"Israeli intelligence" has long been an oxymoron, and the Oslo Disaster has been, more than anything else, a total failure of Israel's intelligence services. Israeli intelligence services have been the very last to understand what Yasser Arafat was up to when he started the "Oslo peace process."
Israeli intelligence officers were among the last people on earth to understand that Arafat was using Oslo not to reach a peaceful settlement, but rather as a way to entrench himself in the West Bank and Gaza in order to escalate terror and to prod the Arab states into war against Israel. For 12 years, Israeli intelligence services played lapdogs for the Oslo political establishment and for the Leftist Ascendancy, telling the politicians what they wanted to hear, preparing intelligence reports that confirmed what the politicians were already mis-thinking, refusing to point out to them their errors.
Yitzhak Rabin, who had been commander-in-chief of the military, demonstrably made clear to them in 1993 that it was not their place to point out where Rabin was in error in his assessments of PLO intentions, but rather to back him up in his "conception" with their expert "artillery".
The entire senior officer corps of the Israeli military has long been characterized by politicization and bias, leaning towards the Left, not to mention innate McClellenism and perpetual preference for finding alternatives to fighting and to victory for Israel. In many ways, the intelligence services are the worst of all.
The idea that these intelligence services are blind prisoners of their own misconceptions was first born and manifested in their Pearl-Harbor-like failure to understand what the Egyptians and Syrians were cooking up in October 1973, when they launched the Yom Kippur War against a snoozing Israel. Completely self-assured, completely self-persuaded, the spooks found out that their absolute confidence that the Egyptians would never try a military assault on the Bar-Lev Line died along with 2,600 or so Israeli troops. They discovered their complete misjudgment of the situation only when the entire world learned the truth.
Some intelligence! Some early warning system! That 1973 Yom Kippur War intelligence failure came close to producing a Second Holocaust.
Yet the total failure of the Israeli intelligence services starting with the 1992 Oslo Initiative was in some ways even worse. Unlike the 1973 debacle, any layman with eyes in his head and an ounce of common sense could analyze in the early 1990s just what was wrong with Yossi Beilin's and Shimon Peres' infantile "plans". Just six weeks after the 1993 White House Oslo Pawshake, I published my first anti-Oslo article, in Midstream magazine in the US, followed by other articles, and explained how, in spite of the Oslo Euphoria at the time, Arafat would revert to terror, would use the territories, arms and funding he was being granted to launch war and atrocities.
I predicted that the PLO would fire rockets and mortars from what were about to become the "Palestinian Zones" into Israeli civilians areas. I predicted that Arafat would not respond to Israeli generosity and goodwill with generosity and goodwill, but with a very short period of quiet, during which he would pocket his gains, followed by war and terror. I did not have access to any secret intelligence sources. I did not have a professional staff of hundreds of analysts working for me. I simply read the newspaper without blinkers.
At the time, the entire world was in the throes of Oslo Euphoria. It is hard to recreate for those who are too young to recall it, or who have forgotten, how universal and overwhelming was the Oslo Euphoria, especially in Israel. I was demonized and attacked as a fanatic for expressing doubt about the genius of the Rabin-Peres initiative, for claiming it would fail and produce a disaster. I was repeatedly threatened and some attempted to sabotage my position in the University of Haifa for my daring to express dissident thoughts about the "peace process". The McCarthyism got far worse when Rabin himself was assassinated, and every single Israeli who had opposed Rabin's "policies" was being accused of collective guilt in Rabin's murder.
I was not the only person to see clearly in 1993 what was about to transpire and do not claim to have any special talent or prescience. There were plenty of people around who called things right on the mark. A minority of commentators inside Israel scored 100% in perfect foresight. At the time, though, they were denounced as haters of peace and as fanatics who put land ahead of peace. They were quiet heroes. Someday Israel will build a museum in their honor, and a National Museum of Folly to document the insanity and stupidity of their opponents. The Jewish people has a long collective memory and there is no doubt about how things will eventually be remembered.
But none of these dissidents worked for Israeli intelligence. Or to be more precise, the only one with correct foresight who did work for Israeli intelligence was General Yaakov Amidror, and he was ignored and then forced into retirement. He still speaks out, but is dismissed by the media, themselves under the near totalitarian hegemony of the Leftist Ascendancy.
Throughout the 1990s, Israeli intelligence was telling Rabin and Peres what they wanted to hear. It refused to tell them that the Oslo Emperor was naked. It refused to point out the existential dangers. It refused to point out the astronomical stupidity of the "New Middle East" preconception. It refused even to report accurately on the preparations - and then on the perpetration - of atrocities by the PLO and its surrogates. Daily snipings were minimized and pooh-poohed. The snoops and spooks were often effective in catching the terrorist perps before they carried out their intentions, but at the same time, intelligence reports reassured the political leadership that Arafat would indeed suppress the Hamas and the Jihad, not collaborate with and shelter them. The intelligence community refused to speak out, while every day brought new proof that Arafat had no intention of complying with anything at all and was seeking nothing but escalation. Even after the fact, their vision could be defined as legally blind.
