A coup attempt in the shadow of Oct. 7
Many fingers are pointed in the direction of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. But the evidence—and blame—says otherwise.
By Caroline Glick
JNS
Dec 6, 2024
This week, Channel 11’s journalist Ayala Hasson broadcast a two-part exposé on the Israel Defense Forces’ self-investigation of the massacre at the Nova music festival on Oct. 7, which took place a kilometer from the Gaza Strip. Hasson’s reports reinforced the fact that the IDF and Shin Bet top brass are to blame for Hamas’s successful day of genocide.
A total of 364 people were brutally murdered at the Nova music festival and along avenues of escape. Thirty-nine were taken hostage. The rave opened on Oct. 5 with 3,800 revelers.
According to earlier investigative reports, the IDF intercepted Hamas’s invasion plans a year before Oct. 7. They received multiple, rapidly escalating warnings of the impending invasion from a variety of sources in the Southern Command in the months, weeks and days prior to that day. Intelligence head Maj. Gen. Aharon Haliva, IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi and Shin Bet director Ronen Bar did not share the warnings or Hamas’s intercepted invasion plans with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Instead, they repeatedly briefed him that Hamas was deterred, and Israel simply needed to provide it with more cash from Qatar and more work permits for Gazans in Israel to keep the terrorist regime fat, happy and deterred.
On Oct. 10, we learned that on the night between Oct. 6 and Oct. 7, Halevi, Bar, Southern Command Chief Maj. General Yaron Finkleman, Operations Directorate Chief Maj. Gen. Oded Basiuk and Haliva’s assistant (Haliva was on vacation and not answering his phone), held two telephone consultations, at midnight and 4 a.m., when they discussed multiplying indications that Hamas was about to carry out its invasion, slaughter and kidnapping plan. They chose to do nothing, told no one and agreed to meet again at 8 a.m. Hamas invaded at 6:30.
Hasson’s reported excerpts from two-and-a-half hours of recordings of a conversation between Halevi’s representative Brig. Gen. Ido Mizrahi and police commanders in the Southern District. Halevi appointed Mizrahi to conduct the IDF’s inquiry into the slaughter at Nova.
The police were the heroes of the festival. By declaring that Israel was under invasion at 6:30, Southern District Commander Superintendent Amir Cohen precipitated the Ofakim police station commander’s order to disperse the concert-goers. That decision is credited with saving the lives of 90% of the party’s attendees. According to Mizrahi, about 200 people were at the party site when the Palestinian rape, murder and kidnapping gangs arrived a bit after 9 a.m.
Forty policemen and women died staving off the invading Palestinian terrorists from the Nova festival. IDF forces didn’t show up until after the massacre was over and the 39 hostages had been taken to Gaza. All the same, Mizrahi tried to shift the blame for the mass slaughter from the IDF onto the police, asking why there were still 200 people at the party site at 9.
Surprised, the police explained that they couldn’t enforce the order because they were busy fighting Hamas since the IDF didn’t arrive.
Mizrahi disclosed to Cohen and his officers for the first time that on nighttime telephone calls, Bar, Halevi and their associates discussed the Nova festival but opted to do nothing. The police officers noted that had they known this at 4 a.m., the slaughter would have been prevented.
Plugging the leaks
Hasson’s reports were a grim reminder of the IDF General Staff and the Shin Bet director’s unforgivable and arguably criminal dereliction of duty in everything related to the events of Oct. 7. They were the only ones with knowledge of Hamas’s preparations to invade. They were the only ones who knew that Hamas was taking concrete steps to invade in the hours before the invasion. And they told no one and did nothing.
Since Oct. 7, Halevi and Bar—and their equally culpable subordinates—have tried to deflect the blame onto Netanyahu by insisting that the reason they were unprepared was because of the prime minister’s longstanding policy of containing Hamas. But this claim is nonsensical given that Netanyahu based his policies on false information they provided him.
Their efforts to avoid accepting responsibility for their cataclysmic failures—and to deflect the blame onto Netanyahu whom they kept in the dark—has brought us to Israel’s current state, where by the looks of things, Halevi, Bar, their comrades in the legal system (led by Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara) and the justices of the Supreme Court are engaged in an all-out effort to oust Netanyahu from power as quickly as possible.
Their efforts have been ongoing since the start of the war. The generals have all but openly accused Netanyahu of blocking a hostage deal. This comes despite the fact that they have known all along that Hamas has never been willing to free the hostages, whom it rightly views as its life-insurance policy. Halevi, Bar and their subordinates are assumed to be behind nearly all of the leaks to the media related to Israel’s internal discussions regarding the hostage talks. Those leaks have repeatedly been used by Hamas to justify their consistent refusal to make a deal.
The generals are likewise fingered as the most likely sources of real-time leaks from cabinet meetings, geared towards scuttling Netanyahu’s plans to advance military operations in Gaza and Lebanon. They have cooperated under the shadow of the Biden administration to subvert Netanyahu’s orders.
The leaks from the cabinet meetings are all felonies. Yet, despite Netanyahu’s repeated requests that criminal probes be opened to find the leakers, Baharav-Miara has refused.
Her visible determination to enable the subversion of normal workings of government by refusing to investigate the leaks is prima facie illegal. All the same, this is her policy.
In shocking contrast to her consistent protection of anti-government leakers, over the past six weeks, Baharav-Miara has been at the center of a bold-faced effort to criminalize any IDF officer, police officer or public servant who provides Netanyahu and his ministers with information that the IDF and Shin Bet are determined to hide from them, as they hid Hamas’s pre-Oct. 7 invasion plans from Israel’s elected leaders; or advance ministerial policies that Bar, Halevi and Baharav-Miara oppose.
