Friday Focus with Lazar Berman: Yaakov Katz on why Israel was asleep on Oct. 7

Welcome to The Times of Israel’s newest podcast series, Friday Focus. Each Friday, join host deputy editor Amanda Borschel-Dan and diplomatic correspondent Lazar Berman for a deep dive into what’s behind the news that spins the globe.

This week, Berman takes up the host role for an in-depth interview with author Yaakov Katz about his new book, “While Israel Slept: How Hamas Surprised the Most Powerful Military in the Middle East,” which he co-wrote with Amir Bohbot.

A former military correspondent, Katz served as editor in chief of The Jerusalem Post from 2016-2023, leaving just before the war. Currently a senior fellow at the Jewish People Policy Institute in Jerusalem, Katz is the author or co-author of four books.

Katz talks about the ignored “alarm bells” indicating that Hamas was about to launch a major attack prior to October 7, 2023. He speaks about the uncertainty whether Hamas was conducting a drill and how warning signs were disregarded because they didn’t fit the paradigm built by Israel around the capabilities of Hamas.

“We were so infatuated, in love with the signal intelligence, the visual intelligence. We knew everything because we had the technology. But while we thought we knew, we did not know what their intentions were, we did not know what they were really planning,” said Katz.

Katz delves into the goals of Hamas head Yahye Sinwar and how many he achieved, despite the terrorist group’s degradation.

We hear an assessment of the war, almost two years in, as well as who should be running Gaza on the day after.

Friday Focus can be found on all podcast platforms. This episode was produced by the Pod-Waves.

The following is a full transcript of this week’s episode:

Amanda Borschel-Dan: Welcome to the Times of Israel’s Friday Focus. I’m your host, Amanda Borschel-Dan, here with Lazar Berman, our diplomat reporter, who is actually going to be hosting this session with former Jerusalem Post editor Yaakov Katz, who is the author of the new book, “While Israel Slept.” So Yaakov, a big hello to you.

Yaakov Katz: Thank you, Amanda.

Amanda Borschel-Dan: It is such a pleasure to see you. We never worked together at the Jerusalem Post when you were the editor between 2016 and 2023, leaving just before the war. But we did work together about a decade prior, I would say, when you were the wee military reporter and I remember our collaborations fondly. So it’s such a pleasure to see you here. Now, listeners, a bit of an admission, I was not able to read the book. So Lazar is going to handle the interview today and we’ll talk about “While Israel Slept,” which is co-authored with Amir Bohbut, and much, much more after the break. And we’re back. I’m Amanda Borschel-Dan, here with our diplomatic correspondent, Lazar Berman and author Yaakov Katz. Lazar, take it away.

Lazar Berman: Sure. Thank you, Amanda. Great to be back from my Scotland adventures, back on Friday Focus with all of our listeners. And Yaakov, of course, great to be with you. We never worked together, but I’ve been reading your work, both your books and your reporting, for a while. So this is a great pleasure.

Yaakov Katz: Thank you very much, Lazar. It’s the same. You’ve been doing a great job. And I can only imagine, I’ve covered wars, but never one this long. So these are very difficult circumstances, I can imagine, personally and professionally.

Lazar Berman: Absolutely. So let’s get right into it. I’ve been reading the book this week, and I think it is going to kind of set the standard for an account of how we got here and why Israel fought the way it did, at least until this point. But there’s obviously so many aspects of October 7 and the subsequent war that could be delved into, whether it’s the pain felt by Israeli citizens and civilians, what the concepts were leading up to it, how the war is being fought, the diplomatic angle. What were you trying to focus on and why did you decide that that was kind of the key as you came to conceive of how you’re writing this book?

