The Honest Take

Every American of a certain age remembers exactly where they were on September 11th. For Israelis, that morning was October 7th. Brigadier General Amir Avivi — a thirty-year IDF veteran, former deputy commander of the Gaza Division, and founder of Israel's largest movement of security professionals — saw it coming. Two years before the war, his organization wrote a national-security assessment describing the attack that was coming; six months before it, he published a book about it. Nobody in power acted on it.

Ben Chertoff sits down with Avivi to understand how that happened, and what it means going forward. They get into the Cold War doctrine Israel quietly adopted and why it failed; what it's actually like to defend a country forty-five miles wide, where you can see your enemies from the airport; the real history of the Gaza withdrawal and why Avivi says Israel can never repeat it in the West Bank; and his blunt, uncomfortable answer to the question of rising global antisemitism — that the only long-term future for the Jewish people is in Israel. Some of it is hard to hear. That's the point.


ABOUT THE GUEST

Brigadier General (res.) Amir Avivi is a thirty-year veteran of the Israel Defense Forces. He served as deputy commander of the Gaza Division and as aide-de-camp to the Chief of the General Staff, among other senior commands. In 2020 he founded the Israel Defense and Security Forum (IDSF / Hebrew: "Habithonistim"), a security-establishment movement that has grown to roughly 55,000 members, including dozens of reserve generals and senior defense officials. He handed the chairmanship to Brig. Gen. (res.) Erez Wiener on June 1, 2026. He is the author of No Retreat: How to Secure Israel for Generations to Come, whose Hebrew edition appeared about six months before October 7th and which he frames as having foreseen the war and its aftermath.

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