Former IDF Chief of Staff Gadi Eizenkot's recent decision to speak up on various issues is not unlike similar statements by his predecessors. He is concerned. Everyone is always very concerned – but not about military issues, only social ones.
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Iran is dashing toward a nuclear bomb. Hezbollah is accumulating precision weapons, Hamas is agitating the situation on the ground in Gaza Strip and the West Bank, and the Bedouin are about to ignite the Negev. But what worries Eizenkot, the 21st commander in chief, is the internal cohesion of Israeli society.
"I think the rift in Israeli society, the decline in governance, the decline in confidence in state institutions, in the courts, the rise in crime – all of these are the greatest threat to Israel's future," he said.
Eizenkot is not alone in his concerns. Retired generals and intelligence community officials are often "concerned" – but not by the military reality they left behind, rather from events taking place in arenas in which they have no understanding.
Their insistence on dwelling on such issues is akin to shirking responsibility for the media agenda. This way, they don't have to face the hard questions about the discrepancies between their status as prominent defense officials and the lack of security they left in their wake.
In the wake of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin's assassination in 1995 then-Israel Security Agency Director Carmi Gillon positioned himself as the moral compass as part of the "investigate the incitement" campaign against the commission of inquiry tasked with investigating the security debacle that allowed the assassination to take place.
Gillon branded himself as a trustee of the ethics discourse, an expert on rhetorical relations and political conduct, spoke on political stages, and was hosted in every arena as the herald of the message "words can kill."
But just as Eizenkot did not deter Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran or the pro-Palestinian elements who infiltrated the Negev when he was in uniform, Gilon did not fail versus Rabin assassin Yigal Amir as a rhetorician. He failed as head of the Shin Bet. His self-branding as a "concerned expert on internal processes" and not as a (failed) personal security expert, helped him not only avoid the difficult questions but to become a sought-after lecturer – a classic case of "from shame to fame."
After the 1973 Yom Kippur War, a concept was adopted by which we should look to Israeli society to find where the blame for the war lies. Words like "hubris," "arrogance," and "militarism" were used to explain what led to the horrific unfolding of events, and it was not the military from which accountability was demanded rather Israeli society.
Since then, chiefs of staff have come and gone, as have military campaigns, commissions of inquiry, and generals who, in the absence of military achievements, prefer to pass themselves off as sociologists who analyze social situations. After all, most of them have degrees in social sciences as Israel has no academy of war sciences.
All that is left, as demonstrated well by current IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Aviv Kochavi, is to use a public relations campaign to paint one's term in office as triumphant. When Kochavi retires, he will surely want to be interviewed about the state of education or health and he will surely argue that these are the troubling issues that demand a solution. After all, why address military issues, if one can skip the social ones?
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