The IDF’s 10/07 Probe - with Amos Harel & Nadav Eyal
On Thursday, the IDF released the scathing findings of its probe into the military failures that led up to and accompanied the massacre of October 7, 2023.
According to those findings, the military vastly underestimated Hamas’s capabilities, misread its intentions, and failed to mount an effective response to the mass invasion of Israel’s borders. The IDF’s probe into its own failures reveals both the extent to which warnings went ignored, and the extent to which so many communities in Southern Israel were forced to fend for themselves.
While some of these findings come as no surprise, they are still shocking and devastating to process. We spoke with two of Israel’s leading national security journalists to walk through the key points of the findings.
Amos Harel is the Defense Analyst at Haaretz, and Nadav Eyal is a Senior Political Analyst at Yediot Achronot.
Full Transcript
DISCLAIMER: THIS TRANSCRIPT HAS BEEN CREATED USING AI TECHNOLOGY AND MAY NOT REFLECT 100% ACCURACY.
NE: Where are Israel's agents in Gaza that pick up the phone at 3:00 AM and just send the digits one through their mobile phone to someone, and that means that their Hamas operative living at the house next to them, their neighbor left his house at 3:00 AM. You know, Israel should have had 5,000 of those. It should have had 10,000 warning lights. This is not Pearl Harbor. Where is the Japanese fleet? It's lost in the Pacific Ocean. This investigation is only the beginning. Everything needs to change and everyone needs to lose their jobs, right? This is the sentiment in Israel.
DS: It's 4:00 PM on Saturday, March 1st, here in New York City. It's 11:00 PM on Saturday, March 1st in Israel, as Israelis have come out of Shabbat and are getting ready to transition to a new week. On Thursday of this past week, the Israeli Defense forces released the findings of its highest level investigation into the military failures, both in the lead up to the Hamas terror attack on October 7th, 2023, and on the day of the assault itself. Now, during this conversation, I'm gonna refer to this IDF investigation as, the investigation, or the IDF investigation. In reality, it was cumulatively 80, 8-0 different investigations. About 40 of the investigations are of actual battles that occurred. And then the other half are a series of investigations about various issues that contributed to the events of October 7th. So in this conversation, we're just gonna refer to it as the investigation to represent the entirety of the 80 investigations. On October 7th, 2023, according to these findings, approximately 5,000 terrorists led by Hamas stormed into Southern Israel from the Gaza Strip, launching a brutal and unprecedented massacre, which claimed the lives of some 1,200 Israelis, with another 251 people taken hostage, and much of the area in southern Israel devastated. According to the IDFs own investigation, the military struggled to mount an effective response, with bases near the border swiftly overrun, and the chain of command severely disrupted amidst the chaos. Now, there has been a lot of press attention, understandably, over the last few days on the Bibas family, and also in the US and Washington on the Rush Ukraine War and President Zelensky visit to Washington. And so this IDF investigation has actually gotten very little attention, but we here at Call me Back think it deserves more attention. And so to help us unpack these findings are military and defense analyst for the Haaretz newspaper, Amos Harel, and senior political analyst for Yedioth Ahronoth, Nadav Eyal. Amos, Nadav, welcome back. Thanks for being here.
AH: Thank you.
NE: Thanks for having us.
DS: There's a lot to get into, and I want to start with the events of the night between October 6th and October 7th, and then we'll continue with the tragic events of the day. And finally, I want to look back at the broader failure and the misconception that led to what seems like a willful blindness that ultimately cost the lives of so many Israelis. But I just want to go back in terms of what the report says about the night between October 6th and October 7th. Amos, can you walk us through those events again from this military investigation?
AH: Somewhere between 10 to 11:00 PM on October 6th, Israel began identifying all kinds of signs. Intelligence signals, if you'd like, from the Hamas side in Gaza. The most significant of those is the fact that dozens of, uh, Hamas terrorists, uh, began using Israeli sim cards on their mobiles. Mostly, this is probably meant to be used while there is an attack in order to record and broadcast, uh, messages from what was going on later on the Israeli side of, uh, of the fence, uh, this is a tactic they've used in the past, and the Israeli Shin Bet found a way to identify those cell phones once the sim cards are inserted. So this was a warning sign, yet, Hamas has done this before, sometimes for, uh, military exercises. Later on, there were all kinds of other signs, and not all of these are permitted to be discussed by Israeli censorship, but there were all kinds of signs either that senior Hamas members, uh, were moving to other places, or that some of Hamas', uh, different units were put on high alert. Because of that, the idea of Southern Command and the Shin Bet Southern Command were both involved following this carefully, there were all kinds of theories about what this meant. Gradually, people higher and higher among the military brass, uh, were involved. I think the chief of staff, Herzi Halevi, was probably woken up somewhere between 3 and 4:00 AM and told about this. There were quite a few discussions in Shin Bet, separately in the IDF separately and some joint discussions, most of them by phone, where there were all kinds of explanations presented for this. All of the intelligence branches were all practically saying the same thing, that this may be somewhat significant, but this isn't immediate. The intelligence uses a specific term for the immediate time frame, and this has not been used this time. So the discussions were mostly about A, what does this mean, and B, what to do about it, of course. But the problem was that both the IDF and Shin Bet wanted to keep the fact that they knew it as a secret from the enemy. The, the fear was that if this in fact was an exercise and if Hamas figured that our forces were put on high alert, then Hamas would know that we have a method of following the insertion of the, uh, SIM cards. And the final decision, which is of course tragic-
DS: Hold on, Amos, before you get to that, the Israelis didn't want Hamas to know that they were onto something that was happening. How did they think that Hamas could learn that Israel knew something was happening?
AH: Okay. This is a concept called read and burn. Uh, this is how they call it, meaning that if you do something like this and you follow intelligence sources on the other side through your sensors, you do everything you can to hide the system you have been using. Because for instance, if you put the Golani Brigade units on the border on higher alert and they start moving their Jeeps at night, uh, in places they're not used to be, the enemy would know that and then Hamas would figure that it has been discovered. Now all of this discussion is based upon the assumption that this is in fact an exercise and not a real thing. Because if they knew that this was an actual attack, nobody would've cared about those, uh, sources being, uh, burned, so to speak. Anyway, the decision made by Halevi at around, I think close to 5:00 AM was, let's wait and see. Let's reconvene on 8:00 or 8:30 in the morning.
DS: For our listeners, I just wanna make sure people know who we're talking about. So, Hertzi Halevi, who's the IDF Chief of Staff at the time, he's notified in the, it sounds so what time? Around 3:00 or 4:00 AM?
AH: Closer to 4:00.
DS: And he makes what decision?
