Herzi Halevi, the top brass and the "Palestinian state" agenda, Part 1

Part 2, Part 3

Yesterday, 21 January 2025, IDF Chief-of-Staff Herzi Halevi formally resigned his position. The magnanimous praise of his tireless exertions to protect Israel and her people has already begun. The conduct of the top brass and the security leadership is still, more than a year later, described as an “intelligence failure”. This is a curious characterisation, since the IDF and security leaders had all the intelligence they needed to stop the Hamas invasion. This was neither a security failure, nor incompetence, but something altogether more sinister. This three-part essay looks at one actor in this tragedy, Herzi Halevi, and puts forward what we were able to glean about the conduct of IDF Chiefs-of-Staff since the Oslo Accords, based only on English sources. We suggest a possible explanation for the “intelligence failure” euphemism. This essay also challenges the idea that the Biden Administration had tied the IDF’s hands behind its back. I relied heavily on Professor Efraim Karsh’s stunning paper, “From Oslo to Be’eri: how the 30-years-long peace delusion led to Hamas’s 10/7 massacres”, in Israel Affairs, 9 October 2024. Until such time as a proper inquiry is held, Prof. Karsh’s paper is the most comprehensive account of the “intelligence failure” I could find. For this source, I am indebted to an Israeli friend who prefers to remain anonymous.

In an interview published on 26 Nov 2024, Yishai Fleischer asked Lieutenant-Colonel (ret.) Jonathan Conricus:

How do you answer the question about how did Israel get caught with its pants down and got attacked on a holy day in Israel? Our army, seemingly, did not catch this terrorist attack, which had been planned for a long time and [by] which we were duped. We fell for it. A lot of people were killed, murdered and raped, and all the bad stuff. How do you answer that question?

Yishai Fleischer had zeroed in on what Colonel Conricus had left out of his answer to the previous question. The honest part of Conricus’s answer is:

There’s still no official Israeli Board of Inquiry. It hasn’t been investigated at the military level, at a sufficient level. This hasn't been presented to Israeli decision makers and the Israeli government hasn’t come clean yet on all of those years of Israeli policy towards Gaza.

But then we descend into some revealing obfuscation, starting with the claim:

The most important thing, is that we underestimated our enemy and we totally misinterpreted their strategic intentions. ...We didn't watch the different signs that we saw of actually Hamas preparing to do what they did on October the 7th and it all goes back to our misunderstanding of what we thought their intentions were and what we thought was what Hamas was about.

Fleischer had to remind Conricus that it was not a matter of underestimation or misinterpretation:

We have on record a chief of military intelligence saying we think that Hamas is more into governance than into fighting Israel. They are deterred. They want to govern. It's not that they want peace or love Israel, but they want to stay in their place and in their lane and get the benefits of being legitimate governors of a chunk of land, of Gaza and we just don't expect there to be a war. So there was also what we call in Israel a contzeptia, a conception of the strategic dangers that was not commensurate with the reality.

This is a damning charge that has pretty much saturated the news since 7 October, yet the IDF’s PR person had to be reminded of it. Conricus responded:

The really basic primal issue was that we misinterpreted their strategic intentions. We also underestimated their capacity and we didn’t understand what they were doing. We told ourselves that what we were seeing wasn’t actually what was happening, and we failed to take notice of the warning signs.

This is dishonest. They did take notice of the warning signs. Already on 1 October 2020, Herzi Halevi, the current IDF Chief-of-Staff wrote:

“Our current enemies – Hamas and Hezbollah, in particular – are planning land-based attacks into our territory. These operations aren't meant to hold onto territory for extended times. Rather, they're meant to cause damage, take captives, and beyond that, seriously affect the consciousness of the Israeli public and cause media buzz over something unprecedented that occurred. Terror aims to frighten people. It does not aim to win, in the classical sense of the word, and in this case, causing the state to lose control over the territory in which it exists, planting fear and causing instability are its achievement.”

