ISRAEL'S FAUDA FALLACY
In the years before the October 7th attack Israel was a complacent, rich place. It’s politics descended into farce with five elections between 2019 and 2022. The big men of Israeli politics were incapable of putting aside their egos long enough to form a stable government. The biggest man, or the most desperately stubborn, was current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In a society as security conscious as Israel this political dysfunction should have set off warning bells but it didn’t. Why? My theory is: the Fauda Fallacy
Fauda is a brilliantly made thriller series about an Israeli counter-terrorism unit operating undercover in the Occupied Territories. It was created by its star Lior Raz, who served in a real-life unit similar to the dramatically imagined one, and Avi Issacharoff, the Palestinian affairs correspondent of Ha’aretz newspaper, who is also a veteran of the undercover world. Both men come from the Middle Eastern branch of Jewry and speak fluent Arabic.
Over its four seasons the show had an uncanny knack of anticipating the news. The last season was about an uprising in Jenin, a refugee town on the West Bank. Within days of its initial run on Netflix last summer, the Israeli army launched an incursion into Jenin. At least 7 Palestinians were killed and nearly a hundred wounded.
Fauda presents a portrait of a security service completely on top of any threats from Hamas or Islamic Jihad or Da’esh/Isis. Visual surveillance, state of the art communications between the undercover operatives and their handlers in a room with realtime images coming in from everywhere allows the team to be updated on threats which leads them to success in foiling terrorists, despite the occasional “fauda”, which is an Arabic for chaos.
The production felt realistic and it was comforting but it was also a total fantasy, as the complete surprise with which Hamas invaded southern Israel demonstrated. In some ways the Fauda Fallacy was embodied by Netanyahu in his self-portrayal as the only person who could keep Israel safe.
Then the real world intruded in the form of the Hamas massacre of October 7th and Israelis belief in the Fauda Fallacy, and Netanyahu’s claim were exposed. It was the worst security failure since the Yom Kippur War almost exactly fifty years earlier, on October 6th, 1973.
I made an hour long program for BBC Radio to mark that anniversary, which aired the week before the Hamas atrocity. There are not many similarities between the two events but there is this: the day before the surprise attacks Israeli society from top to bottom was over-confident to the point of negligence, high on its own supply of self-belief in its political leadership and its military—in which all participated—to keep it secure. Hubris.
Fifty years ago, the 1967 Six-Day War had been the source of this over-confidence. Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s diplomatic overtures had been ignored since he took office following the death of Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1970. Sadat wished to negotiate the return of the Sinai peninsula which Israel had seized in the Six-Day War. Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir ignored him and when it was suggested Sadat might turn to a military option to get the Sinai back, her Defense Minister, Moshe Dayan, scoffed, “Egypt has a military option?”
President Richard M. Nixon’s national security and defense staff, led by Henry Kissinger, questioned the Israelis about an Egyptian military build-up along the Suez Canal. They assured the White House there was nothing to worry about. And that was good enough for Washington. The presidential daily security brief on October 5th 1973 read:
“Egypt - the exercise and alert activities under way in Egypt may be on a somwhat larger scale and more realistic than previous exercises but they do not appear to preparing for a military offensive against Israel.”
The war started the next day.
When you look at the extraordinary coordination of the Hamas attack, the amount of weaponry they acquired or manufactured in Gaza—three weeks later and with much of Gaza city reduced to rubble, Hamas is still firing rockets into Israel—then add in the many, many hours it took for Israel’s army to get to the area where the attacks were going on, it is clear just how large the Israeli systemic failure was. Once again: hubris. The Fauda Fallacy of impregnability.
I was in Israel in June to record my documentary titled, “How the Yom Kippur War Changed Everything, for Everyone“. I spoke with veterans, men and women, of the fighting and asked them about their experiences at the front and also the changes wrought in Israeli life by the close call the war represented. Israel was overwhelmed in the first week with 1,000 soldiers killed. Ultimately, the IDF reversed the battlefield position and re-crossed the Canal and repelled the Syrian Army from the Golan Heights and managed to get to within 40 kilometres of Damascus.
