Accounting for the Failure of October 7 - with Yaakov Katz

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How did we believe in a fairy tale as a country that a genocidal terrorist group that lives alongside our borders that says to us openly, We're coming to kill you, we're coming to abduct your people, we're coming, as tough as it sounds, to rape the women of Israel.

And we said to ourselves, No, you're not.

You just want money.

You don't mean what you say.

We know better.

We thought cash could buy off a terrorist organization.

How did that happen?

How is it possible that the people who were in office, how is it that these people don't feel that they have an accountability?

It's 11:30 a.m.

on Wednesday, September 3rd here in New York City.

It is 6.30 p.m.

on Wednesday, September 3rd in Israel as Israelis get ready to wind down their day.

And as we are just a couple of days away from the theatrical release of the documentary film called Torn, the Israel-Palestine Poster War on New York City streets, which premieres this Friday, September 5th at Cinema Village in New York City and Teenex Cinemas in New Jersey.

And then there will be a Los Angeles premiere next week.

We'll include a link to the trailer of this film in the show notes, but I have seen it.

I highly recommend it.

It takes you right back to the very important efforts to raise awareness about the plight of the hostages.

And it's an especially timely film.

Before we get into our episode today, if you are a subscriber to our members-only feed inside Call Me Back, please make sure you listen to the episode that says extended in the title.

That's because every Thursday we release an extended version to our Inside Call Me Back subscribers.

This week includes a QA with Amit Segel.

The QA is for members only, so if you are an Inside Call Me Back member, make sure you're listening on the Inside Call Me Back feed or go to arcmedia.org to learn how to become a member.

Now on to the news.

Prime Minister Netanyahu is reportedly considering annexing parts of the West Bank in response to recent decisions by many governments around the world to recognize a Palestinian state later this month at the UN.

So a senior diplomatic official from the UAE has said, and I quote, annexation would be a red line and that it would foreclose the prospect of further regional integration, at least from the Emirati perspective.

This is an eerie callback to the eve of the Abraham Accords being finalized when Israel was also talking about annexation of the West Bank.

Interestingly enough, the annexation or threat of annexation disappeared and then the Abraham Accords were signed.

This all comes as the U.S.

government has announced it will not issue visas for Palestinian officials who are planning on attending the September UN General Assembly in New York, including for Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.

Meanwhile, the IDF is moving forward with the government's plan to conquer Gaza City, where roughly 1 million Palestinians reside.

IDF Chief of Staff Ayel Zamir told IDF troops that the military campaign would not end until Hamas is defeated.

On Tuesday, the IDF called up between 40 and 50,000 reservists in preparation for the Gaza city offensive in what is said to be the largest call-up since the beginning of the war, almost two years ago.

However, this time there are reports that turnout is low, as many reservists have already served multiple times in Gaza, mounting to hundreds of days, which have forced them to put their lives on hold.

Now, this call-up is not going to be implemented immediately.

The call-up will be spread out over many months, so the turnout numbers bear monitoring in the weeks and months ahead.

Today, Wednesday, anti-war protests became unusually defiant in Jerusalem, where protesters set fire to dumpsters and tires near the prime minister's residence.

The fire spread and destroyed multiple vehicles in the area.

Now, on to today's conversation.

We've spent a lot of time on this podcast talking about Israel's catastrophic failure on October 7th, 2023.

Over the past 23 months, there's a lot we have learned about how Hamas terrorists were able to penetrate deep into the country for so many long and excruciating hours.

One of the biggest unanswered questions, which I guess will only be resolved in an election, is who Israelis will ultimately blame for the failure of October 7th?

Israel's security apparatus or the government, or maybe both.

The tensions between the government and a number of senior security officials have been playing out throughout the war, including now as the IDF prepares for a major offensive on Gaza City.

To understand the magnitude of the failure of October 7th, we turn to our guest today, Yaakov Katz, who just co-authored a book with Amir Bobat called While Israel Slept, where Yaakov and Amir examine all the pieces that led to Israel's failure to stop Hamas.

Even for those who've read extensively about the details of October 7th, there is a lot to learn from Yaakov's investigation.

Yaakov Katz is a long-time Israeli journalist who most recently served as editor-in-chief of the Jerusalem Post.

He's a prolific writer.

He's the author of numerous books, one of which I reviewed a number of years ago for the Wall Street Journal, and he is the founder of the Middle East-American Dialogue, a conference that brings together U.S.

and Middle East leaders, regular conference both in Washington and Abu Dhabi that I have participated in.

