Making omelettes, breaking eggs

A closer look at the role of Israel's siloviki in the October 7th massacre

The leaders of the Israeli security establishment, our siloviki, have been telling the following story:

“We generals and intelligence officers were simply fooled by Hamas. We had a kontzeptzia, a theory, which said that Hamas leaders no longer wanted to destroy Israel and terrorize Israelis. What they really wanted, we thought, was to improve their own finances and the Gazan quality of life. Captured by our beautiful kontzeptzia, we foolishly ignored all warnings and indications of Hamas’ preparations for the attack. Sorry! But we’ll make it up to the Israeli public by crushing Hamas ruthlessly.”

Major General Aharon Haliva, head of IDF Military Intelligence

It’s possible that the senior officers of the IDF, the Aman (military intelligence agency) and Shin Bet were all so phenomenally stupid and arrogant that they were seduced by a theory which contradicted everything known about Hamas. On the other hand, it’s possible that something far worse happened. Specifically, that the attack on Simchat Torah represented another chapter in Israel’s ongoing civil war.

To recap events leading up to Simchat Torah: until the beginning of 2023, the people who mattered in Israel, our establishment, hoped to get rid of Netanyahu through judiciary means. Bibi’s indictment and trial on obviously ridiculous charges moved forward slowly and jerkily, witnesses retracted testimony they claimed to have been coerced, charges fell apart. Mass protests organized and funded by organizations like the Kaplan Force, which had been ramping up since 2019, kicked into gear in early 2023, leading to protestors blocking major highways, attacking visibly religious drivers, shutting down Ben Gurion Airport and in general attempting to paralyze the country.

Our organic, spontaneous Orange Revolution

Many of the more visible organizers had tight links to the security apparatus. For example, former Prime Minister and IDF Chief of Staff Ehud Barak was a prominent leader, and promised that the end result would be the bodies of Jews killed by other Jews floating in the Yarkon River, following which he would be asked to take power. Shikma Bressler, one of the protest organizers, is allegedly married to a senior officer in the Shin Bet. Noa Haliva, another protest leader, is the daughter of General Aharon Haliva, the head of the Aman. Moran Zer Katzenstein, who organized the Handmaid’s Tale protestors is a Shin Bet veteran. Gonen Ben Itzhak, another protest leader, is a Shin Bet veteran.

In short, our grass roots social activists are actually cutouts for the secret police and the army.

The face of Israeli democracy

Once it became clear that the protests weren’t leading to an overthrow, the organizers took it up a notch. The IDF is very much reliant on its reservists, especially for the functioning of its elite units. Special forces, aircrew, military intelligence all rely on reservists to show up for multiple weeks a year. From mid-spring onwards, elite reservists began to refuse to serve, both explicitly and implicitly (finding excuses that would prevent them from serving, such as work trips overseas and medical issues.) This brought mild overt condemnation from senior military leadership, and much sub rosa encouragement.

They really don’t like Bibi

The discourse coming from the protesters and reservists was as follows: “Netanyahu is the second coming of Hitler. He is racist, evil and destroying Israeli democracy. If he is allowed to remain in office, he will destroy the country, bringing into power a corrupt dictatorship, or perhaps a Jewish theocracy. No means are off the table in fighting such a threat, because the state’s very survival is at stake.”

While all of this was going on, warnings from the various intelligence gathering organizations that Hamas was preparing a major attack were ignored. Signals intelligence analysts’ warnings of Hamas preparing a massive raid on kibbutzim on the border six months before October 7th were dismissed as imaginary. The warnings were brought up to General Haliva, who failed to react to them. The IDF visual observers on the border reported extensive Hamas preparations and rehearsals in detail for months, and were either ignored or threatened by their officers for doing so. Civilian volunteer information gathering groups in the Northern Negev were dismissed and had their monitoring equipment confiscated when they persisted in reporting on Hamas preparations for a massive attack.

In the days leading up to the attack, the Egyptian government warned Israel about an impending massive Hamas attack. Hours before the attack, at 4AM, the IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi, Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar and General Haliva held an emergency meeting. Allegedly, the subject was an impending attack that day which would involve a Hamas attempt to capture hostages in one or two border villages. They did not issue any operational orders except the deployment of two small counterterror units to the area, nor any general alerts which would have allowed the local community defense teams to heighten their security posture.

During the attack, the IDF remained paralyzed for half the day; no senior officer took command, no organized units launched counterattacks. The massacre took place 15 minutes’ flight away from Israel’s largest air bases, but survivors reported hearing no IAF planes or helicopters overhead for 6 hours. Battalion-sized ground forces units were an hour’s drive away, yet did not react for quite some time. Other survivors reported company-size IDF formations standing by outside a kibbutz where Hamas terrorists were conducting massacres, refusing to enter. In short, complete tactical, operational and strategic disarray and paralysis were the order of the day.

It is possible that the years-long, steadily escalating civil war against Netanyahu and his coalition by the Israeli siloviki had nothing to do with Hamas’ attack. It’s possible that senior security leaders were, as they claim, paralyzed by dreams and wishful thinking.

But there is a worse possibility.

If our security establishment’s leadership truly believes what it’s been loudly proclaiming through its mouthpieces-that Netanyahu and the coalition are an existential threat to Israel, that they will create a civil war and install a dictatorship if not stopped, that all means are legitimate when fighting them-could it be that the establishment wished to allow a limited Hamas attack to succeed? A protracted hostage scenario in one or two of the kibbutzim on the border, as described above, could certainly create a crisis which could be exploited to overthrow the coalition. Israel’s ruling coalitions fell in the aftermath of the 1973 war, where the IDF was taken by surprise, and the 1982 invasion of Lebanon.

It’s difficult to imagine senior leaders purposely sacrificing 1200 Israeli lives and allowing the worst military defeat in Israeli history to take place, even to bring down Bibi and save democracy. On the other hand, as the French saying goes, “if you dine with the devil, bring a long spoon.” It is quite possible to imagine Hamas being given to understand that a small scale attack would meet little resistance, and exploiting the opportunity to turn it into a large scale attack.

This would explain the suppression of intelligence warnings of an impending attack, the disarming of local community defense teams, and the IDF’s complete failure to react to the invading force with even the squad-sized elements which were often all that was needed to stop it.

One last piece of information: immediately before the 2006 Lebanon War, Dan Halutz, the IDF Chief of Staff, sold off his stock portfolio. The stock market dropped as soon as the war started. When the story emerged, Halutz refused to resign. And we see that there was massive, unusual short selling on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange in early October, presumably by parties who knew of the impending attack and anticipated the resulting fall in stock prices. It is difficult to imagine that Yahya Sinwar trades on the TASE.

If the conjecture is true, then the leaders of the security establishment are in a quandary. The contained, local attack turned into a crisis of systemic proportions. If Israel wins the war conclusively, Bibi will doubtless spin this to his advantage, explaining that the initial defeat was caused by his enemies in the deep state while the victory was due to his brilliant leadership. If Israel loses, they will also be on the hook. The only hope is an outcome which is neither a victory nor a defeat. This can only come in the form of an extended ceasefire, under the pretext of returning hostages. And indeed we saw the Kaplan Force instantly appoint itself the representative of the hostages and their families, and continue its protests against Netanyahu.

Save democracy AND the hostages? What a deal!

It remains to be seen whether our siloviki will be able to use the war to create the space between themselves and Bibi that they need to finally throw him out of office without falling themselves.