It's been a year and three months since Gadi Eizenkot left the army – but it doesn't seem like he's managed to disconnect. Although he avoids interfering, he is still very involved and makes sure to stay up to date. What happens in Israel and the world concerns him, and at times angers him. Even now as a civilian, Eizenkot is just like before: a balanced and moderate speaker, yet still resolute and opinionated.
The 21st IDF Chief of Staff has not given any in-depth interviews until now, so as not to appear as interfering in the work of his successor, but also to avoid being dragged into the turbulent election campaigns, even though his name was mentioned as a potential candidate for various posts and parties.
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Now, for the first time, he is speaking about everything: On Iran, Hezbollah, Gaza and Judea and Samaria, the botched mission in Khan Younis; and about his successes, and his plans for the future, with a very visible nod towards politics.
Eizenkot, 60, is one of the more prominent commanders of what is called in the IDF "the Lebanon generation". He entered Lebanon as a platoon commander in the 1982 Lebanon War, served as a battalion commander and brigade commander, lost many friends and subordinates and stood at a critical junction, as the military secretary of Prime Minister Ehud Barak, with the decision to withdraw from Lebanon and during the actual withdrawal, exactly 20 years ago.
In retrospect, he is convinced it was the right decision.
"When I entered Lebanon in 1982, as a platoon commander in the 51st battalion, the idea was to push the PLO farther away, to stop the Katyusha firing on the north, to prevent infiltrations into communities. In the late 1980s that changed, because as opposed to the Palestinians, Hezbollah didn't go up to the fence. Its goal was to get the IDF out of Lebanon and give Lebanon back to the Lebanese. So, the goals set for the first Lebanon war were no longer relevant."
Q: Should we have withdrawn from Lebanon in the late 1980s?
"Yes, but that's in hindsight. The protracted stay in Lebanon was a strategic mistake, which took a heavy toll on Israel. In real-time, what interested us, the commanders, was to fight over operations and conduct proactive and offensive activity. I saw things differently when I went from being a commander of the Golani brigade to the prime minister's military secretary.
"I completely identified with the goal Ehud Barak set back then: Get the IDF out of Lebanon, preferably with security arrangements, and if there is no choice, unilaterally. Could we have left in a different way - more honorably, more professionally, while conveying power and strength? The answer is yes."
Q: Where was the breaking point in public trust for justifying the stay in Lebanon?
"1997. The helicopter disaster, the Saluki fire, the naval commando disaster - these three events changed the public's attitude. The IDF needs broad national consensus in order to fulfill its missions effectively, and in '997 it lost that."
When Eizenkot first entered Lebanon, as a young officer, the activity lasted three days, and he commanded it alone. "I would go, a young second lieutenant, to an ambush with 12 people. Slowly, with all the events and attacks, they added weights on us."
These weights paralyzed the IDF: The red line (the northern border of the security zone) was crossed frequently, IDF avoided entering villages, and the forces fortified themselves in the posts and became an easy target for Hezbollah. "The lesson is that even if you act in a creative and sophisticated way, you can't win a guerilla war through defense," he says.
"Every year there ended with the IDF winning many battles, but losing the war. Hezbollah may have had more dead, but they had one simple goal - get the IDF out of Lebanon, and this strategic goal was achieved successfully with a sequence of tactical actions."
Q: You say that the decision to withdraw was right. When we left, Hezbollah was a small organization that a battalion and a half could deal with. Today it's a monster that takes a whole country.
"Today we understand that it's not only Hezbollah. It's something much larger. The idea that Iran is pushing is a campaign whose historical analogy is the battle of Salah a Din against the crusaders. They want to build an operation that will hit Israel just like Salah a Din hit the crusaders. It's something much larger than the confrontations with Hezbollah, and its logic is to bring about the destruction of Israel."
Q: By that logic, it would have been better to stay in Lebanon and keep them small.
"But we paid a heavy strategic price, which hurt the wide national consensus and created rifts in Israeli society. I'm not one of those who think the withdrawal was the motivation for the kidnappings and the Second Lebanon War, but I do think it made the Palestinians understand that the only way to get anything from Israel is through violence and not negotiations."