Yaakov Katz: Well, I mean, let me give a little context if I can. Amir and I wrote a book that came out in 2017 called “Weapon Wizards,” which looked at how Israel developed some of the most sophisticated military technology. I think that everyone is familiar with a lot of it, Iron Dome, cyber technology, missile defense, satellites. We just launched another satellite into space this week as a country. So we looked at how did this happen and where did this innovation come from? And then I wrote another book on my own in between, but we had been thinking about a new book and a sequel to that. And one of the ideas that we had was this thing that Israel had created, which we thought was pretty impressive, this really precision strike capability, a mixture and a merge of intelligence, tactics and technology. And we went to our publisher at St. Martin’s Press and pitched them on this book in the spring of 2023. And we signed a deal with them and began working on this book. And it was going to be, like I said, a sequel to “Weapon Wizards.” Comes October. And of course, everything changes. And I think like everyone else in this country and everyone else who has been closely covering the conflict and Israel’s wars over the years with Hamas, like you yourself have, this was a great shock. How did this happen? How did the mighty Israel? And just to contrast it, how did the Israel that was able to carry out that significant, unbelievable pager attack against Hezbollah in Lebanon be able to do what the Mossad just this week was talking about — how its agents were under fire in Iran during the attack against the nuclear facilities? How was that Israel that was able to do those amazing, magnificent things fail so miserably when it came to the enemy that was deemed to be the weakest and the least strategic of enemies for this country? And as we began to look into it and we pivoted with the book and began to dive deeper into what really happened, it was a much bigger story. And we felt that there was, I would even go as far as to say, and I don’t like to toot our horn, but there’s existential importance in understanding how this happened, because I believe it can happen again. Because ultimately, I believe that the people of Israel, we want something very simple and basic. We want to be left alone. We want to live peacefully and quietly. And to do that, we are willing to contain threats and to minimize them and to try to kick the can down the road, proverbially, and to believe in fairy tales that enemies that are genocidal can be deterred and contained just to be able to live another day of quiet. And unfortunately, while we want to be Luxembourg, our neighbors are not France and Belgium.

Lazar Berman: So are you pointing at that as the kind of the main cause of what led up to October 7, our willingness to deceive ourselves? Or did you discover other deeper trends? You referenced the intelligence strike complex, maybe it was a move away from ground wars. So as you were doing this, what do you think are the two or three main discoveries that could explain this failure at every level?

Yaakov Katz: Yeah, no, I mean, what I just said, I think, is the deep down conscious of the Israelis. But definitely there were severe structural flaws, tactical flaws and strategic flaws. I mean, we could give a couple of the examples, right? Intelligence wise, we go into great detail in the book of what happened between the 6 and 7 of October. What surprised me when we began the reporting on this, OK, we knew that Hamas began its assault at 6:29 a.m. on October 7. But what we didn’t immediately know, and some of this began to come out in the 20 months since, was the flurry of activity that went on through the night. And how at the highest levels of the military, [Lt. General] Herzi Halevi, the Chief of Staff, [Yaron] Finkelman, the head of the Southern Command, the head of the Gaza Division, Ronen Bar [former Head of Israeli Security Agency] went from home to Shin Bet headquarters in the middle of the night, gathered his division commanders, held video conferences. They were all aware and concerned with these different alarm bells that were going off. And here’s just a few examples. We know about SIM cards that were replaced on October 6. So about 100 SIM cards went live in Gaza. Now, just to explain, Palestinians have their own cellular network. If suddenly 100 SIM cards go live on the Israeli network and we see that they’re in Gaza, it can only mean one of two things. Either suddenly 100 Israelis are in Gaza or Hamas is putting in SIM cards because they plan to cross into Israel. But then when they looked back, they saw that actually a year prior, they had done a similar test of a few dozen, so less. Maybe this is their annual drill of SIM cards and test of SIM cards. They started to see throughout the night that they were uncovering in Gaza, underground rocket launchers. They began to see that they were preparing bunkers for their top Hamas leaders. They began to see a lot of different pieces. When they looked back, there were reports that the tzpitaniot, the spotters, the female soldiers who were stationed along the border, whose whole job was to look at the screens and see everything that was happening. There was intelligence. It didn’t make its way up to the top. But there was intelligence that showed that they were seeing more senior Hamas commanders in the days leading up to October 7 who were patrolling the border. But all of this together did not lead them to make the right decision because they were caught in a dilemma. Is this a drill or is this an attack? And if it is an attack, what kind of attack? So we look at the intelligence failure. We look at, OK, we were surprised that happens. Where were the defensive measures? Israel has invested billions of dollars in the border, in building a fence, in building an underground wall to stop the tunnels. Billions created teams, seismic experts, sonar experts, geologists to be able to discover when they’re building a tunnel, where they’re digging it, what tool they’re using to dig it. You know this Lazar. How many guys, how many Hamas guys crossed into Israel on October 7 through tunnels? Zero.

