Analysis : Attack on Israel Points to Systemic Failure at All Levels
October 11, 2023 4 Comments
THE COMPARISON BETWEEN THE October 2023 attack on Israel and the Yom Kippur War is reasonable. We still have an obscured perspective on what happened on October 7. But even this partial picture makes it possible to draw a preliminary comparison. Undoubtedly, there is no precedent for such a monumental failure in the history of Israeli intelligence.
The most striking difference between the two case studies is that in 1973 the system as a whole did not fail. The failure was personal, on the part of several key people, who did not perform according to expectations. The events of 2023 point to a systemic failure at all levels, not personal mistakes. The failure is at the level of intelligence warning, the military response to the attack, and even the actions of Israel’s political leadership.
An Intelligence and Military Failure
In 1973, the intelligence-gathering system was working well, and Egypt’s war intentions were known. Thousands of reports from observations along the Suez Canal spoke of the Egyptian preparations. The wireless transmissions that were issued testified to preparation for war in the Egyptian army. All this did not translate into a warning of war, due to the failed performance of some senior officers in the Israeli Military Intelligence (IMI), who stuck to their preconceived notions until the last moment.
In 2023, the failure is systemic. It involves both the level of collection and at the level of assessment. It relates both to the IMI and the Israel Security Agency (ISA). It has already become clear that the intelligence collection mechanisms failed to detect large-scale preparations for an all-out attack from the Gaza Strip. A massive intelligence system failed to detect the preparatory actions of the assailing forces.
When the perceived enemy is Palestinian civilians and when Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers spend their time guarding settlements and worshipers, instead of engaging in hard training, the result is catastrophic. On October 7, we witnessed the operations of an army whose main mission is occupation. Given what we saw on that day, namely more than 1,000 civilian and military casualties and approximately 150 kidnapped Israelis, it is not clear how this army will be able to face the upcoming challenges in this war. The need 
for the professionalism and resilience of the IDF, which was there in 1973, continues to exist.
A Political Failure
The comparison between the political leadership of 1973 and 2023 is also discouraging. Back then, the root of the failure was that the intelligence information the leadership received from Eli Zeira, the director of IMI, who was the nation’s most senior intelligence officer, was distorted and false. It is now understood that the IMI’s assessments were based on the concept of reassuring the political leadership. Yet, Prime Minister Golda Meir and Minister of Defense Moshe Dayan were challenged after the war, and were eventually removed from their positions. However, they acted responsibly.
In contrast, there is not much to say about Israel’s current political leadership. It suffices to look at the composition of the Security Cabinet and the first leaks that have already begun to emanate from it, or at the surge of slander that members of the governing coalition have begun to heap on the finest of the IDF’s officers. It is nothing short of a disgrace and a disaster.
This war has just begun. It is still too early to draw conclusions. But we can examine the conclusions from the Yom Kippur War and assess their relevance to today. When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu talks about revenge, it is advisable to remember those lessons. The conflict with the Palestinians is long and bitter. They will not give up their ambition for their state. It is now time to comprehend the full cost of the continuation of the conflict.
► Author: Avner Barnea | Date: 11 October 2023 | Permalink
Dr. Avner Barnea is research fellow at the National Security Studies Center of the University of Haifa in Israel. He served as a senior officer in the Israel Security Agency (ISA). He is the author of We Never Expected That: A Comparative Study of Failures in National and Business Intelligence (Lexington Books, 2021).
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Could the esteemed author of this article perhaps furnish us with what the first few lines of Hamas’ manifesto today reads? Back in 2007 it stated words to the effect of, ‘We will not negotiate peace until the elimination of all Jews’.
Israel takes these attacks as casus belli to continue their encirclement of the West Bank and Gaza, emproaching with illegal settlements, squeezing the Palestinians in an ever smaller space.
Israel controls their finances, power, water and almost every resource and service.
The writing is on the war and the Israelis’ are making it clear. Either face an awful, and short life, as we strangule everything, or leave.
Faced with that sort of statement it would appear the Palestinians appear to be wanting to take as many Israelis’ with them before they’re taken out.
As a result neither side is capable of negotiating and enforcing a peaceful solution. Which is why the UN should step in with the entire world holding Israel accountable (and to ensure they don’t use their nuclear weapons when UN forces turn up)
“Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas,” Netanyahu told his Likud party’s Knesset members in March 2019. “This is part of our strategy”
https://haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-10-09/ty-article/.premium/another-concept-implodes-israel-cant-be-managed-by-a-criminal-defendant/0000018b-1382-d2fc-a59f-d39b5dbf0000
Emily Harding from CSIS has written a useful commentary: “How Could Israeli Intelligence Miss the Hamas Invasion Plans?” of October 11, 2023 at https://www.csis.org/analysis/how-could-israeli-intelligence-miss-hamas-invasion-plans
If you’ll permit me to quote most of it:
“The Hamas assault on Israel may turn into a case of nonspecific warning: some reports indicate that U.S. and Israeli intelligence were watching for rising tensions, but there was no precise warning of an impending attack. The New York Times reported that Israeli intelligence issued a specific warning to border guards immediately before the attack, flagging a surge in activity, but those warnings went unheeded for unclear reasons.