By the mid-1990s, one needed no special secret documents nor special analytic skills to see what was before one's own face. One needed horse sense. When Arafat ordered his stormtroopers to open fire on Israelis, using the very same weapons Israel had provided the PLO, in the Tunnel Pogroms under Netanyahu, the main people in Israel taken by total surprise were those in the intelligence services.
There is an old quip that painters and intelligence officers both tend to fall in love with their models. Year after year, the Israeli intelligence services remained captives of the politicians' wishful thinking, refusing to take heat from their nominal civilian bosses should they dare to state the simple truth. When Israel under Ehud Barak's people was prepared to offer Arafat absolutely everything he was demanding, Arafat spit upon them and opened a new round of atrocities, the misnamed "Al-Aqsa Intifada". Among those taken completely by surprise at this were the intelligence services, once again.
The intelligence services turned in report after report searching for the "half full glass of water", for signs of PLO moderation and willingness to compromise.
But things have gotten completely Orwellian in the past few weeks.
A media cat spat has broken out between a handful of ex-intelligence officers. They have been accusing one another in the media of misjudgment and of cooking up biased intelligence reports to serve the political establishment. They accuse one another of being captives of false preconceptions.
But they do not mean what you think!
The extent to which Israeli intelligence is still prisoner of its nave delusions is in fact proved by this latest spook spat. What has been happening is that several leftist intelligence ex-officers, and notably ex-head of military intelligence Amos Malka and senior intelligence officer General Ephraim Lavie, have been attacking another ex-intelligence officer, General Amos Gilad, for his having dared to tell the truth. Gilad, for his part, has denied the accusations vigorously! His two critics are, for all intents and purposes, the Daniel Ellsbergs of Israel.
No, that was not a set of typos and misprints in the previous paragraph. The problem is this: the Left is claiming that over the past two years, Israeli intelligence has misled the Sharon government by providing it with intelligence reports indicating that Arafat is not interested in peace, is interested only in escalation, is personally behind the violence, and that Israel has no "partner" in Arafat or the PLO with which it can pursue a negotiated settlement. In Leftist "minds", these reports served to grant legitimacy to erroneous actions and strategic notions of the Sharon government - and no, they do not mean the erroneous plan for expelling the Gush Katif settlers. In particular, the Left is soiling itself in outrage because a while back Sharon's people circulated a report in Washington prepared by the intelligence services proving Arafat was behind the terror, bombings and other atrocities, and is in violation of every comma in the Oslo Accords.
The Left, and this includes the two ex-spooks who ran to the far-leftist daily Haaretz, are accusing General Gilad of sucking up to the Likud political establishment and telling Sharon's people what they want to hear. Gosh, when have intelligence officers in Israel ever sucked up to politicians before and told them what they want to hear? The Left claims this proves incompetence and politicization of the intelligence services. In a sense it does, but not in the way they mean.
Israeli senior intelligence is so politicized and so incompetent that here, 1,400 murdered Israelis and tens of thousands of destroyed Israeli families later, they are still so passionately clinging to their Oslo delusions that two of the highest are willing to go public in denouncing anyone who dissents from the Grand Delusion. They are, in effect, accusing General Gilad of telling the truth! How dare he? They are outraged that he assisted Sharon's people in their Washington "public relations" project in preparing documents proving Arafat was behaving treacherously. Heavens to Mergatroyd. General Gilad, instead of telling them to stuff it, has responded by protesting his own "innocence", insisting he never bent intelligence reports in the direction of the truth.
One of these days, Israeli intelligence might discover that the world is round. If it is up to these Ellsbergian leftist intelligence "dissidents", then no one in intelligence should dare to report such a truth or actual facts. And if anyone does report that the earth is round, then they will be denounced by Haaretz. Just like Seven Up was once calling itself the Un-Cola, Haaretz in this affair has behaved as the Un-Newspaper. It makes less and less pretense to be reporting the news, and more and more effort to distort the news as part of its systematic campaign of anti-Zionist indoctrination. It ran a full-page scoop on the ex-spooks (http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/438249.html and http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/438280.html) in which it denounced an intelligence officer for stating that Arafat is uninterested in reaching any negotiated settlement. Such "journalism" sinks below the level of Pravda under Khrushchev.
