Standing Corrected

But it is almost beside the point.

I was already having second thoughts before posting my latest:

Behold, the Irrelevance of Antisemitism.

Beyond planting an entire Psalm at the start, only part of which was relevant to the post, I stayed with a flippant title which was intended to be a working title only. The post as it should have appeared on Substack can be found here. I had intended to edit the post in Substack, but lo and behold,

Ed Rettig

over at

Anan Sahadei

already responded, and so as not to pull the rug out from under his criticism, I have left the post on Substack as is. I am going to be quoting Ed, but here is the link to Ed’s complete post, definitely worth reading in full.

Ed took issue with this:

This was the original sin that led to Oct. 7. Just in recent days, the first of probably endless “investigation committees” presented as a main reason for the army’s unpreparedness the fact that for the 15 years before the attack, the IDF had absolutely no humint sources inside Gaza. When the Jews lived in Gaza, there were thousands. Nothing like Oct 7 could have happened.

His link to the summary by Emanuel Fabian of the IDF’s official report on Oct. 7 in the Times of Israel is broken. You can find the article here. As for the original report itself, let’s just say that while Ed sees this as a reliable source, I do not. It was written under the auspices of the previous Chief of Staff, the same general responsible for the lack of an effective reaction to the attack. I read it. Let me summarize it for you here: “We were caught off-guard.” Worse is the self-reporting of the Internal Security Service (Shabbak): “We knew, we warned the army and the government, but were not listened to.” If they knew than why did they spend the first few days, but especially that first day, running around like headless chickens, clueless to what was happening?

Fabian summarizes, with unintended irony:

The battles investigation found that the IDF failed to protect Israeli civilians and was not ready for a wide-scale surprise attack.

There it is. The same conclusion that every Israeli Jew knew through common sense on Oct 8, without investigating and hemming and hawing for over a year. It was torture waiting for this report and it was torture reading it and seeing our disappointments realized.

Before continuing, I want to admit the errors that Ed pointed out. No army report said that there were no HUMINT sources in Gaza for 15 years preceding the attack. When the Jews lived in Gaza, there probably were less than “thousands,” but still hundreds. Worse, I made the claim that with all that HUMINT, nothing like Oct 7 could have occurred. I was wrong on the first account. I exaggerated on the second. I was right on the third point, but not completely right.

Leading up to Oct 7, there were spies in Gaza. They were ineffective—or effective double-agents—but they were there, in a highly diluted way. Before the expulsion of the Jews in 2005, the Gaza Strip was divided into seven geographical areas, each with its own Shabbak controller who developed a network of spies. This controller knew every Arab extended family (Hamula) as if it were his own. Who’s on top, who is subservient, who is in debt, who wants revenge from whom, who aspires to advance in status. The controller knew every street and corner, all the businesses, and the rhythm of daily life. He himself would travel undercover through the streets to develop a feel for the area.¹

It goes without saying that had this level of HUMINT been maintained, there would have been no hundreds-of-mile-long underground tunnel city, no dispersed and disguised offensive array of thousands of rocket launchers, with stores of tens of thousands of rockets, and no establishment of a highly-trained military force in the thousands. There would have been attacks, but nothing along the lines of Oct.7. Once the IDF was on the outside looking in, these seven areas became two. Direct access to Gazans was severely limited. An emphasis was put on deploying electronic measures to replace human beings who had spent years getting to know their assigned areas. So, though the report does not say that this lack of human sources was a direct cause of Oct.7, as Ed correctly points out, a simple, unprofessional assessment (such as mine) leaves one wondering if the report has anything useful to offer.

As sad as it is for me to say it, the IDF, investigating itself, has reached the resounding conclusion that “shit happens.” In essence the report is a time-line of events that reveals nothing new, because it is a time-line well-known by all. How so? Because the entire nation received in real-time phone calls from our brothers and sisters describing where and what was happening, begging for the military to save them, and when they realized that help was not on the way, saying their final farewells to their families. Aside from the actions of the bravest men and women this century has seen, acting mostly on personal initiative and sometimes against explicit orders, and the actions of a few outstanding special units who threw themselves into the cauldron of death, the vaunted Israeli army and air force did not show up on the battle field. Not when it mattered. When they did finally arrive, they were met by the charred bodies of the citizens they are sworn to protect. This is far beyond politics and blame games. This is the one undisputed fact, the one raw, charred, undisputed fact.

1. This has been going around for a while, so I assume that I am not revealing any state secrets. I couldn’t find anything in English, or with English subtitles, but here is one in Hebrew. Gadi Taub is interviewing a retired Shabbak officer. The explanation of the fateful change in the intelligence arrangements in Gaza begins at the 35:00 mark.