Additional Challenge for the Incoming Chief of General Staff: Decline in Public Trust in the IDF

Dr. Chaim Weizmann

In less than a week, Major General Eyal Zamir will assume his new role as the 24th Chief of General Staff of the IDF. He will replace Lieutenant General Hertzi Halevi, who is retiring after a brief but extremely intense tenure that includes a terrible failure, followed by a war that has already lasted sixteen months with no clear end in sight.

Chief of Staff Zamir will inherit an army that has stretched itself to the limit of its capacity. Since the war broke out, its reserve soldiers have served for extended periods, many of them for two hundred, two hundred and fifty days of reserve duty, or even more. Despite the numerous successes on the battlefield, both in the Gaza Strip and on the northern front, such long service periods impose a heavy toll in various levels: personal fatigue and burnout, economic problems, and family issues.

However, when the new Chief of General Staff assumes his position at the beginning of March, he will face an additional problem. He will take command of an army in which the level of public trust is the lowest it has been in over two years. The Institute for Liberty and Responsibility at Reichman University has been tracking the level of trust in various government institutions over time, and generally, the level of Israeli public trust in government institutions is extremely low. The Knesset holds the negative peak with only 13% of respondents expressing trust in it, followed by the cabinet with 18% trust.

In the survey conducted by the Institute for Liberty and Responsibility this month, February 2025, only 62% of respondents said they have trust in the IDF. This is a decrease of almost ten percentage points within two months! This worrying finding adds to a series of additional findings that should raise red flags among the country's decision-makers. Indeed, the IDF enjoys the highest level of trust among all the institutions examined (the next institution in terms of trust level is the Supreme Court, with 43% of respondents expressing trust in it), yet the level of public trust in the IDF continues to decline.

The back sliding in public trust is reflected not only in trust in the IDF but also regarding the war's outcomes. The Israeli public does not think that Israel won the war. If anything, it is Hamas that has won. In the February 2025 survey, only 17% of respondents described the outcome of the Gaza war as a "victory for Israel," compared to 29% of respondents who described the outcome as a "victory for Hamas." Within three months, we see a complete reversal of the trend. Three months earlier, in November 2024, 37% of respondents described the outcome of the war as a "victory for Israel" and only 11% as a "victory for Hamas."

Another concerning figure is that less than a quarter of respondents, only 23%, believe "to a large extent" that if they or someone of their immediate family were kidnapped, the state would invest all efforts to bring them back. Nearly three-quarters of respondents, 71%, believe this only "to a small extent." In the Institute for Liberty and Responsibility's survey from last November, less than two-thirds, 64%, responded only "to a small extent" that they believe this. This sentiment of mistrust in decision-makers is not unique to those who voted for opposition parties; even among those who voted for coalition parties, only a minority of respondents, 38%, said they believe "to a large extent" that if they were kidnapped, God forbid, the state would invest all efforts in bringing them back.

The State of Israel, which is in the longest high-intensity war in its history, cannot afford, over time, a decline in the level of public trust in the IDF. The lack of trust in political institutions will ultimately damage Israeli democracy, even more than the regime coup that began two years ago, in January 2023, and continues even today. A decrease in public trust in the army could affect the willingness to enlist and serve, and ultimately threaten the very existence of the state. Eyal Zamir will be the first tank officer, since the Yom Kippur War more than fifty years ago, who will enter the Chief of General Staff's office in a few days with his hands undoubtedly full of exhausting work. The task of improving public trust in the IDF and its commanders is not the least of them.