Yet, this assumption is not supported by verified facts, including ignored intelligence, abandoned hostages and neglected Israeli communities around Gaza.
A day after October 7, Eurasia Group’s Ian Bremmer said that the “massive attacks by Hamas leadership into Israel… is no less than Israel’s 9/11.” By contrast, in the same interview for CNBC, I said that October 7 did not come out of the blue. “The Israeli-Hamas War is a logical result of 50 years of failed military policies.” Our views were diametrically opposed.
I had warned of the ticking time bomb in Gaza already in 2018, half a decade before. A day or two before October 7, I wrote an essay on the coming explosion in Gaza. It was not prophetic insight. October 7, 2023, was the 50-year anniversary of the Yom Kippur War and I fully expected a high-profile reaction.
After the brutal Hamas-led assault, Israeli authorities vehemently condemned what they called “our September 11” and a “surprise attack.” But the hard questions were conveniently ignored – and still are.
A week ago, the Israeli Defense Forces’ landmark investigations into the October 7 attack disclosed severe, deep-rooted intelligence miscalculations and fundamental misconceptions on the nature of Hamas and its intentions by both the Israeli government and military. Probing the same attack, Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service, recently pointed fingers at Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Typically, the prime mistakes featured the political conception of Hamas as an Israeli asset, the intelligence misjudgment that it couldn’t launch a large-scale attack, and weak defensive deployment.
The intriguing part of the story is that these facts were pretty well known already in the first days after October 7, 2023 – that is, more than a year ago – as I argue in The Fall of Israel. And there is more to the story.
Why was the abundant intelligence on the impending Hamas attack deliberately ignored? Why were the Israeli hostages effectively abandoned? Why were the strategic border communities neglected? With all its might, backed up with U.S. military aid and financing, how did Israel fail to see the writing on the wall?
Ignored intelligence
After October 7, a high-level Egyptian intelligence official said Israel had ignored repeated warnings that “an explosion of the situation is coming, and very soon, and it would be big.” Netanyahu denied receiving any such advance warning. Yet, the Egyptian confirmed that the Israeli PM had received direct notice from Cairo’s intelligence minister. Similarly, Michael McCaul, Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told reporters of the alleged warning.
The inconvenient fact was that Israeli intelligence authorities had been aware of the threat for months yet ignored it. In November 2023, the New York Times reported that “Israel knew Hamas’s attack plan more than a year ago.” Code-named Jericho Wall, the 40-page blueprint outlined a lethal invasion. The document had been circulated widely among Israeli military and intelligence leaders, but experts determined an attack of that scale and ambition was beyond Hamas’s capabilities.
The Times report reverberated internationally. But it wasn’t a scoop. Right after October 7, several Israeli media released several reports indicating that many intelligence analysts’ warnings were ignored. What was new in the Times piece was the document verifying the story.
There was also a potentially explosive issue behind the Israeli deaths. Not about “friendly fire,” which is not uncommon amid fierce battles, but about the consequences of the Hannibal Directive, which many Israelis have charged was now the rule. This directive demands Israelis to kill their fellow soldiers and family members so that their kidnapping and the consequent prisoner exchanges can be avoided, presumably in the interest of a “greater good.” The Hamas-led offensive was compounded by what some Israeli soldiers subsequently called a “mass Hannibal.”
Just days after October 7, testimonies from members of the mainly female lookout units bolstered accusations that Netanyahu’s leadership fatally misread the dangers from Gaza. In an Israeli TV segment, two soldiers, Yael Rotenberg and Maya Desiatnik, recounted their experiences in the months before the attack. Rotenberg frequently saw many Palestinians dressed in civilian clothing near the border fence with maps, scrutinizing the ground around it and digging holes. Once, when she passed the information on, she was told they were just farmers, and there was nothing to worry about. “It’s infuriating,” said Desiatnik who served in Nahal Oz, where 20 other women border surveillance soldiers were murdered by Hamas. “We saw what was happening, we told them about it, and we were the ones who were murdered.”
