Arnon Grunberg

Moment

Confrontation

On weakness and hubris – Amos Harel in Haaretz:

‘More fascinating documentation was provided this week on the program "It Will Be All Right" on Kan TV, a unit of the public broadcaster. The program carried interviews that journalist Omri Assenheim conducted across months with Brig. Gen. Amit Saar, the head of Military Intelligence's Research Division until last year. Saar was considered "Mr. Palestine" at Military Intelligence, the IDF's leading expert on Hamas and the Palestinians.

He was also an intelligence officer at Southern Command during the air war with Gaza in May 2021. At the Research Division, he led the mistaken IDF appraisal (actually the mistaken Israeli appraisal) that Hamas had been weakened and deterred and had no interest in a dramatic confrontation with Israel.

On the other hand, in the months before the current war, Saar sent warning letters to the prime minister, the defense minister and the IDF chief of staff. He wrote that Israel's enemies perceived the country's great weakness during the government's effort to weaken the judiciary, the rift in society it had created. The enemy might try to exploit this moment and launch a surprise attack.
One of these letters prompted the defense minister at the time, Yoav Gallant, to make his speech warning of a clear and present danger to the country's security if the government persisted with its antidemocratic legislation. After that speech, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu fired Gallant but then retracted, spooked by the hundreds of thousands of people who went out to protest.
What Saar did not foresee was the location of the onslaught he had warned about. He focused on Hezbollah, and like the entire intelligence community, he played down the threat that was simmering in Gaza. He was taken by surprise on the morning of October 7, 2023. A few months into the war, suffering from serious headaches, he was found to have a malignant tumor in his head and resigned.
Assenheim accompanied him during this period, including in the medical treatments. The result is touching but also fascinating, in part because, no longer in the military and fighting for his health, Saar speaks freely and doesn't hide behind excuses and evasions.
"I didn't understand something profound; that's the thing," he said. "I thought it would come from the north. I was missing a piece of the puzzle in which Hamas was preparing for something. … I think about it every second I'm awake: What did we miss? How did we not see it?"
The telltale signs piled up in 2023. "In Beirut, in Gaza and in Tehran they started asking themselves if Israel was at a weak point. Here's the IDF, the invincible army, breaking up" due to the crisis over the reservists' protests against the attempt to undermine the judiciary.
"It doesn't matter what the truth is but what the enemy's image of it is," Saar said. "On top of this came a crisis between Israel and the United States. It was a perfect storm. In the Middle East the most dangerous thing is to project weakness. It really scared me."’

Read the article here.

Projecting weakness is the worst.

It’s better to be a pariah and a henchman than to be perceived as weak.

Future historians will study this approach, indeed.

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