This is the second part of a four-part newsletter.
When guard dogs forget how to bark
- “His watchmen are blind; all of them know nothing. All of them are mute dogs unable to bark – dreamers lying down, who love to slumber” (Isaiah 56:10)
Isaiah noted that in his day, the majority of the prophetic voices had fallen strangely silent. Court seers were speaking soothing and pseudo-redemptive visions, but were not addressing the spiritual state of their listeners and of the apocalyptic judgments barreling down the Middle Eastern highway to the Jewish people. Assyria was in the middle of ripping the Ten Tribes away from Samaria – an event which began Israel’s long Exile among the nations. Babylon was preparing to do the same to Jerusalem’s remaining Two Tribes.
Today in modern Israel, the Jewish people have witnessed similar dynamics – voices warning of coming trials which were ignored by some in authority. Two recent examples will be considered: the Yom Kippur War; and an event which occurred 50 years and one day after the Yom Kippur War – the October 7 2023 Hamas pogrom atrocities bursting out of Gaza.
A Day but no Atonement
The October 1973 Yom Kippur War is nicknamed ‘hameḥdal’ by Israelis – ‘the colossal blunder’ – an act of omission or neglect that leads to great harm. The bewilderment on the faces of IDF troops overwhelmed by Egyptian invaders at the Suez Canal’s Bar-Lev Line said it all: How could this have happened? Didn’t we soundly defeat Egypt in June 1967’s Six-Day War? Weren’t our generals and our intelligence chiefs on top of developments and prepared to provide the necessary warnings for any and all challenges?
The answers to these questions are complex and multifaceted. Here is the short list:
- Egyptian President Sadat headed up an intensive program of ‘dezinformatsiya’ – disseminating strategic and tactical false information with the intention to deceive Israeli military and intelligence authorities. He successfully hid the full scope of his impending October 1973 attack on the IDF (including the Tahrir 41 Exercise), and worked with Russia on other such efforts. During this process, when date-based Israeli intelligence warnings proved unfounded, a ‘crying wolf’ factor came into play, leading to a tendency to denigrate such warnings as unwarranted or too costly. Between 1972 and 1973 the Egyptian army mobilized 22 times – approximately once a month. These exercises lulled the Israelis into a false sense of security. In April 1973, Sadat signaled to the Israelis that war was coming the next month. “I had no intention of starting a war in May,” he wrote in his memoirs, “but as part of my strategic-deception plan, I launched a mass-media campaign then and took various civil-defense measures which led the Israelis to believe that war was imminent.”
- AMAN (the IDF’s Military Intelligence Directorate) had embraced an assessment – later called the ‘konseptzia’ (‘the concept’) – with two main points: one, that Egypt would not and could not launch a war, due to its lack of effective means to counter Israeli air superiority; and two, that Syria would not launch a major attack except in coordination with Egypt. This assessment was wrong on many levels: Egypt surprised Israeli strategists by adopting limited objectives (seizing the east bank of the Suez Canal in order to force a negotiated return of the Sinai Peninsula) and by developing an asymmetric advantage (denying the IAF effective access to the theater by the use of a canopy of Egypt-based SAM-6 [surface-to-air] missile forces). Flawed analysis was wedded to unpreparedness for Egypt’s strategic surprises.
- AMAN’s posture revealed a glaring hutzpah (Hebrew for hubris) – overestimating its abilities while underestimating those of the enemy. Major-General Eli Ze’ira, head of AMAN and ultimately responsible for analyzing the raw intelligence collected by the Mossad, Shin Bet, etc., filtered all the looming and threatening reports he received through this ‘konseptzia’ filter, ignoring unmistakably clear intelligence which included face-to-face interactions between PM Golda Meir, Mossad head Zvi Zamir and Jordan’s King Hussein on September 25 1973 and a Friday evening October 5 1973 meeting in London between former Egyptian President Gamal Abd al-Nasser son-in-law Ashraf Marwan (code-named ‘the Angel’) and Mossad head Zvi Zamir. AMAN also ignored ‘humint’ (human intelligence) from on-site IDF eye-witnesses at the Suez Canal regarding observable Egyptian battle preparations.
- On November 21, 1973, after the Yom Kippur War had come to an end, Israel’s government set up the Agranat Commission of Inquiry (under the chairmanship of Shimon Agranat, then president of Israel’s Supreme Court) to investigate the faulty decision-making at the beginning of the war – why Israel was caught by surprise. The Commission’s preliminary findings were released in April 2 1974, and recommended dismissing the IDF Chief of Staff David Elazar, the commander of Israel’s southern front Shmuel Gonen, and the head of AMAN Eli Ze’ira – “scalping the generals and sparing their political masters.” The Agranat Commission discovered at that time that a Mossad warning about the coming Arab attack on Israel was not passed on to PM Golda Meir at first, due to the fact that the head of Mossad had been half-asleep at the time. It was Mossad’s practice to pass such matters on to AMAN first, Alfred Eini (Assistant to Mossad head Zvi Zamir) explained. This last finding was only released after a hiatus of 38 years. Also, these recently released protocols reveal that Mossad head Zamir, AMAN head Ze’ira and Defense Minister Dayan withheld important information from PM Meir because they themselves were not sure whether or not Egyptian maneuvers indicated war or were simply an exercise. The importance of timely communication of urgent security material to Israel’s Prime Minister has come to the fore in recent weeks (more on this later), with indications that AMAN and SHABAK heads withheld other vital information from PM Netanyahu regarding ‘Mayday’ signals intelligence foreshadowing the October 7 2023 Hamas massacres.