This was published in the IDF’s Dado Center Journal. Colonel Conricus, in the same statement, asserts:

When Hamas were saying loud and clear in Arabic that they want to annihilate the state of Israel and that they want to destroy and kill all the Jews, they weren't talking about the Gaza Strip, they were not talking about the Gaza peripheral area, the Gaza envelope; they're talking about all of Israel, which they refer to as Palestine, and we simply didn't listen.

This is an astonishing admission. Jonathan Conricus is saying that they knew Hamas to be planning to “destroy and kill all the Jews [in] ...the Gaza peripheral area, the Gaza envelope,” but had they known Hamas to be talking about “all of Israel,” they would have done something about it. It gets worse:

Hamas, for at least two years, probably more than that, effectively misled Israeli decision-makers, military and political, into thinking that Hamas was into the business of governing Gaza, getting work permits for Palestinian workers to work in Israel and getting Qatari money, with Israeli authorisation, into the Gaza Strip and as if that was the most important thing, but apparently it wasn’t. (My emphasis)

It was three years prior to this that Herzi Halevi made his “Hamas and Hezbollah ...are planning land-based attacks into our territory” statement in an IDF journal. How, exactly, Hamas “misled Israeli decision-makers ...into [granting] work permits for Palestinian workers to work in Israel,” may be learnt from a 22 June 2022 i24 news report:

Israel on Wednesday unfroze a measure that raises the number of work permits granted to Palestinians in Gaza to 14,000, nearly a week after a rocket was fired from the Strip into southern Israel.

The Israeli Civil Administration in the Palestinian Territories, known by the acronym COGAT, announced on Thursday that 2,000 more permits would be added to the quota.

However, that measure was frozen on Saturday, after terrorists from the Gaza Strip fired a rocket into the Israeli coastal city of Ashkelon.

According to COGAT, Defense Minister Benny Gantz agreed that the 2,000 permits will finally be granted starting Sunday, "provided that calm and security are maintained in the area."

COGAT said that these permits to enter Israel are for economic purposes and are in addition to the work permits already granted to 20,000 Gazans by the decision of Gantz.

The Defense Ministry approved a March plan to increase the number of work permits granted to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip from 12,000 to 20,000, a dramatic and unprecedented increase.

As of mid-2021, only 7,000 Palestinians from Gaza had permits to work or do business in Israel. (My emphasis)

We are expected to believe that the Israeli Minister of Defence was unaware that he was letting 20,000 Hamas terrorists into Israel. Six weeks after the October massacre, I wrote:

In the name of [1200] Israelis, we need to know who, exactly, these “workers” were and what role, precisely, they played in the 7 October jihad attack. This is a very serious question, made that much more serious by the Israeli government’s unseemly haste in “expelling” those Gazan Work Permit holders still in Israel after the Israeli assaults on Gaza had commenced, in full knowledge that many, if not all of them, need to be detained and interrogated. Israeli Work Permits discovered on dead Hamas terrorists gave Israel 18,000 Hamas hostages on a platter. All 252 Israeli captives could have been released by now as well as an identity crisis set off amongst the Palestinians. It is inconceivable that the Israeli government had not thought of this. Why were these thousands of terror suspects allowed to return to Gaza?

Which brings us to the then Minister of Defence, Benny Gantz. From June 2021 to December 2022, Benny Gantz served as Defence Minister in the short-lived and avowedly capitulatory Bennett-Lapid government. It was enough time for Gantz to nominate Herzi Halevi as the new Chief-of-Staff of the IDF on 4 September 2022, for him to be appointed on 23 October 2022 and to assume the role on 23 January 2023, the newly-elected and beleaguered Netanyahu government barely a month in office from 29 December 2022. Why did Benny Gantz nominate Herzi Halevi for the role of Israel’s top soldier?

Lieutenant-General Herzi Halevi might now be Israel’s top soldier, but he is far from a serious one. His chosen metaphor for explaining his soldiering philosophy is a game of American football—I kid you not. So central is this metaphor to his thinking that the article quoted above is topped with an image of a tackle on a gridiron pitch. For Halevi, war is a formulaic ratio of defence to offence, just like in a football match, where each side knows the rules, plays by them, and tries to score more points than their opponents. They are certainly not in the business of killing each other, let alone attacking, murdering, mutilating, raping and setting alight each other’s fans.