Underpinning all these ignored warnings was the IDF’s assumption that Hamas lacked the capability to attack and would not dare to do so. The flawed supposition was fostered by two factors. First, gender bias. The longer the militarization has prevailed in Israel, the more the country’s gender gap –the difference between women and men as reflected in social, political, and economic attainments – has deepened. Today, Israel’s gender gap ranks at the level of El Salvador and Uganda. What, after all, did the “girls” of the lookout units know? Moreover, the idea that Hamas lacked capability to attack was predicated on the belief the Palestinians were “human animals,” as Netanyahu and the cabinet ministers called Hamas operatives. Subhumans cannot think out-of-the-box.
In reality, based on over 1 year of evidence, Hamas militants had trained for the blitz attacks in at least six sites across Gaza in plain sight and less than 1.5 km from Israel’s heavily fortified and monitored border, as even the mainstream CNN concluded barely a week after October 7. Worse, many testimonies by Israeli witnesses to the Hamas attack indicate that the Israeli military killed its own citizens struggling to neutralize Palestinian gunmen, in accordance with the Hannibal Directive. As one witness said to Israel Radio: “[Israeli special forces] eliminated everyone, including the hostages.”
Worse, in addition to the ignored intelligence, there were other issues that just didn’t add up, including the abandoned hostages, and the state of the long neglected Israeli communities surrounding Gaza.
Abandoned hostages
On October 7, 2023, as part of the overall Hamas-led offense, 251 people were abducted from Israel to the Gaza Strip, including children, women and elderly. Almost half of the hostages were foreign nationals or had multiple citizenships. The next day, Prime Minister Netanyahu appointed ex-military commander Gal Hirsch to coordinate the cross-governmental response to abducted civilians and soldiers. Internationally, the appointment was portrayed as the PM’s proactive move to ensure the timely release of the Israeli hostages.
Little did they know.
As brigadier general, Hirsch had commanded an IDF division during the 2006 Lebanon War, which saw the first test of the Dahiya doctrine, premised on the destruction of civilian infrastructure. Hirsch was seen as responsible for the blunder resulting in an abduction by Hezbollah militants and the battles of Bint Jbeil and Ayta ash-Sha’b, which the IDF failed to occupy, despite heavy casualties. Following a barrage of criticism, Hirsch was forced to resign. After years of career rehabilitation, he joined the dominant harsh-right party Likud at the behest of Netanyahu himself and became the favorite for the role of the national police chief in 2021 – until he and his business partners were indicted for tax evasion of $1.9 million in a case concerning arms sales to Georgia.
Why did Netanyahu appoint as his hostage tsar a general who had already blundered one high-profile abduction affair, failed to protect his soldiers and had been indicted for corruption?
Unsurprisingly, the families of the hostages concluded that, in the view of the Netanyahu government, the fate of the hostages was secondary to the pretext of October 7 for a massive ground assault. The realization led to bitter and divisive mass demonstrations against the government and for the release of the hostages that prevailed until recently.
If the hostage families and many ordinary Israelis despised the government that seemed to ignore the fate of the abducted, they found it even harder to digest the idea that their government may have been responsible for the deliberate killing of their loved ones. Just days after October 7, early reports and interviews suggested that the IDF had detailed prior knowledge of the Hamas offensive three long weeks beforehand, based on information from military intelligence’s Unit 8200. Highlighting the extent to which the IDF’s Gaza Division was aware of a potential attack on Israel’s southern border communities, the document, which was ignored by senior officials, detailed a series of exercises conducted by Hamas’ elite Nukhba units in the weeks prior to its publication. One of the most shocking sections of the IDF report featured instructions relating to the taking of hostages, the number of which was estimated to be between 200–250, coming close to the actual 251 captives.
