While Israel Slept is a book about what happened on 7/7/14, the day after the terrorist attack in Tel Aviv, a group of people came forward with evidence that points the finger at the most powerful military in the Middle East.
00:05:52.000And we need to understand how to avoid this from happening.
00:05:55.000I want to go back and if you can use some of the Hebrew words because I can't pronounce them,
00:06:00.000but the word concept jumps off the page of you as you go through this.
00:06:06.000The political, military, and intelligence elite had a different – they had a concept,
00:06:12.000and that concept was really focused on Tehran, Iran as the threat, and their proxies like Hezbollah.
00:06:19.000And it seemed like Hamas, although in Gaza, in the Muslim Brotherhood, in a mortal threat,
00:06:26.000the strategic concept was focused on that.
00:06:29.000And we just – we've put this to bed.
00:06:32.000We've got control of this, but we've got to focus on that.
00:06:35.000Is that – what's the Hebrew term you use?
00:06:37.000So we call it the concepsia, which is basically just to play off the word concept.
00:06:41.000I think, you know, maybe a better way to look at it is the prism or the paradigm through which Israel viewed Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
00:06:49.000You know, I think also – I see the comparison that's often made to 9-11, but I just want to say something here.
00:06:55.000I think it's more in a case, an example of Pearl Harbor.
00:06:59.0009-11 definitely when we look at the flow of intelligence that you mentioned, the problems with not enough information moving from one intelligence agency to the other.
00:07:08.000But Pearl Harbor more in the sense that back then, in the 40s, the late 30s, the United States knew that there was a war raging in Europe.
00:07:16.000They knew that the Japanese were preparing for something and were already fighting in the Pacific.
00:07:20.000But they thought that it couldn't reach their shores until it exploded on their shores in Pearl Harbor.
00:07:27.000And Israel, for that sense, also thought, yeah, we knew of Hamas.
00:07:31.000There were wars and operations fought every couple of years ever since Israel withdrew unilaterally from Gaza, handed it over to them, gave them an opportunity to build something great.
00:07:41.000But unfortunately, they decided to destroy it and turn it into an Afghanistan-like territory.
00:07:47.000But we thought that it would never happen.
00:07:50.000We lacked the imagination, Steve, and I think that's the big part of the story.
00:07:53.000But this concept, this concept was very much based on what you mentioned, was the idea that when Israel looked at the threat matrix in the region, what it saw was the great Iran, the greatest evil in the region.
00:08:09.000By the way, a place where when they marched down the streets of Tehran chanting death to Israel and burn Israeli flags in the same breath, they're chanting death to America and burning American flags.
00:08:21.000I think Americans are well aware of Iran's involvement, not just the hostage taking back in the Islamic Revolution and the takeover of 1979 and that hostage crisis that the United States had to deal with back in the time.
00:08:34.000And thankfully, those hostages were released back under President Reagan, but also the assassination plots that we have seen repeatedly over the years by Iranian elements against U.S. officials, some of them from the first Trump administration.
00:08:49.000So the Iranians have long been trying to undermine the West to weaken Israel, to weaken America.
00:08:55.000And they were working together with Hamas and with Hezbollah, of course, to build up this capability that has surprised Israel in a dramatic way on October 7th.
00:09:06.000I want to go back through the lead up to that and about – because what shocked me, and I think I keep up with the Jerusalem Post and the Herats and the Times of Israel and other blogs, military blogs, but I didn't quite understand that there were warnings of this and there were people in that process that warned about it.
00:09:28.540But go back – these young women who were threatened – and I love the way that – because they're so – you know, they've got a keen eye, right, as women often do.
00:09:39.600So these young, I guess, enlisted and junior officers are put in as actually the front early search radar for what's going on in Gaza.
00:09:49.720They had warned people leading up to it.
00:09:51.840And my point is that this wasn't totally like a caught by surprise.
00:09:54.780As you guys go through the step-by-step of the weeks leading up to it and then the, like, 24 hours, and you realize there were people that at least had an idea that something was amiss.
00:10:06.140Talk about these young women that were threatened by court-martial for what they were identifying.
00:10:10.620So these women, we call them in Hebrew tatspitaniot, which is the Hebrew word for basically surveillance soldiers or spotters, observers.
00:10:20.560And their job was to sit in these frontline positions along the border with Gaza, their eyes glued to screens.
00:10:26.180Each one has an area that they are responsible for to look at that peers over in Gaza.
