This week, as the Gaza truce ended, the New York Times published an article about an intelligence failure by the Israel Government in the lead up to the widespread Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023.
The article described how Israeli officials had allegedly acquired Hamas' plan of attack over a year before it occurred. As the New York Times reports, the plan was "point by point, exactly the kind of devastating invasion that led to the deaths of about 1,200 people. Hamas followed the blueprint with shocking precision."
Apparently, Israeli military and intelligence officials dismissed the plan as too aspirational.
This is hardly the first time a military institution has dismissed the capacity of a potential adversary with catastrophic outcomes. It is not the first time for Israel.
In 1973, armies from Syria, Jordan and Egypt conducted a massive surprise attack against Israel. For several days, the future of Israel hung in the balance. But the decisive battles on the Golan Heights, and the successful Israeli counterattack across the Suez Canal and into Egypt, changed the course of the war — and the future of the Middle East.
In the wake of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the Israeli government investigated why Israel was caught by surprise. The president of the Israeli Supreme Court led the so-called the Agranat Commission of Inquiry, which examined the events leading up to the war and the tactical failures of its initial days.
The Agranat commission published its preliminary findings on April 2, 1974. Multiple people were held particularly responsible for the failings demonstrated before and during the war, including the IDF chief of staff, the commander of Israel's southern front and multiple intelligence personnel.
What the Aganat commission found was that it was not just intelligence failure that led to these surprises. All necessary information was available to draw the correct conclusions.
Instead, multiple decision makers in the military and government failed to do so. As a future commission into October 7 will probably show, the Hamas attacks occurred partially because of a failure of leadership in Israel.
You can read the rest of my article, published by ABC Australia today, at the link for free:
I must say the “surprise” in this case should not have been so. Shin Bet, Mossad, and IDF all had the intel and summation of it for about a year. This is not so much an intel failure as a failure of leadership, imagination, and estimation of enemy capabilities. But it goes even further than that. The ruling coalition and Netanyahu had every incentive to let this happen to distract from his failed legal reforms and his own legal troubles.
The problem with governments ruled by extremist fractions (I do not mean "factions") is exactly why the mass of the IDF was moved to the West Bank before Oct 7. Rather than protecting extremist "settlers" in the West Bank, the government should have been keeping them off land they do not own.
Basically, Netanyahu was protecting his government, not his country.