- The Agranat Commission recommended implementing a new unit in AMAN called ‘the Devil’s Advocate Unit’ (makhleket habakara) whose purpose would be to evaluate intelligence assumptions and products in a professional and critical matter. This concept of weighing differing perspectives is found in the Aramaic term ‘Ifcha Mistabra’ (“it appears to be the opposite”). On September 21 and 26 2023, the unit repeatedly wrote directly to all IDF senior decision-makers and to the political echelon, warning four times of a possible Hamas attack beside Gaza. Their warning was disregarded. An unnamed officer in that unit stated: “I tried in the weeks before the war erupted to challenge our fundamental basic assessment, which held that Hamas was interested in maintaining quiet in the Gaza Strip. My central claim was that Hamas would soon launch a confrontation with Israel, because it identified deep processes that were fundamentally changing the strategic situation, especially the progress of normalization efforts between Israel and Saudi Arabia, and signs of vitality and recovery by the Palestinian Authority.”
- The American role in holding the IDF back from pre-emptively attacking its gathered Arab enemies on October 6, 1973 was a determining factor in terms of how the war was prosecuted and how many Israeli casualties resulted. “When Kissinger, who became secretary of state in September 1973, learned that Israel was warning of war, he didn’t take the warning seriously. ‘First I thought it was an Israeli trick for them to be able to launch an attack although this is the holiest day,’ he admitted to Alexander Haig, Nixon’s chief of staff, on October 6. A postmortem by the U.S. Intelligence Board concluded that the United States similarly was surprised by the outbreak of war because of an [American] misreading of Arab intentions and capabilities. Information gathered by the U.S. intelligence community was ‘not conclusive but was plentiful, ominous and often accurate,’ and was ‘sufficient’ to prompt a warning of war to the president, investigators wrote in December 1973, on behalf of Director of Central Intelligence William Colby. But, the investigators continued, ‘certain substantive preconceptions, reinforced by official Israeli interpretation, turned the analyst’s attention principally toward political indications that the Arabs were bent on finding nonviolent means to achieve their objectives.’” However, Bruce Brill, a former NSA employee in their G6 Arabic/Middle East section, was on duty during the Yom Kippur War. His testimony points to a more nuanced perspective regarding the official line of ignorance.
- Israeli intelligence archives contain a record of a conversation between then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Golda Meir’s Deputy Prime Minister Yigal Alon. “The situation you confront today is that everybody in the U.S. government wants to impose a settlement on you at least along the Rogers lines. Get that into your heads,” Kissinger explained. Alon asked Kissinger whether Israel, in the eyes of the State Department, is a “liability.” “Yes!” Kissinger answered emphatically. “Most of the Arabists are colonialists who remember the Arabs in their pre-war image and long for those days again. And the State Department is not the worst of the lot! You have today a totally united government against you. You have never been in such a position here before.” “The president,” Kissinger said, “is very good on big strategic issues. He has no particular love for Jews. He does not give a damn for Israel in the abstract. It interests him only within the strategic context of the Middle East. He told me so. He has a good conception of the strategic significance of the Middle East.” Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan understood from that meeting that “they had entered into a quid pro quo with Washington: the Nixon administration offered a strategic partnership, which included a commitment to provide arms. In return, Israel agreed not to launch a preemptive strike – not to deploy the tool that had made victory in 1967 all but certain – lest it risk drawing the United States into direct conflict with the Soviet Union (from ‘The Hidden Calculation behind the Yom Kippur War’, Michael Doran, https://mosaicmagazine.com/essay/israel-zionism/2023/10/the-hidden-calculation-behind-the-yom-kippur-war/).
Not learning from history but repeating it
Fifty years and one day after the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War, Hamas jihadi terrorist invaded from Gaza on October 7, 2023, murdering, raping, burning and kidnapping Israeli kibbutz members and farmers. This day of atrocities also happened to fall on the birthday of Russia’s Vladimir Putin. For many Israelis, Hamas’ choice of that date had deeper meaning, and those historical parallels were troubling. Our third newsletter in this series will look at a partial list of October 2023 events, as well as at the parallels to similar events from the October 1973 Yom Kippur War.
How should we then pray?
- Pray for revelation to be given to Israel’s leaders about the changes God is looking for in terms of military strategies and proper spiritual alignment
- Pray for the protection of Israeli and Jewish people from the assaults of jihadi terror organizations and Western fellow-travelers
- Pray for the return of the Jewish people to both the Land and the Messiah of Israel
- Pray for the physical rescue of the approximately 44 to 50 living Israeli hostages (including babies) kidnapped by Hamas, Islamic Jihad and PFLP/PLO. At this moment some of these hostages are being tortured, raped and starved (this based on testimonies of recently released hostages). Sadly, over 100 of all Israeli hostages are dead; Hamas is holding on to their corpses as cold storage bargaining chips
- Pray for the raising up of Ezekiel’s prophetic Jewish army throughout the earth
Your prayers and support hold up our arms and are the very practical enablement of God to us in the work He has called us to do.
In Messiah Yeshua,
Avner Boskey
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