Haaretz wants a pure set of intelligence services, one which will do nothing but serve as the lapdogs of the extremist Left, will continue to throw sand in the eyes of the public, and will prepare Israel for future Pearl Harbor surprises, or at least new Yom Kippur surprises.
Israeli intelligence officers were among the last people on earth to understand that Arafat was using Oslo not to reach a peaceful settlement, but rather as a way to entrench himself in the West Bank and Gaza in order to escalate terror and to prod the Arab states into war against Israel. For 12 years, Israeli intelligence services played lapdogs for the Oslo political establishment and for the Leftist Ascendancy, telling the politicians what they wanted to hear, preparing intelligence reports that confirmed what the politicians were already mis-thinking, refusing to point out to them their errors.
Yitzhak Rabin, who had been commander-in-chief of the military, demonstrably made clear to them in 1993 that it was not their place to point out where Rabin was in error in his assessments of PLO intentions, but rather to back him up in his "conception" with their expert "artillery".
The entire senior officer corps of the Israeli military has long been characterized by politicization and bias, leaning towards the Left, not to mention innate McClellenism and perpetual preference for finding alternatives to fighting and to victory for Israel. In many ways, the intelligence services are the worst of all.
The idea that these intelligence services are blind prisoners of their own misconceptions was first born and manifested in their Pearl-Harbor-like failure to understand what the Egyptians and Syrians were cooking up in October 1973, when they launched the Yom Kippur War against a snoozing Israel. Completely self-assured, completely self-persuaded, the spooks found out that their absolute confidence that the Egyptians would never try a military assault on the Bar-Lev Line died along with 2,600 or so Israeli troops. They discovered their complete misjudgment of the situation only when the entire world learned the truth.
Some intelligence! Some early warning system! That 1973 Yom Kippur War intelligence failure came close to producing a Second Holocaust.
Yet the total failure of the Israeli intelligence services starting with the 1992 Oslo Initiative was in some ways even worse. Unlike the 1973 debacle, any layman with eyes in his head and an ounce of common sense could analyze in the early 1990s just what was wrong with Yossi Beilin's and Shimon Peres' infantile "plans". Just six weeks after the 1993 White House Oslo Pawshake, I published my first anti-Oslo article, in Midstream magazine in the US, followed by other articles, and explained how, in spite of the Oslo Euphoria at the time, Arafat would revert to terror, would use the territories, arms and funding he was being granted to launch war and atrocities.
I predicted that the PLO would fire rockets and mortars from what were about to become the "Palestinian Zones" into Israeli civilians areas. I predicted that Arafat would not respond to Israeli generosity and goodwill with generosity and goodwill, but with a very short period of quiet, during which he would pocket his gains, followed by war and terror. I did not have access to any secret intelligence sources. I did not have a professional staff of hundreds of analysts working for me. I simply read the newspaper without blinkers.
At the time, the entire world was in the throes of Oslo Euphoria. It is hard to recreate for those who are too young to recall it, or who have forgotten, how universal and overwhelming was the Oslo Euphoria, especially in Israel. I was demonized and attacked as a fanatic for expressing doubt about the genius of the Rabin-Peres initiative, for claiming it would fail and produce a disaster. I was repeatedly threatened and some attempted to sabotage my position in the University of Haifa for my daring to express dissident thoughts about the "peace process". The McCarthyism got far worse when Rabin himself was assassinated, and every single Israeli who had opposed Rabin's "policies" was being accused of collective guilt in Rabin's murder.
I was not the only person to see clearly in 1993 what was about to transpire and do not claim to have any special talent or prescience. There were plenty of people around who called things right on the mark. A minority of commentators inside Israel scored 100% in perfect foresight. At the time, though, they were denounced as haters of peace and as fanatics who put land ahead of peace. They were quiet heroes. Someday Israel will build a museum in their honor, and a National Museum of Folly to document the insanity and stupidity of their opponents. The Jewish people has a long collective memory and there is no doubt about how things will eventually be remembered.
But none of these dissidents worked for Israeli intelligence. Or to be more precise, the only one with correct foresight who did work for Israeli intelligence was General Yaakov Amidror, and he was ignored and then forced into retirement. He still speaks out, but is dismissed by the media, themselves under the near totalitarian hegemony of the Leftist Ascendancy.
Throughout the 1990s, Israeli intelligence was telling Rabin and Peres what they wanted to hear. It refused to tell them that the Oslo Emperor was naked. It refused to point out the existential dangers. It refused to point out the astronomical stupidity of the "New Middle East" preconception. It refused even to report accurately on the preparations - and then on the perpetration - of atrocities by the PLO and its surrogates. Daily snipings were minimized and pooh-poohed. The snoops and spooks were often effective in catching the terrorist perps before they carried out their intentions, but at the same time, intelligence reports reassured the political leadership that Arafat would indeed suppress the Hamas and the Jihad, not collaborate with and shelter them. The intelligence community refused to speak out, while every day brought new proof that Arafat had no intention of complying with anything at all and was seeking nothing but escalation. Even after the fact, their vision could be defined as legally blind.
