T. Belman. My daughter used to be an Israeli diplomat and she was posted under Amb Halevy in Brussels for three years.
I found no fault with their analysis of our failure except that they suggested our right wing government was focused on the “West Bank” and turned their backs on Gaza. While that may be true, there were many other factors which contributed to the failure.
When it came to their ideas on the war, they all felt that we would not have the time to complete the destruction of Hamas. The American timeline will prevail.
They criticized the government for not articulating what political solution we wanted to achieve for the day after. They thought this was more important that articulating what our military goal was. They also felt that we have no choice but the TSS even if it takes decades.
As the Israel-Hamas war enters its second month, the role of intelligence has figured prominently. How did Israel fail to grasp Hamas’s intentions and capabilities and to anticipate the October 7 attack? Was this a failure of imagination or were there structural and bureaucratic impediments that prevented Israel’s intelligence community from identifying the dots and connecting them? Are domestic politics overriding sound intelligence analysis to shape the Israeli government’s campaign against Hamas, its approach toward Gazan civilians, its efforts to free hostages, and its thinking on post-conflict Gaza and the West Bank? Join us as Efraim Halevy, former director of the Mossad, and Ami Ayalon, former director of Shin Bet, engage in conversation with Aaron David Miller on these and other subjects.
Leftist ideology keeps prevailing in Israel and, in the US even when a republican is the president!
One exception: Trump! We saw the results very quickly!
Sadly, we are back to leftist ideology prevailing.
Stolen elections have dire consequences.
TED, Think again about Mudar’s opinion. No one has ever seen the PM so determined and focussed , constantly repeating that Hamas will be destroyed. It was openly being said during the first temporary cease fire that the P.M would not continue the War, and also the second time. He never does anything RIGHT.
BUT they were all wrong. The War continued to crack Hamas wide open, despite the prognostications.
In my opinion, this is a part of his plan for his future political life and he NEEDS it.
EvRe1 “He does not allow for the fact that Netanyahu was returned to office on the promise of judicial reform, i.e. the people wanted the judicial reform.”
Jews on the left, both in Israel and the U.S. shout that they don’t want Israel to be turned into a Jewish Iran and they are outraged by traditional gender segregation more than anything else. Israeli Jewish leftists are upset about shutting down transportation and business on Shabbat, not allowing chametz into Jewish hospitalls on Pesach. All the restrictions.
It does no good to remind them that such policies won’t fly with the majority of the center-right coalition and they never listen to Bibi. He said, “Israel will not become a Halachic state.” Boom. Period.
They are religious about politics. Their friends are their rabbis, and the TSS and giving terrorists a second chance to kill us have become “Jewish Values.”
This term is meaningless. I have no idea what anybody is talking about when they say this.
In Philosophy/logic/rules of debate this is known as the fallacy of stacking the deck.
The upshot is that the left believes democracy means that the policies they believe in will be enforced by the government in power.
If the majority of the people don’t agree with them.
Then the will of the people is undemocratic and must be subverted. And by way of example, they will always refer to the white majorities of Southern U.S. states keeping the black minority down during Jim Crow and the Supreme Court liberating them..
They call it the “tyranny of the majority” and this is ironic since this is the Anarchist criticism of representative democracy. I should know.. I used to be one in the late 70s. 😀
In the present context, what they actually believe in is Plato’s government by enlightened Judge/Kings in “The Republic.”
They want the Soviet Union.
EvRe1 “He does not allow for the fact that Netanyahu was returned to office on the promise of judicial reform, i.e. the people wanted the judicial reform.
Jews on the left, both in Israel and the U.S. shout that they don’t want Israel to be turned into a Jewish Iran and they are outraged by traditional gender segregation more than anything else. Israeli Jewish leftists are upset about shutting down transportation and business on Shabbat, not allowing chametz into Jewish hospitalls on Pesach. All the restrictions.
It does no good to remind them that such policies won’t fly with the majority of the center-right coalition and they never listen to Bibi. He said, “Israel will not become a Halachic state.” Boom. Period.
They are religious about politics. Their friends are their rabbis, and the TSS and giving terrorists a second chance to kill us have become “Jewish Values.”
This term is meaningless. I have no idea what anybody is talking about when they say this.*
In Philosophy/logic/rules of debate this is known as the fallacy of stacking the deck.
The upshot is that the left believes democracy means that the policies they believe in will be enforced by the government in power.
If the majority of the people don’t agree with them.
Then the will of the people is undemocratic and must be subverted.
In the present context, what they actually believe in is Plato’s government by enlightened Judge/Kings in “The Republic.”
They want the Soviet Union.
——
*”“The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice, have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of régime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way.”
