“When we saw a swarm of rockets, we understood this was the beginning” — The founder of the IDSF movement, Amir Avivi, had predicted the impending war in 2022. Now, a year in, he already has an eye on the future and speaks about how victory will look, about the hostages in Gaza, about a solution to the polarization of society, and about Israel after the war. "I’m optimistic. We have wonderful days ahead.” A special interview.

A year and a half before October 7, officers of the IDSF movement sat in the living room of Amir Avivi, the movement’s founder and CEO. They understood that something was afoot and that they must warn the security services about what was liable to happen. At the meeting, they discussed a “strategic, tectonic, global, and regional change” that we were experiencing and that would lead, in their view, to immense escalation. “When we connected the dots, we understood that we were heading for war,” Avivi recalls.

At the same meeting, they decided to write a situational assessment. The IDSF movement delivered a 300-page document to Naftali Bennett and Benjamin Netanyahu, who at the time were prime minister and opposition leader respectively, and…