"During the Second Intifada, Israeli society faced a huge challenge, and as commander of Judea and Samaria I saw a society standing strong, as opposed to what had been said about it. And I saw determined and creative officers, who every night entered refugee camps and hit whoever needed to be hit and chased them, and at the end of the day beating terror. It's the same army."
Eizenkot resents that "when the IDF was in Lebanon the soldiers became our 'boys' and 'sons'. Meaning, they became more important to Israeli society than the citizens they were actually supposed to protect. That phenomenon is still here today. These 18-19-year-olds are young, but they're not kids. They're soldiers.
"During the Lebanon years, there was a lot of talk about the crying at funerals of soldiers who died. When I was the head of the Golani brigade I told my soldiers, 'you can cry, you can shed a tear. It's okay. But stand proud, don't weep and don't collapse on each other.' What I meant by this was tell them that we are fighting, defending civilians. There are difficult moments, but stand tall. You're men, not children.
"My son served in the [commando] Maglan Unit. He is my boy, but he is also a man who is responsible for his actions, and in the army he is supposed to be ready to risk his life to carry out missions. I think if we treat them as children, it will be detrimental to the military. It must be said clearly, even if it's not popular."
Q: So in your eyes, Gilad Schalit and Elor Azaria are not "our children."
"When I spoke about this I did not mean Elor Azaria, but all IDF soldiers. [Hamas captive] Gilad Schalit was a soldier, who was in a tank and armed with an M-16 [rifle], and he needed to fight. That's what we expect and demand from our soldiers."
'The withdrawal was seen as fleeing'
Q: When did you understand the withdrawal was really going to happen?
"At the beginning of 1999, I began working in my position as military secretary for the prime minister. In the first week there was a discussion on withdrawing from Lebanon. There was a whole conversation, where at the end Chief of Staff Mofaz stayed for a one-on-one meeting with Ehud Barak. Barak told him that if there was no withdrawal with arrangements he should be prepared for a unilateral withdrawal. At the end of March 2000, after the failure of the Clinton-Assad summit in Geneva, I understood it was inevitable."
As opposed to what many officers claim today, that they supported the withdrawal in real-time - Eizenkot, who in every meeting was the army's representative at the state level and the state's representative at the army level, says the objection of the high ranking officers in the IDF to a unilateral withdrawal was absolute. "Their stance was unequivocally against it. All of them."
The withdrawal was planned for the end of July. In mid-May the IDF evacuated two posts and handed them over to the SLA, but the SLA did not succeed in its mission. The IDF understood things were spiraling and feared losing control on the ground.
"On May 22, I came with Barak to inaugurate a community in the north, and at the end we met with the chief of staff and army leadership at a nearby base. The meeting was supposed to deal with the IDF's request to 'take care of' a senior Hezbollah figure who was supposed to arrive in southern Lebanon. Meanwhile the Lebanese went on parades, and we understood the clocks had moved forward significantly.
"The IDF recommended an immediate withdrawal. Barak asked to wait to make some more moves in the international arena, to reach agreements. A long discussion ensued, of four-five hours, and then Barak took a break to think about it, and when he came back, he asked the people if they were prepared to withdraw that same night."
The withdrawal eventually took place two nights later, on May 24. It was seen as a panicked escape, with a lot of equipment left behind, and a mess in absorbing SLA members and their families in Israel.
"The whole thing just went too fast for us," says Eizenkot, "the SLA understood we were leaving immediately and swarmed the gates. 6,000 people came and made a traffic jam that looked very bad. It was the result of an unplanned event that came two and half months earlier than we had thought.
"The basic lesson is that unilateral steps in our region are not recommended, certainly not withdrawals. Although we left with no casualties, and most of the equipment, we paid a price for the way the withdrawal was portrayed, and we learned that images in the Middle East should be taken seriously. Your image in this region has great importance. I hope we fixed that over the past few years, with the decision to hit the neighborhood bully."
Q: The Iranians.
"Yes. That was a decision approved in the cabinet in early 2017. I see that it's being discussed now and many things are being said, so I'll say that the decision made by the cabinet, that I pushed for and recommended, was a major decision. The Israeli public may not see it, but it is influencing it, in Gaza and any other place.
"The Iranians, the Quds Force, were hit severely over the past four years. What they managed to do to us is not proportional compared to the hits they took from us."
