"End the war!"
Introduction: I preface this post with a disclaimer: it isn’t hagiography. It isn’t a love letter to Israeli generals and spy chiefs. It isn’t a whitewash of their crimes. After all, they all have blood on their hands, some more than others. They only earned their positions based on their ruthlessness.
So this video is a bit of a sweetheart deal. They are relieving their guilty consciences. But a day late and a dollar short.
It’s a curious thing–that after these military, intelligence and even political figures leave the stage, they all of a sudden turn into leftists: after they’ve lost the power to make any change in military-security policy. Now, virtually no one listens to them. Before everyone listened to them. But they said nothing and played their part in the killing machine.
Their current focus is on the nation’s military and intelligence. They are not pragmatic political analysts or dissidents. They see everything through an Israeli lens and care little for how the world sees them. Those are some of their limitations.
Nevertheless, this offers us a window into the thinking of contrarian veteran national security officials. It is important for Israelis to see this united front in which a dozen of the nation’s best military minds denounce this godforsaken war.
The video accompanies a letter organized by many of the participants here and signed by 600 senior military and intelligence officers.
אנו נמצאים בחלון הזדמנויות נדיר להובלת מהלך אזורי ובינלאומי לשינוי יסודי ברצועה.
לטראמפ יש את היכולת לעשות זאת.בשם 550 בכירי עבר מכל זרועות הביטחון ושירות החוץ שלחנו מכתב לנשיא טראמפ: עצור את המלחמה והשב את החטופים.
כל מה שניתן להשיג בכוח – הושג. החטופים לא יכולים להמתין עוד.… pic.twitter.com/4gWFC0W9PV
— מפקדים למען ביטחון ישראל (@cisorgil) August 3, 2025
Liberal Zionism finally, reluctantly says the G-word
On a similar note, there are now prominent Israeli figures who have gotten religion regarding Gaza. One of the country’s best known novelists, David Grossman has, after two years of resistance and with a heavy heart admitted Israel is engaged in genocide. He was joined by prominent human rights NGOs, B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights. They too, for the first time, called Gaza and genocide.
He is a liberal Zionist, meaning he is loyal only to Israeli interests. His perspective does not take into account Palestinian interests. In that he is barely interested. This is one of the fatal flaws of his ideology:
Israeli propaganda us[es] liberal intellectuals as the mainstay of its work abroad,…Audiences in many countries are aware of the trio of authors – David Grossman, A B Yehosua and Amos Oz, who are the permanent whitewashers of Israeli policies, travelling around the globe, financed by various Israeli Ministries, as evidence of the open-minded Israeli society, and allowed their mild critical edge as proof.
Any approach that truly wants to achieve a lasting peace must encompass both sides. Not one privileged side and one subordinate side. This, I’m afraid may never happen, certainly not in my lifetime.
When I was a liberal Zionist up to two decades ago, I believed in several cornerstones of Zionism: I believed Israel could be a democratic and Jewish state. I even believed that such a state combining these two values would be a proud phenomenon for Jews worldwide. I also naively believed that peaceful coexistence was possible and that surely I would see it in my lifetime. How foolish I was. I was a liberal Zionist mugged by Israeli reality. The worse Israel became, the less Zionist and more radical I became, till now I am an anti-Zionist.
Of course, during those years I knew about the Nakba and other crimes before 1967. But I did not understand how critical and interconnected those events were to the present. I largely believed that the problems began with 1967 and could be solved by a Palestinian state. That seems a cruel chimera today.
רמטכ”לים, מפכ”לים, ראשי שב”כ, המוסד ואמ”ן, בקריאה משותפת להפסקת המלחמה: “הפסיקה להיות מלחמה צודקת ומביאה את מדינת ישראל לאובדן זהותה”@yanircozin pic.twitter.com/8XlIVuKvqY
— גלצ (@GLZRadio) August 3, 2025
Here is the dramatis personae followed by a translation:
- Nadav Argaman: Shin Bet (2016-2021)
- Shlomo Aharonishky national police chief (2001-2008)
- Efraim Halevy: Mossad (1998-2002)
- Tamir Pardo: Mossad (2011-2016))
- Uri Sagui: AMAN (1991-1995)
- Danny Yatom: Mossad (1996-1998)
- Moshe Yaalon: IDF chief of staff (2002-2005)
- Dan Halutz: IDF chief of staff (2005-2007)
- Amos Malka: AMAN (1998-2001)
- Ami Ayalon: Shin Bet (1995-2000)
- Yoram Cohen: Shin Bet (2011-2016)
Narrator: The vast majority of IDF chiefs of staff and intelligence agencies, Mossad, and AMAN (military intelligence) are here. Every one here was in cabinet meetings, top secret deliberations, and involved in every aspect of the most sensitive decision-making processes. Together, they have nearly a thousand years of national security experience…
Ayalon: Which gives us the obligation to stand up and say what we have to say.
Pardo: We find ourselves on the verge of defeat.