In the wars of the past, offense was the only part that counted, with defense relegated to a marginal role. ...In today's wars, when fighting terrorist armies, should this ratio be changed, and should more attention be devoted to defense as well?

If the reader suspects that this formulaic approach has nothing to do with the actual nature of the enemy, then they would be correct. According to Halevi, Israel’s enemies, Hamas and Hezbollah in particular, are unwilling to play according to the rules of the game, because they are afraid of the IDF. It does not cross Halevi’s mind that Israel’s enemies do not see war as a football game, but a struggle for “victory or death”, and that the rules are whatever you enemy would never do. Halevi is confident that:

The major changes in the enemy are due to our powerfulness and our past successes. Our military strength, as a maneuvering army, is precisely what turned our enemies into guerrilla armies, due to their unwillingness and inability to face off against us, army against army. The superiority we developed in our intel and aerial firepower has sent our enemy into hiding, taking it deep underground. Active defense systems developed by our brightest minds have led our enemy to the conclusion that merely shelling the Israeli home front will not give them the achievement they seek, so the enemy has begun developing land attack capabilities. ...When we grow stronger in one area, we should ask ourselves what our enemy would do in response. (My emphasis)

This was written almost two years before Benny Gantz let 20,000 military-age Gazan males into Israel. Everybody seemed surprised that when Hamas went marauding house-to-house, they seemed to know each house and family intimately, right down to the name of the dog. Furthermore, Benny Ganz’s choice of Chief-of-Staff did not disappoint.

Jonathan Conricus was the IDF’s official spokesperson. His job was to do hasbara for the IDF and, as we have seen from the Fleischer interview, "forget to mention" information that puts the IDF in a less than favourable light. If he had concentrated only on the ground forces, not only would his job have been easy, for that is the good side of the IDF and he would have come across as an honest man. The upper echelons of the IDF, on the contrary, are a strange beast indeed, and Conricus has had to tell many a fib to cover for them. But what does veteran Israeli journalist, Caroline Glick, make of Herzi Halevi?

A few days before the second inauguration of Donald Trump as President of the United States, Glick reports on the most recent roadside bomb attack in Gaza, in which four soldiers were killed and six others wounded, and continues:

One of the things that’s most disturbing about the IED attack is that it occurred in Beit Hanoun in Northern Gaza that Israel took control over in the early stages of the ground offensive last year, and has since returned to and shed blood in over and over and over again. Israel is currently winding down, apparently—although not clear why—a major ground offensive in Northern Gaza that’s been going on for over a month. Twenty-eight IDF soldiers so far have been killed in these operations in Beit Hanoun, Jabalia and in other areas of Northern Gaza. The question that people are asking now, with increased urgency and anger, is, “Why do we continue to lose IDF forces?”

The people are asking exactly the right question, and Caroline Glick correctly identifies it. She offers the damning statistic that Hamas has carried out two successful roadside bomb (IED) attacks on IDF soldiers within a week.

We’ve had 400 now, the number of IDF forces that have been killed in the ground operation in Gaza that began in late October 2023 and it’s gone on until now. And it doesn’t seem that there’s any end in sight, to the contrary. It feels like the gains that Israel made on the backs of our incredibly courageous soldiers and officers are being squandered. Hamas is recruiting new forces. They continue to maintain their control as a regime throughout the Gaza Strip and the question is: How did we get to this point where we’re seeing our hard-earned gains seemingly undermined right before our eyes and more and more soldiers continue to be killed? (My emphasis)

Glick offers two main reasons for this:

The US demand under the Biden Administration that Israel provide effectively unlimited supplies to Hamas throughout the war. From the very outset, the first day of the war October 7^th, the Biden Administration began making this demand on Israel that we allow resupply to Hamas-led Gaza as much as possible as early as possible. They started insisting that people were starving in Gaza from the first week of the war. (My emphasis)

From this point on, we have yet another depressing example of how hasbara loses wars. Glick sinks into classic hasbara impotence by explaining why the people of Gaza were not starving:

They were fully supplied. There had been no siege of any kind on Gaza on October 6th and so they were fully supplies their larders were filled and yet by October 10th the administration was already on the ground here demanding that Israel open up passages to allow food, water, medicine, fuel and electricity to flow into Gaza under the control of Hamas.

