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EXPLAINING ISRAEL’S ‘INTELLIGENCE FAILURE’ ON HAMAS  
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Nyki Duda
January 30, 2024
The Progressive
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_ Discussion about the failure to see that Hamas had the capability
and intent to do what it did isn’t being linked to something that
would be obvious to any historian of colonialism: these intelligence
failures are inherent to any colonial project. _

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One of the biggest questions around Hamas’s October 7 attack remains
unanswered: Why didn’t Israel or its allies see it coming? Oliver
Kearns is a lecturer in intelligence and security studies at the
University of Leicester in the United Kingdom, where he is currently
researching the U.S. War on Terror, lynchings, and how secrecy shapes
the way that violence was understood. That work builds on his 2023
book _The Covert Colour Line: The racialised politics of Western
state intelligence_
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it, Kearns analyzes declassified documents from the United Kingdom’s
Iraq war inquiry to understand “intelligence failures” and how
racism played a role in the conflict. 

He spoke with _The Progressive_ via telephone to discuss Israel’s
“intelligence failures” in Gaza, and how they came about. 

Q: WHAT IS AN “INTELLIGENCE FAILURE” AND HOW SHOULD WE UNDERSTAND
THAT TERM? 

OLIVER KEARNS: The idea of “failure” gives us an idea of what
intelligence looks like when it goes right, and when it goes wrong.
Normally, failures are described as a mismatch between what you say
and what actually happened. So talking about failure implies that
there are real facts out there that you could go and get if only you
had the right informant or the right satellite information… And
certainly the way Hamas’s attack has been talked about, there’s
been a lot of repetition of the idea. [Which is that] despite Israel
having a gigantic surveillance machine pointing towards the Gaza
Strip, there’s either something Israel missed because it didn’t
have enough human sources [or] someone higher up in the government
didn’t make the links. The main problem with that story of what
intelligence failures are is that there’s no politics in it.
There’s no discussion of how intelligence services end up
understanding their role in the world [or] their ultimate political
objective.

Q: WHAT CONTEXT DO YOU SEE AS MISSING FROM THE DISCUSSION OF HAMAS’S
ATTACK? 

KEARNS: A lot of the early coverage rightly emphasized that Hamas
chose to attack on the fiftieth anniversary of the Yom Kippur War of
1973. That’s an easy story to then tell—oh, this is the biggest
intelligence failure since 1973 . . . . [But] why did that happen?
Henry Kissinger famously said that the failure to predict the
Egyptian-Syrian attack in 1973 was because [the] United States [and]
Israel’s definition of “rationality” did not take seriously the
notion of starting an unwinnable war to restore self-respect. So even
very early on, Kissinger was setting up the idea that it’s about
different ideas of what’s rational or irrational to do, which as I
show in my book, is a very old idea in Anglophone intelligence . . . .
[many have said] how unexpected it was that Hamas would be able to
carry out such a—as it’s usually put—“sophisticated”
operation, involving such “high-tech” techniques as saying things
that aren’t true over a mobile phone to try to fool the enemy.

But there’s also this lack of understanding of Hamas’ political
objectives . . . . Hamas released a statement shortly after they began
their attack, explaining their political objectives. One of the top
three was to get political attention to the issue of Palestine and to
try to prevent normalization between Israel and other Arab states.  

In the Six-Day War in 1967, the United States and Britain [thought] if
Israel won, it would permanently cow Arab states, and they would
accept some sort of settlement in Israel’s favor. And instead what
happened is [the Yom Kippur war in 1973] . . . . [I]ntelligence has
been so bad at acknowledging the sheer scale of those political
problems, and that it might be advisable, for instance, to recommend
Israel withdraw from the Occupied Territories or that the United
States take a less interventionist approach towards the Middle East.
Both of those things might be rational. But it goes against the
fundamental principle of these intelligence services, which is to
support their state’s power and influence in the world.

Q: HOW DOES RACISM PLAY INTO THE “FAILURES” OF WESTERN STATE
INTELLIGENCE? 

KEARNS: In the case of 1973, there was this very prominent idea that
the reason it was unlikely Egypt would carry out an attack was because
there would be a need for a level of Arab unity which was [seen as]
simply impossible . . . . Something strikingly similar has come up in
the last few months, where former and current [Israeli and U.S.]
officials have explained an operation of this scale by Hamas, with
other Palestinian militant factions—what’s unsaid is their
assumption that it just wasn’t going to happen, that it was seen as
impossible because “you know what these people are like.” 

