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by philistine
810 days ago
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> The IDF, Shabak, Aman, and Mossad have all deteriorated severely since the 2000s Absolutely true. Never forget that the vicious attacks by Hamas were never leaked to the Israelis. The supposed spookiest spooks in the whole wide world didn't know about an attack being planned within their own borders. |
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The lower levels of the Intelligence Services had a vague idea an attack like this would happen [0] but dismissed it as unrealistic, and Egypt even warned Israel 3 days before the attack [1] but most likely it was ignored/procrastinated due to the Judical Protests and Yom Kippur holiday season.
There was a systemic failure that is very unsurprising due to the relative lack of long term institutional knowledge as Intelligence Community and Policy members left to work for American MNCs like Microsoft or Google, or start their own massive cybersecurity companies like Palo Alto Networks, SentinelOne, Wiz, etc.
Before the economic reforms in the 1990s-2000s, the only options for the best and brightest in Israel was to become a careerist in the Israeli Government or emigrate to the US to found companies like PANW. This meant a large subset of Israel's top talent remained in the government, but all that fell apart due to economic liberalization because people had better choices that paid more and had better work hours.
It's the exact same story in Singapore and South Korea today, and a similar brain drain happened in the former Soviet Union and India in the 1990s.
> The supposed spookiest spooks in the whole wide world didn't know about an attack being planned within their own borders
Imo, the reason Israel's intelligence community was a top player in the 1970s-90s was because most Israelis were 1st-1.5 generation refugees from Arab countries. Mizrahi Jews (especially Yemeni) are fairly overrepresented in careerist Military and Police roles in Israel due to a relative lack of career options, and a number of that generation was L1 Arabic or Farsi speaking.
By the 2000s-2010s, the younger generation was 2nd or 3rd generation and truly "Israeli" so a lot of the cultural nuances in the Arab World fell by the wayside.
[0] - https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/30/world/middleeast/israel-h...
[1] - https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67082047