Guide for the perplexed

A colossal failure in Israel’s espionage has allowed Hamas terrorists to brutally attack Israeli territory on October 7, 2023, in an operation that had been in preparation for two years, under the very noses of Israel’s security and protection systems, from Gaza, separated only 6 kilometers from the terrorist training and drills that had been taking place since 2021.

HAS THE 8200 UNIT FAILED US?  All spies in the world suffer from a professional flaw: they overstate what they know and undervalue uncertainty. And, logically, the younger they are, the more notable this bias is. Could Israel’s sophisticated surveillance technology have been in the hands of some “spoiled brats” working remotely? This question occurs to all of us who have read the book A Long Night in Paris, written by Dov Alfon, former director of Haaretz , Director of Liberation, and above all else a Unit 8200 chief, which is the Secret Service of the Israel Defense Forces. This former spy has become a successful writer, with the fast-paced thriller, A Long Night in Paris, using his professional expertise. The plot takes place in Unit 8200 headquarters, which should have reported on the Hamas plan for October 7, 2023, and the portrait it paints of it often seems like that of a group of privileged youths playing with big data, while escaping boredom. And he drops gems like this: “A street as small as rue Rabelais (where the Israeli embassy in Paris is located) generates more than a million data points per hour, and all are recorded, transferred, copied, cataloged, classified and analyzed.”

So, we readers ask ourselves, if one of the smallest streets in Paris generates a million data points per hour for Israel’s spy services, what massive amount of data has been generated by the 51 kilometers of border between Gaza and Israel since Operation Wall Guardian in 2021? It does not seem credible, that a rat or bedbug doesn’t move in downtown of Paris, without being known in Israel, and that the Tiktokers of Unit 8200 let pass vital information about Hamas’s plans. But it could be true what Vladislav Yerminski says, (the protagonist of A Long Night in Paris) “Unit 8200 is a club for the children of a very small elite class who takes advantage of its secrets for their own benefit, putting them at the service of their own greed”. The other hypothesis is much worse and, if it’s true, it will come to light in the next Agranat Commission, if those in the 8200 unit informed their political leaders, and these did not listen or did not act.

HAS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE FAILED US?  Israel has a security fence, built at enormous financial cost, with an automated defense system called Roeh-Yoreh /See and Shoot), which is remotely controlled by watchers and is designed to counter infiltrators approaching it. On October 7, only Roeh-Yoreh stood between the children of Kibbutz Kfar Aza and his killers. The security system was quickly and effectively disabled by Hamas, without the need to use heavy weapons, which opened the way, first to terrorists trained for the operation, and later to waves of spontaneous terrorists.

In Africa, the Spanish city of Melilla is surrounded by 12 kilometers of a double fence that separates it from the surrounding hills of Morocco. It has motion sensors and high-intensity lights, as well as surveillance cameras.  The double fence has been attacked on many occasions and in some massive attacks, such as that of 2012 (4,000 simultaneous assailants) the defenses have been breached.  The Maghrebis and sub-Saharans who occasionally manage to jump the fence and enter this city of infidels, do not represent an existential danger to its inhabitants, because 3,000 police and 8,000 soldiers of the Spanish army are deployed to protect the city’s 85,000 inhabitants. Melilla and Spain remember that in 1921 between 13,000 and 20,000 Spanish soldiers were massacred, tortured, and emasculated in a blood bath in which not only Moroccan fighters participated, but the whole population did.

As Nassim Taleb reminds us, humor, sadness, or anxiety attacks are sources of intelligence, and perhaps the most important.  It seems nonsensical that only ALGORITHMS got in the way between the people of Kibbutz Kfar Aza and its butchers!

HAS SINGLE-MINDED THINKING DECEIVED US AGAIN, LIKE IN 1973?  Political or business decision-making groups tend to fall into single-minded thinking, since most decisions in life, such as when we drive a vehicle, are usually binary. And, we all think conservatively, because we treat our ideas as our personal properties, which leads us not to let go of them, not to change them. With this in mind, we can empathize with Golda Meir, Moshe Dayan, Eli Zeira , or Zvi Zamir when they adhered to THE CONCEPT, spread among the Israeli military starting in 1967, the idea that  Egypt would not start a war before having an Air Force, which would allow it to attack deep inside the territory of Israel. Such was the existing consensus in this regard, that not even the notice of the The Angel (our spy in Cairo and Nasser‘s son-in-law), who traveled to London to set-up a meeting with the head of the Mossad, Zvi Zamir at the time and date of the attack, could change the mind of decision-makers in Israel.

