Jamie Dettmer is opinion editor at POLITICO Europe.
TEL AVIV — “Benjamin Netanyahu is just not a courageous chief,” says Tamir Pardo, a former director of the Mossad intelligence company. “To make arduous selections for struggle or for peace, you must be courageous, and he isn’t, and he panics.”
That’s how Pardo views his former boss’ response to October 7 — as becoming a sample of conduct he noticed first-hand from 2011 to 2016, when Pardo led Israel’s vaunted exterior intelligence company.
Within the days after October 7, “Netanyahu was in a state of panic and heightened alarm by evaluating the Hamas assault, nonetheless bestial, to the Holocaust,” Pardo says. He faults the Israeli PM for giving the misunderstanding that the nation’s very existence was at stake, when in truth it was not.
Pardo additionally blames U.S. President Joe Biden for fueling apprehensions that Israel was going through an existential disaster. Biden did so, the previous spy boss claims, by dispatching plane carriers to the area, and by telling American Jewish leaders that “no Jew on this planet can be finally secure” if there was no Jewish state.
That comment was poorly timed, Pardo tells me throughout an interview in his workplace in Herzliya, north of Tel Aviv. “I feel Bibi informed Biden that Israel was liable to annihilation,” he says. “However Israel has the perfect military within the Center East.”
U.S. Protection Secretary Lloyd Austin mentioned final month that the plane carriers had been deployed “to discourage hostile actions in opposition to Israel or any efforts towards widening this struggle.” However Pardo isn’t persuaded that Hezbollah plans to launch an all-out struggle on Israel. “In the event that they had been going to take action, they might have finished [it] when Hamas attacked” and earlier than Israel bolstered the northern border, he tells me. “They missed their alternative.”
Israel’s endgame
All of the speak about one other Holocaust did two issues. First, it helped Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas chief in Gaza, obtain one among his essential objectives: delivering a “shock-and-awe” blow that will shake Israel to its core. “Sinwar needed to terrify Israelis, so that they not would really feel secure in their very own nation,” Pardo says.
The Holocaust comparisons additionally meant that Israel rushed into motion with out first devising a day-after technique. Pardo is emphatic that Israel’s existence was by no means in danger on October 7, and that nonetheless grotesque the assault, it shouldn’t be in comparison with the Holocaust, wherein an estimated six million European Jews had been slaughtered by the Nazis.
As an alternative, he says, the Holocaust comparability has clouded arduous strategic enthusiastic about the navy marketing campaign and its day-after finish aim, one thing that has troubled the Biden administration from the beginning.
Greater than a month after the Hamas assaults on kibbutzim in southern Israel, Pardo continues to be analyzing October 7 and drawing conclusions. He worries about what’s to come back and what Israel’s endgame can be.
He doesn’t making gentle of the Hamas assault, nonetheless — the barbarity troubles him deeply. Some of the disconcerting conclusions he has drawn is that the estimated 3,000 attackers would have been groomed to be as vicious as doable.
“Hamas leaders selected them and ready them psychologically and indoctrinated them to dehumanize Jews and it might have been finished over many months,” he says. Maybe the identical size of time, in different phrases, because it took to tug collectively the operational plan, collect the intelligence and stockpile the tools — as a lot as two years.
Pardo’s pondering is echoed by what Israeli Navy Intelligence interrogators have been informed by captured Hamas gunmen — that their leaders emphasised indoctrination, with spiritual leaders lecturing the attackers to inflict most ache and excessive struggling on the Jews they encountered.
‘We don’t perceive it but’
Since he was 18 years of age, Pardo, whose dad and mom emigrated to Israel from Turkey and Serbia, has been battling Israel’s enemies, both as an elite soldier or as a Mossad officer.
As a member of the Sayeret Matkal elite commando unit, he participated within the Entebbe raid, serving beneath Yoni Netanyahu, the present PM’s elder brother, who was killed on the mission. Pardo was Mossad’s senior adviser to the Israel Protection Forces through the 2006 Lebanon Struggle, ultimately rising to develop into the company’s director in 2011.
He has spent most of his skilled life finding out Israel’s foes, making an attempt to know how they suppose and to anticipate their strikes.
Like others in Israel’s protection institution, he has trawled by what occurred on October 7 to higher grasp what went so terribly unsuitable. He appears preoccupied with Hamas’ “turning of males into monsters.”
“We don’t perceive it but and we’ll have to know it,” he continues. “There have been only a handful of incidences when the attackers stayed their hand. They had been 99 p.c profitable in grooming them.”
Hamas had free rein when it got here to recruitment, Pardo notes. Like many others within the protection institution, he frets that Israeli leaders thought they might stick Gaza in a bottle, and switch their backs on severe negotiations with the PLO-led Palestinian Authority to realize a political decision.
He additionally highlights the tactical missteps that Israel’s navy and intelligence companies made in failing to choose up the indicators of an assault — the results of misreading Hamas, of an over-reliance on high-tech digital surveillance, and of a shift in navy and intelligence focus to the West Financial institution to fight agitation over Israeli settlements there.
“We underestimated them — they’re from an operational viewpoint fast learners,” he says. “I’ve been warning about that for years. There’s one thing fully silly in Israel pondering you may deter terrorist teams. There’s no deterrence. You may eradicate them otherwise you may give them such a fierce blow that they perceive they’ve to show away from terror in direction of politics.”