Two Grey Swans
Eizenkot has observed Hezbollah since the organization appeared in southern Lebanon. "I remember the first time I heard the name, as a battalion commander that replaced the paratrooper battalion commanded by Benny Gantz. We killed a few terrorists with tank shelling. When we arrived, we found bodies ripped to pieces with some kind of green bandana. I remember in the debriefing someone said they belonged to some ephemeral group called Hezbollah."
He believes Hezbollah is at one of its lowest points ever. It's due to the price it paid during the Syrian civil war (around 2,000 dead and 10,000 injured), the economic difficulties in Iran that significantly dropped the amount of aid it gives Hezbollah (from $1 billion a year to $600 million), and mostly the hit it took from Israel - the ending of its tunnel project the group was building into Israel.
"When talking about 'the black swan' we usually mean the Yom Kippur War, but the Israeli intelligence had in the past few years two very grey swans that went under our radar, and they should be a warning for the next generations. We think we have amazing intelligence, but under that intelligence grew a Syrian reactor that was almost hot, and Hezbollah schemed with Iran an attack plan to conquer the Galilee, which we discovered a decade late.
"The tunnel project started even before the [2006] Second Lebanon War, and accelerated a lot after it. There was always talk that they were maybe digging tunnels, but we understood it as fact five years ago. The knowledge that they had an attack plan with tunnels 60-80 meters deep followed me from my first day as chief of staff [Eizenkot served from February 2015 until January 2019] and influenced also the decision making in other areas."
Q: That's the highlight of your term?
"Definitely. Since it ended two days before I left my position, and there was no PR done for it, Israeli society didn't notice it much. But this is a seminal event, and in my eyes is the biggest security achievement of the past decade. Because there was something here that was supposed to put Israel off-balance."
Q: Are you sure they would have used it?
"No doubt. They prepared it for a future confrontation or when necessary. They prepared to put 5,000-6,000 Radwan fighters, their elite unit, into our territory. When I got out of the tunnel in Zar'it, 84 meters (275 feet) deep, I looked back at Zar'it and I had a cold sweat on my back. I imagined a foggy night in 2021, when simultaneously there were exchanges of firing between us, and they attacked us from behind with 6,000 men."
Q: And yet, despite that success, we're still wary of confrontation with Hezbollah. The deterrence works both ways.
"Deterrence is a tricky term. The US is a mighty superpower, and yet North Korea and Iran wrangle with it. We have Hezbollah, which is part of a whole Shia axis."
Q: You mentioned the cabinet decision from 2017 to attack the Iranians. Where did that come from?
"Until 2016 Iran was busy with saving the Assad regime. Once it understood things were under control, it moved on. We know that part of Qassem Soleimani's vision was to build a line of intel stations on the Golan Heights. He built them. Afterward, they built them again, and after I was finished, they were destroyed again.
"He also thought about building air bases in Syria, but that didn't work. He wanted to bring 100 thousand young Shiites from Pakistan and Afghanistan. That didn't happen either."
Q: Did Israel consider killing Soleimani?
"In the end the best thing for Israel eventually happened, when the Americans killed him. Soleimani had three main goals: safeguarding the ayatollah regime and Iran as a strong and developing country; achieving regional hegemony in the Middle East; and getting nuclear weapons, as a means to safeguard the regime. His death is a dramatic event with repercussions we are yet to see."
Q: Outgoing Defense Minister Bennett said last week that the Iranians are beginning to withdraw from Syria.
"The goal of getting them out of there should be set, but whoever thinks that by attacking a few times it will happen is badly mistaken. The actions I took, which continue to this day, blocked the Iranian intention of establishing themselves in Syria and opening a front against Israel and prevented the strengthening of Hezbollah, in particular, the precision missile project.
"We decided years ago to begin a campaign against their precision capability, and today they do not have such a capability. They're in a completely different place than they want to be."
Q: Hezbollah still has 150,000 missiles and rockets that could cause a lot of damage to Israel.
"In the 21st century the national security balance has changed immensely in our favor. In 2000 they spoke of us as spider webs and then the intifada began. Today Israel has enjoyed six years of quiet, normalcy and growth. We understood that the confrontations with the weakened players in the neighborhood make us weaker, so the decision to go after the stronger player in the neighborhood was not a whim, but our desire to show force in the Middle East."