Next, investigators will examine whether their services had collected information on the potential attack and were holding it in their systems. Investigators will scrub databases for indications that Hamas was planning a massive strike, including from established intelligence sources and from an array of less credible sources, from hearsay to walk-ins. Hindsight is, of course, 20/20, and this exercise always risks turning up information no analyst would have considered credible at the time but now seems prescient.
If that search turns up information pointing to an impending attack, the next question is why the information in question did not prompt a warning. Was it translated and disseminated? Did analysts read it? If not, why not? If they did read it, why did they discount its importance? Interviews with analysts will be important in this phase, and while those discussions could feel accusatory, investigators should approach these conversations with curiosity and a forward-looking approach. This is the same approach congressional committees should take when conducting their own investigations.
If information was there, and analysts missed it or dismissed it, the intelligence services face the most painful outcome: an analytical failure brought on by human error. These are often failures of imagination, where analysts know something is coming, but they neglect to think as big and as ruthlessly as their adversary. If this is the case, the organization needs to carefully consider retraining staff and initiating cultural or staffing changes. If it turns out the indications were there, but holiday leave got in the way of warning, the intelligence services are likely looking at hours at their desks over holiday weekends in the future. Commentators have speculated about whether extensive political protests against Prime Minister Netanyahu may have also been a distraction; while only time will tell if domestic turmoil played a role, it is unlikely. Intelligence professionals pride themselves on staying mission-focused, particularly with a mission as important as protecting Israel from terrorist attacks.
But assume for a moment that the search for information in the existing holdings comes up dry, or the results are quite thin—thin enough that no rational analyst could have connected the dots to warn of a massive Hamas attack, much less on a certain day. Then, the investigators need to explore whether this failure came from collection gaps.
First-class intelligence services like the Israelis have a list of priorities for collection. For Jerusalem, at the top of that list is always Palestinian terrorist groups and their Iranian supporters. Iran in particular poses a potentially existential threat to the state of Israel, and the rulers in Tehran have threatened Israel’s existence with every tool in their toolkit. Hamas, therefore, would be a perennial high-priority target for Israeli intelligence. Tehran would be too, along with Hezbollah’s presence in Lebanon.
First-class intelligence services also hedge their bets. No intelligence officer wants a single thread of information on a top threat. Instead, officers plan for multiple routes of entry: SIGINT, phone and internet tapping to read the adversary’s communications; IMINT, overhead images of adversary activity; and HUMINT, human sources reporting on the inner workings of an adversary, for the secrets that cannot be stolen any other way. The Israeli services are best in class for computer network operations, like clandestine entry into adversary phones and computer systems—their capabilities so good and so sneaky they have caused more than a little controversy. Further, for each of these INTs, collectors will develop multiple streams of access, so if one is discovered or shut down, others are still reporting.
So where was the collection on the Hamas operation? Charitably, it is possible the Israeli services had few to no human sources. Gaza is a closed society, and Hamas is in charge of most things. Someone spying for Israel would risk both death and the safety of their entire family. It is possible that human sources were either not reporting or had been discovered.
SIGINT, then? Did Israeli operations to penetrate Hamas computer networks and communications fail to collect information? Those kinds of accesses can be fragile—an updated operating system or effective patching of vulnerabilities can kick spies out of long-held accesses. The role of Iran here needs to be examined. Much like Tehran provides rocket technology and financial aid to Hamas, they likely also provide assistance with cyber defense, having been the target of a great many cyber operations themselves. It is possible that in the run-up to such a large operation, Hamas, with Iran’s help, undertook an extensive cyber cleanup campaign. Further, Hamas engaged in a classic denial and deception scheme. On a line they knew was monitored by the Israeli services, they talked to each other about how they were not eager to renew hostilities and were still recovering from the two-week conflict in May 2021. The scheme worked: in a briefing for senior Israeli security officials last week, briefers assessed that Hamas had been effectively deterred.
Finally, good operational security can go a long way. Hamas might have kept the planning circle for the attack very small, and when it needed to expand to include all the players, they almost certainly compartmentalized the planning. The paragliders likely had no idea about the pending rocket attack; the amphibious operators likely were unaware of the effort to breach the border wall. Only a small number of people would have known the full extent of the plan, and they would have been careful to discuss it only in person, with cell phones outside the room.
Israeli leaders have publicly acknowledged that they were surprised by the attack, but they have also brushed away questions about intelligence failures. They rightly point out that they are at war, and that focus must remain on finding the perpetrators of the attack and the hostages they took. When the initial wave of responses abates, the hard work of taking apart the last few months and identifying what went wrong will begin, so this kind of intelligence failure does not happen again.”