AH: After a lot of discussions with both people under him in the IDF, some in the Southern commands, some in the headquarters, and some discussions with Shin Bet, there are all kinds of, not very serious steps taken. Some acts of caution, but nothing very serious or out of the ordinary. That's, uh, one decision. And the second decision is to wait for more information, which is again, quite typical, I think, to Israeli, uh, thinking. Um, if you want more information, you assume that you have the upper hand on the enemy, you assume that time is on your side and if you'll wait a little bit longer than you, perhaps you can, you know, achieve a better decision under the circumstances. Now, nobody involved in those conversations figured that, in fact, within an hour and a half, as you said, more than 5,000 terrorists would be crossing the Gaza border and would be inside Israeli communities and beginning to slaughter civilians by 7:00. So they waited and they decided to speak again at 8:00 or, I think it was 8:30, if I'm not mistaken, Nadav. This was the decision made. Once 6:29 AM, the attack began by Hamas, launching thousands of rockets within a few hours, and then crossing the border. It was like they call it, Tufan Al-Aqsa, which in Arabic is the flood of Jerusalem, of the flood of the Temple Mount. The name is quite symbolic. This is exactly what happened. It's like a tsunami that broke through the Gaza dam and moved forward while the idea of forces were not on high alert. And while there was no kind of prior notice given to the forces that something, uh, serious is going on. So you have this combination of, on the one hand, total surprise and we'll get to that later, but it is an Israeli misconception, a total misconception about Hamas', uh, plans and intentions. And then you have the forces themselves, not only outnumbered, because we now know that there were only 717 combat soldiers. So this is a ratio of one to seven or one to eight.
DS: 770 in the south.
AH: Yeah, deployed along the Gaza border. If you have 770 well-trained soldiers and on the other side you have somewhere between 5,000-5,600 Hamas terrorists, and you do the math, it's very, very hard to defend under these circumstances, especially if this is a full scale surprise, if you have no preparations in advance to fight this attack.
DS: And before I bring Nadav in, I just wanna ask you, how much of a factor was that this happened on Shabbat and it was a holiday.
AH: Okay, this is tragic. But Israel, for years and years somehow assumes that our enemies respect the Shabbat as well. Well, if you go back to the history, this is exactly what happened on Yom Kippur, which was also a Shabbat day, a Saturday. So the always, the assumption is that you can keep a smaller force there on the weekends and especially on the high holidays and something that we only realized even myself, you know, covering that area and those specifics for years and years and years. I never realized that a few years back, the IDF has changed its home method of sending soldiers on vacation. It has to do with the days. You're supposed to serve, you used to serve seventeen days on the border and go home for vacation for four days. They changed the ratio to elevn to three, meaning that soldiers could go back to their families on weekends. But of course, what this leads to is that you only have 50% of the force on each weekend because half of the unit is at home and half is waiting for the next weekend. So the number, instead of having close to 70% of the force, you only have 50%, and that's on top of the army’s underestimating the capabilities on the Hamas side, thinking that Gaza was not the most important frontier. That Hezbollah in Lebanon and the situation in the West Bank came first, and that even on regular days, he only had four battalions deployed to the Gaza border.
DS: Okay. Nadav, first of all, anything to add to that?
NE: Yeah, first of all, I need to say that there was some sort of a commotion within the IDF senior ranks during the night. So this was not some sort of a sleepy kind of discussion when, you know, the chief of staff is probably woken, you know, several times a month on average because of security developments. But this time it was different. For instance, the general responsible for the Southern Command, Yaron Finkelman decided to cut short his vacation, which was up north, and he headed back to the Southern command at 3:00 AM or even before 3:00 AM. The regiment commanders across the Southern command were notified of this, you know, development. The entire Southern command went through a situation assessment, which is a very, you know, formal process in the IDF situation assessment. It's not just bringing people online, but also preparing for that. You had Hertzi Halevi, and this is something that we now know for a fact. When he was woken at night, he said to the person calling him, look, it's an update, but you, I'm already awake, so let's have a conversation in 15 minutes from now. He went to his study and he wrote on a piece of paper some points to himself preparing himself for an informal situation assessment that was about to happen in 15 minutes, and the headline of this paper, now we know and it's part of the investigation of the IDF is, first of all, do not assume this is nothing. This is the first thing that the IDF Chief is writing to himself at about 3:30 AM. First of all, don't assume that this is nothing, but the reason that he didn't connect the dots is as Amos just said, that the entire conversation with within the IDF is under a presumption that this is not immediate, that this is something that might be developing to next week or further down the week. And the commander of the Southern Command, the general responsible for the Southern Command, Finkelman, asks his intelligence officers, his high ranking intelligence officers, what is happening with the Nukhba? The elite force of the Hamas that's gonna invade Israel. It's gonna lead the charge. And they say they are in the routine. There's nothing unusual and they are in routine. And it's such a damning answer, because if you hear this across the IDF that Hamas is just in a routine process, nothing extraordinary is happening. Although we are getting the signals that we can't explain, but no one is moving, then you can understand a lot about the decisions made by, by the IDF that night that were, of course, in retrospect, a mistake. But then the question always, when you have these investigations, and this is the question Dan. Is this a mistake that knowing what they knew at the time, not 2020, you know, hindsight, but at the time, could they’ve made a different decision at the time. Should they have done something differently?
DS: Okay.
NE: And that's the difference between a mistake and something that's much more than a mistake, than being sloppy. You know, this is also a matter of fault. When you look at this just from an army perspective, so when I speak sometimes with former chiefs of staff, Amos speaks with those people more than I do. They're saying, if I would've heard that, I would've put the entire Southern command on alert. But this is, again, very much in hindsight and there's always, you know, political rivalries between former generals. I don't know. I don't want to be the judge of that. I can say that the decisions by the IDF Chiefs at the time that were, for instance, to order the Air Force to take flights over the Gaza Strip and see if actually they're opening and preparing to launch rockets to Israel, the decision to have more unmanned Air Force vehicles across the Gaza Strip, the decision to notify the regiment commanders, although not to put it on high alert, the feeling that if they do that, they must risk sources and there's no reason to do it because it's a read and burn kind of situation, and it's not immediate. All of this could give some sort of an argument that it was reasonable to act the way that they did. But the problem, and that is the conclusion of some of the investigation, is that it was so horrendous, the mistake for so many years, you cannot correct in three hours during the night. Again, I'm not saying that this is the truth of the matter, but I'm saying that this is the argument for the defense of the decisions they made, and I'm not saying I accept everything they're saying in that sense.
DS: Nadav, I want to come back to you in a moment about what happened at the IDF base at Nahal Oz, which you wrote about, but before I do, we're gonna be throwing around a lot of language here, a lot of nomenclature about different army divisions and different regimens and different intelligence units and intelligence agencies. Can you just do a quick summary of what the different entities are that feature most prominently in this report, that you guys would be referring to?
AH: Not too many, but there's the, of course, the IDFs headquarters led by Hertzi Halevi, who's the chief of staff. That's in Tel Aviv. You have the Southern Command in Ber Sheva, uh, led by Yaron Finkleman, the general.
