The conference was the Bithonistim’s first public presentation of its broad national security strategy, which top experts have been working on for an extended period.
“The Gaza story must end with an IDF decisive victory in Gaza, not with Indonesian peacekeepers or any other foreign forces disarming Hamas,” Brig.-Gen. (res.) Danny Van Biran said at the Bithonistim (Security Experts) conference in Jerusalem.
Tuesday night’s conference was the Bithonistim’s first public presentation of its broad national security strategy. Top experts – most with security backgrounds and some with expertise in other arenas relevant to national security – have been working on the strategy for an extended period.
A significant part of the national security strategy presentation focused on identifying problems with Israel’s recent strategy and tactics.
Maj. (res.) Omri Cohen said the main traditional strategic doctrines of deterrence and decisiveness, coined by the founding prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, have become distorted and misunderstood.
Cohen said that according to Yigal Allon, one of the founders of the Palmah and an early top commander within the IDF, “decisiveness was the basis for deterrence. Decisiveness was cumulative. But later, deterrence became its own purpose, and decisiveness was dropped.”
IDF soldiers operating in the Gaza Strip, August 1, 2025. (credit: IDF SPOKESPERSON’S UNIT)
Another problem Cohen flagged was that the country’s national security concept had devolved into emphasizing lower-grade tactical considerations rather than higher-level strategic ones.
In terms of tactical considerations, Cohen said the “war between the wars” campaign, in which the air force periodically bombed attempted weapons transfers to Syria and Lebanon, was at most a temporary, somewhat successful series of moves to reduce the volume of rocket and missile threats on Israel’s border in Syria and Lebanon.
However, he said, much of the defense establishment and the country fell into the trap of viewing the campaign as its core strategy rather than developing a strategy to address the buildup of threats on its northeastern borders in a permanent way.
Cohen said that, given that the defense establishment had no coherent idea about how to proactively make Israel safer and achieve its long-term interests, it chose to believe that trying to contain growing threats on all of its borders was sufficient, and it has become complacent in terms of readiness for any unexpected surprise attack.
Moreover, Cohen criticized how this readiness to “accept” growing threats along the borders and the failure to imagine a possible ground invasion had led the defense establishment to improperly shrink its ground forces, especially its tank units.
Former IDF intelligence chief emphasizes importance of understanding Hamas
Former IDF intelligence analysis chief Brig.-Gen. (res.) Yossi Kuperwasser said Israel must “disarm Hamas,” but asked, “Once you do that, what do you do next?”
Kuperwasser, now the head of the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security (JISS), spoke about the importance of deeply understanding the many distinct ideologically anti-Israel aspects of many Palestinians’ identities in a clear-eyed manner – in order to have a chance of successfully confronting them.
The former IDF intelligence analysis chief said that much of Israel had mistakenly believed that Hamas was deterred and merely wanted to improve its economic standing and quality of life.
Problematically, Kuperwasser said that much of the defense establishment was focused only on threats from Iran and Hezbollah, with Hamas’s threat in the West Bank being categorized as an afterthought, and Hamas in Gaza being viewed as non-threatening for the time being.
When Kuperwasser tried to present his strategy earlier in 2023, regarding the need for a deeper operation against Hamas in Gaza, in order not to merely act in response to repeated periodic conflicts initiated by Hamas, he said that the government had told him his ideas were not relevant, since Gaza was stable and no one wanted to risk such an escalation.
Col. (res.) Ronen Itzik said that the defense establishment had forgotten that the reserve army is the country’s number one national security asset.
He said that much of the country and defense officials talk about the reservists being important in theory, but then much of the country forgets about them as soon as a given war ends, and time moves along.
The Bithonistim NGO is a right-leaning group mostly of former senior security officials.
It was formed in recent years, when various former senior defense officials were frustrated by the fact that the majority of former defense officials lean politically toward the Center or the Left, even as the government has been led by the political Right.