guarantor of Jewish safety. That idea of the state has now been fatally compromised.

To his credit, however, Halevy continues to speak his truth. In the middle of September, he blew a hole in the narrative that Hamas’ estimates of casualties were a gross exaggeration. Sixty-thousand-plus dead? Over a hundred-and-sixty-thousand wounded? Israel has ritually denied that such numbers are possible, calling them the strategic claims of an unscrupulous enemy.

Halevy is no supporter of Palestinian radicalism, but he has just announced unequivocally that the Hamas figure is correct-ish. In his estimate, the number of dead and wounded is enormous: over two-hundred-thousand persons and growing, as Israel continues to punish Hamas. There may still be a discrepancy between the two casualty figures, but Halevy insists that we reckon honestly with the facts.

The battle of propaganda is likely to go on for years, just like every other debate about this war. Was there no way to protect Palestinian civilians from attack? If Hamas had truly committed itself to its people, it would have opened its tunnels as sites of refuge and fed its citizenry from its ample stores. Instead, it exposed unarmed civilians to the relentless destruction of Gaza by Israel.

Halevi stands out because of his plainspoken honesty. He represents a strain in the Israeli character that has not yet been extinguished. If there is a future marked by some semblance of normalcy, it will be the result of moral rectitude like Halevi’s. I believe that there are many others like him, and we will hear from all of them when the commissions of inquiry commence.