Greenfield: The Hamas ‘Inside Job’ Truthers Don’t Understand Israel or War

1. Israel is a mighty fortress and its security is second to none, so how could this have happened?

Most forms of this ‘trutherism’ claim that Israel’s security is so great and its intelligence apparatus so solid that there’s no way that the Hamas attack could have happened without some sort of complicity.

Sorry, no.

Libertarians, of all people, should know that governments are incompetent. Israel’s security is pretty compared to the United States because it actually tries to secure things. But it’s a long way from being secure. The best evidence of that is how many times it has failed.

Israel’s intelligence has been hyped a lot, but it’s mostly offensive intelligence. That means it’s pretty good at doing what it does now, learning the locations of enemy targets and taking them out. Its defensive intelligence has been a mixed bag at best. Israel’s track record at preventing terrorist attacks using intelligence is only a little better than ours.

Ask where a particular terrorist is and they stand a good chance of being able to answer, ask where the next terrorist attack is coming from, and the answer is no more useful than our color-coded homeland security alerts. There’s usually ‘chatter’ and some ‘sources’ say something, but ‘other sources’ say something else. Analysts pore over it and then someone higher up settles the debate.

Without having boots on the ground, Israel was relying on passive intelligence collection and on sensors and cameras, rather than on human intelligence sources and people who were actually paying close attention to what was going on.

As I recently wrote, Israel was nearly destroyed 50 years ago during the Yom Kippur War because key intelligence figures refused to believe that an Egyptian attack was coming even though they had plenty of warning. That was a worse and more unjustified intelligence failure than this one.

Intelligence is not the same thing as ‘intelligence’. Information doesn’t come perfectly packaged and wrapped in a bow. Human beings have to look at it and draw conclusions. Sometimes they draw the right ones, often they draw the wrong ones. And for every piece of information they see, there’s a thousand pieces of information that they don’t see.

Does it make sense that Israel missed the Hamas preparations? As much as missing the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor or Israel losing the defense strategy that would have allowed it to hold the Suez Canal.

Israel knew that something was coming. It sent a small security team expecting to intercept maybe 5 or 7 attackers. Instead, it was overwhelmed by a massive assault that no one saw coming because it was unprecedented.

And that’s the real issue.

Yes, Israel had been distracted by months of leftist riots. And it was the last day of the High Holy Days which is usually a major celebration. But most of all no one had anticipated something on this scale taking place.

That takes us to the second point.

2. Why did Israel let Hamas rampage for so long without intervening?

Estimates are still preliminary, but reports are that Hamas sent in 2,500 terrorists into Israel. Israel had not been prepared for an invasion on that scale. It did not have the manpower in place to quickly and decisively respond to it.

It’s a disaster that emerged from poor planning and worse assumptions.

Here’s a sample of how disastrously this played out in Kibbutz Be’eri where some of the worst killings happened.

Lt.-Col. “B,” commander of the Shaldag elite special forces unit, was at the forefront of the fighting to retake the Gaza Strip periphery communities that were invaded by Hamas from the first moments on Saturday morning.

B said he was awoken at 7 a.m. on Shabbat while at his parents’ house for Simchat Torah and informed about the invasion some 30 minutes after it had started.

Soon after, he and some other units were in helicopters on their way to the Gaza Strip corridor, simultaneously reaching out to more units to head south.

The first Shaldag special forces units, with 12 fighters, arrived at Kibbutz Be’eri at 8:30 a.m., he said, and immediately started to fight to retake the kibbutz.

There was significant fire from Hamas terrorists at the special forces from the start. Some of the special forces personnel were killed or wounded immediately, and the forces realized that the kibbutz was full of terrorists.After reorganizing and five hours of fighting, they had killed 20 Hamas terrorists.

Other accounts suggest that Shaldag was quickly overwhelmed by superior numbers of terrorists, 90 or so, inside. Anyway, the numbers and the chaos speak for themselves.

By 2 a.m. on Sunday, many Shaldag reservists had also shown up, bringing the special forces numbers to 200 – along with much larger numbers of regular troops, paratroopers, and other special forces.

B said about five of his forces were killed and 15 were wounded, including his top deputy.

Many soldiers who were not at a specific spot that they were expected to be at were attacked on their way, B said, adding that some of the top commanders were killed or wounded because they were off duty and jumped right into the fray wherever it was, often without their full complement of forces.

B told a story about one off-duty commander who ran off toward where he thought the fighting was, happened to find a group of soldiers who were being trained to run basic-training sources, and commandeered them to successfully clean Urim of terrorists and save a group of female soldiers who were trapped and surrounded.

This draws as nice a picture as possible, but a really bad one. The IDF was unprepared and caught off guard by the scale of an attack that no one was expecting. It did not have the manpower or organization to quickly respond. (The question is would we do any better if a million armed terrorists showed up at the border?)

Miki Zohar, the Likud’s culture and sports minister, issues an apology on behalf of the government to the residents of the southern communities slaughtered by Hamas on Saturday and to those who paid the ultimate price.

“The preparations were not in place for an attack like this…. The government, the state, was not ready for an attack like this,” Zohar says on Army Radio.

“In the name of the government of Israel, and in the name of the whole State of Israel, we ask your forgiveness for what happened. Because the responsibility is on the government of Israel and the whole State of Israel.”

There’s nothing self-serving here to say that the preparations were not in place. Blame will be spread around. But hell, were we prepared for a bunch of Saudis to hijack planes with box cutters and fly them into buildings?

The errors here were catastrophic, there will be protests and heads will roll. But this wasn’t a conspiracy, it was government incompetence.

Should the attack have been seen coming, should there have been a faster response? Obviously yes.

It’s a catastrophic failure, not just of intelligence, but of strategic planning. It shows the cost of becoming complacent, of playing defense and letting the terrorists learn how you operate, while assuming that they wouldn’t shake up their strategy.

There are lessons here for all of us. In the wake of the attack, some people try to make sense of what doesn’t seem to make sense, by turning to conspiracy theories. And Israel, which spent decades projecting an image of superior competence, brilliant intelligence, and daring operations, was a victim of its own success. But Israel is also the country that operates best when going on the offensive and, like most militaries, becomes stale and unimaginative on the defensive.

Israel is very far from perfect. Its failures and failings are many. This was among the worst. I’ve written at length elsewhere about those failures, but some people need to believe that government is uber-competent and that its failures can only be explained by a conspiracy, not by the reality that governments are innately incompetent.

How many times have Israeli soldiers been thrown into battle, unready and unprepared against superior numbers and firepower, only to turn the tide with heroism and self-sacrifice? Far too often. This was another of those times.

Israelis deserve a military leadership as good as the men and women who serve on the front lines. And the victims deserved a military leadership that would have planned for this scenario. Sadly, they didn’t get it.

Hopefully, next time they will.