Lazar Berman: Zero. Yep.

Yaakov Katz: So all that money, all that technology that we invested, that we believed could contain them, collapsed before our eyes. And then where was the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] response? And then when you look back and you go even further back in time, you see political policies that were put in place. For example, and this is just one, probably the one that gets my blood boiling the most. Because if I told you today, you know what, we’re going to end the war. And you know how we’re going to end the war? We’re going to pay Hamas every month $30 million. You would say to me, are you out of your mind? Are you insane? You’re going to pay a terrorist group that has done this to you, $30 million a month to buy quiet? Well, you know what, guys? That’s what we did for years. How did we believe that that’s possible, that you can pay extortion money to a genocidal terrorist group? Now, it’s all easy to say now we should have, would have, could have. But like I said in the beginning, we have to understand this because of that deeper motivation and consciousness of the Israeli, because it could happen again. Right.

Lazar Berman: Now, so something that struck me from the book was that you wrote that there was no operational plan for conquering the Gaza Strip on the night of, you know, that’s the situation the IDF was in. And, you know, I would have thought that there’s contingency plans for everything, you know, invading Iceland if you need to and Mars. But the fact that there was this territory controlled by a terrorist organization where we had gone to war every two years and they were clearly a threat and clearly firing at us and clearly getting stronger. And there wasn’t even a plan, I think it was since 2015, since [Shlomo] “Sami” Turgeman left the Southern Command. And that is incredible because that also has an impact on the intelligence that Israel collects. You know, they’re not going to care much if there’s a tunnel from northern to southern Khan Yunis, because if we’re never going to maneuver there, it doesn’t matter. And also the way we build our forces. Why do we need endless amounts of engineers and D-9s [Armored Bulldozer] and things like that if we’re never going to be, you know, in those neighborhoods? So that was really something that stood out. Now, is that something that you think, you know, came about as a part of this concept or do you think there’s some deeper reasons, maybe, you know, the lack of confidence in the IDF’s ground maneuver and a desire to never do that again that led to that?

Yaakov Katz: I think it stemmed from two motivations or two ideas. The first was the fact that Israel never believed it would have to operate inside the Gaza Strip. This was this concept. Yeah, this was the paradigm. This was the fairy tale. And it came from a fact that Israel thought it could keep Hamas where it was. And by the way, there were real valid reasons why we had bigger fish to fry. We had Hezbollah. We had Iran. You were in those briefings like myself. You know, the warnings we had about Hezbollah, the 150,000 rockets that they had amassed, how one day they would rain down on Israel. And therefore, when Israel looked at the threat matrix and said, OK, where do I invest my resources? Where do I invest my focus? The better place to do it was Iran and Lebanon. It wasn’t the Gaza Strip. So there were some valid reasons for that to happen. But Israel believed as a result that, OK, obviously, this is a threat and obviously we have to deal with it. But we can deal with it in this game of whack-a-mole. Like you said, every two years in operation, we hit them on the head. They hit us a bit and then we move on and we have a period of quiet. I mean, look at, Lazar, the issue with the tunnels, right? Israel invested so much money in trying to stop the tunnels that were crossing into Israel. But comes October 7, they take 251 people, they steal them away into the Gaza Strip. They’re now inside tunnels in Gaza. We don’t know where those tunnels are. We know there are tunnels, but we don’t know where they are.