DS: That's the commander of all forces deployed in Southern Israel, and then therefore deal with what's on the other side of the southern border.
AH: Which includes the Gaza Strip.
DS: Right.
AH: Then you have specifically the Gaza Division, which is, uh, one layer, uh, under the Southern command, laid by a brigadier general Avi Rosenfeld, who's, uh, resigned since then. You also have military intelligence. General Al Khalifa resigned as well.
DS: Okay, so military intelligence, again, just distinct from the Shin Bet. Distinct from the Mossad is the Israeli military, the IDFs own intelligence body.
AH: Intelligence branch.
DS: Okay.
AH: An important one, a very massive organization by Israeli standards. And again, it's in the Kirya in Tel Aviv. The leadership is there.
DS: Okay.
AH: And then you have Shin Bet, which is an entirely different, uh, organization, our domestic security agency. Somewhat similar to the FBI.
AH: Yeah, yeah. MI-5 would be the best comparison.
DS: And the reason the Shin Bet is important is because it has intelligence jurisdiction for Gaza.
AH: It should also have, uh, human agents there.
DS: That what I mean, yeah.
AH: Right. And then where does the Mossad fit into this?
AH: Mossad hardly does, it doesn't have a direct involvement in Hamas or Gaza. It's not part of the picture during that night, and yet it's part of the intelligence community. And of course, it follows both Iran and Hezbollah, which are part of the axis, the Iranian axis. So discussions between, uh, Hamas and Iran and Hezbollah, part of this is the Mossad's, uh, responsibility.
DS: Okay. So Nadav, as I mentioned, you wrote extensively about what happened on the IDF base at Nahal Oz. So walk us through from your reporting and based on this investigation, what happened there that day?
NE: So, first of all, I wanna say that this is not my own investigation. These are the details of the report of the IDF according to its own investigation. I did not investigate this independently. I think that the IDF investigation was quite thorough, and I'm saying this after speaking also with independent sources. The story of the battle at Nahal OZ is probably the most difficult battle that the IDF has ever had in terms of the results, in terms of the military failure and the tragedy and the type of failures that were exposed in Nahal Oz. The failures are multifold. They begin with the decision to place an army base that was actually defined as an outpost. So when you define in the Israeli army something as an outpost, it means a different build, but they called it an outpost. In actuality, it was just a regular base that they placed 800 meters, much less than a mile, half a mile from the Gaza border. And in actuality, it was the headquarters of one of the battalions, one of the important battalions of Golani Battalion 13 that was holding the entire section. But there were a lot of, uh, soldiers there that were not trained as fighters to begin with. They were trained to use a rifle if they need to, but they were not trained as fighters. At the morning you had about 160 soldiers there, many of which are not fighting soldiers, uh, the time of the attack, and this is part of the entire tragedy and failure of the IDF. The time of the attack is a classic time in which in the IDF, it's called “dawn alertness”, I'm translating from Hebrew. It's the alertness at about 6:30 AM you know, forces that are inside outposts and bases. Some of them are supposed to be outside of the base awaiting a possible attack, and the base itself is, should be, most of the fighting force should be awake at 6:30 alertness. And this was part of, you know, the tragedy because basically classically the time in which Hamas attacked is exactly the time of the day in which you should be prepared for an attack according to the classic IDF doctrine. Now, the fact that they placed the base there was only the beginning of the failure because they were assuming that the Israeli separation between Gaza and Israel, the element that was built, it's a military element that was built to prevent both underneath tunnels and crossing from above.
DS: So just to be clear, you mean basically the security barrier, the fence.
NE: Yeah.
DS: That's above ground and beneath the ground to try to prevent tunnel attacks.
NE: It's one of Israel's biggest projects in the recent 10 years. You know, I met a Golani regiment battalion commander 36 hours after October 7th. I went down south. He actually cursed that barrier. He said if we didn't have this barrier to begin with, we wouldn't have had this false security that led us to failure. And, but also if you look at the situation room in the base, this is where you know, if there's an attack on the base, there's an infiltration in the base. You need this to keep on working because it has, you know, the communication with the outside world and everything else. They didn't have the proper doors. They didn't have the proper ceiling, they didn't have the proper elements that you would need for a possible attack of an outpost. It was like a regular base. And just as an example, there was only one guard at the entrance of the gate when the attack began at 6:30 AM. Now I'm saying only one guard, in a matter of minutes there were already three and more, and this was, as Amos said, it was a flood. And one of the things that Hamas understood according to the investigation is that if they come to the base and they manage to cross from the border with Gaza and get to the gates of that base, in a matter of about 15 minutes, the base will be taken. Because the IDF won't have enough time to prepare and they, they studied the routine in the base very carefully. And they didn't do that because they had a spy over there. They did that because they were just watching people coming in and out of the base for years and they learned the IDF routine.
DS: And Nadav just, this kind of blew me away. Because I read about the, the Hamas monitoring of the comings and goings of the base. So they just literally just, did it from where? Just stood near the border with the binoculars and just watched?
NE: I'm not sure that in this area, but in certain areas on the Gaza border, they built, you know, watchtowers.
DS: Got it. Okay.
NE: I'm not sure about this base specifically in Nahal Oz. And then you saw that there was an assault at the base, uh, you have about 160 soldiers there. There is an assault of several waves. The first wave is more than 150 that is crossing, and you see that everything goes wrong almost immediately, the battalion vice commander runs and engages immediately with the Hamas terrorists. He got shot in the head and severely wounded. And then from that moment, the entire command chain is actually gone, and all forces are operating actually alone. And a lot of these forces are operating in an extreme brave manner, and sometimes doing things that are, I'll give you one example. The person writing this investigation has recommended two people to receive Israel's medal of bravery. I'm translating as I go along. In Israel, medals are very rare, unlike in other countries. Receiving a medal in Israel for distinction is extremely rare in the Israeli defense forces. They don't hand out medals, you know, for every person, for instance, that was wounded in action. Okay? And this person was a company commander. Shilo Ha’evan. At a certain point, he was actually caught outside of the base. He became actually the senior commander that was trying to manage this battle against severe odds, and at a certain point, he's left with six soldiers, including himself. And because everything is photographed, everything is videoed, and to the extent that the IDF has the pulse meter of the fighters, and it has also the Hamas media that was broadcasting from there. So they, they looked at everything and they know that he manages to have a motivation conversation with these soldiers. And he plans their assault on the base, trying to take the base back after it was taken by Hamas. And they charge the base six soldiers. They don't know that at any given moment there are about a hundred Hama terrorists inside and they're all killed at the gate, basically at the gates of that. And this is just one example and when we go to the failures, uh, different elements of this battle, but this is just example of, uh, you know, you have the spotters there and this is the most terrifying, the most terrible story for the Israeli public. This is the place from which the spotters were taken hostage.
DS: The four young women.
