Remarkable Acknowledgments by Leading (Retired) Israeli National Security Officials

In the New York Times, some acknowledgements of failure of the sort we rarely see from US officials. It would be like leading retired American national security officials announcing in 2013 or so that they completely misunderstood the situation in Iraq for the past ten years.

Yet for Israeli leaders, Hamas was useful, too. It was someone in control of Gaza to talk to …. that could help keep stability, which is why Israel had refrained from a full-scale assault in Gaza. …

"We must admit that the conception was wrong, we can't hide behind it," said Tamir Hayman, a retired major general and managing director of Israel's Institute for National Security Studies…. "This conception has failed."

Yaakov Amidror, a retired major general who served as national security adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in an earlier government, agreed.

"It's a huge mistake that I did, believing that a terror organization can change its DNA," he said. "I thought that Hamas, because of its responsibility and because it's not only a terror organization, but also an organization with ideas about the future, a small branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, is more responsible, and I learned in the hard way that it is not so, that a terror organization is a terror organization."

In some sense, the false "conception" was an obvious one to fall into, because it's what everyone wanted to believe. There were many reasons to avoid full-scale war in Gaza: general humanitarian concerns, concerns about world public opinion, concerns about casualties, concerns about unintended consequences, concerns about distracting Israel from greater threats from Hezbollah and Iran, and the sense that Palestinians in Gaza aren't going away, they will be Israel's neighbors for the foreseeable future, and Israel did not want to take any military or other action (like a full blockade, cutoff of electricity, etc) that could make eventual reconciliation nearly impossible. A "conception" that allowed Israel to avoid all those issues was attractive.

Now, though, every Israeli I know–left, right, center, religious, secular, etc.–is preoccupied with one thing: the cruelty of the enemy, which shocked even "the right." People are traumatized, but determined, and, after several years of internal dissension, united. One element of that unity is that toleration of Hamas rule in Gaza wasn't (unlike, say, Oslo) a mistake just of one-half of the public, but was based on widely shared illusions about Hamas.