The IDF Chief’s apology to the lookouts is only a first step

IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi just did something that all too few of our leaders have done to date. He met with and apologized to the female lookout soldiers who were held by Hamas for more than 470 days of captivity, until their release just a few weeks ago. “It was wrong not to have taken you seriously,” he said, acknowledging the utter failure of all those further up the chain of command to listen to the warnings of these women and their fellow lookouts in the months leading up to October 7.

The story of the lookout soldiers encapsulates critical failures of both Israeli and international systems, carried out on the bodies and souls of these young women. While the IDF are the first in line for blame, they are far from the only ones. The Israeli government and religious leaders are also guilty for how they failed these young women, as are international women’s and human rights organizations.

The five – Karina Ariev, Daniella Gilboa, Naama Levy, Liri Albag and Agam Berger – were 18 and 19-year-olds serving at the Nahal Oz military base on the border of southern Gaza at the time that Hamas took them hostage on October 7. As lookouts, they were to be “the eyes of the army,” incessantly scrutinizing all activity taking place over the border of Gaza and reporting anything that seemed out of order up the IDF chain of command.

This they did, along with their fellow spotters, observing and reporting troubling increases in suspicious activity over the course of several months prior to the October 7 attacks. The list of examples is chilling – and infuriating – in light of what took place that day. They witnessed: exercises attacking models of exact replicas of IDF outposts and tanks; approaching and tampering with the border fence; trial runs, timed, racing to the fence; flurries of briefings with senior Hamas officials at the border; drone practices; and, perhaps most chilling of all, role plays of hostage abductions.

The lookout unit was increasingly certain that a significant attack was in the planning, yet their reports were ignored. So the spotters – a role exclusively held by women – persisted. But senior officers – all men – continued to dismiss their concerns, even belittling and admonishing them for transgressing the parameters of their role. One higher-up even threatened that they would stand trial if they didn’t stop badgering him.

Now we know that the lookouts had been right all along. And when, on the morning of October 7, the exercises that their unit had been watching turned into real attacks in real-time, one of Hamas’s very first targets was their Nahal Oz base. In the hours of fighting that followed at the base, at least 53 IDF soldiers were killed, including 15 spotters; 7 spotters were abducted into Gaza.

Lookout soldiers are neither armed nor trained in the use of weapons and never stood a chance against Hamas that day. Even worse, in the wee hours shortly before the October 7 attack took place, IDF and Shin Bet officials did finally realize that there might be a risk of terrorist infiltration, and issued alerts to the border communities. But no one bothered to inform the lookout unit. Had they known, they likely could have been better prepared to do their job of observing, alerting and protecting – both the civilians and themselves.

Instead, they were still asleep in bed when the onslaught began. Hamas GoPro footage from that morning shows Ariev, Gilboa, Levy, Albag and Berger in their pajamas, hair disheveled, injured and bloodied, looking like teenage girls at a slumber party turned horror-movie-reality show. They are surrounded by masked armed Hamas terrorists yelling, ordering and threatening them. Eventually, the women are taken forcibly to a Hamas jeep, hands tied behind their backs. Some struggle to walk due to their injuries. As Naama Levy is led away, the seat of her grey sweatpants is blood-soaked. In a photo that Hamas later released from during her captivity her right eye is swollen shut, deeply purple.

Though it will still take time to know fuller details of what these women underwent – and the public may never know all the details –  there is no doubt that they experienced terrible physical and psychological abuse.

The women’s parents watched the full unedited footage, which was not released in its entirety for the public to view, and reported that the Hamas captors referred to them as “these are the girls who can get pregnant.” Who does not shudder at this?

This is all the harder because it feels profoundly personal. For so many Israeli Jews it was easy to see their own daughters, sisters, nieces or friends in the young women’s place. I’ve certainly felt that. Every time I saw Naama Levy’s pictures I was haunted by how much she looked like she could have been a friend’s daughter, or one of my campers when I was a camp counselor. She participated in an Israeli-Palestinian peace program like so many young people I know. She was in the same youth movement as my daughter – who will one day receive the same callup notice to fulfill Israel’s compulsory military service as Naama and her fellow spotters did.

But that sense of empathy hasn’t been shared by all. Throughout these past 15 months, as the war and hostage negotiations dragged on, there were numerous reports of Knesset members insulting, yelling at or silencing hostage family members. When the footage of the capture of the five lookout soldiers was to be shown to the Security Cabinet, some ministers refused to watch it including Minister of Finance Bezalal Smotrich, saying to those who agreed to see it, “You don’t want to sleep well at night?” I struggle to believe that he would have responded in just the same way had it been his own daughter or religious girls in a midrasha study program who were being held hostage.

I’ve found this all the more galling because of the ways that alleged concern for the bodies of Jewish women and for protection of Jewish women from Arab men has been cynically deployed by religious nationalist right actors to advance their political and ideological agenda. We’ve seen this in the work of Lehava (whose aggressive opposition to relationships between Arabs and Jews has led Israeli governmental and non-governmental actors to try to have them outlawed as a terrorist organization; and the EU has now decided to sanction them); in election campaigns (which I wrote about in 2018); and in Jerusalem municipal politics, to give just a few examples.

But apparently, that was then – when playing the protect-Jewish-women’s-purity card served their political agenda. And this is now – when key players from the religious nationalist wings of the governing coalition consistently opposed the hostage deals that could have gotten these women released earlier, due in no small part to ideological interests to remain in and ultimately resettle Gaza. Their concern for Jewish women’s well-being was never really about real flesh-and-blood women. It’s identity politics at its most dehumanizing.

While sexism led the military men to ignore the female lookouts’ advance warnings, and nationalist politics blinded key leaders to their suffering, international women’s and human rights organizations who could logically have been among the advocates demanding the protection of their rights, also failed these young women because their political and ideological lenses made them unable to see the rights of Israeli Jewish women as worthy of universal protection. The fact that they were also IDF soldiers put them even further beyond the pale of humanization. (My hometown of Berkeley was recently a locus of heated debate because of an event organized by the university’s gender and women’s studies department examining what it claimed were fabricated allegations of Hamas sexual assault).

When I look at these five women – and at the pictures of them upon their return engulfed in the arms and cuddled in the laps of their parents because they are still so very young – I am overwhelmed by the enormous price they paid due to the hubris and ideologies which blinded key actors who should have done so much more for them. They bore the weight of these failures for 470+ days – and will do so for the rest of their lives.

These young women survived despite all of these failures. They have provided the Israeli public with an extraordinary example of grit and solidarity. But individual heroism against all odds is required precisely when systems fail. Halevy’s apology is an important step, but it must be one of many steps to recognize and rectify the mistakes made. It’s the least we can do – both for the five surviving spotters and for ourselves.