Key Takeaways

• Brigadier General Amir Avivi published a book six months before October 7, warning that Israel’s decades-long “containment” doctrine had collapsed and that a catastrophe was coming; the cover showed a frog being boiled alive in a pot.

• Avivi argued that Israel’s survival depended on “absolute security control” of the land west of the Jordan River, rooted in Jewish-Zionist values, not just weapons or technology.

• On the Diaspora, he was blunt: “It’s over. There is no future.” His answer was mass immigration to Israel, and a demand that Jews everywhere stop being “the villains in someone else’s story” and become the heroes of their own.

Brigadier General Amir Avivi spent thirty years in the Israel Defense Forces — deputy commander of the Gaza division, chief of staff to the defense minister — and then he did something soldiers rarely do. He wrote down exactly what he thought was about to happen, and he put it on a bookshelf for anyone to read.

The book was called No Retreat. It came out in Hebrew six months before October 7, 2023. The cover showed a frog sitting calmly in a pot of water on a stove, the heat rising underneath it. “This is Israel,” Avivi said of that image. “Israel is dying.”

He was not gloating when he said he saw it coming. He was angry — angry at the decision-makers he had briefed personally, ten and twelve generals at his side, at every meeting he could get. “We told them exactly what’s going to happen,” he said. “They cannot say they didn’t know.”

When the attack finally came, his first emotion was not shock. It was anger, and something stranger: a sense that he was, as he put it, “born for this moment.”

This was the story of a general who had changed his own mind once, painfully, decades ago — and who now believed the entire country, and the entire Jewish people, had to do the same.

He Knew Within Four Hours That Israel Would Win

Avivi’s account of October 7 was not the one most people carried. He was surprised, but not by the massacre itself; he was surprised that only Hamas attacked. He had assumed that when the day came, Hezbollah and Iran would move at the same time. “We foresaw a simultaneous attack from all fronts,” he said. 

His wife, Anat, an ambulance driver with Magen David Adom, woke him at 6:30 that morning. She had read every one of his assessments. “Amir, the war started,” she told him. “We are in a war.”

Four hours later — after checking in with the northern command, confirming that Hezbollah was not moving, that Judea and Samaria were quiet, that Israeli Arabs were not rising — Avivi already knew Israel would win the war. “This is an understanding nobody had,” he said. “Everybody was in complete shock. The government, the society, the army, the Shin Bet, everybody was shocked. And we said, ‘That’s it, we’re going to win.’”

So that same day, while the country was still battling invading terrorists, his deputy Yaron Buskila told him what to do. “If you don’t speak to the people of Israel this morning,” Avivi remembered Buskila saying, “this country today is going to collapse. Nobody’s talking to them.” 

He went on national television with a message no one else could deliver: “It won’t take us more than two or three days to kill all of them on our side. We’ll push them back to Gaza. And from that moment onwards, we’re taking the initiative.”

The clarity did not spare him the weight of it. He described three things at once: anger at the failure that made the day possible, a sense of purpose so total it felt like destiny, and guilt. Guilt was the word he kept returning to. “I’m one of the few people that actually knew a new war was coming,” he said. “I could have done more, shouted more. I felt powerless.”

Israel Copied America’s Cold War Strategy

To understand why Avivi thought October 7 was inevitable, you have to go back to a strategy Israel borrowed from Washington.

In 1946, the United States adopted “containment” against the Soviet Union: don’t conquer the enemy, just hold the line and let the rival system rot from within. While the US and USSR faced off in Korea, Vietnam, or Cuba, the Soviet Union eventually collapsed without a single bullet being fired directly at them.

Israel, Avivi explained, quietly ran the same playbook against the Arab world for decades. It’s what in Israel has come to be known as “the conception.” 

“When you say to Israelis ‘conceptzia,’ they go crazy. They hate this word, hate it,” he said. “But if you ask, what is the conception? Israelis will tell you: containment.” The government’s version was simple, and Avivi laid it out flatly: “We don’t want a big war. We want to avoid a war. So let’s contain it.”

For a long time, it worked spectacularly. The Arab world convulsed and collapsed — the Arab Spring, failed states, civil wars — while Israel’s GDP per capita climbed from roughly fifteen thousand dollars to fifty-five thousand and beyond. “Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Libya,” Avivi listed off, “all these places collapsing.” Containment looked like a winning strategy.

But containment only worked if time and geography were on your side, and Avivi watched the ground shift. He saw American power receding: the drift from Obama to Biden, the chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal that broadcast weakness to every enemy watching. He heard the region draw its own conclusion: “The US is done, it’s weak, it’s retreating. They lost the willingness to fight.” Then Avivi added the line he said haunted him: “What does it matter how many capabilities and technologies you have if you don’t have the will to use them?”

He saw Russia, China, and Iran drawing into alignment. And at home he saw political chaos: five elections in four years, a country turning on itself. “The difference between us at the IDSF, and the government and the military,” he said, “is we saw the shift. We saw the moment where we knew this was not going to work anymore.”

Almost no one else wanted to. “It’s human nature to want to believe that what has been working well for a long time will continue to work well,” Avivi said. “[The government] really wanted to believe that this would continue.”

The frog was in the pot, the water was heating, and almost no one wanted to look at the stove.

A Country You Can Cross in a Lunch Break

When Avivi meets with Americans, he said he asks them to picture something. Israel at its widest is about forty-five miles across. “It’s like living in Manhattan and looking across the Hudson,” he said. “Your enemy is exactly on the other side. Even closer, it’s a canal or a sea between you. It’s just a few hundred yards. Between you and fifty thousand murderous terrorists with rockets, anti-tank missiles and drones. And these people, they have one thing they want. They want to annihilate you. They want to kill you.”

That’s the actual geography of Israeli life. “The whole land of Israel, all of it, with Judea and Samaria — or what people call the West Bank — from the shores of Tel Aviv to the border with Jordan, it’s forty-five miles,” he said. “It’s not even a city.” Nine of those miles are coastal plain; another nine are the Jordan Valley. Everything else — the actual spine of the country — is the mountains of Judea and Samaria.

From this fact he drew a conclusion that put him on one side of Israel’s fiercest argument. A country that narrow, he argued, could not survive without the high ground. “This is why all the history of the Jews is on the mountains,” he said. “If you are not on the mountains, you cannot exist.” Give the ridgeline up, and an enemy can look over Tel Aviv’s suburbs and Ben Gurion airport. For Avivi this was not ideology dressed as strategy. It was topography. It was a map.

Security Starts in the Spirit, Not the Arsenal

Here Avivi said something you might not expect from a career soldier. National security, he argued, does not begin with tanks or the Iron Dome or cyber units. It began with values. “National security is first and foremost about national values,” he said. “It’s about a deep connection to Judaism and Zionism. The sense of rightness. The biggest issue is the will.”

He returned to the American example: “What happens with a country that has an endless amount of capabilities and zero will to use it?”

“National security starts with a sense of purpose,” he went on, “and the sense of purpose comes from the connection to our Jewish Zionist values. And this sense of purpose is the fuel for will.” Then, more plainly: “It’s all about spirit. This is the most important weapon that you have.”

He laid out a four-step method. “Don’t mix your values with problem-solving,” he said. “You cannot punch a hole through the holistic idea of Judaism and Zionism in order to solve a problem.” Step two: define your red lines “for the next thousand years, not the next news cycle.” As he put it, “a nation that has been around four thousand years needs to at least be able to think a thousand years ahead.” Step three: define the problem honestly, rather than rushing to a solution. “The classic discussion between two Israelis” about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he said, “is a discussion about the solution to a problem they never defined.”

Only then, at the fourth step, can there be a flexible approach to solutions. “While our national security needs are very, very rigid,” he said, “statecraft is almost endlessly flexible.” In No Retreat he offered four different solutions. Not one of them, he noted, surrendered Israel’s security or its heritage.

The Withdrawals That Taught Him Everything

Avivi’s approach was born out of hard lessons learned, what he saw over the course of decades in the army, and an unforeseen change in political view.