AH: Actually seven.
NE: Yeah. Seven.
DS: Seven taken hostage?
AH: Seven taken.
NE: Five returned.
DS: Okay.
NE: One of them, Orima Giddish was returned in a Shin Bet operation at the beginning of the war. Another one, Noah Murciano was murdered by Hamas.
DS: But the four women, I'm saying that were were turned in this hostage deal, they're of that group.
NE: Yes. But the Hamas terrorists killed a larger group of the spotters-
DS: On the day of. Yeah.
NE: And it was terrible scenes in which they are hiding in a shelter, a makeshift shelter that is usually used, you know, if there is a mortar attack against the base, and Hamas terrorists and it's all on video, enter that shelter and they throw grenades into that shelter. And there is one of the officers there of a different unit, a Edan Niri, and she's fighting the Hamas terrorists and she's fighting them to the death. They're trying to take her rifle away. And at the meantime, some of the spotters managed to run away to the residence where they sleep. And some of the Hamas terrorists are running after these female spotters. And then an IDF unmanned drone sees what's happening in the base and decides. To shoot, although he doesn't really understand, the handler doesn't really understand what is happening, and he shoots ammunition at the Hamas terrorist. And until the finalization of this investigation, he didn't know that because he shot that ammunition. The Hamas terrorists ran away and some of these spotters managed to survive. But most of the stories are terrible. And the story is that out of about 160 soldiers, 53 were killed by Hamas. And many of them didn't have the opportunity to fight to begin with because they were not fighting soldiers. And the most terrible scene, and I, I'm trying to sort of shorten this tragedy, was at the situation room of the base, because it is there that the spotters are sitting and really in such an impressive and military professional way, they report the fence has been breached. And they use the code names and they don't lose their temper, and they're reporting and they see that the barrier has been breached and the terrorists are making their way and they report immediately and they keep their positions knowing, and we know now for a fact they knew that the terrorists are on the way to them and they know what's gonna happen to them. And they keep on reporting sitting in the situation room. And then the tourists come to there and they are joined by a man called Ibrahim Haruba, who's uh, the senior tracker. He's a sergeant. He's a first sergeant. So he's much older than the other people there, right. And you have the spotters and some of the officers that are not combat hiding in a room in the headquarters and just in front of the door for hours. You have two junior officers of Golani, another fighter soldier of Golani and Ibrahim Haruba, that tracker, who are conducting a firefight against the Hamas terrorists who are basically trying to break in. And they are fighting almost to the last bullet. At a certain point, Ibrahim Haruba turns to the spotters and turns to his comrades there and says, it has been the honor of my life to serve with you and to serve my country, and to serve Israel. And then the Hamas terrorists throw something to set the place on fire. It does. There's a lot of smoke. Three of those four fighters die there. Ibrahim Haruba’s body is found by the door. There's a lot of black smoke inside. Some of the officers there managed to break out of the room. They break through a window at the restroom and they managed to get out with one of the spotters with them, another soldier and a few officers of the battalion that are non-combat officers. But the rest of the spotters are left behind and they died of smoke inhalation and places burn down. And some of the families are extremely angry at the fact that the officers managed to break out and their daughters remain there behind. They are 19, 20-year-old soldiers. And the IDF investigation to that point, that is extremely, extremely delicate says basically, we're not gonna judge them. We're not gonna judge their activity at that moment, but it is the principle of the IDF that officers should leave last. This is what it says, by the way, these investigations, there is no punishment there. This is not the legal military system, right. The entire idea of the IDF investigations is always to tell the truth and you are defended against, you know, legal actions because we wanna learn and study from it. I'm, I'm sorry. I know it was a-
DS: No no, no. It's important. It's important.
NE: It was, it was a big speech.
DS: Yeah. That was a big speech.
NE: Yeah. I, but I wanna say about this, that this is, after I said all the bravery acts and everything else, this thing was the most terrible failure of a battle that the IDF has probably ever had because it was so multifold and over years, the failure. And also because there was a fighting force at that base, and it was just overrun. It was, uh, held in specific quarters. Again, the IDF investigation says, we're not gonna judge, you know, soldiers that were put into this, that they didn't have a chain of command anymore, and they were fighting, they were killing terrorists. It was an impossible situation that these young soldiers were put in.
DS: Amos, any reaction to this?
AH: Yeah. Two brief notes. Uh, one, regarding discipline. It's true that no disciplinary steps have been taken against rank and file soldiers, junior officers, and so on, but Hertzi Halevi who will, uh, resign next week, has already announced that he's going to resign.
DS: I mean, he steps down. He's already announced his resignation. Yeah
AH:. So he's going to, uh, give his successor Eyal Zamir a list of, uh, senior officers, which he thinks that step should be taken regarding the rest of their military, uh, career. I don't think this would be published or official. I assume Zamir has his own opinions about the performance of these offices, but they are going to talk about it and there is going to be some kind of a document passed from one chief of staff to another regarding that. Now, one final word about the, the battle in, uh, Nahal Oz. I asked one of the senior generals in the IDF what image remains for him from October 7th and he said one image above all. And this is from Nahal Oz. He says, uh, there was a body there of a Golani fighter with only his underwear and a protective vest. And he said, I can't get over the fact that we didn't give him the dignity of being able to dress. He didn't have 30 or 60 seconds to dress before he started fighting because we were not alert enough to what was going on on the other side.
DS: Hmm. Amos, the story of Israeli intelligence, specifically her military intelligence, you know, it's one of the most colossal failures of this. What did the finding, the probe, reveal that we didn't already know regarding Israeli intelligence?
AH: I think this put it more into context than anything else. There are many similarities with our earlier disaster of, uh, October 6th, uh, ‘73. And also to some extent with Pearl Harbor and, uh, 9/11 as well. A lot of this has to do with a misunderstanding the enemy and underestimating enemy's intentions and, uh, capabilities. I think, again, I'm, I'm generalizing again, simplifying of course, but I think that most of Israel's intelligence community fought of Hamas as the lesser enemy, as a bunch of barefooted goons with, uh, AK-47s were not capable of doing any serious damage. We worried about Hezbollah, we worried about Iran. We kept preparing for a possible strike at Iran and so on, and Hamas was a lesser deal. And even when there were growing signs that Hamas is in fact changing its position and that Hamas believes that it's possible to hit Israel, do a sort of an, AL-Aqsa flood, a tsunami, and actually invade the Gaza division because this is what happened. Hamas managed to occupy and invade for a few hours, the Gaza Division and the communities, uh, which are part of it, even when the writing was on the wall, so to speak. Uh, when the Hamas' operational plans, what is called, uh, the Wall of Jericho, were stolen by Israeli intelligence, we refuse to believe that this is serious. But the same kind of thinking, oh, there are Palestinians, we're not capable of doing something like this. The most that can happen is an incursion. There were more than a hundred border crossings that morning. And this is, uh, the, the end result. Of course, if you underestimate your enemy, if you are ill prepared for the challenge, you get hit very badly.