Eizenkot says the IDF succeeded during his tenure to remove strategic threats without being dragged into war. "That's how it was vis a vis the Iranian entrenchment and the Galilee conquer project of Hezbollah; vis a vis the tunnels that Hamas built from Gaza; and the lone wolf terror attacks in Judea and Samaria in 2015, which could have become the third intifada, but didn't because we acted correctly.
"The Israeli public is not aware that since 2015 we have also fought against ISIS. We undertook more than 1,000 actions, missions, attacks, operations, including things beyond imagination – without having one word about them in the media. We said nothing because it was very sensitive. We didn't want to be upfront.
"As a matter of fact, ISIS was strong on our borders. But not one Israeli was scratched by ISIS. It was a great operation that concerned the army a lot during my time. I think we contributed a lot to the victory over ISIS, but it's as if it never happened. One day we'll talk."
Q: At the peak of the Syrian civil war, wouldn't it have been right to help oust President Assad?
"That was a serious dilemma, and we considered it at length. But from my experience, in the space we live in it's better to have an address. The trend that says the harbingers of democracy have arrived here - that'll take generations. Therefore the Israeli interest is to have an address, and if needed, you take care of the address, and don't chase everyone who decides to shoot a rocket at us. That's true in the north, and also in Gaza."
Q: You were criticized quite a bit for not using force in Gaza.
"One can't deny the fact that when there were fires and balloons, they hurt the sense of security in the areas around Gaza. But you have to see where I was coming from, and I didn't have the privilege of being a populist. I saw the fight against the Iranian entrenchment, the arming of Hezbollah, and the tunnels they built in the Galilee, and at the same time - we also used force against the Palestinian violence.
"I should remind you that Yahya Sinwar set himself a goal in 2018 to break the siege by using violence. We stood strong and didn't allow it, and they paid heavy prices with many dead terrorists. Unfortunately, they also pushed citizens forward, and even though we didn't mean to, there were also civilians killed here and there."
Q: Are you worried about the possibility this could bring Israel to the International Criminal Court in the Hague?
"No. We showed the High Court of Justice all the material, the intelligence. These were not spontaneous innocent parades on the fence. In every parade were Hamas members with hidden weapons who wanted to commit an act of terror or kidnap a soldier or infiltrate a community."
Q: But still, officers may be put on trial. You, too.
"We did what we had to do. Factually, when you look at the years since Protective Edge, the lowest number of Israelis have been killed during them, and also the lowest number of Palestinians."
Q: Maybe because you didn't use enough force. Maybe those who say the legal advisors are restricting the army have it right.
"That's ridiculous. The thing that is annoying is that that is part of an attitude that is meant to weaken the legal system and threaten the attorney general, claiming the IDF is being ruled by the courts. We used a lot of force, and there was not one case where the military advocate general raised a flag. In my tenure there was only one case of someone put on trial for illegal use of a weapon in the IDF.
Q: Elor Azaria.
"Yes."
Q: So, everything is political?
"Everything is political. The legal system in the army is professional, practical and supports the military's actions, but in the end the decisions belong to commanders. And in my tenure a lot of force was used. Criticism is fine, you can criticize the chief of staff or the attorney general. But we have here a systematic attack, in my eyes, and the problematic part is that not all the Israeli leadership came out to condemn the threats on the life of the attorney general, who is an honorable man doing his job reliably, professionally and forthrightly."
'Separate from the Palestinians'
Q: Can we reach an agreement with Hamas?
"Yes, but they must be based on the agreements reached in Cairo on the last day of Protective Edge: A complete ceasefire, opening of the crossings and fishing areas, the return of the Palestinian Authority to the Strip and the reconstruction of Gaza, the settlement of the hostages and missing persons issue, and the opening the airport in Dahaniye and the seaport in Gaza."
Q: Would you allow them to have a seaport?
"After they return the civilians and bodies of soldiers, and after they demilitarize the Strip from their heavy weaponry - yes. Because we have an interest for them to have hope, not poverty. What they have today is a murderous ideology of Hamas, who wants to destroy us, together with 57% unemployment, low-quality water, electricity for half a day, illiteracy, poverty and hopelessness. What can grow in that?"
