Show Notes
Israel is winning on every front, and Brig. Gen. (res.) Erez Winner says the next war is already being armed inside Israel's own borders. In his first weeks as chairman of the Israel Defense and Security Forum (IDSF–HaBithonistim), Winner sits down with Anna Ahronheim to argue that Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas have all been militarily defeated, and that the threat Israel is least prepared for is domestic: smuggled illegal weapons, organized crime in Arab society, and an armed Palestinian Authority in Judea and Samaria that could turn its guns the day Mahmoud Abbas dies.
On Gaza, the former head of Southern Command operational planning is blunt about why the war dragged on: "The failure of not ending this war long ago is a military failure." Israel, he says, spent 2024 fighting Hamas with one hand and feeding it with the other. Winner spent over a decade drawing the IDF's operational plans in the Southern Command, from Protective Edge through the current war, which makes his critique unusually specific.
He calls the Lebanon agreement a genius move, the first time an Arab state has signed with Israel and gotten no territory in return, warns that Turkey, not Iran, is the long-term rival in a contest over the India–Middle East–Europe corridor, and diagnoses what he calls the "unprofessional professionalism" of an army whose officers rotate every two years and let industry decide what it buys.
He closes with rapid-fire answers on Israel's biggest blind spot, the one mistake it keeps repeating in Gaza, and the single reform he'd make to national security decision-making tomorrow.
Produced and edited by Gadi Zaig, Lara Sukster Mosheyof, and Shifra Jacobs.
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