New Cold Wars: China's Rise, Russia's Invasion, and America's Struggle to Defend the West

by David E. Sanger

In an instant, almost everything the world had come to take for granted about the omnipotence and competence of Israel’s security institutions seemed wrong. Its intelligence services had failed to recognize the significance of the months or years of planning and the deliberate dismantling of the digital surveillance infrastructure around Gaza. The barriers that protected Israelis from underground tunneling were useless against terrorists using gliders to fly over them and bulldozers to knock down fences. The Israel Defense Force was pitifully slow to respond. “On that fateful day, the country’s long-standing security doctrine crumbled in the face of a perfect storm,” wrote Amos Yadlin, the country’s former military intelligence chief, and Udi Evental, a retired colonel in the Israel Defense Force. Yadlin was a legend in the country: As a young fighter pilot he had flown covertly into Iraq and destroyed a nuclear reactor that Saddam Hussein had been building. Now he was declaring that Israel’s government had failed at its most basic task because “its intelligence and military institutions were unable to keep citizens safe.”