Add ToI as a Preferred Source on GoogleWelcome to The Times of Israel’s Lazar Focus. Each Friday, join host and diplomatic correspondent Lazar Berman for a deep dive into what’s behind the news that spins the globe.
On Sunday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did something rare — he convened a group of Israeli journalists to give a briefing on his new national security concept.
A national security concept is no trivial matter. It affects how armies build their forces, how they fight wars, and how they think of core ideas like war and peace.
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Gen. (res.) Tamir Hayman, the head of the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, argues that there is a new, unofficial national security concept that has emerged after the Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023, and the subsequent wars.
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He says that peace is no longer the goal in this new concept, and instead there is openness to unending wars as the best way to guarantee security. Moreover, Jewish superiority is becoming a dominant belief, Hayman warns, in violation of Israel’s Declaration of Independence.
Hayman also cautions that Israel has no way of replacing its relationship with the US, not with other countries nor through autarky. It makes sense to be more self-sufficient, but Israel doesn’t have a “diversification path.”
Hayman was the IDF’s chief of military intelligence before Aharon Haliva, the general in office on October 7. He says that only a commission of inquiry will be able to truly provide an answer to what went wrong in the lead-up to the attack, and acknowledges that he should appear before the commission as well.
He lays out several failures in intelligence during his tenure — Israel never thought the Palestinians could lead the Iranian axis, it didn’t take Hamas’s attack plan seriously enough once it gained access to it, and there were nine pieces of intelligence from October 4 that should have been evaluated more thoroughly.
On Iran, Hayman doesn’t see many paths that don’t lead to another military confrontation. “We are in a no-deal, no-strike situation,” he says. “The conclusion, unfortunately, is you need to do something.”
Lazar Focus is available on all podcast platforms. This episode was produced by Gabriella Jacobs and video edited by Yitzchak Ledee.
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