Intelligence assessments must be based on both excellent ability to gather raw data and the ability to judge that data objectively, understanding what is important and what is not. Political considerations, personal and organizational egos and other subjective factors have no place in good intel reports.
I have great respect for US intelligence capabilities and assessments. So when I saw this New York Times headline "Netanyahu’s Coalition ‘May Be in Jeopardy,’ Intelligence Report Says - The document predicted that Israel would struggle to achieve its goal of destroying Hamas in Gaza" I was concerned that perhaps there was something in the report that would show a crack in the intelligence community's objectivity.
There is, but not in the way the NYT reports it.
The report does make both those points amongst hundreds of others. And no one disagrees.
The Netanyahu coalition has always been precarious even before the war but no one has been able to put together an alternative that has more support. Anger at the Israeli intelligence failure that led to so many deaths is widespread in Israel. And no one says destroying Hamas completely would not be a struggle, especially because of its tunnel infrastructure. The report says nothing that would be out of place in any Israeli newspaper every day.
In short, the assessment is reasonable, but the NYT is trying to make it frame it like a prophecy. That is not how intelligence works. The 2023 report did not mention Hamas as a threat at all, and neither did the reports from 2022 or 2021. It isn't a crystal ball. It prepares the US for possibilities and probabilities.
However, one word in this section of the report does point to a crack in the US intelligence community's objectivity:
Both al-Qa‘ida and ISIS, inspired by the HAMAS attack against Israel, have directed their supporters to conduct attacks against Israeli and U.S. interests. The HAMAS attack is encouraging individuals to conduct acts of antisemitic and Islamophobic terror worldwide and is galvanizing individuals to leverage the Palestinian plight for recruitment and inspiration to conduct attacks. The Nordic Resistance Movement—a transnational neo-Nazi organization—publicly praised the attack, illustrating the conflict’s appeal to a range of threat actors.
Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence, repeated this almost verbatim to a hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee yesterday. "We have seen how [Hamas] is inspiring individuals to conduct acts of antisemitism and Islamophobic terror worldwide,” she said.
Who is conducting acts of Islamophobic terror? Where? When? Who are these vigilante terror gangs targeting Muslims in response to Hamas? Israel does not exactly have Houthi-style allies that engage in terror attacks against Muslims in solidarity with Kibbutz Be'eri.
Perhaps they are referring to attacks by hot-headed Israeli "settlers" but those are not Islamophobic and they are not worldwide. The man accused of shooting three Palestinians in Vermont is mentally ill and sympathetic to Hamas, not Israel. There are always a small number of incidents against Muslims, and they did increase somewhat after 10/7, but terror attacks?
In recent years, there has been a tendency to routinely and unthinkingly add the word "Islamophobia" after the word "antisemitism" in every context, as if the two are equivalent. They aren't. In this case, the US intelligence heads are saying that the Hamas war is inspiring terrorist acts against Muslims - and it isn't.
This reflexive addition of "Islamophobia" with every mention of antisemitism is dangerous to Jews. Antisemitism is a unique kind of hate and not a specific example of more generalized bigotry. Conflating it with Islamophobia waters down antisemitism, Jew-hatred cannot be combatted using the same tools and methods to fight racism or other kinds of hate. Putting it in the same bucket as Islamophobia helps empower antisemites.
Adding in "Islamophobia" in this assessment is politics, not intelligence. It has no place in this report. Anyone who admires the US intelligence community should be very concerned that this indicates a direction away from objectivity that could lead to disaster.
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