Calls to boycott Israel, including sweeping demands to sever defense ties, have grown louder since the Gaza war.
The slogans are simple, but modern warfare is not.
Whatever the optics, a military boycott of Israel is not going to happen because the IDF’s hard-earned lessons from Gaza should become indispensable to Western planners preparing for the next urban fight.
Militaries value results over rhetoric, and Gaza has been a live laboratory of what works and what fails in high-intensity urban combat.
Lessons learned
Start with Israel’s speed of learning. The IDF did not enter Gaza with a perfect plan; it transformed in contact, using a multi-layered lessons system to capture frontline improvisations and turn them into standard practice at a pace few Western militaries can currently match.
Every division runs its own “lessons learned” cell, mirrored in the branches, and junior leaders were empowered to innovate and see those adaptations disseminated force-wide. That cultural permission to change fast was decisive. When a single RPG killed 11 soldiers in a stalled vehicle, the IDF paused operations for 24 hours, pushed the lesson across multiple brigades, and rewrote tactics immediately.
That kind of institutional agility is exactly what NATO armies know they must emulate in the next city fight. Gaza also rewired combined arms.
Active protection systems (APS) on Israeli tanks defeated long-range anti-tank missiles, shifting the main threat to close attack; infantry moved into a tight 100-meter cordon around armor, creating a compact, mutually protective bubble that made the whole team harder to kill.
Layer in drones: Platoons using quadcopters for rooftop surveillance and precision drops turned every small unit into a mini sensor shooter network, while jamming and drone fratricide forced better airspace deconfliction and counter-drone measures at the lowest echelons. Those realities will shape Western procurement and training in the future.
Subterranean challenge
Then there is subterranean and combat engineering – Gaza’s signature problem set. Hamas’s “City of Jihad” required a specialist headquarters for underground warfare, paired with surface and subsurface operations and relentless breaching. Engineers and armored bulldozers led assaults, clearing IED belts, pushing through rubble, and collapsing tunnel nodes – tasks standard infantry could not do at tempo.
The D9 and other protected breachers were the point of the spear, and their psychological effect on defenders mattered, too.
Western armies looking at urban contingencies will draw the obvious conclusion: Put engineers up front, in armor, as part of the contact battle.
The doctrine is portable: Attach sappers down to the company level, give maneuver leaders direct communication with engineers, and fight above and below ground simultaneously. Special operations were integrated, not isolated. Israeli SOF (special operations forces) paired with conventional companies to clear tunnels below while infantry secured the block above, synchronizing micro-raids with the main urban scheme of maneuver .
Information flowed both ways with reconnaissance from below and exploitation from above, and military cultural barriers gave way to tactical necessity. This surface-subsurface pairing, plus habitual SOF liaison, is already a template Western forces can adopt. None of this ignores the law and legitimacy. The IDF’s experience shows that protecting civilians and managing the information fight are operational requirements.
Western militaries studying Gaza will take practical measures varying from advanced evacuation warnings to deploying legal advisers with combat units to vet time-sensitive targets, precisely because every strike in a city will be forensically scrutinized in real time. Operational freedom now depends on disciplined targeting and narrative agility.
Boycott fantasies
Two more battlefield truths puncture boycott fantasies.
First, technology plus mass wins urban wars. Precision surveillance, active protection on armor, and loitering munitions mattered in Gaza because they were fielded at scale and paired with manpower to fight block by block. That is a force design lesson.
Second, logistics is destiny. Gaza devoured ammo, explosives, fuel, and spares; last-mile resupply under fire required armored escorts (including bulldozers) and modular support that could keep pace with ad hoc combined arms teams. Those are precisely the problems NATO staffs are war gaming now.
Put bluntly: The very features that BDS seeks to stigmatize, such as Israel’s battlefield adaptation, its integration of drones and breachers, its SOF conventional pairing, and its law of armed conflict tooling for urban combat, are the reasons militaries will keep engaging with Israel.
Western officers do not have the luxury of ignoring relevant experience; they have a duty to absorb it before they send their soldiers into Bakhmut-like rubble or a Baltic city under fire.
The report cards from Gaza are already being read in allied headquarters, with clear guidance on what to adopt, what to adapt, and what to avoid.
So yes, governments will calibrate the optics, and some exchanges may be quieter.
But an actual defense boycott? Not in a world of peer competition, drone swarms, and tunnels.
In the end, battlefield reality trumps boycott rhetoric. Rather than becoming isolated in the military field, Israel is becoming unignorable because those who prepare to fight in cities know they cannot afford not to learn from the military that just did.■
Andrew Fox is a retired British army officer and research fellow at the Henry Jackson Society.