[opendoor]

Originally Posted by Pointman

Israelis are shocked by the false alert rates and, together with failure to anticipate initial attack by Hamas, this generated a lot of talk about how Israel army may not be as great, as we thought it is.

I ran across a pretty scathing article written by former Israeli Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami which touches on that. Though his position is that it's more poor government (both in terms of handling this whole issue and their focus on the West Bank/settlements) rather than the army itself being lacking:

Sooner or later, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s destructive political magic, which has kept him in power for 15 years, was bound to usher in a major tragedy. A year ago, he formed the most radical and incompetent government in Israel’s history. Not to worry, he assured his critics, ‘I’ll have two hands firmly on the steering wheel.’

But by ruling out any political process in Palestine and boldly asserting, in his government’s binding guidelines, that ‘the Jewish people have an exclusive and inalienable right to all parts of the Land of Israel’, Netanyahu’s fanatical government made bloodshed inevitable.

Admittedly, blood flowed in Palestine even when peace-seekers such as Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Barak were in office. But Netanyahu recklessly invited violence by paying his coalition partners any price for their support. He let them grab Palestinian lands, expand illegal settlements, scorn Muslim sensibilities regarding the sacred mosques on the Temple Mount, and promote suicidal delusions about the reconstruction of the biblical Temple in Jerusalem (in itself a recipe for what could be the mother of all Muslim jihads). Meanwhile, he also sidelined the more moderate Palestinian leadership of Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank, effectively beefing up the radical Hamas in Gaza.

Many have expressed surprise that Hamas so easily penetrated Israel’s defences along the border with Gaza. But there were no such defences. When Hamas began slaughtering hundreds of defenceless civilians, Israel’s glorious army was mostly deployed elsewhere. Many were assigned to the West Bank to protect religious settlers in clashes (sometimes initiated by the settlers themselves) with local Palestinians, and in festivals around invented holy shrines. For long hours, desperate men and women cried for help, and the strongest army in the Middle East was nowhere to be seen.

The assumption was always that Gaza was not a vital priority. The underground wall of sensors and fortified concrete that Israel has built around the enclave was supposed to block the tunnels through which Hamas tried in the past to penetrate Israeli border villages. It was of no use. Hamas militias simply stormed the fences on the surface.

There was no intelligence about Hamas’s intentions, either. The ‘start-up nation’, whose sophisticated cyber units can detect the movement of a leaf in a tree in an Iranian base in Syria, knew nothing of Hamas’s plans. Israel’s obsession with Iran’s possible nuclear breakout and its internal security services’ focus on the occupied West Bank partly explain this negligence.

https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/hu...sis-in-israel/