Yaakov Katz: We’re still, just last week, right, the IDF announces, story on Times of Israel, IDF announces it discovers a new tunnel in Khan Yunis, a kilometer and a half long. It’s got offshoots and branches and rooms, VIPs, etc. We’re almost two years into this thing. We’re just discovering that tunnel now. And this is a result of the fact that we did not know the great extent of the tunnels. I’ll take you back a year and a half. Israel said, we’ve just we’ve destroyed 70 percent of the tunnels. Well, you ask the IDF today how many tunnels they’ve destroyed. Maybe 60 percent. I understand. What have we been doing?

Lazar Berman: At most. Yeah.

Yaakov Katz: Yeah. So we’re still not there. And this is because we did not know. And the reason we didn’t know is because we weren’t collecting intelligence on the tunnels in Gaza, because in our mind, why would you know? Yeah, we know they have them. We know they move their people there. We know that they go down there in the event of an attack. But we’ll never have to go in there. So you wanted an operational plan. There was no operational plan because there was never a thought that we would ever have to go there. I mean, you know, it was almost you joked about Iceland. It was almost like Iceland for the state of Israel.

Lazar Berman: Yeah. And just to emphasize that, and this is in your book as well, that they closed down five the unit 504 in the in the southern region. So they weren’t collecting, you know, humans there. And I think a great point you made was the fact that in the thousands of terrorists that came across the border, let’s say three thousand, there wasn’t a single IDF informant or Israeli informant among them, which is unimaginable.

Yaakov Katz: It’s astounding, you know, when you think about it, because ultimately thousands of people ended up crossing into Israel on that morning. But they were most of them Hamas, but about half of them were pillagers and looters who came also weren’t necessarily, you know, card carrying members of Izz ad-Din al-Qassam [Brigade], the military wing. But you had hundreds who knew what was happening and they were getting ready and they got on and we’ve all seen those videos of them on the motorbikes storming the border in those last moments when they’re doing their final briefings and checking their weapons. There’s not one, not one who could call their Israeli handler and say, hey, FYI [for your information], we’re coming. Get ready. Sound the alarm bell. And then we met with the 504 people. This is an elite unit in military intelligence. Their whole role is to manage agents, spies in other places. For the last years, many years, they’ve been focused on Lebanon and Syria, not at all on Gaza. We were so infatuated, in love with the signal intelligence, the visual intelligence. We knew everything because we had the technology. But while we thought we knew what we knew, we did not know what their intentions were.

Yaakov Katz: We did not know what they were really planning. And we did not know that this was what was going to happen. Although, when we reverse engineer and go back in time, we discover a number of things. We discover the Jericho Walls document that was written in 2022 and was prepared in the IDF and the Gaza Division, which basically one to one said, this is what Hamas is planning. In 2016, Avigdor Lieberman, who was then Defense Minister, writes an 11 page document called the Situational Assessment of the Gaza Strip, where he too says that in a number of years, this is what Hamas will do. Hamas will launch an attack. All of this, really, it was there. And by the way, Lazar, this is the most disturbing part of it. Hamas told us what they were going to do, right? They were on Telegram. They were writing it. They were announcing it. They were making speeches about it. They were saying, we’re coming to kill you. And what was our answer? And this is obviously tongue in cheek. Our answer was, you don’t mean it. You just want more money. You want economic prosperity. You just want more growth for the Gaza Strip. And the idea, the concept again, was through economic prosperity, we can create assets for Hamas that they could potentially lose in a war and therefore they would not want to go to a war with Israel.