Does this enumeration in the report reflect extraordinary foresight? Or does it – since its findings were blatantly ignored prior to October 7 – illustrate a deliberate intention to allow a certain extent of devastation, in order to permit a transformational event that would legitimize a broad-scale invasion and, ultimately, a war of obliteration? Such considerations, of course, have been quickly torpedoed as “conspiracy theories.” However, as long as credible investigations are deferred or suppressed in advance, legitimate concerns prevail on the causes of devastation on October 7.
And then, there was the odd issue of the Israeli communities surrounding the Gaza Strip, which had been regarded as “strategic” since the creation of Israel in 1948. Why had they been ignored as if they were “non-strategic” for several years?
Neglected Israeli communities
When Israel was established, its founding fathers considered its border areas strategic. Adjacent to the Gaza Strip, these are the populated areas in Israel’s Southern District located within 7 km of the border and thus within the range of mortar shells and Qassam rockets. If these areas were strategic to national security, why were they so vulnerable on October 7? It is one thing that Israeli intelligence ignored over a year of warnings about the ability and willingness of Hamas to launch a major offensive. But it is another that the security of the surrounding Israeli border areas was effectively downplayed.
Some of these settlements were created at the eve of the 1948 Arab Israeli War, including Sa’ad and Nirim, the two kibbutzim. The bigger ones were established soon after the 1949 Armistice Agreement, including Sderot, a development town for Mizrahi immigrants – that is, the Jews from the Middle East – and the military Nahal Oz, designed to become a civilian settlement and serve as a first line of defense against possible Arab incursions. In the early days of the Israeli state, many new arrivals from the Arab countries found themselves treated as “more primitive” second-class citizens by the predominantly European-born Ashkenazi-Jewish elite. These subtle and not-so-subtle ethnic differences, compounded by visible “white” and “non-white” distinctions, continue to haunt the Israeli civil society. Yet, the Mizrahi Jews near Gaza faced additional challenges, and there were many Ashkenazis in these communities as well.
Many of these localities were neglected, while some, particularly the immigrant development towns, felt shunned by their government. When Israel occupied the Gaza Strip in 1967, border threats diminished until the First Intifada in the late 1980s and the rise of Hamas. Following Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005, cross-border shelling and rocket attacks into Israel increased accordingly. To protect these areas, which now became known as the Gaza Envelope, the Israeli parliament Knesset enacted a law to assist the “confrontation-line communities.” But when these measures expired in 2014 – a decade before October 7 – the district command of the IDF cut the associated budgets. This enraged many of the communities. After all, the 2014 Gaza War had caused a substantial adverse impact on the proximate settlements, due to rocket and mortar attacks, tunnels, intrusions, even incendiary kites. The war was followed by another wave of violence in 2018. And on October 7, many communities in the Gaza Envelope were infiltrated, with hundreds of Israelis butchered and kidnapped.
Instead of protecting its citizens, Israel had retreated from its traditional security obligations to the adjacent Israeli communities. As evidenced by the national budget for the Gaza Envelope localities in 2014–2024, these communities were, as critics said, “slated for abandonment following the November 2022 elections.” In effect, the per capita budgets approved for the years 2023-2024 were almost a third lower than that of 2022.
So, well before October 7, the strategic needs of the Gaza Envelope of adjacent Israeli communities were effectively neglected by the government. However, the huge military border barrier prevailed. Between 2017 and 2021, to counter the many tunnels Palestinians dug for infiltration, Israel also constructed an underground border wall, equipped with sensors several meters in depth along the entire border. In Israel, the high-tech security barriers were portrayed as impenetrable. And yet, the IDF was tricked by Hamas’s messaging, over-relied on a remote-controlled surveillance systems and weapons that were swiftly disabled by drones and snipers, enabling its infiltration and onslaught. Furthermore, the builder of the barrier had warned already in 2018 that it absolutely required a military presence. It was not designed to prevent mass assault on its own.
