At the same time that Director of Military Intelligence Aharon Haliva acknowledged his responsibility for the serious intelligence and operational failure that preceded the war, he declared that "it is not an existential war, the existence of the State of Israel is not at stake, but it is a war over the way we exist here" – and therefore it is a war of "no choice."
Here, in a nutshell, lies the failure of thought that governs the perception of Israel's security establishment, which is addicted to Oslo concepts. Likewise, former Mossad chief Yossi Cohen stated that "there is no existential threat... We are not fighting for our existence and we are not fighting for our independence."
The two may have sought to reassure the public. But you don't relax by spewing talk detached from reality. In this you increase anxiety.
When the prime minister declares that this is an existential war, we may not "calm down," but we know that the man in charge of managing our affairs understands the gravity of the threat that came to us on October 7. And from the words of Haliva and Cohen, we note the nature of dogmatic complacency and fundamental misunderstanding that apparently led to intelligence and operational lawlessness.
Only from the point of view of the "State of Tel Aviv," detached from the reality of the State of Israel, is it possible, perhaps, not to see that the abandonment of large settlement areas such as the Western Negev and the Upper Galilee is an existential risk to the State of Israel.
If we do not win the war against Hamas, followed by the war with Hezbollah, we will lose the Negev and the Galilee, and without them Tel Aviv is doomed. This is not a war over the "mode of existence," as Haliva put it, but over our own collective existence, over the soul of the State of Israel. None of us would gamble with our family's lives in the western Negev, the Negev in general, the Upper Galilee and the north in general. We must uproot the Nazi murderers from our borders. What is not necessarily existential, Haliva and Cohen?
But their statements are not just unsuccessful statements. They reflect the broken Oslo concepts that have been imparted to our security establishment for some four decades. In order to understand the nature of the problem, it is necessary to carefully distinguish between two errors. One is a mistaken assessment, shared by the writer of these lines, that the IDF and our other security organizations can sufficiently seal the border between us and Nazi organizations that held on to our borders.
This mistake led to an erroneous assessment of our ability to maneuver between the existential risks posed by the Palestinian Authority on the one hand and those posed by Hamas on the other.
This mistake can be summarized as follows: Thanks to the defense capabilities of the IDF, the Shin Bet and the Mossad, we have a long time at our disposal and we can maneuver and set in motion gradual processes in order to neutralize the damage caused by the Oslo Accords, and gradually remove from our well the stones thrown at it by the sages of Oslo and the disengagement from Lebanon and Gaza. It turned out to all of us that this was a mistake. We exaggerated the IDF's defensive capabilities.
It is now urgent to begin immediately uprooting Hamas and Hezbollah, even though the task may be militarily long and politically convoluted.
Thanks to the defense capabilities of the IDF, the Shin Bet and the Mossad, we have a long time at our disposal and we can maneuver and initiate gradual processes in order to neutralize the damage caused by the Oslo Accords
But this mistake is only the least malignant part of the perception laid down in the Oslo Accords.
Our current existential trap has been led by the general idea of atrocities, that our security will be entrusted to a hostile Arab army disguised as the police. This idea is the main obstacle in the thinking of senior officials and former members of the security establishment. He may mislead us by the US plans to restore the PA to the Gaza Strip, God forbid. An Arab army inside the country is an existential threat. After all, Hamas has developed into a genocide monster in a society led by the Palestinian Authority. Similar nationalist or Islamic monsters will develop in Samaria and Judea if we leave the Oslo Order there. It is no exaggeration to suspect that senior officials like Haliva and Cohen do not understand this existential risk.
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