If the US is offering such a patently untrue justification for their insistence, then clearly, they do not care whether the justification is or is not true. Whatever the facts are is irrelevant. It was a propaganda attack meant to rouse the liberal world against Israel, which it did, thereby immediately mitigating, and eventually cancelling, Western liberal shock at the savagery they witnessed the Palestinians perpetrate the day before.

The first question that more alert observers asked was, why should Israel comply? The immediate and rather obvious answer to this, as we all know, is that if Israel did not comply, the US would deny Israel the wherewithal to fight the war. It is a long-established pattern. In short, the US was blackmailing Israel to strengthen her own enemy during an active war. The blackmail was an act of war against Israel. In other words, the US entered the war on the side of Hamas. That is the important point that Glick had to establish. From here, the dots lead straight to the people’s question: “Why do we continue to lose IDF forces?” And one of the dots between the US entering the war and the continued loss of forces, is Herzi Halevi. Beyond this point, any discussion about “humanitarian aid” becomes irrelevant. We are looking at treason at the head of the Israel Defense Forces.

The war had to continue, there is no argument about that, but did it have to continue under compromised leadership? Those who argued that it was impractical to change leadership in the middle of a war seemed self-evidently correct, but were they? In Britain, the Sovereign is the Head of the Armed Forces (Commander-in-Chief), but in practice, the Prime Minister (consulting the Cabinet) makes the key political decisions on deploying the Armed Forces and the Secretary of State for Defence (Defence Minister) is responsible for day-to-day military operations. World War II opened with Neville Chamberlain, whose name is synonymous with appeasement, as Prime Minister. Eight months into the war, Chamberlain was replaced with Winston Churchill, and we all know the rest.

In Israel, the Prime Minister, over the course of the war, changed himself from a Chamberlain into a Churchill, an association he cultivates. The Israeli Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant, was not only an appeaser, but a capitulator and a collaborator. He had to be changed as early as possible so a proper Defence Minister might get rid of a traitorous Chief-of-Staff. Given that the Israeli Churchill was so slow in coming, Herzi Halevi remained where he could do the most damage to the IDF.

Caroline Glick is culturally and intellectually an American, and displays the same one-dimensionality so often the undoing of the supremely confident pronouncements of naïve American analysts. Even the deservedly renowned Victor Davis Hanson does not escape this. In a recent conversation with Caroline Glick, he talks about the tardiness in Israel’s response to the 7 October massacre:

Rapidity is really important [to] what happens in world opinion and here in [US] domestic pressures politically. When Israel was attacked on October 7^th, it took three weeks to regroup and get ready and go in. (My emphasis)

“Regrouping and getting ready to go in” was deliberately obstructed so that it ended up taking three weeks. “It's very important when these things happen,” says Hanson, “for Israel to have contingency plans and to strike back immediately within an abbreviated time frame.” Prof. Karsh writes of how such concerns were addressed when Benny Gantz was Chief-of-Staff:

While the IDF’s planning directorate prepared a ‘road-map for underground fighting’ as early as February 2008, no comprehensive plan for neutralising the tunnels was prepared, no operational or organisational measures to this end were taken, and the intelligence directorate did not even include the tunnel threat on its list of vital national targets until 2015. Indeed, in their numerous appearances before the cabinet, the intelligence heads consistently refrained from mentioning the tunnel threat, whereas Chief-of-Staff [Benny] Gantz downplayed its significance in his rare allusions to the issue. In May 2013, for example, he told the cabinet that the tunnels posed ‘a threat of an attack, but not of a major assault’, reassuring ministers that this threat was not ‘very significant’ as it could ‘only’ include ‘a few hundred people’. (p23)

A more reliable approach than assuming inactivity or incompetence when a powerful and sophisticated armed force fails to develop contingency plans, would be to assume that something serious is interfering with the development of such plans. After Oslo, the job specification for IDF Chief-of-Staff seems to consist of only two duties: one, ensure the IDF never defeats the Palestinians; and two, hoodwink to the Cabinet. Ehud Barak, Shaul Mofaz, Moshe Ya’alon, Dan Halutz, Benny Gantz, Gadi Eisenkot, Aviv Kohavi and Herzi Halevi form a veritable rogues’ gallery of top brass. All of them went out of their way to degrade the IDF’s ground forces, while Ehud Barak, in his role as Defense Minister, compounded that scandal by dismantling Israel’s defence industry and creating dependence on the United States.