Lazar Berman: So now that we’ve seen October 7 and you’ve had a chance to review a lot of the intelligence and talk to people, what do you think Sinwar was trying to accomplish? Because it seems mad, you know, he’s going to have one day, one good day and his organization in the Gaza Strip will have, you know, that’ll be it for them perhaps. So what do you think he was trying to accomplish? What was his game plan here?

Yaakov Katz: Well, I mean, I think it’s a there were some immediate objectives that he had stated for himself. And now there are probably there’s some bigger ones that we’ve seen play out over the last almost two years of this war. And the immediate was he wanted to derail the Saudi-Israel normalization. You remember, and you’ve been writing about this for a long time, how this was at the this was at the top front burner, right? The Americans, the Biden administration was working very hard to make that happen. And there were real optimistic predictions and assessments in Israel that this could come very, very soon. So that was reason number one. There were other reasons he wanted to bring the Palestinian issue back to the forefront of the world’s agenda. It had been neglected. People were not interested. This was a way to do it. And let’s also not forget they are a genocidal terrorist organization. He had coordinated this with the Iranians, with the Lebanese, then Hezbollah. There were plans at some point for all three to launch an attack together. Sinwar jumped the gun. Hezbollah joined a day later and also limited its activities against Israel. But I think that they genuinely thought that they could strike and pierce the heart of Israel. They could maybe not destroy Israel, but they could definitely shake the Israeli sense of security and that they have done. They have traumatized the country. Now, there is the flip side to October 7. It’s a coin with two sides. Israel has reengineered the Middle East. We have really dealt a severe blow to Hezbollah. We have taken on Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities, taken out their aerial defenses, really degraded their ballistic missile capabilities. All of that is true. And Hamas is degraded beyond what it ever could have imagined. Nevertheless, if you are now the leader of Hamas in Gaza, even today as we speak in September, and you look at the world today and you say, one second, I still got 48 hostages. I got Israel not clear what it wants to do. And I look at the world and what’s the world saying? We’re about to recognize a Palestinian state at the United Nations [UN]. Hey, I’m winning this war to some extent, because let’s remember, they don’t care about their people being killed. They don’t care about Gaza being devastated. What they care about is to cause us pain, to keep Hamas at the top of the and keep Gaza and the Palestinians at the top of the world’s agenda, and to also keep Israel isolated, hurting, and diplomatically in a very tough bind, which is all very true today.

Lazar Berman: So now that we’re, you know, almost two years into this ground operation, I think almost day 700. How do you assess it now, looking back? Do you think, you know, given the constraints, given the army that, you know, they had to go to war with, given the international pressure that it was fought in the optimal way, or do you think that it’s been fundamentally flawed? And that’s why we’re going back into places, you know, like Zaytun [Quarter in Gaza], like back into Gaza City that we’ve been in many times and we still haven’t achieved any of the war’s goals?