DS: Wasn't part of it though, that there was this concept that Hamas was much more practical in terms of its desire to improve the quality of life for Palestinians and Gaza, and it wasn't looking to trigger some war that could, you know, result in flattening of Gaza, that they were just trying to kind of keep the status quo intact of what had been. Yes, there are military skirmishes between the IDF and Hamas numerous times going all the way back to 2005 when Israel pulled out of Gaza, but basically that as long as Hamas could keep doing what it was doing since it took over from Gaza, it was fine and didn't have grand ambitions.
AH: Okay, so this is where the intelligence community meets the politicians. Mostly Netanyahu, because he was in power since 2009, except for a brief time, the Bennet-Lapid government in ‘21 and ‘22. But this was shared, there was almost a consensus there. It starts with the politicians, this whole approach of, uh, divide and conquer between the Palestinian authority and the West Bank and Hamas and Gaza. At some point, Netanyahu began talking, and people like Smotritch began talking of Hamas as an asset to Israel in fact. There was talk that Hamas was not really a strong enemy, and as long as Hamas maintained control of the Gaza Strip, Israel had an excuse not to deal with the Palestinian authority in the West Bank. On top of this came the Qatari money later on. So this is, if you'd like the context. And much of this lays in the hands of the political, uh-
DS: But wasn't Hamas, my understanding is that Hamas was sending messages to the Israeli government that it was looking for calm.
AH: Every now and then. And here comes the intelligence part, the intelligence fiasco, which is that most of the intelligence community, most of the time believed that yes, Hamas was torn between its mulqawama, uh, resistance ideology to Israel and its daily, uh, everyday responsibilities, to the wellbeing of 2.2 million residents of Gaza. Now, what we know in retrospect is of course, that they didn't care about them at all. Uh, that the, the proof is in the pudding. We saw what happened later on, and Sinwar knew that this would be the outcome of Hamas' attack, that the Palestinian people would pay a high price for that. But what the generals and the intelligence analysts kept telling themselves and kept telling the politicians what the politicians love to hear was that, you know, we could contain the challenge. Even when Hamas provoked us, it did so as a sort of a lip service to, uh, its, uh, hard line ideology. But in the end, they had to pay the bills as well. We supplied some of the payments through, uh, the Qatari, and that meant that Hamas would maintain the current situation for a long time because it's more interested, again, in, in, in feeding all those hungry mouths in Gaza. And this meant not only the delivery of money, but also later on a decision. That began under Netanyahu, uh, but uh, grew to a much more massive project under Bennett, which was to allow Palestinian workers into Israel. Now, most of these workers, I think at the height of this under Netanyahu, by then it was 18,000 or something like that. There were discussions with Qatar and Hamas of bringing in more, even more Palestinians, and most of these people worked in the border Gaza envelope communities in the kibbutzim and in Sderot, and places like that. And we presume that some of them also collected information intelligence for Hamas, which was used later on for these attacks.
DS; I want to, maybe it's a question for either one of you. There were three periods that are discussed in the report, the end of the Gaza War of 2014, where based on, it sounds like interrogations of Palestinians from Gaza since October 7th, meaning Hamas operatives and combatants that were captured by Israel, interrogations of them, and then plans and other documents that were discovered. It seems that after the Israel-Hamas War of 2014 was a turning point where Hamas decided they were gonna do something big at some point, it wasn't clear that it was gonna be nine years later. The second date I'm interested in is 2018, because I remember in 2018 there were these big protests, these what they called protests, where Gazan Palestinians were going up against the border, so that had some significance here. And then there was May of ‘21 during the operation Guardian of the walls, which was Israel-Hamas kind of short war. I think it was 11 days or something that was significant. So I wanna go through each of these periods. Can you start with 2014? Is that accurate that after the 2014 Israel Hamas war, that's when Hamas leadership began to think about doing something really big like this? I was that long ago?
AH: Uh, yeah, I think so. What happened was, at that time, it was, uh, what was the name of his, uh, pillar of defense, I think was the English translation to that operation. It took 51 days, and like many of those operations, it ended in a sort of a miserable draw again with both Netanyahu and the army claiming victory while Hamas was celebrating its own victory. Now, there was an internal discussion among Hamas leaders, and their conclusion from that small war was that they could have been much more ambitious. That had they insisted on element of surprise, had they managed to surprise Israel, and had they used more ambitious plans, they could have gotten further, uh, achievements against Israel. Then comes 2017, which is the time Sinwar gets elected as the leader of Hamas, uh, in Gaza. Sinwar, of course, is the leader of Hamas during the current war, uh, killed by Israeli forces last October, October ‘24. And Sinwar, once he got the keys to power, he became the more prominent, uh, leader pushing forward with the idea of, uh, going at it against Israel, going full scale against Israel. 2018, there were the border demonstrations at that time.
DS: So Palestinians marching right up to the Israeli border.
AH: Yeah, calling that a march of return. There was one day after Trump decided to move the embassy to Jerusalem. It was the day the embassy was moved, where I think close to 60 Palestinian demonstrators were killed by the IDF. But now we know for sure some of this from documents that were caught during the latest war that actually Sinwar’s plan at the time was to use those demonstrations as a platform for attack inside Israel, sending in elite forces and trying to kidnap Israeli hostages and so on. Then came ‘21, the guardian of the walls.
DS: May ‘21. Yeah.
AH: Yeah. Nine or ten days, ended in, again, in a sort of a draw, Israel, both Netanyahu and chief of staff at that time, uh, Aviv Kohavi, again, very, very sure of themselves. Yes, a marvelous victory for Israel, Hamas learned a lesson. Aron Haliva, who later on became head of military intelligence, even said publicly that he was not afraid of saying that it would, uh, take five years of calm, before Hamas tries anything again. And of course what happened was the exact opposite. What we now know is that ‘21 is the, the point of change. This is the exact moment after guardian of the walls where they realized that they could go for the bigger deal, that they could go for the whole, uh, plan of attack, that Israel could be surprised and that they could even hope for other forces where, whether it's Arab Israelis or Palestinians in the West Bank, or Palestinians in Lebanon to join in. So their plan became much more ambitious. By late ‘21, uh, they came out with the Jericho Walls operation plans. This is of course the, uh, Israeli name for that. Later on it was stolen, and this is the time where we should have figured, uh, that this was serious. By mid ‘22, we had the operational plan of attack. We should have known where they were heading. And in retrospect, what we have now, and this is included in the report, there are many quotes of Hamas leaders in internal discussions saying, yes, we now have the capabilities. The Israelis are not ready for this, and we construct them.