00:10:31.820And just to give people a sense, Steve, Israel did have a very sophisticated border barrier, multilayered fence, phased array radars, electronic fence.
00:10:41.620They had turrets with remote control guns on them if people started to venture too close to the border.
00:10:48.180There were cameras, of course, that lined the border and other sensors.
00:10:52.660And these women were in this role in the IDF and the Israel Defense Forces was to watch.
00:10:57.900The joke was, and I had visited their bases numbers of times, the joke was that if they saw a bee flying along the border, they would see it and they would identify it.
00:11:06.320And they were supposed to look, did a bush that was in this place on Monday, on Tuesday, suddenly move here?
00:12:01.360That's what our intelligence is telling us.
00:12:02.900You stay in your tactical seat because we, on the strategic level, we really see the full picture.
00:12:09.460And the tragedy, Steve, is that on October 7, when Hamas crossed in and invaded and went straight away for those frontline positions and stormed them,
00:12:18.78015 soldiers in that base were murdered.
00:12:22.420Six of those women were taken hostage.
00:12:24.800One of them was miraculously rescued by the Israeli forces about five, six weeks into the war.
00:12:30.820But five of them spent almost 500 days in Hamas captivity.
00:12:34.520And that profound tragedy is striking.
00:12:39.440But I'll say one other thing, because this is, I think, important for us to remember.
00:12:43.800This was a sophisticated border barrier.
00:12:46.480I had been a few years ago to Korea, and I went up to the DMZ.
00:12:51.320And you thought you saw something that was also quite impressive.
00:12:55.400And the Israeli border, the barrier on the border with Gaza, to people who have been there over the years, looked like an impenetrable barrier.
00:13:05.080And I know that the United States thinks a lot about these issues of walls and borders and faces similar challenges, potentially, on its borders.
00:18:00.060This is not something that never happens.
00:18:02.820There are always, every few weeks, once a month at least, some indication that something might be happening.
00:18:08.580And there's always a state of awareness and alert and vigilance.
00:18:12.160But here, the commanders made the existential, the crucial mistake, where they leaned more on the option of a drill than on the option of an attack.
00:18:23.760And I think that what they missed here, to an extent, was not the information, because the information we had, now we know.
00:19:05.600And I want to make sure the audience gets in.
00:19:07.220By the way, you've got to read the book.
00:19:08.940You read the book, you won't put it down.
00:19:10.300But the timeline, because what shocked me in having done live coverage of it with Posobiec, is that when these two events of the cyber, either cyber attack or the system just fails because it's got some issues, and the SIM cards, as I think of 6 or 7 o'clock the night before.
00:19:29.480From 6 or 7 o'clock until the attack happens at 6.29 a.m. the following morning, this book, you cannot put it down.
00:19:40.100You're just flipping pages and reading that because it was the senior most people in the Mossad.
00:21:14.580Israel has three key intelligence agencies, like you mentioned.
00:21:17.620The Mossad is pretty much the equivalent of the CIA.
00:21:20.880And we've seen, for example – I'm sure that many of our listeners and viewers remember the Pager attack, the beeper attack that was launched against Hezbollah, which was incredible.
00:21:29.580The beginning of the 12-day war against Iran with the elimination of their nuclear facilities, which started with the elimination and decimation of their top military leadership and their top scientific leadership, also part of Mossad, had a hand in that.
00:21:43.160So Mossad mostly is focused outside of Israel, almost completely – it doesn't do anything inside Israel.
00:21:48.980But under the structure of the intelligence agencies, Mossad also does not deal with Gaza, does not deal with Hamas in Gaza.
00:21:55.600That falls under the purview of what's known as the Shin Bet or the Shabak is another term that's often referred to.
00:22:01.540It's the Israel Security Agency, the ISA, and it is responsible for countering Palestinian terrorism.
00:22:08.360In addition, AMAN, which is the Hebrew acronym for military intelligence under the IDF, is responsible for all fronts and all threats.
00:22:18.020It's the largest of the organizations, but it also is the one that kind of translates the intelligence and gives it for an operational use to the actual fighting units of the military, whether it be the Air Force, the Navy, or the ground forces.
00:22:34.420So the two players here were the Shin Bet and military intelligence, and you're 100 percent right.
00:22:39.380I mean, what we do is we go into detail, hour by hour, they were all on the phone talking to one another.
00:22:46.700The heads of the IDF were on the phone call looking at the data, looking at the intelligence, trying to assess what's happening.
