by Jonathan Foreman | Commentary | May 2025
(Photo by IDF Spokesperson’s Unit, CC BY-SA 3.0)
The Hebrew word mechdal has no precise equivalent in English. It signifies a great catastrophe for which human beings are responsible by inaction, error, or irresponsibility. The Yom Kippur War of 1973, which began when an unprepared IDF was taken by surprise by simultaneous Syrian and Egyptian attacks, has often been referred to as a mechdal. The October 7, 2023, attack was an even greater mechdal.
The more you learn about the events of that day, the more it seems that almost everything that could go wrong did go wrong. In fact, things could easily have gone far worse.
That the attacks did not kill many more people, and have a vastly more destructive effect on the State of Israel, was largely thanks to the extraordinary heroism of civilian defense teams, local police units, and small groups of soldiers who fought Hamas attacks on communities, cities, and key junctions even as nearby IDF garrisons were overrun. The thanks also goes to special-forces teams that were the first to arrive in the south in response to the invasion.
All these defenders were both outnumbered and outgunned by the Hamas Qassam Brigades that formed the majority of the invaders. (The Israeli special-forces teams that raced to the south expected to confront five- to 10-man groups of terrorist infiltrators, not to be caught up in long, intense battles against 100 or more trained infantry with a vast supply of ammunition.) Many did not survive long enough to be rescued by the Israeli army when its battalions finally arrived that afternoon.
Then came Israel’s Dunkirk-in-reverse: the heroic response of hundreds of Israelis, many of them reservists and retirees, but also active-duty soldiers who did not wait for orders but raced down to the Gaza envelope in private vehicles, rifles and pistols in hand. The fact that these volunteers were able to get so quickly to Route 232 (the sole highway to the battle zone, and the road on which so many were killed by Hamas ambush) makes the many hours it took for sizeable IDF units to get to the combat zone look all the worse.
Errors and indiscipline on the part of otherwise disturbingly impressive Hamas invasion forces also prevented deeper disaster. At least two convoys of Hamas attack trucks got lost, including the one that came upon the Nova music festival while trying to get to the city of Netivot. Some Hamas Nukhba (elite) units that were apparently instructed to penetrate deeper into Israel after overrunning nearby posts and communities chose instead to indulge in hours of looting, rape, and corpse-mutilation alongside Gazan civilians, before eventually returning to Gaza with their material and human booty.
The Blame Game. Certain Israeli institutions and individuals share particular blame for the disaster, alongside the prime minister and his cabinet, who bear ultimate responsibility by virtue of their position. Among those individuals are the men (and they were all men) then in charge of the Military Intelligence Directorate, the Shin Bet security service, the Defense Ministry, and the generals and colonels who at the time headed the IDF’s Gaza Division and Southern Command.
But responsibility for the mechdal goes much wider. While conducting interviews for a British parliamentary report on October 7, one overseen by the historian Andrew Roberts and published this March, I and a small team of researchers from the All-Party Parliamentary Group on UK-Israel, were struck by evidence of deeper unpreparedness that could not all be laid at the feet of the current administration and the current senior leadership of the military and security services. The more people we spoke to, the clearer it became that October 7 was the product of vast systemic failure. Moreover, Hamas’s shocking, murderous triumph depended as much on relatively long-term trends that had led to the decline of the IDF as a conventional army as on the disastrous failings of the intelligence community and the policies of the Netanyahu administration.
This is why the instant historical analogies of Pearl Harbor and 9/11 may be less apposite than a comparison to the British loss of Singapore to imperial Japan in February 1942. That epochal defeat—the largest in the history of the British Empire after Yorktown during the Revolutionary War—was also accompanied and followed by atrocities and war crimes against both civilians and soldiers. It was enabled by willful strategic blindness, poor planning, foolish faith in the colony’s fortifications—and, once fighting began, by the poor performance of under-trained troops badly led by their commanders at every level, followed by abject failures of coordination and communication in battle. At bottom of the failure lay an attitude toward the Japanese that hubristically combined arrogance with unmerited and ill-informed contempt for the enemy’s military capability. Every one of those factors was present in Israel’s October 7 mechdal.
I fully agree that reading this article is very painful. I also agree that the issue of permits for hand held weapons borders on ridiculous. I have been away far too long to be knowledgeable as far as training of any of the IDF soldiers is concerned but I find it inconceivable that any soldier, irrelevant of his position or task, be sent out in uniform to protect his country without adequate training and a side-arm.