Yaakov Katz: You know, it’s a tough one, because on the one hand, you can’t, the IDF has done a remarkable job. The soldiers have really shown amazing resilience and bravery and courage and really are fighting in very difficult, difficult circumstances. But with that said, I think where I look at this and my greatest criticism of the way the war has been managed is the lack of the outline and no articulation of what the day after and what the plan will look like. So if you’re looking at the war in Gaza today, you’re saying, one second, Israel is going back into places it was. It went into these places. It pulls out. Hamas reconstitutes itself to some extent there. Now Israel has to go back in. Shouldn’t they want to have someone else do that for them? Shouldn’t they want to help facilitate the creation and establishment of that new governing entity in Gaza? Where is it and why is Israel not doing it? And that leads people to believe that Israel just wants the war for the purpose of war. And that Netanyahu wants the war for political gain, when really, I think there are genuine dilemmas here, right? And Israel has to deal with those, right? Like people who look at the war now and say, one second, why would Israel launch a new Gaza offensive? Hamas is willing to give back some hostages, at least in a phased agreement. Now, suddenly they’re making sounds that they might agree to a full agreement. But Israel’s building up pressure and it needs to use that pressure to get Hamas to agree to a deal. If people think that without military pressure, Hamas just says, you know, one day says, hey, take the hostages. Come on. We know that’s not true. You need pressure. So he’s right to build up pressure. But if there is just a phased deal, should he take it? I would take it. But I also understand why he says, if I have the pressure now and I agree to a phased deal, I have to lower the pressure dramatically. I got to release the miliuminikim, the reservists. I got to stand down the army. Let’s say three weeks in, suddenly Hamas walks away from the table. How do I rebuild up the pressure again? And then I’m just going to drag this out even longer. So if I have the pressure at the maximum level now, should I not use it to its fullest extent? I hear that argument. And it’s legitimate, too. Israel’s in a really tough dilemma here. It’s not simple. People tend to look at this as like a zero sum game. Hamas says they’ll give back the hostages, take the deal, Israel, end the war. But then we look even at the day after. And what are Israel’s options there? We got elements in this government that want to retake Gaza, control Gaza, resettle Gaza. It doesn’t look like that’s going to happen, thank God. But there are people who want it, senior people in the government. We have also senior people in the government, including the Prime Minister, who says, I will not allow the Palestinian Authority to take a, you know, presence in Gaza. OK, so who exactly? Who do we think is coming?

Lazar Berman: And who do you think it should be?

Yaakov Katz: I mean, I think it needs to be a force that I would like to see it be a something that has the support of the Saudis and the Emiratis and the Egyptians and the Americans, for that matter. But I think there’s no alternative to Palestinians. This is a Palestinian territory. The Palestinians need to control themselves, right? It has to be governed by the Palestinians. No one else is going to come step up to the plate. I mean, it’s just not going to happen and it’s not going to, I think, work in a way that will really be able to stabilize the situation. Does it have to be the so-called Palestinian Authority? Maybe not, but there aren’t that many actors out there. And then when you hear reports, for example, like the ones that came out a few weeks ago, maybe two months ago now, about Israel giving weapons to the Abu Shabab militia in southern Gaza and Rafah, these are former Al-Qaeda guys or, you know, Islamists, whatever. These are not Zionists. These are not good people. We are giving them weapons because we think they’re going to fight against Hamas? When I heard this and saw these reports, we wrote in the book about how Israel saw Hamas being established in the 1980s, how when it first saw this new organization, it understood fairly quickly that it was coming out of the Mujama al-Islamiya, which was the Islamic association that Sheikh [Ahmed Ismail Hassan] Yassin, the wheelchair-bound spiritual leader of Hamas, had founded. By the way, he got Israeli permission to found it in the late 70s. And it was going to be Islamist institutions to educate the youth. He turned this into the radicalization center for the Palestinians. This is what became Hamas. We then caught them with weapons. But what did we say to ourselves? Not a big deal, because they are a counterweight to Fatah. They were the real bad guys, the Fatah [Palestinian political & former terrorist organization] guys, not the Hamas guys. So we’ve been down this road before. Did it work out well for us? I think we all know no. So we’re going to do this again. We’re going to arm militias. We’re going to think they’re going to be the solution to our problem. That’s not just bad policy. It’s stupid policy. Sorry, that’s dangerous. So I think that we need to really, and I hope that that’s being done at the highest levels, but I mean, you cover this on a daily basis. I think you and I both know, it doesn’t look like there’s a very clear plan right now that Israel has for what it really wants to happen. Like if the war were to end tomorrow, OK, who governs Gaza? We don’t know. Now, how is it that we still don’t know almost two years into this thing?

