Who’s in Charge of the IDF?

Despite its reputation as a professional military that prides itself on being “the most moral military in the world,” the Israel Defense Forces’ (IDF) campaign against Hamas and other militant groups in Gaza has exposed serious command and control problems.

Before proceeding, it is worth noting that while the Israeli military is operating in an incredibly challenging environment in Gaza, where Hamas uses civilians as human shields, the human costs of its operations have been staggering; more than 38,000 Palestinians, many of them women and children, are dead, and over a million have been displaced in more than eight months of war. While some have argued that the IDF has done more than any army in history to protect enemy civilians, others have highlighted how Israel has not done nearly enough to protect innocent Palestinians in Gaza.

As Israel continues operations in Rafah, pushing into the city’s center, questions surrounding the use of U.S. military equipment will continue to proliferate, as seen in the catastrophic May 26 Israeli airstrike on a tent camp in Rafah that killed at least 45, which was conducted utilizing U.S. munitions.

Strategically speaking, the regional situation remains fraught. Hezbollah attacks on Israel in May were the most intense since October, as the IDF warns of offensive military action against its northern neighbor. In early June, an Israeli airstrike near Aleppo in Syria killed a top Iranian military advisor. (When the Israeli military killed a top Iranian general in Damascus in April, it led to the first direct Iranian attack on Israeli territory in history.)

Clearly, then, there is plenty of room for escalation. This renders the seeming lack of proper chain of command in Israel an even more urgent problem—and one in which U.S. support and arms are entangled.

Israel’s command and control issues are clearest in its alleged war crimes. The purpose of this piece is not to litigate which allegations are true but rather to examine the implications of those war crimes for the Israeli chain of command. Though these categories overlap, Israeli violations of international humanitarian law and the law of armed conflict in the war may be broadly grouped as follows: starvation, torture, mass executions, and the indiscriminate use of bombs, drones, and missiles.

Here are a handful of cases that most clearly suggest the command and control problems.

First, the Israeli military has blamed midlevel officers for the killing of seven World Central Kitchen volunteers in an early April drone strike. Numerous experts and nongovernmental organizations have noted the need for better coordination processes between humanitarian organizations and the IDF. Statements from the Israeli military and Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories (an Israeli governmental body responsible for implementing Israeli policies in the West Bank and Gaza Strip) indicate that World Central Kitchen properly coordinated its movements with the IDF but midlevel commanders made the decision to fire anyway. This suggests that the Israeli military’s command and control structures are not as strong as they ought to be.

Second, in late February, IDF Chief of the General Staff Herzi Halevi publicly urged his soldiers not to film themselves committing war crimes. As has been well covered, Israeli troops have engaged extensively in this behavior for months, documenting these violations themselves on social media. This suggests that the Israeli military is having significant problems maintaining discipline. The fact that such behavior has continued despite Halevi’s admonitions only strengthens this interpretation.

Third, the IDF has been credibly accused by detainees, whistleblowers, and human rights groups of torturing Palestinian captives throughout the war. This torture has been done privately, as in Sde Teiman and other Israeli prisons and detention facilities run by the IDF, and publicly, as in the very public use of stress positions and the humiliation of noncombatants by stripping them to their underwear and parading them—clear violations of international humanitarian law. In May, the IDF announced the creation of a committee to investigate allegations of torture, the desired implication being that these torture facilities are not sanctioned by the upper echelons of the Israeli military and government, despite decades of credible allegations of Israeli use of torture against Palestinians.

Israeli military personnel have been and remain engaged in activities that suggest a serious chain of command problem for the IDF. Three factors explain this phenomenon: the existence of a permissive politico-military environment, Israeli military doctrine, and the fact that the IDF is a conscript army.

First, as underscored in reporting on Israel’s Lavender AI targeting system, there is an environment in Israel that gives midlevel commanders unusual latitude as far as civilian casualties are concerned.

The behavior of the rank-and-file troops, on the other hand, follows the rhetoric of top politicians. As former Israeli soldier Ori Givati told the BBC, because “there are no repercussions,” Israeli soldiers “get encouraged and supported by the highest ministers of the government.” This, in turn, interacts with Israeli military culture, which dehumanizes Palestinians, weakening the chain of command and undermining civilian protection norms and Israel’s military professionalism.

Second, Israeli military doctrine, even before Oct. 7, was remarkably tolerant of civilian casualties, as seen in the Dahiya (or Eisenkot) doctrine, which dictated deliberate, “disproportionate” attacks on civilian infrastructure as a means of bringing the enemy to its knees. It was formulated by Israeli commander Gadi Eisenkot in the wake of the 2006 Lebanon War; the concept was based on the Israeli devastation of the Dahiya neighborhood of Beirut during that conflict.

As numerous analysts have argued, the Israeli military appears to be employing a version of the Dahiya doctrine in Gaza. In recent years, the IDF adopted a more proactive doctrine that seeks a “decisive victory” against Iranian proxies and their growing threat to Israel’s military supremacy, rather than the retaliatory approach of the Dahiya doctrine. Despite this strategic shift away from reactive measures toward proactive ones, the Tenufa (Momentum) plan still relies on the “swift and massive use of force against enemy systems,” ultimately resting on similar notions of collective punishment and a lack of concern for civilian casualties that were evident in the Dahiya doctrine.

Indeed, since Oct. 7, guidelines around acceptable civilian casualties have been significantly loosened, resulting in unprecedented destruction. Additionally, field commanders are given a wide berth.

Third, despite Israeli attempts to frame the country’s military as one of the most professional in the world, it is ultimately made up of conscripts, due to the country’s Defense Service Law. In this way, it is closer to the Russian military than that of the United States. Conscript armies are known for being less disciplined than their professionalized counterparts; consider the U.S. experience in Vietnam.

With Israel’s heavy reliance on its reservists—who, as a rule, are far less well trained than their American counterparts (U.S. reservists are required to train at least 38 days per year, whereas only 6 percent of Israeli military reservists meet the required 20 days of service over three years)—it is no wonder that discipline is a significant problem. Combine that with Israel’s younger, weaker officer corps than that found in the U.S. military, and it is hardly surprising that the IDF has command and control problems.

The Israeli military seems eager to maintain the posture that it is a professional fighting force; in his video statement after the World Central Kitchen attack, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari prefaced his comments by describing the IDF as “a professional military committed to international law.”

In March, Halevi expressed concerns over incidents that, in his view, threatened the chain of command, saying that “we cannot fight when discipline and our principles are not clear and are not followed,” emphasizing the need to “balance between” commanders’ tactical discretion and maintaining the IDF’s hierarchy.

All of this leads to the inevitable question: Is Israel responsible for its military personnel’s atrocities?

Some will argue that it is not and that the atrocities outlined above are the result of a few bad actors and/or mistakes. But states are legally responsible for their soldiers’ action. This stance also suggests that the Israeli government is ineffective at managing troops and by extension the war. It therefore cannot be trusted with U.S. weapons, both because of the risk of Israel’s commission of war crimes and its reckless actions that could further expand the conflict throughout the region, as seen in the April escalation with Iran and the ongoing escalation with Hezbollah.

But if the Israeli government is in complete control of what’s happening—that is, directing or allowing for these atrocities—it is, to an even greater degree, in violation of international humanitarian law and the law of armed conflict.

Either way, this presents a problem for U.S. policymakers, who have continued to supply the Israeli military with materiel, making the United States complicit in whatever human rights violations are committed with such weapons and supplies.

If the IDF cannot control its own personnel, how can the American people be expected to continue to fund and arm it?