00:22:52.600The head of the Shin Bet goes from his house back to headquarters just north of Tel Aviv in the middle of the night at about 3 a.m.
00:23:20.940But what happened was where the Israeli military made the ultimate mistake, Steve, was when they looked at the intelligence and they said, OK, we understand that something might be happening.
00:23:32.180But we have our forces along the border.
00:23:34.180We don't anticipate this would be anything too big for those forces to be able to manage.
00:23:39.640And if we put them in, for example, metaphorically turn on the spotlight and shine a light into Gaza or throw some helicopters up there and they're spinning their rotters and now Hamas knows that we know that they're doing something, you have two things that might happen.
00:23:55.620One is, if it is a drill and they're not going to attack, but now they think we're going to attack, then they might attack.
00:24:04.420Concern two was if it's a drill and they're not planning to attack, they now will know that we know about the drill and they will reverse engineer to try to find out about the system, for example, the classified one.
00:24:16.140And how do we know what's happening so we could be burning our intelligence sources?
00:24:22.860It was, you know, I think a strategic mistake, but it was a mistake that will happen.
00:24:28.660These mistakes are made when it comes to intelligence.
00:24:31.220What we discovered, though, unfortunately, was that some of the intel got stuck in the pipeline.
00:24:37.140And this is true also we know about 9-11, of where one agency had information, was not sharing it with the other agency.
00:24:44.020And after 9-11, you, of course, had the 9-11 Commission, which established the DNI, the Directorate of National Intelligence, which had the goal, whether it's working is a separate question,
00:24:53.040but had the goal of putting together all of the different intelligence agencies in the United States to coordinate better, to work better, to ensure that no information is lacking from one another.
00:25:06.640One of the recommendations that we do make in this book is to consider the prospect of establishing a similar entity for Israel, or at least, at the very least, breaking down the bureaucracy and the red tape that hinders sometimes that flow of intelligence between the different agencies.
00:25:23.040We're going to take a short commercial break.
00:25:24.820A book, whether you're pro-Israel or you're not pro-Israel, whether you're part of Israel First or you're part of America First or somewhere in between,
00:25:36.740this is the first cut of what I'm sure eventually will be a major commissioner investigation, but first of all, it reads like a novel.
00:25:45.640If you just want to get something you cannot put down, While Israel Slept is the book.
00:25:54.360We're going to take a short commercial break.
00:25:56.280Of course, with what's happening in the Middle East, you saw President Trump.
00:26:01.020We did it live last night, 10 p.m. to 1 a.m.
00:26:03.500I want to thank everybody for the coverage.
00:26:04.780His incredible audience was huge because you guys are engaged in these issues of geopolitics, national security, how it relates back here to the United States of America.
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00:26:15.460Remember, for four years, we've been working with him on the end of the dollar empire to talk to you about why the dollar as a prime reserve currency is so central to the post-war international rules-based order,
00:26:28.420and why the Chinese Communist Party and others are in a massive de-dollarization effort to destroy the dollar.
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00:32:42.160You've got a system that can look at everything.
00:32:44.080You've got, you know, you've got in-depth, intelligence in-depth, defense in-depth, these spotters who are brilliant and can spot things.
00:32:52.760But at no time in this – maybe I'm missing it.
00:32:54.940At no time in this, which I thought was the key of whether it's Mossad or Schoenberg or whatever, human intelligence, informers, guys that are on the payroll, right, either for patriotic reasons or just for cash money, that never comes – you never see that arrive.
00:33:12.540Is that something that the technology has just lulled people to sleep?
00:33:17.320Is it not something that's a huge part of activity?
00:33:20.280Because I keep arguing all the time here in the United States, particularly in our efforts in China.
00:33:24.940You know, a couple of dozen years ago we lost I think 20 of our intel agents in the CCP to a leak, and I don't think we've ever recovered from that.
00:33:33.980And you can tell our intelligence on the CCP and the China is not great.
00:33:39.280Is that – one of the things that happened here?
00:33:40.860Are there not guys on the payroll that they just flip and wouldn't give you the information?
00:33:45.380Or has the technology lulled you guys to sleep?
00:33:49.460Well, I think it's a combination of a number of things, Steve.
00:33:51.360I think on the one hand, when we look at this, what I call the policy of containment, it had a couple of legs to it.
00:34:06.740They didn't have to drag us every time into a war, every time a missile was fired our way.
00:34:11.240And when they would pop out of Israel, pop outside in Israel through tunnels that they dug across the border, like they did back in 2014,
00:34:18.720we built an underground wall and a system that could detect tunnels.