Lazar Berman: Yeah, and if you go back, let’s say, if you asked even an American soldier, the lowest level in Iraq or Afghanistan, what is the goal here? I think they would be able to tell you, we’re trying to protect this legitimate government that was elected and is pro-Western. I don’t think even senior officers in the IDF or even the government, as you said, could tell you. So I think that is absolutely something to be concerned about. I just want to ask you, we talked about the paradigm, the concept here. And of course, October 7 happens a day after the 50 year anniversary of Yom Kippur, where that terminology comes about. Looking forward, do you think, or are you worried that we have these paradigms about other things that we’re only going to see after we pay the price? Are there other things that you can point at or say, wait a minute, even if we got intelligence about this, we might miss it because we, across the spectrum and across the establishment, are all thinking the same way.

Yaakov Katz: Firstly, I just want to say one thing on what you just said before about the military not knowing and still not being able to explain. By the way, this leads to the breakdown in trust that we’re seeing playing out right now between Eyal Zamir, the Chief of Staff, and the government, with Zamir saying, don’t do the offensive, take the deal, and Netanyahu saying, we have to plow forward. So this breakdown in trust between the military and the political echelon partially stems from the lack of articulation of what we need to see happen. But to your question, I’m deeply concerned because I do think, and that’s why Amir and I ended the book with kind of a prescription of sorts of different ideas of things that could be done to try to minimize that surprise element. So we talk about some intelligence structural reforms. We talk about relations with the United States [US] that we need to invest more to preserve. We talk about the preemption strike policy, how Israel needs to change its national defense doctrine and go from not containment, but when you see a threat in the beginning, even if it’s one rocket, you take action because one becomes 100, becomes 1,000, becomes 10,000 fairly quickly. And therefore, we have to operate. We will have to live with a sword in our hand for many years to come. But I think that if I look at the ‘conceptia’ [concepts] and the different places of where this could potentially blow up again in our faces, I think right now the vigilance is at the level that it needs to be. We see that with continued strikes in Lebanon. We see that with continued activity in Syria. And we see that also with this high level. And we know that there’s a lot of talk of maybe renewed operations and hostilities one day very soon with Iran, whether Iran attacking Israel or Israel having to once again operate in Iran to continue to degrade their capabilities and prevent them from construction. So that’s not over. I’ll tell you where I don’t think we have fully internalized the paradigm and I think existential is internally and socially in Israel when it comes to social cohesion. And I know this isn’t the military topic, but there are two elements that I’ll just point to briefly. One is the Haredi draft, this idea after everything Israel has been through, that we still allow a dramatic large sector in society, a blanket exemption, and that this government has not recognized and understood this and that society has not understood that we have to change. That is number one. But the second thing is the other part that I learned from this war and I did not know before was how existential unity of our people is for national security. In the almost year leading up to October 7, we were fighting about judicial reform. We were arguing about matters of how we appoint Supreme Court justices. This is what exposed and made us vulnerable. And this is something that we cannot allow to happen again. So that paradigm, unfortunately, those ideas have yet to real take hold and be understood that they need to change.

Lazar Berman: Okay. So I think we’ve unfortunately reached our time limit here. But I want to thank you for this conversation. It’s sobering. It’s eye-opening and I encourage everyone to take a look at the book “While Israel Slept.” And I think it’ll really help people understand how we got to October 7. What, why, the last two year have looked like they have. And where we might go from here. And what opportunities in rest ahead.

Yaakov Katz: Thank you very much Lazar.

Amanda Borschel-Dan: And Yaakov I just wanted to jump in and very much give you such a kol hakavod [well done] and I’m so pleased to see your success as I mentioned at the top of the program we worked together, wow, 15–20 years ago, and it’s just such a pleasure to see how far you’ve come along and to see your name on the shelves in bookstores near you, right Yaakov?

Yaakov Katz: Thank you very much Amanda. I really appreciate it.

Amanda Borschel-Dan: Thank you so much for listening to the Times of Israel‘s Friday Focus. Please check out another installment next week. This episode was produced by The Podwaves. If you have any questions or comments about this or any other episode, please drop us an email at podcast@timesofisrael.com. Until next week. Shalom.

Check out last week’s Friday Focus: