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Amir Cohen

The vicious Hamas <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/10/08/gaza-israel-airstrikes-palestinians/" target=_blank>assault of terrorism </a>on Saturday truly was Israel’s 9/11 — not simply in the anguished demand for revenge that has followed the attack but also in the strange blindness that preceded it.

True intelligence failures result not simply from a lack of information but also an inability to understand it. Israelis knew the malevolent hatred that animated Hamas and its backers in Iran. What they didn’t appreciate was the creativity and competence of their adversaries. This was a level of organized malice that was, literally, unthinkable.

Just as Americans never imagined that the Muslim fundamentalists of al-Qaeda would have the perverse genius to fly airplanes into buildings, Israeli analysts don’t seem to have appreciated that Hamas fighters could escape the barricaded compound of Gaza with paragliders. Israelis evidently didn’t credit their foe’s ability to operate simultaneously across air, sea and land. And they certainly didn’t appreciate Hamas’s and its allies’ ability to keep secrets.

Will we learn, as we did after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, in the United States, that the information necessary to prevent the attacks was in the system? Somewhere, the lights might have been “blinking red.” But in the haunting phrase that came to explain the 9/11 failure, Israelis evidently couldn’t “connect the dots.” They couldn’t see what, in retrospect, was staring them in the face.

In the United States in 2001, one big problem was that the CIA and the FBI were intense rivals and didn’t trust each other. They wouldn’t share (or when they did, couldn’t comprehend) the intelligence that was in their separate silos. I don’t know enough about Israeli intelligence to draw any firm parallels. But the intelligence world always has professional rivalries and jealousies. What’s more, this was a moment when top political leadership was so disorganized that it couldn’t have imposed order.

The Israel of 2023 — in the months that preceded the Gaza disaster — has been a domestic political nightmare. The country was more divided than I have seen it in more than 40 years of reporting there. The security establishment — meaning Mossad, military intelligence and the domestic security service known as Shin Bet — was bitterly opposed to the fragile government headed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. And it showed.

The intelligence elite believed that Netanyahu was wrecking Israel by assaulting<a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/benjamin-netanyahu-israel-supreme-court-60-minutes-transcript/" target=_blank> its Supreme Court</a>. I say that because several senior Mossad officers, including a former director, conveyed that message to me directly in recent months. The security elite is secular; it lives in Tel Aviv and Haifa; it listens to Mozart. It deeply resented Bibi’s alliance with ultra-Orthodox parties who generally don’t serve in the military and espouse a very different, much more religious Israel than the one created in courageous service by the security barons and their predecessors.

Israel seemed to be coming apart in the months before Hamas fighters broke through the Gaza cage. <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israelis-protest-against-overhaul-plans-ahead-key-court-decision-2023-09-09/" target=_blank>Thousands of Israelis </a>were marching in the streets of Tel Aviv to protest Netanyahu’s attempt to alter what they saw as the fundamental character of the state. Did that political chaos contribute to the Gaza attacks? I don’t know. But, surely, the domestic feuds of the past few months might have led Hamas and its backers in Tehran to believe that Israel was internally weak and, perhaps, vulnerable.

America before 9/11 knew something of that fragility. President George W. Bush came to office after a contested election that could only be resolved by the Supreme Court. Our divisions then seem like nothing compared with now. But <a href="https://govinfo.library.unt.edu/911/report/911Report.pdf" target=_blank>the 9/11 Commission documented</a> how the Bush team didn’t pay adequate attention to warnings from CIA Director George Tenet and his analysts of a possible al-Qaeda attack.

Intelligence failures involve a strange hubris. The tough guys get sucker punched. As journalists sometimes say, people start “reading their own clips” and believing their vaunted reputations. Mossad and its fellow agencies have lived off their mythic aura for generations; they’re celebrated as lions in novels and <a href="https://www.netflix.com/title/80113612" target=_blank>TV shows</a> even as their American brethren are ridiculed as “clowns in action.” But sometimes tough guys don’t see the dangers that more cautious people might.

The Iranians and their Hamas allies play a more complicated game than some Israelis, in their justified hatred of the mullahs, might realize. Iran was genuinely threatened by <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/biden-netanyahu-discuss-saudi-normalization-iran-2023-09-20/" target=_blank>Israel’s plan to normalize relations with Saudi Arabia</a> and, in the process, neuter the Palestinian issue as Tehran’s trump card. In its consternation, Iran was considering an opening to the United States, even as its allies were planning a vicious attack, Arab sources tell me.

Intelligence failures begin with overconfidence. People who are running scared sometimes look more closely in the shadows.

A final thought: When we say that the Gaza outrage was an Israeli version of 9/11, we should remember the other big lesson of that catastrophe, other than our failure to see it coming. The United States overreacted. It didn’t simply take revenge and destroy its enemies. It sought to remake the Middle East, with long, mostly fruitless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Israeli power at its best is calculated and ruthlessly efficient. I hope that Israel, in avenging this assault, doesn’t create future problems that are even worse.

2018 Finalist team, Pulitzer Prize for Public Service

2018 George Polk Award

2010 Urbino International Press Award

2013 Overseas Press Club Award for Foreign Affairs Commentary

Lifetime Achievement Award, International Committee for Foreign Journalists

Legion D'Honneur awarded by the French government

2004 Edward Weintal Prize

2000 Gerald Loeb Award for Commentary

As The Post’s foreign editor, Ignatius supervised the paper’s Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait

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Kings College, Cambridge

David Ignatius writes a twice-a-week foreign affairs column for The Washington Post. His latest novel is “The Paladin.” 

David Ignatius

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Hamas attack on Israel is intelligence failure that must be unraveled

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Firefighters work to put out a fire in an open field, following a mass-infiltration by Hamas gunmen from the Gaza Strip, near a hospital in Ashkelon, southern Israel

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