DS: Okay, so Nadav, it's that point. So there's a, in the executive summary of the report, and I'm quoting here, the English translation of the report is, and I'm quoting, “the system of Israeli concepts was deeply rooted. And over the years, no systemic and significant effort had been made to dispute it. And no profound discussion was held on: what if we're wrong?” So, I guess my question is for you, you know, Amos is describing all these things that Israelis are learning over the years, and they have this theory of what's going on in Gaza. They have this theory about what Hamas' intentions are. We can get into a whole debate about how serious Netanyahu and his political lieutenants were about dividing the PA from Hamas and using them both. But I think it's fair to say even the most cynical politician didn't believe Hamas had the ambitions to do what it did on October 7th, you know, when they were making decisions about how to manage Hamas. But I guess we should now know the signs were there, and there was no one in the room, metaphorically speaking to challenge the monolithic conventional thinking. And that to me, strikes me as like so antithetical to how Israelis do things, to how Jews do things. It's like, it's like the, it's antithetical to like, you know, Talmudic debates that there's not, there's not just someone there to challenge for the, even just for the sake of challenging.
NE: Look, we've been spending a lot of months on this podcast describing, Dan, the success of the IDF after a very, very difficult beginning to this war. But at the end, when you read the investigation, you are left with a very worrying impression as to the Israeli army and the Israeli intelligence division in the Israeli army. And the reason is exactly as you pointed out, but it's, it's even more severe than that. I'm teaching a course now about strategic surprises, and so I have to reread, for instance, the 9/11 commission report and the classic books published on Pearl Harbor. 1973, of course, Uri Bar Yosef is probably the world's most renowned historian as to the 1973 Yom Kippur War surprise. This is definitely worse than anything experienced by Israel, but it's worse than 9/11. It's worse than 9/11 because on 911 the White House was notified as to an intent by Bin laden and Al-Qaeda to have a wide range terrorist attack against the United States in the near future, and it came to the executive branch and it's much worse in 1973 because of the year up to 1973, the IDF, the entire IDF was debating whether or not we're gonna go to war. And the mistake of the intelligence branch was that it assessed low or very low probability of war. But at the end of the day, it was very much there. And an example I'm bringing writing this week is from a letter sent by a Lieutenant General in the intelligence division four months ago, and he says there, we have not missed an opportunity to mislead the chiefs of staff, we, the intelligent division during these years. And he says, this is much worse than 1973. I'll just give you one example, Dan, why it's worse, because in 1973, for instance, there was a, the general commander responsible for the Northern Command, a very important person that would be later, probably one of the most successful, if not the most successful head of the Mossad, a man called Yitzhak Hoffi. And he knew about this general discussion. Would there be war? Wouldn't there be war? And he had an intelligence officer. And that intelligence officer of Yithak Hoffi said back in 1973, just before the war, he said, you know what, I, I think that's gonna be something. And then the Israeli general said, you know what? I want another regiment. I don't care. I want another regiment to go to the Golan Heights. And that regiment is regimen seven of the Israeli tanks. This is Avigdor Kahalani, this is the famous story. The, these are the people who stopped the Syrian tanks and to an extent, you know, stopped the Syrian invasion. And why was that? Because there was a discussion, because there was uh, you know, enough collection of evidence here. You know, everybody's talking about the wall of Jericho and about the spotters warning. I didn't mention before. The same spotters that were taken captive their warnings in the South, but these are just small, tiny drops in the bucket. And the truth of the matter is that Israel built a multi-billion dollar intelligence system that was completely blind, not for a year, but for about ten years or seven years. As to the, not only the intentions of the enemy, but also the preparations and the drills of the enemy, not in Hezbollah and Lebanon, not with the Iranians, but on its own backyard in Gaza, less than a hundred miles away from Tel Aviv, an area that Israel occupied for many years. An area in which much of the population will do everything for a hundred dollars a month, uh, which is much more than the average salary. We didn't talk about the Shin Bet’s failure. You know, they used to have agents in Gaza. Where are Israel's agents in Gaza that pick up the phone, uh, 3:00 AM and just send the digit one through their mobile phone to someone, and that means that their Hamas operative living at the house next to them, their neighbor left his house at 3:00 AM? You know, Israel should have had 5,000 of those. It should have had 10,000 warning lights. This is not Pearl Harbor. Where is the Japanese fleet? It's low in the Pacific Ocean. This is not 9/11, in which the executive branch didn't know what to do, when Richard Clarke told them, this is massive, this is gonna happen. They didn't know what to do with that. Right? What should they have done? They didn't know exactly where this is gonna come from. This is a condition in which it blows your mind, and it is so tragic. And it's tragic because of the point that you put, Dan, here. It's because you wrote Startup Nation. That's the reason you're so, you know, sensitive to that point. Within the division branch, there is a code, there is a narrative that says even the corporal, if he thinks that something's wrong, this is because of 1973, he goes all the way, all the way to the commander, the general responsible, and he has the legitimacy to do so. And they enshrined this through the training courses. They might not mean it as we just discovered, but that you should do that. So this kind of group thinking, this kind of heavy movement, the fact that the IDF moved so slowly that morning, whatever they're saying about the surprise seven hours afterwards, you know, for Jewish Israeli mothers to hold the door of their safe room when terrorists are on the, on the other side waiting for the IDF to arrive in Nir Oz, and it never arrived. And this is something that, this investigation is only the beginning and this needs to be treated very carefully because everything needs to change and everyone needs to lose their jobs. Right. This is the sentiment in Israel. The more you learn about this, the more frustrated you become and maybe Amos has a different sensation about this. And he's much more professional in the military. He's by the military, so many years criticizing it, covering it, maybe has a different perspective on it, but for me, as someone who doesn't do it on a daily kind of uh, basis, the stuff I learned during this process was so disheartening to an extent, and together with all these stories of people who were so well intentioned, including that night, were willing to do everything really to put on high alert, to go and sacrifice their own lives, the number of Israeli high senior officers and officers that died during that day. This is not a matter of being people, not being brave enough or willing enough to do everything, including waking up at 3:00 AM. No, this is a different story.
AH: I perfectly agree with, uh, what Nadav has said. Uh, but I think there are, uh, there's a sort of a dissonance between a lot of, uh, what he has described and what you wrote in Startup Nation and other parts or other trends in recent years in the IDFs organizational, uh-
DS: So just for our listeners, when you’re referring to Startup Nation-
AH: Everybody's read that Dan, come on.
DS: Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for that, Amos. One of the reasons the Israeli startup nation, the tech sector has thrived is because there's this culture of challenging authority in debating decisions. And we describe in the book, this is the book that Saul Singer and I wrote in 2009, but we attributed much of the success in the Israeli tech sector to a culture that comes outta the IDF that puts such a premium on heated debate, and again, challenging authority and breaking down hierarchy and being able to challenge superiors and supervisors. And so what you're saying, we just assumed that startup nation culture that originated from the military was still there and it wasn't.