00:34:23.580By the way, the system that Israel developed is actually used by the United States Army, also along the border with Mexico and the southern border in the United States.
00:34:34.340So this is a system that is probably the most sophisticated in the world to detect when someone is digging a tunnel, where it is being dug.
00:34:42.720And even so sensitive, it could tell you what tool is being used to dig that tunnel.
00:34:46.940So that technology is super impressive.
00:34:48.980But what it does is it gives you a false sense of security.
00:34:52.120It makes you feel like you're impenetrable.
00:34:53.840And we know how many people crossed into Israel on October 7th through a tunnel.
00:36:36.040This is about the forces that are anti-American, anti-West, that they focus often for the first stage on Israel because it's the easier target.
00:37:00.280And when you look at the alliances and the relationships that exist there between the Chinese, for example, or North Korea, for that matter, and Iran, and then definitely under the Assad regime back in Syria.
00:37:15.800We'll wait to see what happens with the new government that's now in place in Damascus.
00:37:19.680But you get a sense that this is a much bigger adversary with much greater ambition, Steve, than what we think about when we just look at Israel solely.
00:37:31.840I want to get to that second because you guys have some very specific recommendations.
00:37:38.560The other question I've got about the human intelligence and why that didn't play a bigger role and why it's quiet.
00:37:43.800But as the attack unfolds, and this is why I said on the show live, and I'm very proud we talked about this, I said this is not a terrorist attack.
00:37:51.740This is not even a paramilitary attack.
00:38:31.760And the only thing that we have that I've warned about it was these young women who said, hey, this looks like there's more activity.
00:38:37.940This had to be years in the planning, didn't it?
00:38:40.280And not just the financing in the organization, but for them to hit basically all their marks when the balloon went up, it had to have a very sophisticated planning to execute.
00:38:52.260How was – did they not have it or did they have it and was just missed?
00:38:57.020So they had it, and there was even an intelligence report that came out back in 2022.
00:39:03.580It was named Jericho Walls, was put together by some analysts, lower-level analysts in military intelligence in the IDF, named Jericho Walls for the walls of Jericho from the time of the Bible.
00:39:16.600As you remember, when Joshua enters the land of Israel and blows the trumpets, the shofar, the ram's horn along the walls, the walls come tumbling down.
00:39:28.020And this was the figurative metaphor for how this barrier that Israel had built along the border could come down.
00:39:34.680But, you know, we spoke about before the flow of information.
00:39:38.640So this intelligence report that came out a few years before spoke of how one day Hamas might try to launch a cross-border infiltration with hundreds of people.
00:39:52.060It's planning to abduct and take people hostage.
00:39:54.440The defense minister did not see this report until weeks into the war after October 7th, not before.
00:40:02.700This was something that, again, has to be fixed in the flow of information.
00:40:06.420But Hamas was practicing and training and was even telling us, you know, when we go back, you know, another source of information of intelligence is what we call OSINT, open-source intelligence.
00:40:16.520And that should not be dismissed or undermined because that is something, or underappreciated, they often are communicating what they plan to do, right?
00:40:24.860When you hear Hamas say, we're coming and we're going to kidnap and we're going to murder, and you, Israel, say, well, you know, we'll just build a bigger wall.
00:40:46.200When you see the Iranians building long-range ballistic missiles that don't just cover Israel, because Israel is nearby, but can go into Europe and start to make their way towards the United States of America,
00:41:00.940America, you get an understanding that this is about something bigger than just let's invade Israel, kill some Israelis, kill some Jews.
00:41:09.200Because, you know, for these genocidal jihadist groups to want to kill Jews or Israelis, that's just called Monday.
00:41:16.740This is what they want to do all the time.
00:41:39.200The other thing that's shocking, and I want to get back to the IDF response because that's also going to shock people.
00:41:45.180What stuns me is that there seems to be, particularly in this aspect of it, no concept of which I argue that the MAGA movement has perfected because we don't have resources.
00:41:58.240We didn't have resources for anything else for years.
00:42:00.600What I call narrative warfare or information warfare.
00:42:06.180When the balloon goes up, the Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood are so far advanced on driving the narrative.
00:42:15.260And I don't want to get into who's right and who's wrong in here, right, because I know my audience is going to be blowing me up here in a second.
00:42:20.300But the Israelis in the IDF are like have a blind spot for narrative warfare, communication.
00:42:29.740It's everything's kind of reaction in its back foot.