It's very important work that he's doing there.

Yaakov, thanks for being here.

Great to be with you, Dan.

Yaakov, we've spent countless hours on this podcast discussing the failure that led to October 7th.

But your book, which I'm holding up here, While Israel Slept, which we will link to in the show notes, and I'm encouraging all of our listeners to order and not just plan to order it, but order it now.

It's the only time you get a permission slip to multitask.

Your book has made it so clear to me that some of the failures you diagnose in the book that led to October 7th might just be playing out now in the tensions we're seeing between Israel's top security officials and the government.

So I want to just tackle this somewhat chronologically.

What were the policies that led Israel to, let's call it to the evening of October 6th?

Well, first of all, I totally agree, Dan, that some of what we're seeing playing out right now in the tension between the IDF Chief of Staff and the Prime Minister is very reminiscent of the months ahead of what led to the horrific massacre and attack on October 7th.

But if I look at the policies, you know, just about 20 years ago, Israel pulled out of the Gaza Strip, and there will be a lot of people on the right who will say, well, the original sin was in the pullout and the unilateral withdrawal from Gaza.

There are those who will even go back to the past and to Yitzhak Rabin and accuse him of being the person responsible for October 7th because of the Oslo Accords.

I mean, I'm not going to talk about that.

What I can look at is what happened after the disengagement from Gaza, when Israel began to fight rounds of violence with Hamas every two years almost.

It was as if this game of whack-a-mole kept on repeating itself and Israel didn't have a way out.

One of the policies that came into effect that the prime minister brought to the table, Benjamin Netanyahu, was the Qatari suitcases of cash.

And Qatar, I know, today is a very toxic term that a lot of people hate and some people sympathize with and is stated as we're one of the most important non-NATO allies for the United States.

But the Qataris aren't wrong.

And I've seen the documents that Israel asked them, send money to Gaza, right?

We want you to send $30 million of cash.

I mean, I just have to tell this quick story that we tell in the book.

People blame Nets on You, obviously, for the suitcases of cash.

And we look back now and we say, I mean, if I told you today, the way to end the war is we're going to get the Qataris to send money to Gaza, you would think I'm insane.

But we literally did that for years.

So really the question is, why did we think, number one, that money could buy off genocidal terrorist organization?

But then you'll remember, Dan, that in the summer of 21, when the Bennett-Lapid government came in, Bennett promised at the time, no more suitcases of cash.

In the end, they had to come up with another system that was just another way of doing the same thing.

It was a policy that was accepted by everybody.

All of Israel believed in this.

They believed in the containment.

I want to just say one more point on that because Bennett was in the government.

I think he was in the security cabinet that had agreed to this initial policy.

And I have heard from others who were around the table when this decision was made.

It was a security cabinet meeting.

It was, I mean, just to underline your point, it was not objectionable.

There was not anyone who was hammering the table saying, we can't do this.

There was a logic to it.

Everyone accepted it.

And you see, what we tried to discover is how did we believe in a fairy tale as a country that a genocidal terrorist group that lives alongside our borders that says to us openly, we're coming to kill you.

We're coming to abduct your people.

We're coming, as tough as it sounds, to rape the women of Israel.

And we said to ourselves, no, you're not.

You just want money.

You just want Palestinian workers to come into from Gaza, into Israel to work.

You don't mean what you say.

We know better.

How did that happen?

How did Israel, which is so vigilant of its military threats, there's no country more vigilant than Israel.

How did this country fall asleep, fall into a state of complacency and believe in this fairy tales?

That's that's one policy, but really tells to the greatest extent the story.

We thought cash could buy off a terrorist organization.

So there was the cash, there was a sense that Hamas was fine with these military skirmishes every year or two, but that the same theory that had that that that was what Hamas wanted, it also had that Hamas didn't want to go much farther than that.

So the Hamas threat was basically managed.

I look at three reasons for the policy of containment, very practical reasons.

Number one is we had bigger fish to fry.

We had Iran.

We had Hezbollah.

We had huge, unimaginable challenges and threats that Gaza while a problem, while we knew it was there, but it could be kept in a box almost.

And we could contain it because of technology.

We had iron dome to swat away the missiles like mosquitoes.

We created the iron wall.

So we dug deep underground and put an impenetrable wall to stop the cross-border attack tunnels.

