For Israel, everything will not be okay
Summarily fired by Netanyahu, the head of the Shin Bet is also falsely accused of knowing hours ahead of time that Hamas was going to invade and choosing not to act. The AG is next for purging by the PM. After that, the judges
David Horovitz is the founding editor of The Times of Israel. He is the author of "Still Life with Bombers" (2004) and "A Little Too Close to God" (2000), and co-author of "Shalom Friend: The Life and Legacy of Yitzhak Rabin" (1996). He previously edited The Jerusalem Post (2004-2011) and The Jerusalem Report (1998-2004).
As the rain battered Jerusalem on Thursday night, and Israel’s ministers gathered to dismiss Ronen Bar, the head of the Shin Bet domestic security agency, an unnamed “official” — identified in Hebrew media as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — issued a statement falsely charging that Bar “knew about the Hamas attack many hours before it took place” on October 7, 2023, but “did nothing” about it.
If the Shin Bet chief had only called the prime minister and woken him up, the statement claimed, the disaster would have been prevented. “If Ronen Bar had carried out his job in the way he is now clinging to his seat, we would not have got to October 7,” the “official” pronounced.
The core assertion in the statement is unfounded and foul. Bar did not “know about the Hamas attack many hours before it took place.”
The internal probes carried out by both the Shin Bet and the Israel Defense Forces, completed in recent weeks, established that the military and security establishment identified several signs of unusual Hamas activity the night before the terror group’s invasion and massacre. These included that Hamas terrorists had activated Israeli SIM cards in their phones. But, as they had done for years, Israel’s intelligence chiefs utterly misread Hamas’s intentions and concluded that the various pieces of information did not indicate an imminent attack.
All of Israel has been consumed for 17 months by the horrors that Hamas perpetrated on October 7, 2023, and the sheer unfathomability of the failure — by Israel’s security establishment and its political overseers — to recognize what Hamas had been planning for years in plain sight and take the obvious, rudimentary measures to prevent it.
But the terrible truth is that the Israeli political and military leadership did indeed fail to read the writing on the wall, and that this enabled thousands of would-be genocidal terrorists to carry out the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust, in the country whose prime responsibility was and is to ensure that the mass murder of Jews could never happen again.
The IDF failed the nation, and its chief of staff, Herzi Halevi, and several senior officials, have resigned from their posts.
The Shin Bet failed the nation, and its chief, Bar, needed to follow suit. He had said he intended to do so, but had wanted to stay on until the hostages are home, until a state commission of inquiry is established into October 7, and until he could be certain that a capable, independent successor would be appointed in his stead.
The elected leadership under Netanyahu failed the nation, but has not taken responsibility. Nobody has resigned, and the prime minister is resisting the state commission of inquiry that would comprehensively probe the failures and assign blame. Thursday’s statement by the “official,” indeed, constitutes one of his most despicable efforts to cast all blame on the security establishment in order to escape culpability.
The disaster happened on Netanyahu’s watch. He held all the levers of power. He oversaw all policy, including insisting on the flow of suitcases of Qatari money into Gaza — funding that, the Shin Bet probe inconveniently made explicit, was delivered to Hamas’s military wing and helped facilitate the October 7 assault. The buck stops with him.
To accuse the head of a security agency whose entire purpose is to keep Israelis safe — including ensuring the personal safety of the prime minister — of knowing ahead of time that Hamas was about to invade and choosing not to act is beneath contempt.
The false, toxic allegation that the military and/or security agencies had advance knowledge of the Hamas attack and deliberately ignored it, facilitating the massacre, has been peddled online, including by pro-Netanyahu conspiracy theorists, since soon after October 7, but had not hitherto been directly advanced by the “official” widely believed to be the prime minister himself.
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In a letter that he sent to the cabinet ahead of Thursday’s meeting, Bar charged that the move to oust him was “entirely tainted by improper considerations and personal and institutional conflicts of interest of the highest order.” He referenced the ongoing police-Shin Bet investigation into allegedly illicit connections between aides to Netanyahu and Qatar, the prime minister’s apparent disingenuousness as regards the now-lapsed hostage-ceasefire deal in Gaza, and his own willingness and obligation to express independent opinions in high-level forums.
He also promised to detail the various measures and recommendations “that I brought for the prime minister’s approval, both before and after October 7” in the course of what he hoped would be a proper procedure to examine his dismissal rather than the “superficial process with a predetermined outcome” that was taking place Thursday night.
Unless he chooses to accept the cabinet’s decision, Bar’s fate now becomes a matter for the Supreme Court, whose independence and authority Netanyahu is also bent on neutering.
The government’s case in court — against petitions that are already being filed over the Shin Bet chief’s ouster, and that immediately prompted a court injunction on Friday afternoon — will presumably not be made by Israel’s chief legal officer. Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara had told Netanyahu ahead of Thursday night’s cabinet session that Bar could not be fired before her office reviewed his motives for doing so, and repeated her opposition to the move during the meeting.
Baharav-Miara, too, is on the prime ministerial list of independent irritants to be removed, with the cabinet on Sunday set to debate a motion of no confidence in her, en route to her intended dismissal.
The audience stood, and sang, and cried
As Netanyahu and his unanimous sycophants were gathering to terminate Bar, an hour’s drive away in Tel Aviv, “The 16th Sheep,” a group of veteran musicians who first got together almost 50 years ago, were completing another of their comeback concerts. They have reunited to try to make Israeli audiences a little happier during the war, and have been playing a succession of sold-out events in recent weeks.
Toward the end of the show, one of the group, David Broza, sang his most poignant and wrenching song, “Yihyeh Tov,” an insistent assertion that “Everything Will Be Okay” (or “Things Will Be Better,” or “All Will Be Good”…) that was written soon after Egypt’s president Anwar Sadat visited Israel in 1977.
The audience stood, and sang, and cried for our precious Israel, desperately wanting to believe the lyrics.
Back in Jerusalem, the former chief justice Aharon Barak, 88, who last year accepted Netanyahu’s request to serve as Israel’s ad hoc judicial representative in the Gaza genocide case at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, warned in several TV interviews that Israel is on the edge of civil war. “Stop, stop,” he pleaded with Netanyahu. “Don’t take the rift beyond where it already is.”
Likud MK Galit Distel Atbaryan, in response, airily dismissed what she described as Barak’s “fantasies about Jewish blood being spilled in the streets” and gloated that the “entire notorious and dictatorial life’s work” of Israel’s most respected jurist “is collapsing before your eyes.”
Meanwhile, near the Prime Minister’s Office, the officers of a police force now again controlled by National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir attempted to smash the car windows of anti-government protesters who were blocking the roads, with their occupants inside.
The ministers voted.
The rain pounded down.
Everything will not be okay.
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