Ayalon: This war began as a just war. It was a war of self-defense [after 10/7]. But once we achieved all the military objectives, and achieved a clear military victory against all our enemies, this war ceased to be a just war. This brought the state of Israel to the point of losing its security and identity.
Malka: We are well over a year beyond the point in which we could end [the war] with a satisfactory operational achievement.
Argaman: We are now essentially wasting our success.
Pardo: We buried these achievements.
Argaman: I don’t know of any other army that defeated a guerilla insurgency. But we are now in a stalemate in Gaza. An army that isn’t moving on the battlefield is an army that is weakened.
Pardo: It doesn’t matter how good the army is, a war without a political objective is doomed to failure.
Ayalon: This war is based on deceit.
Malka: Operation Chariots of Gideon hasn’t achieved anything.
Cohen: We paid too high a price in injured and killed. Our achievements there were quite limited, and damage internationally was deep. Up to now, we haven’t achieved anything regarding the hostages.
Pardo: What the world sees today is a result of our own making. We are hiding behind a lie of our own making. This lie is sold to the Israeli public. To my sorrow, the world has for some time known that this is a false image.
Aharonishky: Does the army agree with everything happening there?
I don’t envy the chief of staff.
Aharonishky: He is the only figure who can get up in the morning and you trust him.
Yaalon: There are black flag situations. We must stand firm and say: “Here and no further.”
Cohen: The IDF’s capabilities cannot achieve [an outcome based on] a fantasy of someone sitting in a cabinet meeting who believes it is achievable.
Yaalon: At present we have a government in which the messianists have dragged us in a direction that isn’t rational.
Cohen: This is a minority. The problem is that the minority’s politics prevail.
Argaman: This government’s direction is determined by zealots and extremists, who were never elected to run a government of zealots and extremists. They have taken us hostage.
Cohen: If anyone imagined we could reach every terrorist, every hole [in the ground] and every weapon, and similarly to bring our hostages home–this is unachievable, fantasy.
But this is now the role of the army commanders, to come and bang on the table.
Argaman: Agency chiefs must know and stand firm before the prime minister and cabinet and say things about this war in the most candid way possible–about the its futility. They must say what they can do and what they cannot even if someone wants it badly.
Ayalon: The time has come to stop this war.
Pardo: End the war.
Argaman: We could have ended the war yesterday.
Cohen: Retreat to the perimeter [of Gaza] and end the war.
Aharonishky: End the war immediately.
Sagui: Bring the hostages home.
Yatom: All at once.
Argaman: The return of the hostages all at once. This war must end. They must return the boys home the quicker the better.
Hurrah … hurrah
”הן עם כלביא יקום וכארי יתנשא” (במדבר כ”ג, כ”ד)
רב-אלוף אייל זמיר, ראש המטה הכללי
link to idf.il
Spat idf chief eyal zamir and pm netanyahu
link to timesofisrael.com
link to theguardian.com How do any of them deserve anything but a prison cell and how dare Grossman clutch his pearls after stating that Palestinians must be disarmed, on what universal plane does he have that right?
I dont know if you noticed the massive march in Sydney, but at age 72 I can say nothing has ever incited Australian’s to get off their bums every week for nearly two years for the same cause, usually we have a very short attention span but his betrayal of Palestine is our third and there is scarcely a person my age still alive who didn’t have a family member in Palestine in one or the other WW’s, yet Gen X leaders betray Palestine again, just as they did after WW1 and WW11 , and the illegal partition and let me speak frankly – it is not because Australia likes jews all that much, it’s because Australia did not want jews here.
WE will not recover, the west has no right to recover from this perfidy and they should never recover.
Could you (or have you already elsewhere) say more about why you no longer believe that the conflict could be resolved by the creation of a Palestinian state?
I mention the 2 state solution in many posts so it’s hard to pin down one particular one. In short, 2 states is not viable because neither the US nor Israel want it. In fact, they’re vehemently opposed it. So unless global bodies like the UN can force the issue by threatening sanctions or military force (very unlikely), it will never happen. That’s the main practical impediment. Add to that, even if there was a separate Palestinian state, Israel would seek to dominate, if not strangle, economically etc. Settlers will never accept losing their superior territorial rights over Palestinians. Nor will they accept returning to 67 borders & withdrawing fr their settlements.
Finally, the only way to have a political outcome that offers full equality to Palestinians is a singl democratic secular state. The fates of both peoples are intertwined. The Israelis reject this. But eventually, such a thing will happen, though certainly not in my lifetime.
The brain haemorrhage of PM Ariel Sharon in first week of 2006 ended any opening for a two-state solution. All Netanyahu had to do is hammer Obama and #Joe from 2009-17 to make Eretz Yisrael irreversible by settlement building, ousting Palestinians from East Jerusalem and making apartheid the primary step. Building a terror state in all of Palestine after Sykes-Picot travesty of International justice.
link to thecairoreview.com