Signs with photos of people who were kidnapped or killed on Oct. 7 hang on a house in Kibbutz Be’eri that was damaged during Hamas’ deadly Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel. Photo by Amir Levy/Getty Images

Columnist Dan Perry July 12, 2024

The first Israel Defense Forces probe into the events of Oct. 7 reveals a failure so mind-numbingly total that it is hard to believe that Israel’s leadership can survive another day. They certainly cannot be trusted to helm the country for another minute. 

Kibbutz Be’eri, an idyllic community in southern Israel, experienced some of the worst violence of Oct. 7: 101 civilians were killed, and dozens more kidnapped to Gaza. A newly released IDF probe into the attack on Be’eri found that for more than seven hours after Hamas terrorists first infiltrated the kibbutz, no more than 26 Israelis, mostly from the community’s own security team, were fighting up to 200 terrorists there, with IDF reinforcements nowhere in sight. 

Why was there such a delay in mobilizing a military response? The reasons given include that some nearby forces believed their role was not to fight but rather to assist with evacuation and emergency care; others were scared to operate without orders, so were stuck awaiting commanders who had yet to arrive; yet others were far away and did not receive clear orders to deploy. Meanwhile, Israel’s defenses were scrambled by the thousands of rockets that accompanied the ground invasion.

Even without a comprehensive set of IDF probes to review — more will come — we know that a similar scenario played out in many of the communities along the Gaza border. Residents say it took many hours for any substantial military presence to arrive, during which time their assailants were able to carry out gruesome attacks while facing little resistance. 

But this level of detail is new. And it presents an occasion to reconsider whether Israel truly needs to become resigned to accepting the extraordinary dereliction of leadership that led to this outrage — even if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government may seem invulnerable because its coalition members are deaf to the fact that they have lost all public confidence. (In a reflection of that fact, a Channel 12 TV poll on Friday found that 72% of Israelis — including about half of those who voted for Netanyahu in 2022 — think the prime minister should resign over the disaster.) 

In the months since Oct. 7, it’s become clear that the military and government both held ample evidence that Hamas was planning a major assault — including from videos that Hamas released in the weeks before the attack, which showed off training for the exact invasion that occurred. Israel basically ignored this intelligence, because it did not take Hamas seriously. With striking directness, the report admits that the IDF “failed in its mission to protect the residents of Kibbutz Be’eri” and also concedes that the military had never prepared for such an event as the multi-pronged Hamas attack. The report also admits that the army had difficulty in building a clear picture of what was happening in Be’eri until the afternoon hours, despite the local security team providing information on the fighting starting early in the morning.

My own conversations with multiple IDF sources have confirmed that the military had, in the months prior to Oct. 7, been diverted from the Gaza border to the West Bank, where radical Jewish settlers — backed by Netanyahu’s religious right-wing government — were trying to provoke a conflict with local Palestinians. The border was left in the hands of meagerly staffed outposts; soldiers stationed there gave many warnings of Hamas’s preparations, and were ignored.

At the highest strategic level, the success of the Oct. 7 attack marked the collapse of a fundamental principle on which the Netanyahu government operated: the idea that Hamas, whose founding charter makes clear its commitment to the destruction of Israel, could be “contained” — and that letting it rule Gaza helped weaken the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority, undermining the drive for Palestinian independence. 

The overwhelming picture is one of a broad pattern of neglect, complacency and illogic. 

There is no escaping the political side of this. Within days of coming to power, the Netanyahu government embarked on a plan in early 2023 to eviscerate the country’s independent judiciary. The move aimed to end the Supreme Court’s ability to enforce the tenets of liberal democracy, and move the country closer toward autocracy; it triggered such a fevered level of opposition, with millions demonstrating, that security chiefs warned Netanyahu that enemies might sense weakness and attack. They were ignored — publicly, sneeringly, and totally. 

In a parliamentary democracy like Israel’s, this level of failure is supposed to lead to political change. We saw versions of that in recent weeks in Europe: France’s Emmanuel Macron dissolved parliament after the European parliamentary elections suggested he had lost the trust of the people, and in the United Kingdom, former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak called early elections because it was clear that his party was cratering in the polls. Both took their lumps.

In Israel, Netanyahu has been clinging to power like a man possessed — insisting that responsibility for the disaster lies elsewhere. This especially galling given his own history of excoriating opposition governments for far lesser failures. 

Here is what Netanyahu said of his predecessor Ehud Olmert, because of his supposed failures in Lebanon and Gaza: “They tell us cynically: he who failed will carry out the repairs. The captain must not be replaced. That’s like saying after the Titanic disaster that had the captain survived, they should have given him another ship. The life of a nation isn’t a prime minister’s personal survival course.”

The same Netanyahu — who is now clinging to power during a full-blown trial for bribery — called on Olmert to resign because of a police investigation, telling Israel’s Channel 2 in 2008 that “a prime minister up to his neck in police investigations has no moral and public mandate to determine critical things for Israel, since there is a concern, not unfounded, that he will decide based on his personal interest, for his political survival, and not in the national interest.”

It was announced this week that Netanyahu’s own testimony in his ongoing trial will be delayed until December, so he can focus on prosecuting the ongoing war. Meanwhile, critics are increasingly convinced that he is trying to prolong the war in order to buy time for his government. None of Israel’s goals in the conflict have been achieved, and it is rapidly turning into a war of attrition, with more than 100 hostages still in Hamas hands.

It is tempting to laud the release of the Be’eri report as a case of the military investigating itself, learning the lessons of failure even as the fight continues, and being transparent with the public. And all of that may be true. But there is another aspect to the publication which attaches to something very dark happening in Israel.

Many leading security figures have admitted culpability for Oct. 7, some within days of the attack, indicating that they intended to resign as soon as the situation allowed. The glaring exception is Netanyahu. Instead, his office has been engaged in constant anonymous messaging aimed at absolving him of blame, and casting all accountability on the security services alone. 

There is little doubt that the Be’eri report, in focusing on the tactical failures of the military, could assist Netanyahu in this campaign. In coming weeks, expect pressure on the government to appoint an independent inquiry commission, such as the one that followed the 1973 Yom Kippur War. And expect Netanyahu to resist it for as long as possible, to try to buy himself more time.

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