We tell the story in the book of how they brought the best of the best of minds of Israel, seismic and sonar and geologists and you name it to detect where the tunnels are being dug, when they're being dug.

And it was amazing.

Not a single terrorist, by the way, crossed into Israel on October 7th in a tunnel.

They all came above ground.

I mean, you know, Israel was so obsessed with the cross-border tunnels, but it did nothing about the tunnels inside Gaza.

I mean, just take a look at last week.

The IDF revealed, put out video footage of another tunnel two kilometers long, somewhere in Khan Yunis with side rooms.

I mean, two years into this war almost, we're still discovering these long strategic tunnels.

The truth is we had no intelligence about the tunnels because we said to ourselves, we don't care about inside Gaza.

We just care about if they can get into Israel.

Never in our minds did we imagine they would have over 251 people who they would have abducted and be storing inside hundreds of miles of tunnels inside Gaza.

The IDF today has probably gotten to maybe 60% of them, but there's still 70%, if I want to be generous.

There's still a lot there.

So all of that contributed to this policy of containment that Israel felt this can be contained if we have to.

Once every two years or so, go at it with them in those skirmishes.

Okay.

I want to talk about the immediate period before October 7th, where, according to your reporting, there were all these signs.

And the way I read your book, it's like everything broke down.

Everything that could have gone wrong did go wrong.

You know, I try to give hope to people and be positive and optimistic, but this chapter where we really go into great detail of what happened blow by blow, almost hour by hour in that night between October 6th and October 7th, I wanted so many times writing it and rereading it and editing it to take my, just bang my head against the wall because there were signs.

So go through a few of those signs.

The most famous was the SIM cards.

The Palestinians, their phones are on a Palestinian network inside Gaza.

Suddenly on Friday, about 100 SIM cards went live, Israeli SIM cards inside Gaza in Palestinian phones, which is Israel sees the Shin Bet and the military intelligence have a system that sees that in Gaza now there's 100 Israeli phones.

They should not be there.

Now, why would they need Israeli SIM cards?

Only if they're coming into Israel and they would want to be able to communicate once inside Israel could be an indication of an invasion an attack.

When they looked back though, they saw that a year prior, around the same time, almost to the day, Hamas had also inserted 30 or 40 SIM cards.

So smaller number.

But then there were people who in the intelligence agency started to say, hmm, maybe this is just their annual drill.

They test the SIM cards.

Right.

That was sign one.

Sign two was there were underground rocket launchers.

that Hamas started to uncover in the middle of the night.

But then Israel intercepted phone conversations between Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

Islamic Jihad calling up their Hamas friends and saying, hey guys, are you planning something that we don't know about?

And the Hamas guys say, no, it's just a drill.

Israel hears these calls.

They start to see that Hamas is preparing underground bunkers for some of its top commanders.

Muhammad Def is an example.

Underneath where he was living for his family and his kids and himself, they started to open up the underground so-called bunker or bomb shelter or tunnel and get ready, which would mean also he's planning to descend into there for a reason.

Israel might bomb him above ground.

Why would Israel bomb him above ground?

Because something is about to happen.

All of this is going on and more.

The Shin Bet is seeing what's it seeing.

The IDF intelligence in the Southern Command, in the Gaza Division, and back at the headquarters in Tel Aviv is seeing what it is seeing.

And starts a flurry of phone calls that has Herzi Alevi, the chief of staff, Jeron Finkelman, the head of the Southern Command, the head of the Gaza division, Odade Basiuk, who's the head of the operations director.

They're talking almost every hour between themselves, reassessing, reanalyzing the intelligence.

Through the night.

They're speaking every hour through the night into the early morning of October 7th.

Into the early morning.

I mean,

tragically, military intelligence sets up a call for about seven o'clock in the morning.

They speak at one point in the night.

They say, okay, keep looking.

We'll reconvene at seven.

It was too late.

The attack commences at 6.29.

Ronaine Barr over at the Shabak head, the Shinbet headquarters, he feels something is wrong.

He goes from his house back to headquarters in Tel Aviv in the middle of the night, convenes a video conference call with his division commanders, even dispatches a team of his own top elite commandos known by the unit named Tequila for the drink, you know, rapid response.

And they go down, but they're just a small group of people.

The real mistake here, Dan, there's one point during the night, which really was deeply disturbing to me.

when reporting on this, is when Herzi Alevi, the chief of staff, on a call with Oded Basiuk, the head of the operations directorate, the head of the Southern Command, and he says to them, listen, don't do anything.

