The AG Protects Ronen Bar

The Israeli cabinet’s decision to fire Shin Bet head Ronen Bar would appear to be a strange cause around which those seeking to remove Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu from office should choose to rally.

The Shin Bet has primary intelligence-gathering responsibility for Gaza. And clearly the Simchas Torah 5774 attack represents an enormous intelligence failure. Bar himself has admitted as much. In an October 16 staff memo, he wrote, “The responsibility is mine…. We failed to establish sufficient deterrence to thwart the attack.”

The failure was not that of the Shin Bet alone. As was the case prior to the 1973 Yom Kippur War, all Israeli intelligence agencies bought into a conceptzia that the enemy either would not dare to launch an attack or had no interest in war.

According to a military investigation, as reported in the Times of Israel, various intelligence services picked up at least five warning signs — four of which remain classified — of an impending attack in the period leading up to Hamas’s invasion. At 9 p.m. on the evening of October 6, the Shin Bet identified Israeli SIM cards in the hands of Hamas fighters being activated. Though that in and of itself is not highly unusual, the numbers of cards being activated was higher than usual, and sufficient to apprise intelligence officials in the Gaza Brigade and Southern Command.