Israel s Intelligence Failure – Tablet Magazine
Israel s political misjudgments about Hamas intentions, especially in the context of recent hopeful movements toward further peace agreements with Arab countries including a deal with Saudi Arabia, may well have played a background role in lowering the country s vigilance. But it is no excuse for the massive intelligence failure that allowed Hamas to pull off its deadly surprise offensive. Indeed, Israeli wishful thinking is not even relevant to Saturday s disaster, because the 24/7 scrutiny of enemy doings and undoings to detect threat indicators is not supposed to be switched off for any reason, ever.
In theory one may have to wait for years to find out what happened. But in reality there is only one way Hamas could have pulled off Saturday s massive surprise: by feeding valuable, indeed actionable information to individuals who were Israeli intelligence sources, even though that information allowed the Israelis to destroy rockets before they could be launched against them and achieve other such successes.
Because the destroyed rockets belonged to Islamic Jihad, which is the chief competitor for Hamas and Shia-leaning to boot (Iran pays the bills), Hamas itself paid no price to thus fill the espionage horizon below which yesterday s attacks were planned.
There are techniques that with much skill and patience can uncover double agents, but no tricks can detect agents who are reporting as best they can what they actually know and who report enough good intelligence to keep everybody too busy to look for what they do not know.
Evidently years of war with Israel and its intelligence services have taught Hamas how to fight them effectively.
Caught by surprise, because of errors that allowed Hamas to take the initiative, it is now Israel s turn to act and not just by bombing Hamas headquarters. A new approach altogether is needed, with nothing off the table.
Hamas’s “deadly surprise offensive” has Iran’s fingerprints all over it. Israel knows this, to be sure. How will they respond? And behind Iran, there’s Russia, all anti-neocon, Putin-is-just-being-rational sentiments to one side.