It is necessary to start from the end: Prime Minister Netanyahu did well to delete the tweet he published yesterday against the heads of Military Intelligence and the Shin Bet. Netanyahu would do well to be careful from now on what he says, and what his direct and indirect associates publish and brief. You can't ask not to be criticized, and at the same time stick a knife in the back of commanders. Israel is in a war and must join forces to win it, and this requires first and foremost those who are in charge of our lives and our future here.
'You are guilty of the omission': Hundreds protest in front of Netanyahu's home in Caesarea // Yaron Doron
And now for the facts. Netanyahu is correct in claiming that no warning or direct warning was given of Hamas' intention to launch the October 7 attack. He is also right that the entire defense establishment, without exception, assessed that Hamas was deterred and headed for an arrangement, including in the days preceding the attack. And he is also right that the role of intelligence was to warn – that's why it gets up in the morning and goes to sleep at night – and this is, therefore, a resounding failure.
Archives bursting with warnings
But Netanyahu is wrong when he reduces the discussion to this narrow dimension. Hamas does not operate in a vacuum, and this attack did not arise out of nothing. Since coming to power in 2009, Netanyahu has built Hamas as an alternative to the Palestinian Authority. He has been warned countless times that this is a dangerous recipe: that instead of strengthening pragmatic elements, he is strengthening those who will never recognize the existence of the State of Israel.
Netanyahu is the man who signed the Shalit deal, in which 1,027 prisoners were released (including Yahya Sinwar). The man who promised to eliminate Hamas, who declared Hamas to be ISIS, continued to feed the organization in every way – suitcases of money, supply trucks, fuel, electricity, workers and more. As someone who saw Hamas as Satan, he should have eliminated him, but throughout his long years in power, Netanyahu did the opposite: Hamas under him prospered and grew into a military monster. Netanyahu challenged him, thereby allowing the concept to build around him.
The monster must be killed. Israeli Air Force bombings in Gaza, yesterday, Photo: AFP
Moreover, since Operation Protective Edge in 2014, all the heads of the Shin Bet have demanded the elimination of the Hamas leadership, but Netanyahu has consistently rejected them. He preferred quiet, but did not back it up in an attempt to advance long-term arrangements. The archives are bursting with warnings that this is a recipe for disaster, that Israel is playing for time, that Gaza will explode one day, that Israel's main challenge is not Iran or the northern arena but the Palestinians. Netanyahu knew all these arguments, and ignored them.
The peak was in the past year. The defense establishment warned at every gate about the implications of the legal legislation on security stability. The defense minister warned and was fired (and reinstated), the head of the research division of Military Intelligence wrote four warning letters, the chief of staff asked to convene a cabinet (and was rejected), and if all this was not enough, Israel suffered a multi-front attack from Lebanon, Syria, Gaza and Judea and Samaria last Passover, but refused to learn any lessons.
Last July, on the day the Knesset passed the law relating to reasonableness, the chief of staff asked to meet with Netanyahu in a last-ditch attempt to persuade him. The prime minister refused, and met with him only after the vote. At the same time as the chief of staff, the heads of the intelligence and operations divisions also came to the Knesset to explain to the ministers the situation as the defense establishment had warned it: that the legislation is tearing society apart and harming the IDF's capabilities, and may be interpreted by Israel's enemies as weakness that will be exploited for an attack. The two generals sat in the Knesset for hours, but the ministers did not come to talk to them.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, photo: AFP
These warnings have been smeared everywhere in recent months. They were a strategic warning, met with utter indifference. On the contrary, government ministers competed over who would hit the IDF and its commanders harder. The result was that the IDF had to invest precious time in an effort to close loopholes at home, instead of properly preparing for an enemy from without.
15 years to change
The IDF and Shin Bet will not be able to absolve themselves of their responsibility for the Simchat Torah disaster. Everyone who was in the chain of command will pay for it in his seat: the chief of staff and the head of the Shin Bet, all the top echelons of Military Intelligence, the Southern Command and the Southern Region of the Shin Bet, as well as more junior commanders.
These systems will also need a thorough refresh of the nature of intelligence gathering, analysis, and determination in which it is presented, as well as everything related to defense – which in the future will look completely different from the big hole that enabled the harsh consequences of the October 7 attacks.
But Netanyahu cannot claim that all this has nothing to do with him, and not only because of the responsibility he attributed to Ehud Olmert after the Second Lebanon War as the head of the system at the time. He had 15 years to ask, to wonder, to change, and he chose to ignore it with a mixture of smugness and carelessness. The result – 1,400 dead, 239 abductees, hundreds of missing persons who have not yet been identified, thousands displaced from their homes, unprecedented destruction, a war whose duration is uncertain and an unprecedented blow to the resilience of the State of Israel – is entirely on his watch.
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