00:42:32.680How did the Israelis not understand that in modern warfare the narrative part, the information war, is as important and sometimes more important than the kinetic part?
00:42:44.180Well, I think you're 100 percent right that the narrative warfare or information warfare is an integral part and is part of one of those fronts of any war.
00:42:54.280You have the front in Gaza where those soldiers are fighting against Hamas.
00:42:57.980You have the home front where those missiles are landing, whether they're Hamas missiles, Hezbollah missiles, Iranian missiles, and missile defense systems that Israel has developed, which are key to keeping us safe.
00:43:11.240But you also have the public diplomacy front and that narrative.
00:43:15.180And if we look at the world today, tragically, I think the world does not understand, for the most part, what has happened here.
00:43:22.640I mean, you know, for example, when we look at Gaza, there is a tragedy that has taken place in Gaza.
00:43:45.580And we see in those tunnels how Hamas is fighting, what it's doing, where it's storing its weapons.
00:43:50.940You go into homes in Gaza, and under children's beds, you see the rockets and the RPGs and the anti-tank weapons and the AK-47s.
00:44:00.880They're keeping them in the same room where they might have a Mickey Mouse sticker on the wall and a nice pink girl's bed.
00:44:08.560Underneath, you could have a cache of rockets and grenades.
00:44:13.660You have the tunnels under every supermarket, mosque, school, UN compound, and home.
00:44:19.860So when Israel is trying to defend itself and it sees a rocket launcher in a window or in a mosque and it blows that place up because it doesn't want that missile to be fired into Israel and kill potentially Israelis, and then there are civilians who do get killed.
00:44:35.140I mean, is Israel not supposed to be able to fight?
00:44:40.280And I think that we needed to do a better job explaining that 100 percent, and we have failed at that.
00:44:45.780But I think what the world is misunderstanding is the nature of this conflict today.
00:44:53.160People, you know, what the Hamas understood was that having so many civilians killed, that's their job.
00:45:00.620They want them to be killed so that the Western world falls into the trap of believing this falsehood that there was a genocide in the Gaza Strip.
00:45:10.760And when they believe that, they crack down on Israel, and that serves their greater purpose.
00:45:16.120Even though so many people are dead, Hamas doesn't care, right?
00:45:26.960Come to Jerusalem, where I live, and when there are missiles that go off, we go down to the bomb shelter.
00:45:31.600So these tunnels underneath every home and hospital and school and supermarket in Gaza, how come the Palestinians of Gaza are not allowed inside there?
00:45:53.740And this is a terrorist group that is out to destroy the way of life of the Judeo-Christian values and the way that we all live, whether it's in Israel or in the United States.
00:46:58.940Then I want to ask you, hey, particularly for people that supported Israel and never agreed with a two-state solution,
00:47:04.780you essentially have a two-state solution now with Qatar financing it and the Turks going to provide for security.
00:47:10.940But you are fairly critical of the Netanyahu government and the overall response and how this thing has gone on for a couple of years.
00:47:19.040What is the key basis of your, not attack, but of your analysis of the government's response?
00:47:30.260Well, Netanyahu has been prime minister pretty much uninterrupted since 2009.
00:47:36.640And I look at the policies that were put into effect under Netanyahu and this policy of containment.
00:47:43.080And for example, I mean, something that is difficult to ignore is asking the Qataris and the two-faced role in the double role that they play in this region
00:47:54.420to send back in 2018 $30 million every month to Hamas in cash to Gaza to figuratively buy quiet.
00:48:02.480That was a policy that was put into effect by Netanyahu, this idea that you can pay off your enemy.
00:48:07.960And I understand what was at the foundation of it, this attempt to buy quiet, to kick the can down the road, to avoid that war,
00:48:16.300because Israel is a country like, is a liberal democracy, is a country like the United States and like those in Europe
00:48:23.360that wants quiet and wants to grow and flourish as a society.
00:49:26.060The access we get, which was phenomenal, I want to believe, is just scratching the surface of what a real state-appointed commission of inquiry could uncover.
00:49:35.700And I hope that that is created, because we have to learn the lessons to prevent this from happening again.
00:49:40.540Because like we said earlier, there will be strategic surprises in the future.
00:49:44.740And I think that Netanyahu, we needed accountability.
00:49:48.240We needed taking of responsibility, because this, at the end, happened under his government and his watch.
00:49:54.400I would love to get you back next week sometime to talk about the IDF and the IDF response.