Unsurprisingly, the Hamas offensive caused a full breakdown in trust between the Israeli localities and their state, with residents reluctant to return to homes until security was fully ensured. As regional escalation spread to northern Israel, it shared the Gaza Envelope’s challenges, facing the rockets of the Hezbollah. By summer 2024, local leaders were warning the Netanyahu cabinet they planned to leave if the situation wouldn’t improve. “Where is the government?” asked the chief of the regional council, Moshe Davidovitch. “Even a banana republic does not work like this,” he added. “The government is destroying the North.”
Convenient narratives and inconvenient truths
By May 2024, new evidence indicated that Israel’s intelligence failure was the net effect of a “chain of failures” that pervaded the entire security sector, both in the Shin Bet and the IDF. The common denominator was the fallacy that Hamas was only able of firing long-range rockets against Israel. Whatever did not fit this theory was rejected. So, the warnings of the IDF female spotters were systematically ignored. What they saw as an impending mass attack intelligence officers dismissed as “routine Hamas training.”
Second, after the Gaza war in 2021, it was decided to cease intelligence-gathering on Hamas’ tactical array and the intermediate ranks of its military arm, to focus only on few individuals. Opposing views to this intelligence concept were marginalized. These failures were coupled with a sense of disdain in the intelligence culture, which viewed the border fence, together with the underground border barrier between Israel and Gaza, as denying Hamas the possibility of invading Israel. The “Iron Wall” was considered impenetrable; for all the wrong reasons. In effect, Hamas operatives breached the border barrier at 44 different points.
Consequently, the so-called intelligence failure on October 7 can be attributed primarily to the rejection of external warnings, denial of internal evidence, suppression of tactical intelligence, autocratic culture, and inflated perception of the effectiveness of the separation barriers. The ongoing investigation of the military is likely to stress similar factors. But was that the full story or a part of the story? In effect, what was the story?
In the early conventional narrative, “intelligence failure” was framed as the prime narrative. But the thesis is hard to argue when tactical intelligence was delivered exceptionally well, despite reduced resources, and it outlined the threats in detail well before the attack, including the almost exact number anticipated to be abducted. There are too many anomalies and happy coincidences in the current narratives. So, if “intelligence failure” is not the story, what is? This leaves open the question, was the “neglect of intelligence evidence” just unprofessional conduct?
In the United States, September 11, 2001, provided the kind of catastrophic and catalyzing event – like “a new Pearl Harbor” – that the leading neoconservatives, gathered around the Project for the New American Century in 2000, envisioned as critical to achieve massive rearmament in America. Subsequently, it served as a flawed pretext for the war against Iraq and global war on terror. Netanyahu was well aware of this neoconservative Project; he funded some of its pioneers. The rise of neoconservatism in the U.S. went hand in hand with the emergence of Netanyahu’s Likud in Israel. It resulted in a neoconservative policy document, A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, described as “a kind of U.S.-Israeli neoconservative manifesto.”
In Israel, the Hamas offensive was immediately followed by a coordinated nationwide outcry that “October 7 is our September 11” by PM Netanyahu, who had built his rise to power in the 1990s in cooperation with the very same U.S. neoconservatives, as well as the rise of Hamas at the expense of the Palestinian Authority, which his policies had tacitly supported for years. With October 7, he used the Hamas offensive to legitimize the subsequent ground assault and genocidal atrocities, which many in his war cabinet hoped would result in ethnic expulsions that would open Gaza for Jewish resettlement. Meanwhile, his Messianic far-right cabinet partners used the fog of war to disguise their ongoing (and largely successful) effort at the effective annexation of the West Bank to Israel proper.
The point is not to argue that one or another of these narratives is conclusive. Too much evidence is still missing. The point is that the current “facts” feature many anomalies that conventional wisdom shuns, but alternate narratives can explain. Conventional wisdom may be convenient, but it is seldom either persuasive or final.
Source: AntiWar.