By the mid-1990s, one needed no special secret documents nor special analytic skills to see what was before one's own face. One needed horse sense. When Arafat ordered his stormtroopers to open fire on Israelis, using the very same weapons Israel had provided the PLO, in the Tunnel Pogroms under Netanyahu, the main people in Israel taken by total surprise were those in the intelligence services.
There is an old quip that painters and intelligence officers both tend to fall in love with their models. Year after year, the Israeli intelligence services remained captives of the politicians' wishful thinking, refusing to take heat from their nominal civilian bosses should they dare to state the simple truth. When Israel under Ehud Barak's people was prepared to offer Arafat absolutely everything he was demanding, Arafat spit upon them and opened a new round of atrocities, the misnamed "Al-Aqsa Intifada". Among those taken completely by surprise at this were the intelligence services, once again.
The intelligence services turned in report after report searching for the "half full glass of water", for signs of PLO moderation and willingness to compromise.
But things have gotten completely Orwellian in the past few weeks.
A media cat spat has broken out between a handful of ex-intelligence officers. They have been accusing one another in the media of misjudgment and of cooking up biased intelligence reports to serve the political establishment. They accuse one another of being captives of false preconceptions.
But they do not mean what you think!
The extent to which Israeli intelligence is still prisoner of its nave delusions is in fact proved by this latest spook spat. What has been happening is that several leftist intelligence ex-officers, and notably ex-head of military intelligence Amos Malka and senior intelligence officer General Ephraim Lavie, have been attacking another ex-intelligence officer, General Amos Gilad, for his having dared to tell the truth. Gilad, for his part, has denied the accusations vigorously! His two critics are, for all intents and purposes, the Daniel Ellsbergs of Israel.
No, that was not a set of typos and misprints in the previous paragraph. The problem is this: the Left is claiming that over the past two years, Israeli intelligence has misled the Sharon government by providing it with intelligence reports indicating that Arafat is not interested in peace, is interested only in escalation, is personally behind the violence, and that Israel has no "partner" in Arafat or the PLO with which it can pursue a negotiated settlement. In Leftist "minds", these reports served to grant legitimacy to erroneous actions and strategic notions of the Sharon government - and no, they do not mean the erroneous plan for expelling the Gush Katif settlers. In particular, the Left is soiling itself in outrage because a while back Sharon's people circulated a report in Washington prepared by the intelligence services proving Arafat was behind the terror, bombings and other atrocities, and is in violation of every comma in the Oslo Accords.
The Left, and this includes the two ex-spooks who ran to the far-leftist daily Haaretz, are accusing General Gilad of sucking up to the Likud political establishment and telling Sharon's people what they want to hear. Gosh, when have intelligence officers in Israel ever sucked up to politicians before and told them what they want to hear? The Left claims this proves incompetence and politicization of the intelligence services. In a sense it does, but not in the way they mean.
Israeli senior intelligence is so politicized and so incompetent that here, 1,400 murdered Israelis and tens of thousands of destroyed Israeli families later, they are still so passionately clinging to their Oslo delusions that two of the highest are willing to go public in denouncing anyone who dissents from the Grand Delusion. They are, in effect, accusing General Gilad of telling the truth! How dare he? They are outraged that he assisted Sharon's people in their Washington "public relations" project in preparing documents proving Arafat was behaving treacherously. Heavens to Mergatroyd. General Gilad, instead of telling them to stuff it, has responded by protesting his own "innocence", insisting he never bent intelligence reports in the direction of the truth.
One of these days, Israeli intelligence might discover that the world is round. If it is up to these Ellsbergian leftist intelligence "dissidents", then no one in intelligence should dare to report such a truth or actual facts. And if anyone does report that the earth is round, then they will be denounced by Haaretz. Just like Seven Up was once calling itself the Un-Cola, Haaretz in this affair has behaved as the Un-Newspaper. It makes less and less pretense to be reporting the news, and more and more effort to distort the news as part of its systematic campaign of anti-Zionist indoctrination. It ran a full-page scoop on the ex-spooks (http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/438249.html and http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/438280.html) in which it denounced an intelligence officer for stating that Arafat is uninterested in reaching any negotiated settlement. Such "journalism" sinks below the level of Pravda under Khrushchev.
Haaretz wants a pure set of intelligence services, one which will do nothing but serve as the lapdogs of the extremist Left, will continue to throw sand in the eyes of the public, and will prepare Israel for future Pearl Harbor surprises, or at least new Yom Kippur surprises.