Intelligence is not a simple matter of finding the one piece of smoking-gun evidence that ties everything together. And if it did, you'd rightly suspect its authenticity. If narratives get set too deeply, you fool yourself.
As we read about how Israeli intelligence failed to detect the Hamas preparations for their terror invasion, keep in mind a key point about how one most effectively deceives an enemy:
... surprise is not about hiding what you are doing but about helping your enemy accept a benign explanation for what they see you doing[.]
On October 6, 2023, Israel believed Hamas was settling down and increasingly concerned about governing Gaza rather than killing Jews.
Which is amazingly similar to the Obama/Biden position on mullah-run Iran. But don't you dare ridicule Smart Diplomacy.®! This time, for sure!
But I digress.
I bet a lot of information before October 7th about the pending terror incursion was interpreted away because Israelis believed they knew what was going on. I've read and heard that Israel lacked human intelligence sources within Hamas. That didn't used to be true. When did that change? Is it really the explanation? Or was accurate HUMINT dismissed as violating the comforting narrative?
If you know what your enemy wants to believe, fooling them becomes fairly easy.
UPDATE: Huh. The Israelis have spies who want to control the government, too:
Legendary former Mossad boss Efraim Halevy says Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “is living in a world which is not real” and cannot stay in office much longer.
He says it is unfair for Netanyahu to blame the intelligence services for [checks notes] failing to develop the intelligence to thwart the Hamas October 7th terror invasion.
And then he blames Netanyahu for dividing the Israeli public for trying to rein in an all-powerful judiciary. So apparently Netanyahu is at fault for the intelligence agencies failing to do their job because they were [checks notes again] more interested in opposing Netanyahu.
UPDATE: George Friedman:
I don’t know the frequency or extent of coverage of U.S. intelligence on Israel, or of Israel’s own intel, but if we take 1973 as a cautionary tale, then complacency might be the answer. In other words, Israeli intelligence noticed what was happening but dismissed it as improbable or inconsequential. Or the intelligence had been misinterpreted altogether.
UPDATE: George Friedman also wonders why Hamas attacked Israel on October 7th:
Why did Hamas choose to attack now rather than, say, six months from now? One answer might be logistics. Hamas had everything in place and wanted to move before the plan was detected. Perhaps the agreement slowly coming together between Israel and Saudi Arabia compelled someone with regional interests – someone who couldn’t attack the Saudis – to encourage Hamas to attack in the hopes of scuttling the deal. It’s a theory with too many unknowns to count.
From the start I thought it was giving Hamas too much credit to argue killing Jews was for a grand strategic purpose benefiting Iran. I will revise my view if information is revealed.
Right now I assume Hamas simply likes to kill Jews. Lots of them. And so timing was the only issue.
Indeed, while Iran clearly
sustains Hamas and its ilk with weapons, money, technical support, and information, I wonder if Hamas launched this war for the
purpose of entangling Iran--via the lever of Hezbollah--into direct
support of Hamas. Maybe the timing was to prevent Iran from discovering preparations as much as it was to prevent Israel from catching wind. Iran might insist Hamas know its place as the proxy for Iran's goals and not an independent actor.
Maybe the Hamas rulers didn't worry about warming Arab-Israel ties as much as they worried about warming Iranian-Arab ties after the China deal between Saudi Arabia and Iran, as over-hyped as that agreement has been.
UPDATE: Knowing your enemy:
Armed with an unusually deep understanding of prevailing political currents in Israel, he and other Hamas leaders began issuing subtle signals in recent years hinting of a new pragmatism.
It was a message that Israelis wanted to hear — that “Hamas wants no more wars,” said Michael Milshtein, the former chief of Palestinian affairs in Aman, Israel’s military intelligence directorate. Milshtein, who briefly met Sinwar years ago, said that Oct. 7 bore an essential hallmark of Sinwar’s previous operations: a “knowledge of the basic consciousness of the Israeli public.”
To buttress that perception of moderation, clashes between Hamas and Israel ceased after 2021. The group notably refrained from jumping in on several occasions when its Gaza ally, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, or PIJ, fired rockets or engaged militarily with Israel. To many in Israel, it was further evidence that Hamas had changed and no longer sought a bloody conflict. Some reports suggested that Hamas officials even passed along intelligence about PIJ to the Israelis to reinforce the impression that they were being cooperative.
When your enemy desperately wants to believe you, you're golden.
NOTE: TDR Winter War of 2022 coverage continues here.
NOTE: I'm adding updates on the Last Hamas War in this post.