Don't let them know that we know that something might be amiss.

His reasoning was if they know that we know, then they could reverse engineer and say, how did Israel find out something was happening?

They have intelligence sources, all, by the way, electronic, but they found out something, and then they'll go back and figure out how we figured out what we knew.

And it would burn our sources.

And that was a tough, obviously, I don't know that any of us can make a different call with what we knew.

I was thinking about that as I was reading it because it's a fair point.

I mean, I've seen this in U.S.

national security decision making.

There's always concern about sources and methods.

But there was also a concern that you talked about in the book that if they signaled to Hamas that Israel was getting ready for something Hamas was about to do, Hamas may accelerate whatever they were planning to do.

Right.

Because if it was a drill.

And it's not a real attack, then if they now think we're ready, we're about to attack them.

They might attack us.

In other words, we were so scared to the point of the what-ifs that we made the wrong decision.

Because we know now, and this is easy to say today, had we taken two tanks, and there were many more along the border, but had we just taken two, moved them up into the front positions, turned down the floodlights, and said, hey, guys, we're here.

We know what you're thinking.

Don't you dare.

Good chance it never would have happened.

Had we thrown up a couple Apache helicopters over the border, good chance it never would have happened.

And they would have potentially stood down or it would have been much smaller in scope.

That's for sure.

You talk in the book about how you just referred to signal intelligence.

So they're, you know, Shimona Mataim, others are 8,200.

They're listening to these, they're getting these signals, telecommunication signs of something happening, but they don't have any human intelligence sources.

And when you think about the scale of this operation, the thousands and thousands of Palestinians that knew about it or had to know about it.

And you point out in the book, Israel is not getting anything from human sources about, hey, this is about to happen because it really didn't have human sources inside Gaza.

No, it's

we were so infatuated with technology and the reliance on the definitely SIGINT, signal intelligence, visint, visual intelligence.

We neglected any interaction with human intelligence and agents and assets on the ground.

I mean, you have to say to yourself, so eventually thousands crossed in, about 200, 2,500, 3,000.

Not all of them were part of the initial team.

Not all of them were read in that this is what's going to happen.

But there were a few hundred.

We didn't have one who could pick up the phone to their Shabak handler and say, hey, you should know something's happening.

I mean, this is Israel that was able to create a whole fictitious company and production system and logistical system to supply beepers to Hezbollah that had people on the ground under fire in Iran to take out nuclear facilities.

We didn't have one spy inside Gaza.

And we tell a story of the unit 504, which is one of the elite intelligence units in military intelligence in the IDF, that their whole job is to run agents.

They did a lot in Lebanon, they had in Syria, but in the run-up to October 7th, they had zero in Gaza.

And suddenly they're thrown into the mix.

They have to scramble.

They have soldiers who are wounded.

They happen to have a soldier who was at the Nova Festival.

So they suddenly get involved.

And the next thing you know, what they've been doing over the last two years is rebuilding infrastructure, of course, inside the Gaza Strip.

Okay, just a couple other quick things.

One is there's intelligence, IDF observers right right at the Gaza border who at some point leading up to October 7th see very visually specific training, like Hamas operatives carrying out the training for taking Israelis hostage.

Yeah.

I mean, these are the famous Tatspitaniot, the women.

The women who were in the IDF, who were in that observation barrier.

Right.

They were in different outposts.

There was Nachal O's.

There was others along the border.

And they're watching.

Their job is to sit in front of screens and watch their designated area of operations.

And they know it like the back of their hand.

They see everything.

The joke was always if a bee flew near the fence, they would see it.

And they notice things are changing.

There's something happening on the ground in the weeks and months leading up.

And they're alerting their commanders.

And their commanders are saying, you don't know what you're talking about, basically.

They're shelving, putting it in a drawer.

These women paid the ultimate price of abandonment.

right there were about 15 who were murdered on october 7th another six were taken hostage five of which spent hundreds of days in Hamas captivity.

The video, which I'm sure many people have seen that later came out, that shows the Hamas terrorists lining up the women on the wall of concrete slabs inside their base and talking about how beautiful they are, how they would want to marry them, then bowing down, prostrating, and praying to Allah, is horrifying to see that happen.

Yeah, one of them says that these women are ready to be pregnant.

And the soldiers who warned about what would happen are the ones who paid the ultimate price.

And Yaakov, one of the many things that was chilling for me in the book is you describe what we could learn from the supplies that Hamas brought with them into Israel and what those supplies tell us about what Hamas thought was achievable.