But the damage had been done. Golda Meir, leader of the Labor Party which had held power since Israel’s founding, would resign nine months later. Meanwhile the fractured Israeli right-wing parties, united and formed the Likud under Menahem Begin. At the next general election, in 1977, Likud took power and Begin became Prime Minister. Begin referred to the West Bank as Judaea and Samaria and began a steady process of annexation for settlement.
Likud has been in office for most of the ensuing 46 years. The only time it hasn’t been in power, the Oslo Accords were signed and the last serious negotiations on issues left out of Oslo took place and failed. That was in 2000.
In Tel Aviv, I got the sense that the era of Likud’s political hegemony was coming to an end. Following the last election no established political group would form a coalition with Bibi Netanyahu. So he had turned to political parties of messianic Zionists, led by people who idolized Baruch Goldstein, who slaughtered 29 Muslim worshippers at Hebron’s Cave of the Patriarchs, reputedly the burial plot of Abraham, in 1994, just after Oslo was signed.
It was a government of extremists. Itamar Ben-Gvir, who Netanyahu appointed Minister for National Security in charge of policing the West Bank, had once produced a video arguing for the release from prison of Yigal Amir, assassin of Yitzhak Rabin.
Bibi’s new government immediately overreached and tried to pass a judicial reform law that would neuter Israel’s courts, the only check on executive power in the country’s system of government. This sparked a protest movement. Starting last January, every Saturday night more than 100,000 people turned out in Tel Aviv and other places around Israel to demonstrate against the proposed legislation.
The deep divisions in Israeli society that had been papered over by the country’s flourishing economy, its reputation as a high tech hub, and its sense of security erupted.
When I was in Israel I went to one of these Saturday night events. What I found interesting was how many of those in the street were veterans of the 1973 war, some were with their grandchildren. Others had been arguing against the Occupation of Palestinian territories since they were gained by conquest in the Six-Day War.
A woman named Michal told me,
“We were silent when Rabin was murdered and we were silent in the occupation and the apartheid. We were silent all these years, too long. And we let all these fanatics and religious and messianic people get to power with their counter-revolution so now we woke up and we are going to stop you with all necessary means. People are radicalized including in the army and the shabak (secret services).”
Looking back to 1973, novelist Orit Shaham Gover, said,
“It was the turning point in the righteousness of the Israeli way. It was kind of the breaking of society from a place where we thought we are belonging to something bigger than us.”
Then she added ruefully,
“There’s not something bigger than us. It’s everyone to himself.”
But now she had become an enthusiastic participant in the demonstrations. It was a return to fighting for something bigger than oneself.
In the months before the attack, the divisions visible on the street were also affecting Israel’s security apparatus: army and security services. Army reservists were refusing to report for duty. Netanyahu ignored warnings from the leadership that his proposed judicial reform and the authority of Ben-Gvir in the occupied West Bank imperiled security.
The Prime Minister indulged in the Fauda Fallacy, believing that whatever domestic political problems were manifesting themselves, his all eyes in the skies surveillance and super-heroes undercover had everything under control.
October 7th would have marked the 40th week in a row of demonstrations. Instead Hamas embarked on its day of butchery. Almost immediately, the Israeli protest movement turned to a war relief effort. Groups like Brothers in Arms, a veterans organization active in the anti-Netanyahu marches began aid deliveries to the internally displaced and those still living near Gaza.
The war will end. My guess is it will end inconclusively, as every war Israel has fought with non-state actors whose militias are made up of Palestinians has. Hamas may be destroyed but another group will take its place. Bibi will meet the same end as Golda Meir.
And Fauda in theory will be back. In September it was announced a fifth season had been commissioned by the Israeli production company, Yes, for Netflix. Although the production schedule may be delayed. The show’s creators, Lior Raz and Avi Issacharoff, have other things to attend to at the moment. They were recently seen under fire delivering aid to Sderot for Brothers in Arms.
I will look forward to another season of Fauda, I will not look forward to the return of the Fauda Fallacy.