AH: And in a way since history tends to repeat itself, it's a little bit like the gap between ‘67 and ‘73, the same kind of thing. We were so thrilled by our military and intelligence successes, stealing the nuclear archives from Iran and bombing every other convoy we wanted to do to, to hit in Syria and all those, uh, um, cyber attacks in Iran and other places that we forgot about our, uh, backyard. And part of this has to do, I think, with a culture that has changed in which it was dangerous for a junior officer to come out publicly against what the top brass was, assuming in which there was a system of gaslighting regarding junior officers. Uh, the same kind of treatment the spotters received once they warned about certain movements around the border also happened at around desks and in the Tel Aviv headquarters, when junior officers had different opinions of what was going on. There were many, many of those, uh, mostly from the intelligence community, mostly from Amman, which is the, as we said, the military intelligence, uh, branch. Some of these people, and again, I, I don't think we have to name names here. There's quite a large group of those people who were. Absolutely sure about themselves, that they knew everything regarding Hamas, that they could always second guess what was going to happen and that they would have enough information at the right time. And the whole system was built on that. Because we've mentioned earlier the number of battalions and the numbers of soldiers defending the Gaza border. It was not much higher on the Lebanese border, actually, the more or less the same numbers against a more dangerous enemy. And why? Because in both of these cases, both the top brass, and to some extent, the division commanders assumed that the, uh, military intelligence would have it right, that they would give them a six hour notice or the twelve hour notice, and that the forces would be deployed and on high alert, and that there would be even enough time to call in the miluim, the reserves. The way we did in different wars and so on. So because of this culture of vanity on the one hand and gaslighting on the other, it was very, very hard to hear other voices. And Nadav has alluded to that earlier, even from my point of view as, uh, somebody who's written about the army for three decades now, and has had a critical opinion about the, um, amy's performance. It was sometimes very, very hard to make your voice heard because most of the army and most of the public, and most of the Israel media was by this nonsense of, uh, our, uh, of the, you know, the, the greatest power in the region, the strongest intelligence community ever, or whatever. There's this old one saying, I think should never be repeated. It has to do with the West Bank mostly, but for years and years after the Second Intifada, the assumption, you could hear it from every other commander, uh, this metaphor about the West Bank saying that once a Palestinian dreamt at night that he was going to stab an Israel in the morning, then the Shin Bet would appear on his doorstep the next morning and arrest him because he only, uh, he was dreaming of that. You cannot say such things anymore, especially because as, as Nadav said, 5,000 people woke up at 3:00 AM said goodbye to their wives, left a note quoting the Quran or something, rode a motorcycle or whatever. There were all of these bleeps, all of those, uh, movements on our radars that should have been intercepted and understood, and we failed to understand and completely forget about those damn sim cards. We, there were so many other signs that we should have received and intercepted that, and understood in advance. This is the, if you'd like, the intelligence fiasco. This is the, the nutshell of the story.
NE: And also I would add to that, that it has something to do with the Palestinians not perceived as a strategic threat. The entire assumption in terms of resources is that the Palestinians are not a strategic threat. It's not, you know, the most prestigious thing would be on the desk that deals with Iran. The second most prestigious thing would be on the desk dealing with Hezbollah and Hamas. You know, we're just mowing the lawn. This is another metaphor that was used. We're gonna mow the lawn. And of course this could be, this is the Netanyahu perception, it could be good for us politically, that there is a division between the West Bank and the PA and Hamas, and there are many quotes of Smotrich, uh, you know, far right, politicians saying, we have an interest, a vested interest that Hamas will control Gaza. Why would he say that? Not because he wants Hamas to attack Israel. He says that because he thinks that Hamas doesn't have the capability to do so. And I think this goes very deep into the Israeli psyche about the conflict. It stems from 1948. It stems from the fact that the Palestinians were never a strategic threat. And so the assumption is that they could never be. And the fact of the matter is, you know, Bennett, who's a regular in criticizing Netanyahu and the rest, and-
DS: Naftali Bennett, former Prime Minister, possibly a future political leader.
NE: The expression he used, another metaphor is that the Palestinians are, you know, a pain-
AH: Sharp nail.
NE: Sharp nail. And a pain in your buttocks. Okay. You know, and the idea that you can shrink the conflict that was adopted by Israeli generals. So at the end of the day, one of the things that we have learned through this is that we began, Israel was founded through a civil war. Uh, we call it the War of Independence. The Palestinians call it the Nakba. It was a civil war. And that civil war was existential. It was the only really existential threat in the history of Israel. It ended with the Israelis losing 1% of the newly founded state. 1% died in that war. It was Israel's hardest war to date in absolute numbers, not only in relative terms. And now we are remembering again that the Palestinian issue is an existential issue and could be an existential threat to Israel. Look, one of the things that we learned, and the Mossad still has not said anything in that regard. And they should have, and we learned from this investigation. Is that Hamas, and we talked about this in your show, Dan, Hamas is sending their emissaries to Beirut, and they're hearing from Hezbollah from Nasrallah, that Nasrallah believes that the annihilation of Israel, the destruction, the physical destruction of this polity is possible. Not only through its crumbling in destroying itself from within the cobwebs, the spiders web. It's so, no, no, no. An invasion. And you know, the Israeli intelligence division doesn't know about it. The Mossad doesn't know about it and the Mossad should know about it to an extent. So this brings about a very spartan mode of thinking in Israel. Israel is, will be less of an Athens and more of a Sparta in the coming years to an extent. It's unfortunate. To an extent it's unfortunate, but people in Israel feel that it's very necessary to survive.
DS: Nadav, a lot has been written and said about the failure so far, at least the, the absence of, uh, an independent commission of inquiry by the government. Can you just distinguish, I think it's important for people to understand the distinction between this IDF investigation and then a formal government commission of inquiry. Why is what we're discussing today important and necessary, but not sufficient?
NE: This is an internal investigation of the IDF. Its purpose is to study from the events. This is the purpose of internal investigations with the IDF and soldiers and officers are told, tell us the truth and you'll be protected from legal action. It's not about this. It's about studying from these elements and, and the principle of telling the truth in internal IDF investigation is sacrament in the IDF. I'm not sure that it's being upheld every time, but let's say, it's supposed to be a sacrament. Now, a state commission, a national State Commission of inquiry, is a legal tool that Israel used, for instance, after 1973, during the 1982 Lebanon war, after the massacre by the Christian Longo in Sabra and Shatila and many other times. Now, this commission of inquiry is independent in the sense that it is the chief justice that nominates a Supreme Court judge-
DS: Or a former judge.
NE: A former judge.
DS Yeah.
NE: To hold that.
DS: To lead, to lead the inquiry.