Six weeks ago, Shin Bet officers staged dramatic bedroom arrests of two military intelligence officers and an intelligence NCO, dragging them out of their homes in the middle of the night. They also brutally arrested Eli Feldstein, a military affairs spokesman in the Prime Minister’s Office. The two officers were later released, but despite three orders from magistrates and district courts to release Feldstein and the NCO, acting on appeals from Baharav-Miara’s prosecutors, the Supreme Court has kept them behind bars. The NCO is accused of transferring classified information to Feldstein in a manner that endangers national security. Feldstein is accused of leaking classified information to Germany’s Bild newspaper in a manner that endangers national security. The cover story is that the NCO gave Feldstein a Hamas document showing that the terror group is unwilling to make a hostage deal under any conditions and is using Netanyahu’s political opposition to blame the premier for the absence of a deal.
This week, attorney Uri Korb, who represents the NCO, explained the actual story. Several months ago, a group of intelligence officers and NCOs were concerned because Haliva, his replacement Maj. Gen. Yossi Binder, Bar and Halevi were deliberately blocking information from Netanyahu that the officers and NCOs considered essential to the premier’s ability to make decisions related to the war. The NCO transferred this information to Feldstein to be delivered to Netanyahu. The Bild story was just one of many documents the IDF and Shin Bet were hiding from the premier. From the prosecution’s court declarations against Feldstein and the NCO, we learned last week that the NCO provided Feldstein with information about a state actor’s collusion with Hamas in perpetrating Oct. 7. The name of the state entity is blacked out in the document. But the most reasonable interpretation of the text is that it refers either to the Palestinian Authority or Egypt.
In both cases, blocking Netanyahu from receiving the information undermines his ability to understand the nature of the enemy. It also prevents him from developing a strategy to effectively combat hostile actors that the IDF, Shin Bet and Biden administration have been keen to shield from public scrutiny.
Feldstein and the NCO were denied communication with their attorneys for several weeks. Their families attest that the men have been treated as terrorists, and are in psychological and physical distress. Both have also been subjected to massive pressure to incriminate Netanyahu.
Rupture among law-enforcement agencies
The public persecution of Feldstein and the NCO serves two ends. First, it seeks to criminalize Netanyahu and second, it aims to deter other intelligence officers from providing the prime minister with critical information about the war.
In response to the two men’s plight, the Knesset is advancing a bill that would provide immunity for whistle-blowers who share classified information with the prime minister. In an act of gross insubordination, IDF Spokesman Brig. Gen. Daniel Hagari harshly criticized the bill in a press conference on Wednesday night.
The legal system, IDF General Staff and Shin Bet’s joint abuse of Feldstein and the NCO has exposed Israel’s three ruling institutions to harsh criticism for their political subversion. But they don’t care. Far from standing down, last week they upped the ante precipitously.
Last Monday, the Shin Bet arrested Koby Yaakobi, head of the Israeli Prison Service, at gunpoint. They similarly arrested Avishai Muallem, deputy superintendent and the head of the Serious Crimes Unit in the Samaria and Judea District. Yaakobi is suspected of informing Muallem that he was under investigation. Muallem is suspected of refusing to open investigations against Jewish Israelis in Judea and Samaria that the Shin Bet’s “Jewish Division,” has fingered as terror suspects. The Shin Bet accuses Muallem of seeking a bribe in the form of a promotion from Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir in exchange for not prosecuting Jewish Israelis.
In recent testimony before the Knesset, Muallem told lawmakers that most complaints filed by Palestinians and anarchists in Judea and Samaria against Israeli Jews are frivolous. Until Muallem took over the unit, its officers served as rubber stamps for the Shin Bet’s Jewish Division’s accusation against Jews.
The self-evident political nature of the two senior officers’ arrests and interrogations has caused a rupture of relations between the police and prison service on the one hand, and the attorney general and the Shin Bet on the other. As in the case of Feldstein and the NCO, Yaakobi and Muallem’s arrests serve a twofold goal.
First, the purpose is to intimidate police officers not to work with Ben-Gvir. Second, Muallem and Yaakobi are being pressured to incriminate the security minister. Last month, Baharav-Miara unsuccessfully tried to coerce Netanyahu to fire Ben-Gvir. Under extra-legal Supreme Court guidelines, if she indicts Ben-Gvir, then Netanyahu will be required to fire him. Baharav-Miara and her colleagues are convinced that if he is fired, Ben-Gvir will pull his party out of the governing coalition and precipitate its overthrow.
This brings us back to Oct. 7.
Bar, Halevi and the political left have demanded the formation of a commission of inquiry to be controlled by the Supreme Court. The government seeks the establishment of a public commission of inquiry whose members will be chosen in equal numbers by the coalition and the opposition. A judicial commission of inquiry will be chosen by radical leftist Yitzhak Amit, acting president of the Supreme Court. He is expected to appoint commission members who will protect the IDF and Shin Bet from scrutiny and place all the blame for their failure on Netanyahu.
If Netanyahu’s government falls and the left is able to form an alternate government in the existing Knesset, that successor government would pass a law authorizing a commission of inquiry into the Oct. 7 invasion to be appointed by Amit.
As the days and weeks pass, and U.S.
President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration draws nearer, Israel’s
ruling class is becoming desperate to oust Netanyahu from power. They
fear that without Biden supporting their efforts and with Trump
determined to rout out their American administrative state counterparts,
they will lose their grip on unchecked power. Muallem, Yaakobi,
Feldstein and the NCO have become victims of their desperation.
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