No, Hamas came for a long battle.

Meaning they were planning to be in Israel for a long time.

They came with tools for amputation.

To amputate, if one of them was injured, they would need to cut off an arm or a leg or that came ready to stay and to fight for a long period i mean we know right on october 7th they got to stay rot they got to ofakim they wanted to go further they had plans and they had maps of the air force bases nearby they were planning for a long battle within israel and it showed the extent of course of this failure and of the intelligence that wasn't there not only did we not know that it was coming but we had no idea about what they were actually planning to do once they crossed in okay i want to talk now about the events that followed 6.29 a.m.

the morning of October 7th.

What can you tell us about how the security officials, Israeli security officials responded to the initial reports and how government officials responded to the reports?

I mean, first of all, we all know there was total shock, right?

All across every possible level, right?

Netanyahu himself was, you know, here we get into some controversial water, but Netanyahu was not woken up throughout the night.

He heard about it once the attack commenced, basically.

Yov Galant, we tell the story, he lives up north in a moshav called Amikam.

He was, you know, wearing spandex, getting ready to go on a bike ride.

It was the morning of Saturday of Shabbat, Sinchatora holiday.

And then it's about 6.29, 6.30, his daughter calls him from Tel Aviv because she lives in Tel Aviv.

He didn't have the sirens up north and says, you know, dad, there are sirens going off in Tel Aviv.

What's going on?

He gets on the phone, calls Herzy Alevi, the chief of staff over WhatsApp, and says, what's happening?

And Herzy says, yeah, you should probably get down here.

Hertzi knew about this all night long.

So why didn't anyone call the defense minister or the prime minister?

This is one of the great questions.

And we asked Herze and Ronaine Barr and the other people, why did they not update?

And their answer, we could accept it or not, but was pretty much along the lines of there was nothing that was out of the ordinary from their perspective, right?

This is something that happens quite often.

There are threats that are always being reviewed.

are always being analyzed.

There's always a tenuous situation and a high level of vigilance that needs to be maintained along the border.

And therefore, it didn't feel like it was something that they needed to be woken up for, that it was something that could be managed throughout the night with the decisions that were made.

And if it escalated in the morning, then they would read in the prime minister and the defense minister.

And Netanyahu is correct in that he wasn't woken up.

He wants to claim that had he been woken up, things would have been differently.

But I'm very skeptical about that because when you have your entire command in intelligence and operations who are all saying, we don't think it's real, then they are unlikely to do something dramatically different than what the entire military and intelligence apparatus is telling them.

But back to your question of what was the response at the time, they were all horrified by what had happened, but the breakdown in the operations and the lack of communication that was not possible because of how Hamas had effectively attacked the frontline positions and had knocked out the communications, the cameras, the sensors, the ability to communicate back to Tel Aviv.

No one knew what was happening.

No one understood what was actually going on on the ground in that exact moment.

And, Yaakov, it was a Chag.

It was a holiday.

There were less troops.

People go home.

You have your Shabbat format.

Including senior people.

Senior people.

Like some of the people you write about.

This one's on vacation in a lot.

This one's on vacation.

Aaron Khaliva, the the commander of military intelligence, is in a hotel in Eilat.

Finkelman, the commander of the Southern Command, is up north at Etzimr at one of these guest houses that he had rented.

You know, he, in the middle of the night, started to drive back to base.

One of the brigade commanders along the border with Gaza, who...

tragically was killed and his body remains in Hamas captivity, had come to base with his son, who was there with him to celebrate the holiday.

And didn't bring his gun.

Yisral Shomer, who was another brigadier general, he's the commander of a division up in the north.

He lives down at one of the kibbutzim along the border with Gaza.

He came home for the weekend, left his personal weapon up in the base in the north.

He lives along the border with Gaza, Dan.

And when the attack happens and Hamas invades his kibbutz, he goes out in shorts and, you know, workout clothes, because it's early in the morning, with a kitchen knife, fights his way to get his hands on a weapon.

and helps to push back and get Hamas out, tragically after they've killed so many and abducted so many.

I mean, it was a complete breakdown of everyone in every possible position.

Every single person here was part of this failure and this mishap.

Okay.

You know, we had Gallant on our podcast a couple times, and he talked quite movingly about the guilt weighing on him.

Is there any personal reckoning that you encountered during your interviews with either security officials or political leaders that you can tell us about?

