Want victory? Get citizens 

Want victory? Get citizens 

Ribonut (Sovereignty), an NGO advocating for Israeli sovereignty in Judea and Samaria, published an interview with Col. Dr. Ephraim Laor titled Victory of Israel! Analysis. Dr. Laor served as commander of the 7th Brigade and received the medal of General of the Northern Command in the Yom Kippur War. He is the director of the National Research Institute for Disaster Reduction and a member of the Public Council for Jordan Valley.

The interview focused on “the connection between citizens and the army during times of emergency and war, both in the context of the ability to contain the enemy’s attack and the matter of the uninvolved, if this definition actually exists at all.”

“Citizens are an integral part of defense preparations,” Dr. Laor said. “We still need to wake up and internalize this. There is no such thing as ‘uninvolved’ people in a war zone.”

Dr. Laor stated that a faulty concept has arisen in which many people believe that the state provides security and the citizens have no active role in it.

“Since there were no wars, it has not been tested,” Dr. Laor said. “The army, police and the entire security system can cope with small incidents such as local terror, but not with a situation of war, which requires the citizens’ cooperation in everything. We see this in all Middle Eastern states. In Lebanon, it was the citizens who decided the wars, in Syria the war was decided by citizens and this is true for Iraq as well, in Afghanistan and southern Turkey and even in Ukraine.”

Laor explained that this was not the case in Israel; the message was that the security is and will remain in the hands of the army alone.

“There is a very clear distinction between the citizens and the establishment security system that must rely on parallel security bodies such as the National Guard, the Police, etc., and on the other hand, on the citizens who have a security role within the state, while the army deals with attacks on the borders of the state,” Laor said.

He noted that October 7the Hamas attack and the ensuing war indicated that this hands-off approach was insufficient. Indeed, citizens bore the brunt of the attack. Citizens, Laor said, must take an active role in the national defense but to do so, they need to train and be skilled in the various fields of defense.

“It is not by choice. It is a duty. There is no other alternative”, he said. “At the height of the events, it was ordinary citizens who happened to be there, who heard and came, but there were no organized units; it was citizens who came, each one with whatever he had and some came with nothing.”

“If we want to defend the State of Israel, and not only the line of conflict, where it is imperative, as in the Jordan Valley and Judea and Samaria, we must know how to defend ourselves. The enemy can strike even in Bograshov Street in Tel Aviv. Even if we depend on the establishment forces for backup, there is a time gap between when the event happens and the time it takes for them to arrive. This might be 6 minutes or 60 minutes and even 6 hours and sometimes several days. This is not peculiar to Israel, but it is needed especially in Israel, which is in conflict and only someone with an overly active imagination can think that they will be able to plan for every scenario and have a response for it”.

This form of civilian participation in the national defense barely existed two months ago but is quickly being built up.

“In the beginning of October, there were a few dozen standby units in Israel and now there are more than 800, and the phenomenon is still expanding,” Laor noted. “It is happening because people are not stupid and this must be the direction.”

He cited the case of a relative who refused to prepare for home defense. The family was taken captive. Two of the children were returned but the mother was murdered and the father remains as a hostage in Gaza. 

“Everyone should check to see what is happening in and around his house,” Dr. Laor warned.

Regarding the ongoing war, Dr. Laor warned that it was essential that Israel emerge with an unequivocal and complete victory.

“We can and we must achieve it,” he said. “It is one part of a large, ongoing war involving additional places and we must win in all places in such a way that will be unambiguous, even to the dullest person. In our world, you win when you kill the enemy and conquer territory and crush regimes and especially, remove the enemy’s desire from to go another round.” It is impossible to kill dreams; dreams may remain for thousands of years but it is possible to uproot the will.”

He noted that this was the case in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Despite horrific losses, the Arab nations that attacked Israel on the holiest day of the Jewish calendar suffered a crushing defeat. Dr. Laor noted that this led to five decades of relative peace.

“How does this happen?” Dr. Laor asked. “Because they know it is not worth it. In the defensive fighting of fifty years ago, they failed and learned the lesson that even under the best of conditions they cannot conquer the State of Israel and reach Haifa or even Safed. Our attack into the enclave, an attack that was stopped artificially forty kilometers from Damascus but allowed for cannon fire at the Damascus airfield, taught them, for fifty years, at least for now, that it is not worthwhile to start with us because from their point of view, it might end badly, and the fact is that it has lasted for Assad the father as well as the son, who feels that it is not worth it for him.”

Dr. Laor presented the painful observation that in this war, there are no “uninvolved” parties.

“At the front lines, there are no uninvolved. Anyone who does not want to be involved packs up his things and leaves. If he remains within the area of his state, he is considered displaced and if he goes to another country, he is a refugee and there are 140 million refugees and millions of displaced. Those who remain are involved, period. Anyone who is involved is treated like an enemy.”

“In war, they shoot with tanks for a distance of 3000-4000 meters. Is anyone looking for a certificate of integrity or conduct a project to investigate whether someone is involved or not? We shoot and every target is legitimate, and we have seen that the enemy uses hospitals and ambulances as a shield so they are a legitimate target”, repeats Laor.

“They know to take their bags and the family and go to another place. From that moment, they are not in a dangerous area and they are not involved”, he said, noting that in Israel as well, anyone who did not want to be involved traveled away from the lines of conflict.

He explained that the concept of humanitarian corridors during the fighting is a requirement placed only on the IDF. Indeed, Hamas used the humanitarian corridors as bases of operations to attack the IDF with impunity.

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