Q: How far should we go in a deal for hostages and missing persons?
"There have been many deals in the past. The model of the Shalit deal should not be repeated, because in the end, it released many terrorists and motivated terrorism. We paid heavily for this."
Q: So what can we do?
"I think the Goldwasser-Regev deal was the right price. They got Samir Kuntar and four other prisoners and 120 bodies. Therefore we need to make them understand they pay a high price for holding two Israelis who entered not as combatants and that they are holding bodies of soldiers and abusing their families."
Q: What price are they paying?
"The policy I advocated as chief of staff is to give Gaza the minimum required - food, water, electricity, medicine and sewage, and opening the Strip when Protective Edge is concluded. From my point of view, Protective Edge will be over when the two soldiers who were sent to battle come back."
Q: The possibility of annexation in Judea and Samaria and the Jordan Valley is on the agenda these days. What is your position?
"I differentiate between the Jordan Valley and Judea and Samaria. In our valley we have excellent security relationships with the Jordanians, who contribute a serious strategic contribution to the State of Israel, much more than what the public sees. It is a high priority to keep good relations and stability with Jordan, against the common enemies we have to the east. That doesn't mean that Israeli security control in the Jordan Valley can't be on the negotiating table."
Q: Meaning, you would avoid annexing the Jordan Valley.
"The Israeli interest is to safeguard the peace agreement, to strengthen it, and avoid unilateral steps that could endanger it. As opposed to others, I don't think the King will cancel this agreement if there is annexation, but I don't think that should be tested. The relations with Jordan should be strengthened. That's what I did as chief of staff.
"In Judea and Samaria the situation is more complex. I don't see an agreement any time soon, but the Palestinians need to understand that time is against them, and we need to conduct ourselves wisely, so we don't create a situation where they believe they can achieve things by force.
"The Israeli interest is for there to be a Jewish state here, democratic and safe, and therefore our interest is to separate from the Palestinians. There should be a State of Israel and a separate entity because I don't want there to be 2.8 million Palestinians here.
"The Trump initiative should be the basis for any future negotiations. It needs to be advanced as a plan, and not unilaterally with just an annexation component. Unilateral steps are not desirable."
'A professional army'
Eizenkot follows from afar the meandering of the multi-year work plan "Momentum" of his successor Aviv Kochavi. As chief of staff he succeeded in implementing most of his own program, "Gideon."
"A multi-year work plan is not the army's privilege, it is a functional necessity. The IDF needs a multi-year plan, and it needs a five-year budget in order to take care of all the critical components - training, inventory, armament, operational activity, people, day to day existence and strengthening."
Q: Is Kochavi's work plan a good one?
"I'm one of those who believe in conservative innovation. The IDF is not a high tech company or a speed-boat. It's an aircraft carrier. The army needs innovation, but it needs to be conservative because there's no time for experiments, you need to be ready at any given moment to activate the whole army. I thought that after 70 years the army needed to move from being a stately people's army to a stately people's army that is more professional, more diverse and more rewarding.
"During my time the IDF grew by every parameter: in training, inventory, armament. The leap in the number of targets was thanks to the former Air Force commander Amir Eshel [who will soon be appointed Director General of the Defense Ministry], who also under Chief of Staff Gantz built a machine that knows how to attack thousands of targets a day. This is an ability that maybe only three countries in the world have."
Q: So the current plan is all about pyrotechnics?
"Aviv showed me his plan, and I think the directions he's taking are reasonable."
Q: Former IDF Ombudsman Yitzhak Brick claims the IDF ground forces are in the worst state since the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
"I presume Brick's intentions are good, and that he is concerned about future generations and the security of the state. There's something strange in the fact that for nine and a half years that he was the IDF ombudsman and no one heard a word from him; not Gabi, not Benny, and not me. And suddenly four-five months before he finishes his job, he throws a bomb and says the army is in horrible shape."
"No one is saying the reality is 100% [perfect]. It's obvious there are gaps and constraints. For 40 years we haven't bought trucks, we need ambulances and forklifts, and not all brigades are perfectly trained. The IDF is a huge army, and not all are in perfect shape.