You know, Herzi Alevi, for example, was beaten down, was completely broken.

During the night, even, as he's holding these phone calls, he actually sits down at his desk at home and writes a note.

Don't fall into that trap.

And he did.

And he, of course, gets into his car when the attack commences and starts heading towards the Kiryat in Tel Aviv.

to his office.

And on the way, he starts to think to himself, maybe I should go fight down south.

Maybe that's where I'm needed.

Something that I found, by the way, among a lot of the commanders, especially in the military, was that the first thing, we need to go down.

We need to fight.

You know, we're a soldier.

We put on the uniform and we go fight.

That was the initial reaction.

And then he stops himself.

He even, at some point, says to his driver, maybe we should go down south.

And then he understands that's not what he is anymore.

He's not just a soldier.

He's the commander of the entire military.

In the Gaza Division headquarters at Raim, where Rosenfeld, the brigadier general in charge of the Gaza Division, is inside, he was at the base, inside the Kamal, the war room.

He's a former Shaldag commando, one of the elite Air Force units, really, like Sayyar and Matkal.

And he's stuck in there, and his base is overrun by terrorists.

And he keeps on, he's fighting internally.

Do I go out and fight?

I know how to fight.

I should go fight.

Or do I stay inside and try to manage what I can?

There's tremendous, tremendous guilt among these people.

And I think it's guilt that will never go away for how they failed and what happened.

But where I see that guilt and accountability in the defense establishment, and if you look at the military, it's very much been replaced in the year, almost two years since.

Hertzy is no longer there.

Finkelman, the Southern Command, is no longer there.

Rosenfeld is not there.

All been replaced.

On the contrary, in the government, you don't see what we would call in Hebrew and Jewish tradition, Cheshibon Nefesh, right?

An accountability, a personal reckoning.

The contrary, what we've seen is them holding on to their seats and not willing to let go.

After in those initial hours, when the cabinet finally convenes in Tel Aviv, I mean, it was actually Betzal Smutrich, of all people, who says at the cabinet meeting, we're done, guys.

This is over for us.

We will not survive this as a government.

But look what's happened since then.

I mean, not only have they survived, they've pushed away any criticism or condemnations.

Who do you think Israelis will ultimately blame for October 7th?

Look, I'll tell you who I think they might blame, but I'll tell you who I think they should blame.

And

I think that there's...

Because of how political everything is today in Israel, you're going to have your group that's going to blame Bibi, and it's easy to do that.

Bibi's to blame.

I've had people who have said to me, why did you need to write a 330-something page book and fill it with 80,000, 90,000 words?

It was one word, BB.

I mean, come on, that's not serious.

And I've had people who have said to me, it's just the military command.

They didn't wake up Netanyahu like we spoke about before.

And had they woken him up, he would have changed everything as if he's Superman.

Personally, I think everyone is responsible.

I think I've made that clear.

And I think that we need a culture of accountability in Israel, which we unfortunately lack.

But when we look at Israel and what's happened since the war, Dan, the purge has only taken place within the military.

It really raises serious questions, I think, about how is it possible that the people who were in office and made the decisions that led to the greatest disaster in Israel's history, the greatest massacre of Jews on a single day since the Holocaust, a war that has dragged on for two years almost.

How is it that these people don't feel that they have an accountability?

Just as a citizen of Israel who has children who serve in the army, this is very concerning.

How is this playing out with General Zamir, who's the IDF Chief of Staff now?

He's Herzegi-Alevi's successor.

How does he own or not own October 7th, and how does that fact impact him now?

I mean, you know, Ayal Zamir is a fascinating story in of itself, right?

He gets appointed.

Netanyahu celebrates it.

He quotes from the Song of Songs.

Zamir is a song.

Well, because Netanyahu had wanted to put him in the job years ago.

Exactly.

He said, I wanted twice.

I was stopped.

I only got it in the third time.

He quoted the verse from Song of Songs, the time of the songbird has come.

The time of Zamir has come.

He was celebrating his appointment.

And look at how they're fighting today.

Is it just Netanyahu and was it Justin Netanyahu and Herzi Alevi?

It brings us back to the months preceding October 7th when Israel was fighting.

We were at each other's necks and throats over judicial reform.

We were ripping ourselves apart at the streets.

And Herze comes and asks for a meeting with Bibi.

And Bibi says, I don't want to meet you.

There was the tension then.

And there is the tension now over what Israel should do in the Gaza City offensive.