In 1994, after Oslo, Israel pulled back from Palestinian cities in Gaza. It did not leave entirely — it stayed in the settlements of Gush Katif, at Netzarim, along the Philadelphi Corridor. “We did only one thing,” Avivi said. “We retreated from the cities. Khan Yunis, Rafah, Gaza, Jabaliya… We handed them over to the new-created Palestinian Authority.”

Then he laid out the timeline like a man who had told it a hundred times. “This took Gaza in seven years from literally the Stone Age to shooting rockets at Israel. 1994, Oslo was implemented. 2001, first rockets were shot at Israel from Gaza.” Along the Philadelphi Corridor alone, his combat engineers eventually found thirty-five tunnels. Ten years after Oslo, the IDF had lost freedom of movement inside Gaza entirely.

Avivi doesn’t have to try hard to imagine the same scenario happening in the West Bank — replacing the coastal strip with hilly terrain. “If something like that would have happened on the mountains of Judea and Samaria, it would have been game over,” he said. “You would need twenty IDFs, which we don’t have.” Gaza, he added, “is nothing” — a small, shallow place on the sea — and Israel has still spent three years and its whole army fighting the infrastructure that grew there. The West Bank sits a thousand meters above Tel Aviv.

This was the hinge of his whole argument. He was not asking Israel to imagine a danger. He was asking it to remember one.

“The Diaspora Is Over”

Then Avivi said the thing that would make anyone outside Israel balk.

Asked about antisemitism and the future of Jewish life in the Diasporal, he did not reach for reassurance. He warned first: “I know it’s hard to understand it, and maybe harsh, what I say now. The Diaspora is over. It’s over. There is no future.”

He meant it as a forecast, the sober assessment of a man who reads threat maps for a living. He pointed to two curves running at the same time: rising global antisemitism and the accelerating loss of Jews who were simply drifting out of Judaism. “The combination of these two phenomena is lethal to the existence of the Jewish people,” he said. “And the only future Jews have is in Israel.”

His solution was as large as his diagnosis: mass Aliyah; bring the Jewish people home. Any concerns about Israel’s small size, comparable to the state of New Jersey, he waved it off. “Just in Judea and Samaria, you can put ten million. Negev, an endless amount of area.” The room, in his telling, existed. What’s missing is the will to fill it.

Aliyah, for him, was also the security argument circling back on itself. “There is nothing more important than Aliyah to secure Israel and the Jewish people,” he said. “The Jews who come will be secure. And the more Jews come, then Israel will be secure. It’s completely interconnected.”

And the deeper fix, the one that will outlast any single war, is a change of self-image. To fight against antisemitism, he said, requires reinvigorating Jewish and Zionist identity and refusing the role the world keeps trying to assign. “You cannot fight anti-Semitism if you are not a fighter, and to fight, you need spirit.” Then, more plainly: “We need to go back to being the heroes of our own story, not the villains in our own story. We forgot we are the heroes.”

He closed with a story from when he was eighteen, a proud Israeli at a British international school, who ended up chosen as house captain — a rarity for a foreign student, rarer still for a Jew. “I was a very, very, very proud Jew and Israeli,” he said. “It reflected everywhere.” The lesson he took from it was the one he offered every Jew in the Diaspora now. “When you respect yourself and who you are and your heritage, people respect you. Even if they don’t necessarily like you, they will respect you. You cannot be respected if you don’t respect yourself.”

That, in the end, was the whole of Amir Avivi’s message, the strategic and the personal collapsed into a single sentence. A nation forty-five miles wide, a people scattered across a hostile Diaspora, and one instruction that applied to both: stand up straight, know who you are, and stop apologizing for surviving.

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Brigadier General Amir Avivi is the founder and chairman of Israel’s Defense and Security Forum (Habithonistim) and a thirty-year veteran of the IDF, where he served as deputy commander of the Gaza division and chief of staff to the defense minister. This interview was conducted by Ben Chertoff for The Honest Take. Listen and subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast streaming platform. [https://podcast.honestreporting.com/episodes/the-solution-is-israel]

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