In October 2023, the consensus among Israel’s politicians (and military?) was that Hamas was appeasing its economic counterparts, and that terrorist violence was now only the preserve of very minority organizations in Gaza.

Although most decisions in life are binary, rarely is the chosen alternative entirely positive, or the rejected alternative entirely negative, causing an unpleasant state of mind called COGNITIVE DISSONANCE. Whenever we make a decision, or make a choice, the doubt of not having chosen well causes psychological discomfort. How do we solve this? Unconsciously and irrationally, we suppress the thoughts and information that question the decision or choice we have made. This is an automatic response, which makes us feel better (more consonant, more coherent), at the price of allowing irrational behaviors. And undoubtedly the Israeli espionage and political establishment has skewed its information about Hamas, towards considering it as an organization in the process of appeasement, thus denigrating any information dissonant with this concept.

WHAT WAS HAMAS’ OPINION OF THE CAPABILITIES OF THE ROEH-YOREH DEFENSE SYSTEM, AND THE DEGREE OF KNOWLEDGE THAT ISRAELI ESPIONAGE AND ITS LEADERS HAVE OF THE TERRORIST OPERATION THAT IS UNDERWAY?

Evidently Yahya Sinwar and Mohammed Deif had knowledge, acquired during the two years of meticulous preparation for the terrorist operation, of Israeli security failures and of the weakness of the separation fence, as well as the consensus among the Israeli political class, of evolving towards the moderation of Hamas. Clearly, these ruthless criminals have followed to the letter what was said by Sun Tzu, in The Art of War; “The art of war is based on deception, and when we are capable of attacking, we must appear incapable.”

We sincerely hope that the new National Unity Government of Israel will not lose sight of this maxim when it looks at Tehran and Beirut from now on.

IS ISRAEL A NORMAL COUNTRY LIKE BEN-GURION WANTED?

Surely Albert Einstein did not share this idea since, he despised what he described as an “assimilatory approach”, which tried to overcome anti-Semitism, by dispensing with almost everything Jewish. Ben-Gurion ‘s idea of building a normal country, like other democracies in Europe and America, seems as naive as the unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, which Ariel Sharon ordered in 2005.

Already Flavius Josephus had to defend in Imperial Rome the Antiquity of the Jewish people as one of the reasons for its peculiarity. Antiquity means that Israel has an incomparably longer presence in civilization, and with more consequences, than, for example, those of large countries such as Canada or Australia, or countries similar in size such as El Salvador or Costa Rica.

Much of the blame for all this was borne by a group of Pharisees, including Ezra, Simeon ben-Shetah, Johanan ben Zakkai and Joshua ben-Gamla, with a series of opportunist decisions that established the compulsory education of all Jewish males, following the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem by the Romans. This decision of forced literacy was irreversible, and enormously expensive, and made the people of the covenant the longest-lived witness of humanity that currently exists on the face of the Earth.

The role of witness to humanity has not been easy. In the wake of the epidemics that devastated the Roman Empire of the West and the Roman Empire of the East, two proselytizing religions emerged from Judaism: Christianity and Islam. Most of the “normal” states that Ben-Gurion wanted Israel to resemble had their origin in these two religions.

As a result, not imagined by Ezra, Simeon ben-Shetah, Johanan ben Zakkai and Joshua ben-Gamla, the imperatively literate Jews, with the vicissitudes of history, moved to all the major cities of the world where they could find jobs compatible with their expensive literacy. With its mere presence in cities around the world, this diaspora questioned the foundation of the truths that every Christian or Muslim should assume for their faith, resulting in anti-Jewish violence that has been ongoing since the founding of Christianity.

WHAT NOW?

Nassim Taleb reminds us that individual mistakes often benefit others, the whole, as if individuals had been created to make mistakes for the common good, not their own. So, we are going to demand that the leaders of Israel raise the deterrence capability of the Israeli Armed Forces, at whatever cost is necessary, to levels different and unlike any for any other country in the world. A country surrounded by fragile states, which are unable to accommodate democratic principles, are inhabited by people who go to mosques on Fridays, who in the face of today’s unthinkable catastrophes such as droughts, earthquakes or epidemics or a collapse in the price of oil, would not hesitate to return to Kibbutz Kfar Aza in much greater numbers than on October 7, 2023.