NE: Its members are not nominated by the government or by the knesset, so the coalition has nothing to do with it. And of course you can't lie to them because you are under oath and you risk perjury. And that commission according to Israeli law, Israeli president, if it says that you failed so much in your job as a politician, that you can't be allowed to serve in that position anymore, the Israeli Supreme Court has held that this means that you, you can't be, you know, for instance, Ariel Sharon, he was kicked out, uh, as a defense minister after Sabra and Shatila in 1982. The state commission said, you know, he needs to be kicked out. And then he couldn't be nominated to any position as a defense minister until he was elected Prime Minister. And that's just one example. And the reason Netanyahu resists this idea is because A, Netanyahu, unlike previous Israeli politicians and Prime Ministers, is a traditionalist. He rejects every suggestion, opportunity, or disaster in order to form a national Commission of inquiry. He didn't have one. He has been the longest reigning prime minister in the history of Israel. He didn't have one national State Commission because he knows that he will be investigated and he knows he has no leverage. That's the truth. And now he doesn't want to have this because he knows that if they will find that his strategy towards Hamas for years, over years, to transfer money from Qatar to not see them as a threat to disregard the general warnings, not the exact warnings that, he had no specific warnings. I don't want to be unfair, but-
DS: Meaning he was not given any specific warnings.
NE: No, he wasn't. But he was given a general warning by the intelligence division that Amos and I spent a lot of the time talking about their failures. One thing they did right, they came to the Prime Minister, they sent him more than four letters, which is highly rare during the summer, three months before the attack, saying Israel's enemies, adversaries are seeing this as a historic opportunity to attack. And we need to do something about it. And Dan, really seriously, here's the question that the Prime Minister will be asked. You received four letters warning that the enemies of Israel are preparing and we don't know the time and place. I published that the head of the Shin Bet, on a phone call, because Netanyahu wouldn't meet him, Dan. Before the vote on the judicial overall made a phone call to the Prime Minister, and he said, and this is a quote, this is a warning as to war. We will not know the time and place. And he's the head of the Shin Bet. He's not responsible for the Iranians. And the question that Netanyahu will be asked, and this is going be the most important question, we understand Mr. Prime Minister, that they didn't warn you that Hamas is planning an attack. We also understand that he, they didn't wake you up on October 6th in the middle of the night saying, hey, what do you think Mr. Prime Minister, that we should do? But you were given strategic warnings as to the intention to attack Israel. What did you do? Did you hold one discussion with the security chiefs as to these warnings? Did you ask for more information? Did you ask for the Intelligence Bureau to have more reports about these specific warnings? Did you have another phone call with them after several consecutive deep dreadful warnings that also were published in real time by Israeli Press? Because the IDF was so worried that it probably leaked it to one of my colleagues, Yossi Yoshua, who's the military correspondent for Yediot. And then some of it appeared with Amos in Haaretz too. So if you heard all of this, what did you do, Mr. Prime Minister? Do you think that a prime minister in Israel that receives these kinds of warnings can do nothing with this and this question? You know, the Prime Minister is gonna be asked if there will be a National State Commission is exactly the reason right now, the position of Netanyahu and the Likud is that they don't want a National State Commission.
DS: How do you respond to the argument that it would be a mistake to conduct this investigation while the war is still being waged? I agree with you that this kind of inquiry needs to happen, but you know what about this is a difficult thing to do in the midst of a war. Now, the war may be winding down for all we know, but I'm saying, you know, and assuming that's the case, then you could make the argument that immediately upon the quote unquote end of the war, although maybe it's not winding down actually, how do you respond to that?
NE: Israel has been at war since 1948. It never stopped us from making these kind of internal, national, uh, investigations.
DS: Well, when, when the commission was done after the Yom Kippur war in ‘73, the ‘73 war was over, and then it was a commission of inquiry about the war.
NE: You know, let me tell you about what happened in Israel's political and military cultures since ‘73. In ‘73, there was a state commission. The state commission basically blamed the army, and you know, the politicians are off the hook. So let me tell you what happened, Dan. The chief of staff resigned. You know, Daddo, uh, David Elazar was an excellent chief of staff, and many people think that he was wronged by the commission report. He resigned. His letter of resignation is so bitter. It's obvious that he, he's writing there, that he shouldn't have resigned. Basically, the general responsible for the Southern command, Schmuel Gonen also had to resign and walk very bitterly. He basically escaped to Africa. The head of the, uh, intelligence branch, Eli Zeira still says that, that he wasn't that wrong. Okay, look at the difference between the IDF today. The chief of staff almost immediately made sure that everybody knows that he's not gonna finish his term. He takes full responsibility. The general responsible for the Southern command has resigned. The general responsible for the intelligence was the first to resign, Aron Khalifa. The person responsible for the 8200 unit, also resigned. I can go on. They assumed responsibility. You know, and in the political field, Golda Meir that was put off the hook and won an election, Dan, after 1973.
DS: Yeah.
NE: With a tremendous majority resigned because she took responsibility after winning an election after failure. So look at the difference. This is what happened to Israel. This is for your next book about the startup nation. You know, the culture inside the Israeli military of accountability to an extent improved. I'm not saying that it improved, but to an extent improved. The culture of accountability and responsibility in the public sphere improved. Israel's health improved. Israel's tech industry, everything improved. Israel's political culture has deteriorated substantially because look at what the 1973 people did. You know, it took a struggle, it took a protest. But after what they did here you have a political culture in which the Prime Minister and the ruling party would not even have a national state commission. This gap needs to be closed. You can't have a startup nation with a political administration that doesn't hold itself accountable as though this is a third, I don't wanna say a third world country, but something of the sort, right. You need to have this kind of standard. And I think Israel really improved in that sense in many elements of its culture, including by the way, inside the, the army. Not that it was a good, you know, someone can say, yeah, but in 1973, the army did better. And that's right. That's true.
DS: Okay. Thank you for staying up late. I appreciate, uh, you guys, uh, taking the time for this long and meaty conversation and, uh, look forward to having you both back on.
AH: Thanks. Good night.
NE: Thank you so much.
DS: That's our show for today. Before we go, I just wanted to announce that Yardena Schwartz will be joining the Ark Media Family and the Call me Back team, she'll be our executive editor. Yardena is an award-winning journalist and an Emmy nominated producer. She was based in Israel from 2013 to 2023, where she worked with dozens of news organizations including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and NBC News. Our listeners may recognize Yardena from our December 20th episode about her excellent book called Ghosts of a Holy War: The 1929 Massacre in Palestine That Ignited the Arab-Israeli Conflict, which I highly recommend Yardena on behalf of our team, welcome aboard. And finally, if you wanna offer comments, suggestions, or sign up for updates or explore past episodes, please visit our website, arkmedia.org. That's arkmedia.org where you can also find transcripts with hyperlinked resources designed to hopefully deepen your understanding of the topics we cover. Call Me Back is produced and edited by Ilon Benatar. Additional editing by Martin Huergo. Ark Media’s executive editor is Yarden Schwartz. Research by Gabe Silverstein. Our music was composed by Yuval Semo. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.