Pluto Press

The big paradox about [this] is the sheer amount of racist ideas in
intelligence doesn’t make intelligence any better. Instead, what
happens is intelligence officers try to hold onto their basic ideas
about race and the world for as long as possible. All of this
discussion right now about the failure to see that Hamas had the
capability and intent to do what it did isn’t being linked to
something that would be obvious to any historian of colonialism: that
these intelligence failures are inherent to any colonial project.

Q: HOW DOES THE NARRATIVE OF ARABS AS “IRRATIONAL” DRIVE
ISRAEL’S GENOCIDAL CAMPAIGN AGAINST GAZA? 

KEARNS: It means that Israel can appear “reasonable and rational”
in its response to “barbaric violence,” as they would put it, by
explaining why they didn’t predict what happened, without having to
acknowledge the political agency of Hamas and the Palestinians. When
you racialize and dehumanize a population, you’re denying the idea
that those people [are] actively shaping politics. What Hamas did . .
. was very disruptive in that it proved Palestinians in the Gaza Strip
have the ability to radically change the status quo overnight. That
poses a big challenge to the story Israel tries to tell the rest of
the world, including the United States, about how successful its
“management” of the Occupied Territories has been.

Q: THERE’S BEEN A LOT OF SPECULATION THAT ISRAEL MAY HAVE ALLOWED
THE ATTACK TO HAPPEN. EGYPT, FOR EXAMPLE, SAID IT WARNED
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OF A POTENTIAL ATTACK. AN ISRAELI MILITARY OFFICIAL CLAIMS SHE TRIED
TO WARN HER SUPERVISORS, AS MEDIA HAVE REPORTED
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THIS DISCUSSION? 

KEARNS: Asking those questions after a while lets Israel off the
hook. The much bigger and more extensively documented, proven
“conspiracy,” if you like, involving Israel, has been the idea of
a peace process and of Israel being committed to negotiations and a
two-state settlement. We know there’s an extensive historical record
showing from early on in Israel’s existence, prime ministers like
Ben Gurion were very explicit to their cabinet members, saying—this
is simply a ruse until we’re in a position to expand our territory
and create a Greater Israel. 

The documentary record of the peace process in the 1990s shows
something similar. You could take that story right up to Israel’s
deliberate assistance towards Hamas . . . because Israel recognized,
like other colonial powers have, that this is a way of controlling a
colonized population if you try to pick particular leaders to favor
over others and sow discontent. 

Q: HOW DOES STATE INTELLIGENCE SHAPE THE MEDIA NARRATIVE WE’RE
SEEING OF ISRAEL’S WAR ON GAZA? 

KEARNS: Lots of former intelligence chiefs now appear on TV [or on
social media], giving their informed opinion about things. One example
that struck me was the former head of Britain’s MI6, John Sawyers,
who recently wrote
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editorial in the _Financial Times_, beginning by saying Israel must
recognize it cannot eliminate Hamas completely, since it has . . .
popular support, and it has an infrastructure there. So what should
Israel do? It should bring in some sort of international
administration in Gaza, as the United States did in Iraq after its
invasion. He then says: Mistakes were made, but nonetheless, that
international administration did allow for a new government with local
support to emerge. So not only is that contradictory—he already said
Hamas has local support—but it’s sheer stupidity to suggest that
the occupation of Iraq should be a model for Israel.

Q: IS THIS ANOTHER IRAQ WAR MOMENT? WILL IT AGAIN ERODE PUBLIC TRUST
IN ESTABLISHMENT POLITICS? 

KEARNS: It’s significant that this is happening as we’re entering
the third year of the war in Ukraine. That happened off the back of
the United States’s massive intelligence failure around Afghanistan,
and its failure to predict how quickly the Taliban would retake Kabul.
When that happened, there was a lot of hand-wringing around
Washington—we should have realized that any armed and motivated
insurgency against an occupying force tends to be successful
eventually. Israel may, and it’s horrible to say this, succeed in
carrying out this genocide . . . But in terms of a long-term political
solution, it has no chance of success.

_Nyki Duda is a writer and editor focused on social movements and the
rise of the far right. Her work has appeared in Dissent, NACLA, and In
These Times._

_The Progressive is a reader-supported, nonprofit, independent news
organization that has been speaking truth to power since 1909. Our
mission is to be a voice for peace, social justice, and the common
good. Our commitment is to quality writing and accurate, fact-based
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The Progressive is a nonprofit supported by our readers. We are
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* Israel-Palestine
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* colonialism
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* Racism
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* Espionage and Intelligence Services
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* Hamas
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