Should it go in?

Should it expand the operation?

Should it take the phase deal that's on the table?

Zamir is in favor of it.

BB is saying, I want a full package, the comprehensive deal.

I've never seen this tension between a military commander and the prime minister at a time of war, where the commander of the IDF is openly coming out against government policy.

I mean, this is a dramatic moment for Israel.

And I think what it shows is that lack of trust that was there on the eve of October 7th is again playing out now at a crucial, and I would say existential moment for the hostages between Ayal Zamir and Netanyahu about what comes next in the Gaza City offensive.

Yaakov, you just referenced this.

I want to bring it up.

I think it's important.

We constantly, when we think about 2023, the year of judicial reform, so basically the year leading up to October 7th and all these fierce protests and the country being torn apart and the levels of disunity.

And now

you have many in the political opposition and many, some in the military leadership, or at least who were in the military leadership, as you point out, many many of them have stepped down, say

Netanyahu was warned that the judicial reform fight was making Israel vulnerable from a security standpoint.

I think both things may be true, that there was incredible internal tension, as we know, inside Israel during the judicial reform fight.

And obviously there was the security threat that was brewing, which we now know.

But many of these folks who draw the connection now say that because of X, there was Y.

Because of the chaos of the judicial reform fight, it made Israel more vulnerable from a security situation.

Therefore, we got October 7th, and therefore it's the government's fault.

And I want you to respond to that.

Look, Hamas wasn't planning this after January 2023.

It suddenly woke up and said, oh, these guys are so busy now with override bills and Supreme Court appointments.

This is the moment to attack.

They were plotting.

They were talking with Iran.

They were talking with Hezbollah.

They wanted to do this together.

We now know from intelligence discovered.

And it was something that was planned over years.

I mean, there were those within the Israeli Defense Establishment who had been warning, for example, that this was coming.

So it wasn't that they woke up one day and they saw Yariv Levin's judicial reform plan and they said, hey, now this is our moment.

What they did see, though, is that Israel was making itself vulnerable and Israel was distracted.

And Netanyahu is to blame for that.

The military also for allowing people to refuse orders to reservists who came out and said, we are not going to serve anymore under this government.

And those reservists not being reprimanded, there's some blame there too.

It's a mixed bag.

It can go all over.

But there's no question in my mind that we did expose ourselves and make ourselves vulnerable.

And that Hamas saw this opportunity and said, this is the moment now to launch that offensive.

This is the moment to go after Israel because they are distracted.

You said during the war, Haliva, who's the head of military intelligence, had time to reflect on where things went wrong on October 7th.

On the one hand, there was never a point, he says, there was never a point in the months leading up to war or on his visit just a few days prior to its initiation where the intelligence showed that Hamas was about to attack or that catastrophe was just days away.

No one in Amman, which is the intelligence, military intelligence, no one in Amman, Shinbet, or any other agency spoke up, grabbed him by the sleeve, pulled and warned him that Gaza was about to explode.

That's his defense, and it might be legitimate.

We tell the story of how Khaliva himself, before Sukkot Talidade, flew around the borders of Israel to get the briefings.

No one said anything.

No one told him that something was going on.

This wasn't just the tactical level.

This was a institutional failure, a national failure, one that includes everybody from the political to the military.

And I'll just say one word, to the journalists, to media, because I was in those briefings with the chief of staff.

I was in those briefings with Khaliva and other commanders.

As a military reporter, as an editor of a newspaper, I was given that access.

And I would sit in those briefings and I would, sometimes my jaw would drop because they would show us the cool things that are happening with Iran or with Hezbollah.

And always at the end, maybe 15, 20 minutes was left to Gaza.

And you know what the bottom line was?

They don't want war.

Sinoir knows it's not in his interest.

We can move on.

We tell a story in the book at the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee.

Then Yuli Edelstein was still in charge of it.

They had a briefing just a couple months before October 7th because they were looking at the annual threats assessment by military intelligence.

And it was several hours long.

It was all about Iran and his balah and the bigger challenges in the region and what's happening with Russia and how that's impacting Syria and Assad.

Not a word about Gaza.

Not a word.

And only at the end, as the guys were closing their dossiers and folders, did one of the members of the committee say, hey, what about Gaza?

You guys forgot Gaza.

So I look at it and I say, well, how did I not see that also?

How did we, maybe had we as the media challenged and questioned more, we could have poked at the government and the military commanders and gotten them to rethink what was their conventional wisdom.

