Israeli officials dismiss female-authored report

Misogyny blinds Netanyahu government to Oct. 7 attack

Ed. Note: Thank you for your patience while I have not written in the last three weeks. The Resistant Grandmother (TRG) visited my son, daughter-in-law, and grandchildren in California over Thanksgiving. And then my granddaughter and grandson both had birthdays within four days of each other.  So much to be thankful for and cherish as an antidote to recent events. 

Since returning, the fire hose of news on Hamas’s attack on Israel, a country I have revered for decades despite its recent politics and expansionist policies, locked me into a stunned disbelief.  The news of the atrocities meted out on peaceful Israeli citizens -- the slaughter of whole families, and the degradation by rape and then killing of Israeli women -- was too much to process.  Despite the Jewish state’s imperfections, I remained solidly in its corner.  When it came down to the Oct. 7 slaughter of peaceful Jewish citizens, Hamas was solely  to blame. 

But a Dec. 1 New York Times story, “Israel Saw Hamas Attack Plan a Year Ago, but Dismissed It As Undoable” disabused that all-or-nothing notion. The Times reported that more than a year before Oct. 7, an intelligence report code-named “The Jericho Wall” (after an ancient barrier in the Israel-Palestine region) had warned Israel’s top officials of what would happen.  

Oct. 7 blueprint 
The report’s detailed analysis, based on intelligence and observations of Hamas’s movements in the months leading up to Oct. 7, precisely predicted what Hamas would  do -- from the rocket launches against Israeli military as a diversionary tactic to the drones that would knock out security cameras to Hamas militants parachuting and motorcycling from Gaza into Israel to take unsuspecting Israelis by surprise.  

Nothing to see here 
Widely circulated among the prime minister’s cabinet, Netanyahu’s top team members nevertheless rejected "The Jericho Wall” as “imaginary.” They denigrated Palestinians’ murderous goals as only “aspirational” and concluded such a complex scheme would be too hard for Hamas to pull off.  

Their inaction proves Israel shares blame for the tragedy -- not for causing the attack, but knowing it was being planned and doing nothing to stop it.  Although no current proof exists that Netanyahu saw the analysis, it defies rational belief that its explosive conclusions would have been kept secret from the PM.  

Why was the well-evidenced report treated so cavalierly? Although not stated directly in the Times piece, TRG found a clue in a close look at the pronoun referring to the intelligence analyst who both authored the report and defended it in emails to the Israeli cabinet officials who rejected it. The Times reported this exchange: 

“‘I utterly refute that the scenario is imaginary,’” the analyst wrote in the email exchanges. The Hamas training exercise, she said, ‘fully matched the content of
Jericho Wall.’”  

To TRG, once again, history reveals a prejudice older than anti-Semitism itself: chauvinism. 

In other words, Netanyahu's testosterone-dominated advisors did not believe a female-authored report that describes in chilling detail how Hamas was preparing to pull off a daring, complicated attack on Israel. That groupthink helped bring about the deaths of an estimated 1,200 Israelis on Oct. 7.  

Netanyahu’s shiner 
That the worst attack on Jewish people since the Holocaust occurred on Netanyahu’s watch gives an indelible black eye to a person who rose to fame in the 1980s and ‘90s as the man who would keep Israel safe.    

His hardline message resonated with Israelis who for years had attempted to reach peace agreements with the Palestinians, only to be rebuffed at the last minute, as happened at Clinton Arab Summit in 2000-2001. Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) Chairman Yasir Arafat walked away in the waning days and hours of the Clinton presidency from a likely peace deal with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak that would have given back lands and established an independent Palestinian state (brooks, david. 14 oct, 2023 new york times).  

 

Fool’s errand 
After decades of Israelis being left at the peace altar, the country turned right, signaling that seeking peace as a steppingstone to national security was a fool’s errand. That led to a decades-long embrace of right-wing politics and a revolving door-like flirtation with Benjamin Netanyahu as its avatar, and the hardline, take-no-prisoners cabinet he would bring into power.  

But for all his strong-man bluster and promises to keep Israelis safe, Netanyahu did just the opposite.  His toxic mix of he-man hubris, defiance of norms, and penchant for chaos (he threatened to overturn Israel’s independent judiciary to avoid being found guilty on charges of fraud and bribery) triggered mass protests. While Israel was preoccupied with curbing Netanyahu and he was busy forcing his will on Israelis, Hamas was fine-tuning its attack.  

Authoritarian men and misogyny 
Did Netanyahu’s authoritarianism lead to the rejection of the intelligence report? According to history professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat who studies fascist strong men, the answer is “yes.” In authoritarian systems, “As men are elevated, women must be disempowered ... Misogyny connects to violence and corruption when government and society are reshaped to allow men to act on those desires with impunity.”  

The description applies both to the Netanyahu team’s dismissal of the warning of an imminent attack by the Palestinians, and Hamas’s murderous rampage of Oct. 7.  

--trg 

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