October 21, 2023

More and more, one sees people saying that, given Israel’s massive intelligence failures in the lead-up to the Hamas massacre, perhaps what happened wasn’t an accident. Perhaps discontented political factions in Israel wanted it to happen as a way to force political change. Let’s examine that premise to see if it might be possible.

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Several years ago, the multi-lingual Tuvia Tenenbom wrote about how, disguised as a German journalist, he had long conversations with the members of the Knesset, residents of the territories, and leaders of Palestinian militants. In addition to what they said to him, he was able to audit their Hebrew or Arabic language conversations. After reading his book, Catch The Jew!, I was horrified. It became clear to me that Israel is seriously ill. It’s standing at the edge of an abyss, and it is not the terrorists of Hamas, Fatah, or Hezbollah who will push it over the edge. The Israelis themselves will take a fatal step forward.

Jews are a highly polarized people, with equal numbers of fools and wise men. In my opinion, every Jew believes that he is the one who knows how to govern the state and how to solve this or that problem. When Golda Meir, who was wise, was asked, “Is it difficult to be a prime minister in Israel,” she answered the question with a question: “How can you be a prime minister in a country where there are already three million prime ministers?”

Israel’s politics reflect over three and a half thousand years of Jewish history. The internal strife in the Diaspora and Israeli society inevitably leads to confrontations, civil wars, and, sometimes, tragic consequences on an epic scale. According to the Torah, the First Temple was destroyed because society was divided, with three main sins flourishing: idol worship, debauchery, and murder. By the time of the Second Temple, society followed the Torah’s commandments but allowed unreasonable and all-pervasive hatred to flourish. The Temple fell. Is that what’s happening today?

Image: An IDF F-16 by the Israel Defense Forces. Public domain.

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The whole world, and especially Israeli citizens, are asking one question: “How did this happen?” No one can understand why the “best” intelligence service in the world failed, why the “most secure” border turned out to be full of holes, and why the “most combat-ready” army in the world took four hours to react to a terrorist attack. No one is particularly surprised that terrorists carried out a massacre in Israel in scale and stunning cruelty comparable only to the 17th-century pogroms of Bohdan Khmelnitsky and his boys. Everyone knew this was how they fight. But Israel’s failures…that was different.

In recent years, Israel has been seriously ill, tormented by a political fever caused by leftist forces working to seize power. Israel was shaken at all levels, from minor officials all the way up to the Knesset and the prime minister. Turbulent waves of demonstrations and strikes rolled across the country, the army was demoralized, and military pilots refused to fly out on combat duty. In fact, a cold civil war was going on in Israel, and the country plunged into chaos. Palestinian terrorists, acting for their puppet masters from Tehran and (likely) Moscow, took advantage of this.

Many observers are concluding that the current catastrophe resulted from the moral degradation of the Israeli political establishment and army command. While I fully agree with this assessment, it seems to me that the failure of the armed forces to defend the country cannot be explained just by the anemia of military command alone.

Regardless of military malaise, the elaborate border protection system that had been built over the years should have worked, at least in some places. However, it turned out to be totally paralyzed absolutely everywhere, in all areas. Completely and simultaneously! This simply couldn’t happen, but it did happen! I suspect that there was a good reason for this, and the name for it is “sabotage.”

History knows cases when the top leadership of a certain country, to achieve some political goals, deliberately exposed their country to attack and made sacrifices among their own population. I will give just two examples from the events of about 80 years ago.

There is a lot of evidence (although some historians dispute it) that President Roosevelt knew in advance about the impending bombing of Pearl Harbor but deliberately did nothing to prevent it. Roosevelt wanted the United States to enter World War II on the British side and to destroy Japan’s hegemony in Asia. In those years, anti-war sentiment was very strong in America. Roosevelt could not start a war with Japan without a serious “casus belli.” The attack on Pearl Harbor gave him such an excuse at the cost of several thousand American lives.