There's an exception to your across-the-board indictment, Yaakov, that you and Amir are expressing your book.

And that exception is for Avigdor Lieberman, who is a senior Israeli politician, who you almost paint as a prophet of sorts back to 2016, so a decade before October 7th.

You write that he saw this coming.

So can you tell our listeners briefly who Lieberman was at that point, who he is, and what he saw coming?

He's an enigma, Avigdor Lieberman, one of the stranger Israeli politicians,

comes from the former Soviet Union, very thick, heavy Russian accent.

Lots of his party followers, he's part of the head of the Israel Beitainu party, are from the FSU, so that million-plus Israelis who came over to Israel after the fall of the Iron Curtain.

He has always been

seen as a hardliner.

Funny enough, back a few years ago, before he was appointed defense minister, he declared that if I'm defense minister, I'll give Ismail Hania, who was one of the leaders of Hamas, was eventually killed in a Mossad operation in Tehran, 48 hours, and I will kill him if he doesn't give back.

Then there were a couple soldiers' bodies that were being kept by him in Gaza.

Then he gets appointed into May of 2016 to be defense minister.

Of course, Hania was not killed.

And people said, oh, he's soft.

He actually now became defense minister.

He sees what's happening.

But in December 2016, just a few months into his job, he's only there now six months.

He writes a report.

with the title, Assessment of the Situation in the Gaza Strip, the position of the Minister of Defense.

Not too exciting, but it's 11 pages.

And inside this paper, he talks about how Israel is making a grave mistake and how it needs to launch a preemptive strike now against Hamas, and it cannot wait longer than the summer of 2017.

And he warns that if we wait, it will be even more, the consequences will be even more severe than the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

He didn't know that the attack in 2023 would come literally on the Gregorian calendar a day after the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur war invasion by Syria and Egypt.

And he outlines there, Dan, what's going to happen with Hamas, what they're going to go from in terms of forces and rocket capability and tunnels and the number of soldiers and terrorists they're going to have.

It was presented to the prime minister.

It was presented to the chief of staff.

It was presented to the heads of military intelligence.

By the way, you know who was the head of military intelligence then?

Herzi Alevi.

And it was put into a drawer and forgotten.

And you look back at that document now, it's almost literally one-to-one.

And, you know, how did he see something that others did not see?

The only answer that I can think of, he didn't come from within that military world.

He was an outsider.

He did his service, but, you know, regular, nothing special.

And he had a fresh pair of eyes.

He wasn't part of that, what we call the concepsia.

He wasn't part of the paradigm.

He wasn't part of that belief in a fairy tale that had taken hold of the entire military command.

I want to wrap here, Yaakov.

I know there are so many lessons you take away from this book, but just in closing, pick one.

What is to you like the biggest lesson or one you would want to focus on in this conversation that you take away from working on this book?

I'll tell you one that I think is really the most important.

Unity is a super existential component of Israel's national security.

We just spoke about this before, of what happened when we were fighting among ourselves and how we exposed ourselves and made ourselves vulnerable, how that was taken advantage by our enemies.

We cannot allow that to happen again.

And we, and tragically, I look now and I see what's happening.

How, in God's name,

have issues like the hostages become so politicized that tell me who you vote for, and I can pretty much tell where you stand and what Israel should prioritize.

This is, how has this issue, saving lives, become political?

How have we found ourselves back in this place?

We have to remain united.

This is literally existential.

And if we don't listen and heed at least that lesson, because intelligence reform, yeah, you could do it, you cannot do it, it could work, it cannot work.

This is really what it's all about.

All right, Yaakov, we will leave it there.

The book is While Israel Slept.

It is available wherever you purchase books, and we will have links to it in the show notes.

Thank you for doing this.

Thank you very much.

This is it for our regular Call Me Back episode.

Inside Call Me Back Members, we'll be getting a longer episode where Amit Segel will join me to answer listener questions, including what will journalists find when they finally do enter Gaza?

If you're not yet subscribed to Inside Call Me Back, you can do so using the link in the show notes or by going to arcmedia.org, that is arkmedia.org, to sign up.

Call Me Back is produced and edited by Elon Benatar.

Arc Media's executive producer is Adam James Levin-Aretti.

Sound and video editing by Martin Huergo and Marian Khalis Burgos.

Our director of operations, Maya Rockoff.

Research by Gabe Silverstein.

Our music was composed by Yuval Semo.

Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.