When Victor Davis Hanson laments the three week delay in ground forces entering Gaza, the sentiment is not out of place. But the situation is not as simple as he assumes. Jonathan Conricus highlights one outcome of the attrition of ground forces:

Of course we have to speak about the level, the availability of troops around the Gaza Division. Most of the troops were on other assignments. There were no readily available reserve units. There were not enough helicopters ready to deploy at Air Force bases. The general assessment was that nothing’s going to happen, because we’ve built this wall underground defending us from tunnels. We have a strong and sturdy fence above ground which we don't think that they're going to be able to cross, and we have the Iron Dome, capable of shooting down the biggest and the baddest rockets that they can fire. So why worry? I think this was the General sentiment in Southern Command Gaza Division.

The point is that beneath the physical unpreparedness at any given moment lies an entrenched culture of unpreparedness, deliberately cultivated by the leaders of the IDF. The Prime Minister, rather sheepishly at the time, explained that it takes a long time to develop a plan for attacking Gaza. This is not the only time that Netanyahu deceived the Israeli people in order to protect the Generals. His nation was entitled to know the real reason for the absence of an existing plan, given how long Gaza has been a problem, how many times operations had to be carried out there, and how long Israelis have suffered from the hubris that expelled them from Gaza and handed the strip to avowed jihad mass-murderers. The truth is that the IDF’s top brass have been dragging their feet on this plan for ten years in defiance of the Prime Minister, who could or would do nothing about it. Professor Karsh again:

No plan for neutralising Hamas’s tunnels existed at the onset of Operation Protective Edge [July 2014], despite their definition as a strategic threat as early as late-2013 and Netanyahu’s request from Defence Minister [Moshe “Boogie”] Ya’alon at a Cabinet meeting a week before the operation to present such a plan within a day. As a result, the first ten days of the operation were exclusively limited to air strikes on Hamas targets, and it was only when scores of terrorists emerged from an underground tunnel inside Israel on July 17 to attack military targets, in a resounding rebuff of the Egyptian ceasefire initiative, that the IDF launched a limited ground operation against offensive tunnels penetrating into Israel. By the time hostilities were over on August 26, only about half of these tunnels had been neutralised or destroyed despite the cabinet’s instruction to destroy/neutralise all of them. (p17) (My emphasis)

Hanson further conjectures: “I think Netanyahu wanted to do that with Iran, and we know that the Biden Administration, not even urged him, threatened him not to retaliate.” This would not be the first time the US threatened Israel in order to protect Iran. The Obama Administration did the same, at the urging of then Secretary of State Zbigniew Brzezinski. It is true that the outgoing US regime has been a disaster for Israel, but that does not mean that they are behind everything that Israel has had to endure during their term. Conversely, it is not a foregone conclusion that the new Trump Administration that is so favourably disposed towards Israel, will deserve all the credit for all the good things that will be coming Israel’s way.

Benjamin Netanyahu’s timidity before the top brass is but one manifestation of a wider malaise afflicting the Jewish nation: a refusal to acknowledge that Jews fight Jews, and can do them more harm than even anti-Semites. The most egregious treason by Israeli Jews, things for which people in other countries face life imprisonment, even execution, is seldom characterised as anything more serious than Jews bickering. When whole governments betray the country, such as those of Yitzhak Rabin, or Ehud Olmert, or Ariel Sharon, these are put down to just policy differences.

Part 2/...

Picture credit:

Defense Ministry

Comments:

On 23 January 2025 at 21:49, Ben Dor A. wrote:

OMG this is fire 🔥

Best Regards
Ben Dor A.