October 5, 2026
Discussions and questions are raging in Israel about failure, accountability, and security preparedness, coinciding with the third anniversary of the October 7 attack, which journalist Avi Ashkenazi described in an article published by the Israeli newspaper “Maariv” as “the heaviest disaster that has befallen Israel since the Holocaust.”
In this context, the Chief of Staff of the Israeli Army, Lieutenant General Eyal Zamir, issued a daily order to army units stressing the need to learn lessons and bear responsibility to protect the people’s trust, pointing to the heroism of soldiers and reserve forces since the outbreak of the war, and stressing that he held a lengthy discussion with the army leadership to discuss these lessons. However, Ashkenazi doubted the feasibility of these measures, asserting that the army and the state had not learned the real lessons or corrected their failures.
Ashkenazi explained that the Israeli army has become “tired and exhausted” and suffers from a severe shortage of fighters and equipment, amid depletion of regular service and reserve soldiers without sufficient training or leave, warning that the military institution is sliding towards unacceptable levels of collapse. He also criticized the official handling of crises, linking the failures of the October 7 attack to what civil aviation security recently witnessed in the Flydubai Flight 1037 incident, pointing to the continued intelligence blindness, the absence of oversight and investigation, and the entrenched “culture of not taking responsibility.”
On the internal level, the article touched on the decline of governance in the north and south, the collapse of the police in the face of crime and violence, and the army’s loss of its absolute sovereignty in the West Bank to groups of hilltop youth and the extreme right. He also pointed to the deterioration of the education sector, the high cost of living, and the decline in the public’s sense of security and stability.
Criticism was not limited to the government and the army, but extended to include the political opposition. Ashkenazi criticized the performance of opposition leaders, such as Gadi Eisenkot, Avigdor Lieberman, Naftali Bennett, Yair Lapid, and Yair Golan, in addition to their election campaign advisors, accusing them of being lax and slow in responding and lacking the courage to confront the failures of the political level, and being preoccupied with partisan power struggles while “the ship is sinking.”
Ashkenazi concluded his article by emphasizing that citizens give priority to security, quality education, restoring governance, and reducing the cost of living, and not to competing candidates for the presidency of the government, calling on everyone to remedy the situation and return to seriousness and assume responsibility in a country that “has no alternative.”
