serendipity
Verified User
.
I don't buy the conspiracy theory that the Israelis sat on their hands and did nothing.
It points not only to Hamas maintaining an exceptional level of secrecy — a feat all the more impressive given the invasion involved many hundreds of fighters — but also to communication breakdowns between the Israeli spy agencies and, above all, abject complacency from the top down.
Some commentators have made comparisons with the way Jerusalem was caught napping at the onset of the Yom Kippur War, 50 years earlier. There are haunting similarities, not least in the way the enemy used a Jewish festival as cover for the opening attack, in this case Simchat Torah, the religious holiday that marks the end of a week of public readings from the Torah, the Hebrew holy book.
But there are also huge differences compared with 1973. Today, Israel has access to a wide array of cutting-edge electronic surveillance methods. Border points bristle with cameras, drones, motion sensors and communications-monitoring systems that collect every single exchange.
Counterintuitively, this may have been part of the problem. A deluge of information is harder to sift and an over- reliance on technology can undermine vital intelligence-gathering on the ground.
https://mol.im/a/12620779
I don't buy the conspiracy theory that the Israelis sat on their hands and did nothing.
It points not only to Hamas maintaining an exceptional level of secrecy — a feat all the more impressive given the invasion involved many hundreds of fighters — but also to communication breakdowns between the Israeli spy agencies and, above all, abject complacency from the top down.
Some commentators have made comparisons with the way Jerusalem was caught napping at the onset of the Yom Kippur War, 50 years earlier. There are haunting similarities, not least in the way the enemy used a Jewish festival as cover for the opening attack, in this case Simchat Torah, the religious holiday that marks the end of a week of public readings from the Torah, the Hebrew holy book.
But there are also huge differences compared with 1973. Today, Israel has access to a wide array of cutting-edge electronic surveillance methods. Border points bristle with cameras, drones, motion sensors and communications-monitoring systems that collect every single exchange.
Counterintuitively, this may have been part of the problem. A deluge of information is harder to sift and an over- reliance on technology can undermine vital intelligence-gathering on the ground.
https://mol.im/a/12620779