I know that there have been many cases where soldiers and even police have been ambushed and their weapons stolen if not actually used against them. It still belies the requirement to have soldiers trained in the use and protection of their side-arms at all times.
As far as the underlying content of the article is concerned, it seems that the IDF was not prepared to defend the country against the invasion of Oct 7, or against the expected invasion of Oct 8 from the north. The word SHAME does not convey my feelings on this subject strongly enough. That no troops were in readiness for any kind of activity within a reasonable period of time also denies my imagination.
Israel has allowed itself to be defeated once too often – on the military field and, most importantly, on the political field. As mentioned in the article, the supreme court must answer to its responsibility in insisting on allowing the Gazans to approach the fence and even more by insisting on lawyers being involved in the decision-making within the IDF. It is not the task of the supreme court to micro-manage the activities of the IDF any more than it would be the task of IDF officers to micro-manage the decision-making of the supreme court. Israel must get back on an even keel as soon as possible and the way to achieve that is certainly related to the judicial reform that has been dis-allowed by the supreme court. (Whose side are they actually fighting on?)
I find this article extremely painful reading. The abandonment of these brave young “Cassandras” is absolutly appalling and shameful. It is a sign of a civilized society that men protect their women. Whay weren’t they guarded in the first place by a contingent of well-armed males, should have been there and fought to the death to protect them? In Israel as well as in every “advanced” society, it should be an absolute requirement that women and children are protected.Why should women soldiers have been left defenseless right next to the border with terrorist-occupied territory. In the ancient Greek myth about Cassandra, she was brutally raped by a Greek chieftain Ajax. Later, the head Greek chieftain, Agamemnon, enslaved Cassandra and took her back to his capital, Mycenae, as a slave to be his mistress. Both Ajax and Agamemnon both came to horrifying, brutal ends. Were the same things happen to our cowardly, treasonous military and intelligence chiefs who desrted our girl-soldier heroines?
All major Israeli Institutions are Woke as commenters like Carolyn Glick, “Abu Yehuda – Vic Rosenthal and many others have pointed out.
When you are Woke you are blind and/or blinded by hatred of Bibi Netanyahu and his quest for freedom, liberty, free markets and his detestation of dirigisme policies of the Left.
Israel at this stage of development can be forward thinking and free or backward thinking and shackled.
It is no different in my country, America.
My biggest “Tell” is the “Never Again” speeches and then the idiotic prevention of Israeli Jews to be allowed weapons to defend their families. You need a “permit” that is almost impossible to get to defend your wife and daughters from being raped by crazed, Muslim fanatics.
Go ahead, and defend that policy. Here. Right Now. Convince us as well as the brave Jews of Israel that this “permit” system makes sense.
We are waiting…………………………………………………….
@Adam
I don’t see anything to rescue. Sorry.
Foreman’s narrative makes incredibly painful reading. The abandonment of those courageous young women soldiers, whom he calls “Cassandras,” after the Greek myth of the courageous Trojan woman whose warning to her fellow Trojans about the Trojan horse being filled with Greek soldiers and the entire Greek, after having only pretended to sail away, who would soon return and sack the city sack the city. First Cassandra is raped by one of the Greek chieftains, Ajax, in the temple of Apollo where she was the priestess. The the “king” or head chieftain of the Greeks, Agamemnon, makes her his prisoner and forces her to be his mistress. Both Ajax and Agamemnon die shameful, violent deaths because of their sacrilege and abuse of a righteous virgin.
I don’t know why I am retelling this story, which most of you are probably familiar with in any case. The only relevance I can think of to the events of October 7, 2023 is that if even the ancient Geeks and Trojans 3,200 years ago knew that it was the duty of honorable men to protect women entrusted to their care,, not to abuse them, why did the Israeli government fail to realize its duty to protect these heroic daughters of Zion less than two years ago? Shame, shame, and again shame.
I have repeatedly posted a comment on this excellent article, but somehow it never appears in the comments secction. Ted and Peloni, can you please liberate it from whatever electronic limbo or cavern in which it may have fallen, and post it in this space? Thanks, Adam D.
Brilliant, on-target analysis by Jonathan Foreman.
However, he omits to mention the Jewish intifada of roughly 2022-2024, which I believe is mainly responsible for the Israel’s lack of preparedness for the Hamas invasion.It is highly probable that all of the key military leaders, high-ranking intelligence officers, and the entire “political echalon” was totally preoccupied with the intifada like all Israeli Jews, and so were not minding the store in repect to Israel’s real enemies.
A major ideological failure. One of many.
But the left must be held fully responsible.