OCTOBER 7TH: AN ANALYSIS
The October 7th attack was a culmination of high grade deception and good operational security on the part of Hamas.
Mr. Uzi Arad is a former director of Mossad and former national security advisor to Benjamin Netanyahu.
On September 11th, this century began with a surprise attack by aterrorist group, oriented as a jihadist, radically Islamic, which created havoc and massive civilian casualties. Al-Qaeda is one type of the multiple forms of Islamic extremism; employing terrorist tactics, it was able to surprise even the greatest of powers in possession of the best of intelligence capabilities, killing en masse thousands of civilians in the Twin Towers of Manhattan and thousands in atrocities committedover Israeli territory to Israeli civilians. It is no coincidence that the two crises originated from the same type of adversaries who present one whole riskto the world: world security and peace.
Therefore, we include the ongoing war in Gaza as, in effect, a part of the larger global risk that should be confronted cooperatively among all nations being targeted by such terrorist organisations. They are everywhere –in Asia, Latin America, Europe, and their place of origin, the Middle East.
How is October 7th Different?
Manyattributes to the October 7th attack should not go unnoticed, especially the fact that on the eve of the attack, Israel itself found itself at the very depth of an internal crisis with deep divisions within Israeli society. There were ongoing mass demonstrations to see the removal of the government, a government that had been suspected of eroding Israel’s very democratic foundations. It was a constitutional legal crisis, but it was so large-scale, involved many disputing parties, and became something close to a civil war that fell short of being violent. That immediately becomes a point of vulnerabilitywhen the nation is completely disoriented regarding its leadership performance and the people's solidarity.
On Black Friday, Hamas went on the attack, achieving total surprise. For any intelligence agency, nothing could be more disastrous, strategically and in every other sense, than a surprise attack. The Israelis quickly counterattacked, and the battle remains open, with no one having any clue how it would finally unfold. The taking of hostages has inordinately complicated the whole situation.
Hostage-taking as an instrument of terrorist organisations has become almost a component of power-seeking decisions on the battlefield. The Americans had a minor experience of that when they had their embassy overrun, and their personnel were kept there as hostages for a year-long, turning into a drama full of agonies and a dramatic rescue attempt that failed.
Now, Israel has to suffer another variation of hostage-taking. In that surprise attack, the assaulting forces went in not only to destroy or to kill but also tocapture civilians of all kinds–children, elderly, women– and sped them back to Gaza to their underground bases to be used as an instrument of power that terrorist organisations have employed elsewhere.
The hostage situation is, therefore, complicating the efforts of the IDF to destroy Hamas as an organisation.
Israeli Failures
Israel has been candid about its failures; immediately, both the chief of intelligence and the chief of staff tendered their resignation; they understood this was a failure of their systems and duties. Having assumed their responsibilities in the entire fiasco, they did their duties while there was no escape from being called to task.Once hostilities subside, a commission of inquiry will pinpoint responsibilities.
While failing to give a credible warning of the assault, it is evident that Israel exaggerated or overstated the value of technical means and all kinds of advanced technology. It fell short of having good, satisfactoryintelligence regarding the direct possession of a warning due to sufficient intelligence collection in this domain. This is, in fact, a success of Hamas in using very tight compartmentation, very strong discipline,and cruelty towards their own people for anyviolation of security and, in that sense, making it very difficult for Israel to obtain necessary intelligence.
Israel also failed to know its enemy as it had refused to accept the very character of these jihadist groups.The assumption was that terrorist organisations mellow become more moderate with time, particularly when they assume power. And that was the instinctive expectation. And that is why, for some time, it was believed that through a combination of all kinds of temptations, Israel could get Hamas to give up the offensive option and to rendera situation to one of relative avoidance of hostilities. The Hamas never denied its long-term objective to destroy Israel; their opposition to Israel is ideological, religious, and it's total. But they claimed and appearedwilling to have a kind of truce or ceasefire for convenience’s sake. It is a failure of anticipation, of imagination and intelligence.
Even worse, Israel was deceived. Hamas employed deception measures to lure Israel into not understanding what it was seeing. This isa gross violation of the old dictum: know your enemy– not only have information about the enemy, its intentions and capabilities, you have to know in the most cultural, historical context. And here, it failed miserably in seeing through the viciousness, cruelty, savagery, and barbarism that characterised that organisation. By the way, Hamas has practised this on its Palestinian people and other political organisations.
Cruelty is something that goes along with what they essentially committed when Hamas attacked Israel. This savagery shocked us into the immediate reaction we felt we needed to do, not to wait one moment, not even for better preparation.
Now, as for the other failure, that of defence.Defensive measures failed miserably because we thought by establishing walls and all kinds of measures, we would create obstacles in such a way that even if they attack, and even if by surprise, they will still be limited in their ability to penetrate Israeli territory in such depth and on such a large scale. Obviously, that defense crumbled completely.
Thanks to the improvised defence put up by volunteers or from units that rushed South without being called, mounting a kind of blocking action to contain the Hamas penetration of Israeli territory. They intended to capture military bases and facilities and possibly reach as far as the West Bank. That was not accomplished, but they did accomplish a lot.
How did all this happen? Because of misplaced political priorities, most of our regular troops were stationed on the West Bank, fearing that that was the problem area, at the expense of defensive capabilities on the southern front, the Gaza front. This is an error that is political in nature. Add to this the flaws of intelligence; intelligence abused by politicians becomes poisoned.
Deterrence applies to nuclear risks. But on the conventional level, there is an alternative to deterrence: defence. But once you sacrifice defence, you become wholly dependent on deterrence. Here, our deterrence assumption or posture was levelled as a directive to the military to increase the cost of any aggression. However, such an increase in the cost entails a cost to the civilian population. At the conventional level, there is a proportionality principle and a need to avoid escalation. Our reliance on that kind of deterrence was simply insufficient. We did not deter the Hamas. No matter what threats we levelled, they were insufficient. I would argue that they were not in place right from the start.
The Israeli leadershipbelieved that Hamas was not putting into effect what it evidently practised and exercised because “they were deterred”. But the question remains whether Hamas was deterred in reality. There was no such confirmation. We may have been fed wrong information into believing that is the case, which was part of the deception exercise practised on us; believing that they are was a completely flawed posture.
This is a risk that indeed is global, which is affecting other societies, other democratic societies, and other non-Muslim countries that are also victims of ongoing activities of organisations like Hamas. Hezbollah is another case, similar yet different. Iran assists both of them, and here is the elephant in the room that I don't want to touch but it is clearly connected. So we are facing a larger, in a way, global risk here, which connects Iran with its nuclear ambitions as a variation of the theme. Still, it includes Iran and its deployment of proxies all over the Middle East and beyond. It involves Iran itself being led by fundamentalist Islamic leaders who sharethe battle against the West, against the Western civilisation, against the democracies of the world.
Israel has learnt its lesson. The failure has been a failure of omission.I would hope that ingenuity, professionalism, and dedication would make it so that we would have sufficient coverage through reliable sources of obtaining advanced warning. There is a lot to do there, but it can be done. Victories are not promised on the battlefield, and warnings are not guaranteed in the field of intelligence.