? George Orwell, Politics and the English Language
I told Mudar that I thought that Israel would be prevented from destroying Hamas and he said he disagreed. I asked him to explain himself and he has yet to do so.
From Simcha Rothman in response to Lapid’s claim that the TSS is not dead, but will only delayed (similar to the hopes expressed by psychopaths in the above talk):
I talked to my daughter at length about this discussion. She said that the stated goal of eradication Hamas was a pipedream, that it couldn’t be done. She preferred bringing in the Abraham Accord nations and get them to manage things. I said that I don’t believe that they will be able to make a silk purse out of the Gazans. She agreed it was a long shot, a very long shot. She said the same about rehabilitating the Palestinians and the PA.. I told her that she and these experts were still accepting the orginal paradym notwithstanding Oct 7 and that she should be considering other alternatives like the JO. She refused to even discuss it because. it hasn’t happened yet and I had suggested that it was going to happen many times. That ended the discussion.
I also talked about the military goals v the political goals and said that I disagreed with these experts.. There is time enough to set you political goals after achieving your millitary goals. There was no rush I said. Better to do it after. She disagreed.
The sick obsession with pursuing the psychopathic delusions of the TSS is what brought about the slaughter of October 7. It is what maintains a terror organization in power in the PA despite their open and frank advocacy for genocide for the Jews. EVERYONE who can not at a minimum acknowledge that the TSS is a policy of courting Jewish annihilation should be seen as part of the problem and not part of the solution. This Kumbaya mentality ignores the reality which Israel is fighting. The consequences for such hubris is Jewish slaughters. The prominence and support of such advocacy must end, and those who ignore the failures of the Oslo policy even after October 7 must themselves be ignored.
Ayalon stated as a reason for the intelligence failures that the security establishment thought that Hamas was deterred. Based on what evidence did they believe this?
Efraim Halevy blamed the intelligence failure on the weakness of the country due to Netanyahu’s judicial reform. Instead of saying the demonstrators who demonstrated against Netanyahu were responsible for the problem, Halevy blamed Netanyahu. He does not allow for the fact that Netanyahu was returned to office on the promise of judicial reform, i.e. the people wanted the judicial reform. No, it was all Netanyahu’s fault that Israel looked weak at the time of the attack.
Next he correctly pointed out there was good human intelligence, but it was not only not heeded but one of the people who gave the intelligence was court martialed! Instead of placing the responsibility for this intelligence failure at the top, with Aharon Haliva, he criticized the use of Ai and other forms of intelligence instead of human intelligence.
Then he began to criticize members of the coalition saying “I don’t know how many ministers are capable of being ministers. And we’ve never had this situation before,” while implying that it is because of this that Hamas chose to attack at this time.
Further he went on to criticize Netanyahu for not telling the Israeli people the plan for Gaza after the war. Actually I thought Bibi had explained his plan without going into great detail. He criticized Bibi for not encouraging the people by showing strength in his TV appearances, but instead said that he “appears nervous” and projects weakness.
Then Ayalon stated that the only way to stabilize the Middle East region is through giving the Palestinians a state of their own. He said only about 20% of Palestinians support Hamas, which we know is not only untrue it is only about 20% of Palestinians WHO DO NOT support Hamas.
Thus he arrives at his conclusion that the answer to everything is to give the Palestinians a state, and that all they want is a state of their own.
It is amazing to me that otherwise intelligent people can be so ideologically driven that they cannot even question their ideas or consider the opinions of those who differ from them.
It seems to me this is the problem with ideology on the left, that it is intolerant of other views, and that people with this ideology depend upon these ideas for their sense of virtue and goodness. So to think that maybe the Palestinians don’t want a state of their own, to them, it implies you are immoral if you think that. The reason for this is they cannot imagine that the Palestinians think VERY DIFFERENTLY from liberal Jews.
The Palestinians have been radicalized since early childhood to want ALL OF ISRAEL totally JUDENREIN. But for these two men, the Palestinians want the same thing that Jews want, i.e. a state of their own side by side with Israel. This flies in the face of all the evidence to the contrary, including the behavior of Hamas which is not exactly the way you behave if you want to tell the world you want a state of your own side by side with Israel.
But these two people from the security establishment are exhibits A and B for the intelligence failures in Israel.
They cannot get out of their own way to see the reality of who the Palestinian people really are. Perhaps they know some Palestinian Israelis who think like they do, and thus they assume ALL Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza think like them. But that is a fallacy.
For people who were once involved in Israel’s defense, to not understand the minds of those indoctrinated by Muslim radicalization is a glaring deficit. It is actually a form of blindness that makes it impossible for these men to understand the reality Israel is facing.