"But during my time we invested another three billion shekels in the ground forces each year, and I think we advanced. With a budget of NIS 31 billion and US aid we need to optimize and balance the components as best we can. I'm convinced the strategic balance is better than the enemy's, as opposed to what Brick says, and I am convinced that the IDF will win every war, and that it can attack at two fronts simultaneously, and fire onto a third front."
Q: And yet, it is widely believed the IDF refrains from using force.
"We don't send tank and infantry battalions to fight in order to raise the morale of commanders or the public. When we need to use force, we use force. Take for example the operation in Khan Younis: that was a creative operation that didn't go well. There were dozens more like that, that contributed a great deal to the security of Israel, and many dozens more in other arenas."
Eizenkot was one of those who believed that the IDF and the Defense Ministry should not take responsibility for dealing with the coronavirus pandemic, but that they should help as much as possible where needed, as they did.
The failure, in his opinion, is the lack of a national security strategy. "The decisions taken were correct from a health perspective, but this event touches all the components of national security - the economy, society, regionally, internationally, and security-wise. So it's an event that caught Israel at its weak spot - a lack of a national security doctrine. I hope that after the pandemic the founding documents of the state will be written, and that afterward executing bodies will be defined.
"An F-35 is important, digital is important, tanks are important, but our national strength is the most important. For the first time in this country's history a seminal event took place. For 72 years we had two tribes fighting, secular and religious, and there were two tribes on the outside of this Israeli experience - the Orthodox and Arabs. Suddenly there's an event that is not war, where all the tribes are present. And 70% hit in this event are the Orthodox, while 21 percent of the medical staff is Arab. And there's also the fifth tribe - the diaspora Jews - who experienced this event in New York, Los Angeles and London. This event can and should be used."
Q: How?
"Service for all. Draft everyone who reaches 18 in Israel. The IDF will choose its warriors and national service for the rest. In Dir el Assad they can serve in education, in ambulances, fire brigades, and hospitals."
Q: The Arabs and Orthodox will come?
"When I was chief of staff I tried to advance with the Orthodox an idea called 'reserve'. I offered to open Glatt kosher bases, only for them, with no women. For all of them to come, be trained for two weeks, so that if there's an earthquake with 100,000 dead they'll know how to take care of themselves, and if there's a third deadly intifada they'll know how to protect themselves. Let them come, do two weeks in uniform, get a certificate and go. I think there's a chance to do this, and we can't miss this opportunity."
'I want to come back'
Last Tuesday, Eizenkot celebrated his 60th birthday. "I'm trying to believe that 60 is the new 40," he smiles. Now he has time to devote to the family, his wife Hannah, an architect, his five children, and his granddaughter. He walks on the beach, reads a lot, and spends a lot of time writing research for the INSS at Tel Aviv University. In November he returned from a six-month sabbatical in Washington, which he used also for academic writing and recharging.
Q: What's next?
"I finished serving a year and a half ago. I held every position, from squad leader in Golani to chief of staff, and they always offered me my next job while I was still doing my job, without even myself asking for any position. It all happened because of accomplishment. Now, after a year and a half of being in a certain comfort space, because it's very comfortable in civilian life, I want to come back and influence."
Q: Where?
"One can influence in the public sector, in enterprises of value, maybe another way."
Q: Politics?
"I look at my predecessors - Benny, Gabi, Halutz, Mofaz, Bogie and earlier, Barak, Rabin and others. After a pause and living in a comfortable space I look at what's happening here and I want to make a better country and influence, and wake up with a spark in my eyes. What's that spark in my eyes? Wait a bit more."
Q: In the past, everyone who knows you said that politics is a no go for you, that you'd never enter. It doesn't sound that way today.
"I was the military secretary of two prime ministers, Ehud Barak and Ariel Sharon, and I stood by their side 12-16 hours a day. I saw up close that the influence is through leadership and accomplishing things through the system. Sharon told me that he greatly values thought and planning, but the most important thing is execution. Because as opposed to the army, where the moment you decide everyone does what you decided - in politics, the moment you decide everyone works to foil your decision.
"And yes, I think military men have properties that may be less suitable for politics, but it's important we keep them: forthrightness, statesmanship, and leading by personal example."
