Weltschau

Although there are many books on the operational activities of the Israeli intelligence community, there is a dearth of studies on its analytical culture and its relations with Israeli governments, both in domestic and foreign sources. The question of how the Israeli intelligence community provides support to Israeli governments is important in this context. The most important factor that led to the writing of this article was a statement given to the press by the Israeli army spokesperson Daniel Hagari. Army spokesperson Daniel Hagari stated that Hamas is an idea and a political party that is rooted in the hearts of the people, therefore Hamas will not be eliminated, and that Netenyahu’s statement that Hamas will be eliminated is throwing sand in the eyes of the people.

These statements indicate that the relationship between the Israeli intelligence community and its government is not functioning properly and that the Israeli intelligence community is busy producing tactical and operational intelligence in line with the needs of the government, leaving aside the priority of producing strategic intelligence.Let me try to explain these technical statements with an analogy so that the reader who is not interested in the subject can understand them. Some types of cancer manifest themselves as a wound on the body. Tactical and operational intelligence focuses on the wound and its treatment. That is, it deals with the threats posed by the enemy. Strategic intelligence, on the other hand, focuses on what type of cancer is the source of the wound, what causes it, and what is the source of the symptom that manifests as a wound and how it is caused.

Army spokesman Hagari’s statement, “Hamas is an idea, it cannot be eliminated, we are throwing sand in the eyes of Israeli society,” is exactly what the Israeli intelligence community is saying when it stops producing strategic intelligence and focuses on tactical and operational intelligence. The question of why a country’s intelligence community focuses less on producing strategic intelligence and more on tactical and operational intelligence becomes important in this regard. The answer to this question is hidden in the intelligence codes of intelligence communities.

Analytical Traditions of the Israeli Intelligence Community

Each country develops intelligence traditions according to the threats it deals with, and these traditions influence all processes from the production of intelligence to the scale at which it is produced and how it is used by decision-makers. The American intelligence tradition is more about painting a picture of what a problem or threat is, how it came to be, and how it is likely to play out in the future.  It is more of an intellectual and cognitive process, and the decision of what to do in response to a threat or problem lies with governments.  If intelligence organizations have a duty in line with the decision made by governments, they try to achieve the goal that politicians want to achieve through covert and clandestine operations in this process. Even in this part, intelligence organizations working in the field of politics do not have the authority to decide what to do; they only plan how to do it.

In Israel, intelligence traditions focus on what to do in response to the threat. Given the Israeli security ecosystem, strategic conditions and threats, counter-action or prevention is indispensable and this increases the importance of intelligence in the Israeli state system. It can be said that Israel does not consider intelligence that does not affect action as intelligence. In this respect, the Israeli intelligence traditions are characterized by the production of intelligence on the threat or problem, the interaction of intelligence and political decision-makers, and policy-making and action.

The Relationship between Intelligence and Decision Making in Israel

There is a saying that “Prime Ministers do the intelligence, not the agencies”. This saying implies that the vast majority of intelligence agencies’ work agendas are shaped in line with the demands of decision-makers. Intelligence agencies routinely continue their activities without waiting for requests and instructions in negative intelligence issues such as counter-intelligence, organized crime and counter-terrorism that concern national security, and operational activities for collection purposes. In this context, it can be said that the influence of political decision-makers is quite low in the so-called negative intelligence areas that are intended for defense. However, in the field of positive intelligence, the demands and instructions of decision makers affect the content and scale of production. This suggests that the way political decision-makers run intelligence organizations influences the character of the services and their analytical traditions. 

Israeli professionals argue that it is not possible to produce intelligence without knowing the needs of the decision-maker and the political context, and that intelligence produced without taking these elements into account will only produce dry information and therefore will not do its job. In addition, they emphasize that making accurate intelligence assessments alone is not enough; intelligence organizations need to influence decision-making processes; if they fail to do so, it is only a partial success.  According to an Israeli expert of Turkish origin, intelligence is generally concerned with the dialectic between the enemy and the state, and in this respect, a clear assessment of the enemy cannot be made without understanding the political preferences of political decision-makers and the capabilities and capacities of your country.

The Israeli intelligence tradition states that the key to the success of an intelligence organization is active participation in decision-making processes and that intelligence should first present and interpret evidence and then make policy recommendations to decision-makers.

Critics of this assessment argue that intelligence should produce information on the enemy’s intentions and capabilities, and that the focus on what the Prime Minister should do, i.e. on action and policy, does not produce a high-resolution picture of the enemy. It is also wrong for an intelligence analyst or manager to advise a politician.  These statements apply to a healthy intelligence-decision-making relationship. In Israel, however, intelligence organizations are integrated into decision-making processes and therefore believe that they have the authority to produce intelligence about the threat and decide what should be done to counter it. This situation is known to cause tensions between intelligence organizations and politicians at times when the roles of intelligence and decision-making are not functioning properly.

Two main pathologies emerge in the relationship between intelligence organizations and decision makers. The first is that decision-makers use the intelligence community for tactical and operational matters and not for high political issues, and the second is that they make intelligence a docile tool and take a service approach. An example of intelligence taking a service approach is the former head of Mossad, David Cohen, threatening the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Fatou Bensouda, to drop the investigation into Netanyahu. Some commentators argue that David Cohen was Netanyahu’s unofficial special envoy and confidant, and that during Cohen’s presidency the Mossad became an institution that carried out Netanyahu’s special requests.

In line with this information, it appears that the Israeli intelligence community focuses only on the demands and instructions of political decision-makers and that Netanyahu uses the Israeli intelligence community to produce tactical and operational intelligence.

Israel’s Intelligence Community Fails to Produce Strategic Intelligence

It is known that intelligence is only an input to decision-making processes in Israel and that politicians act on political issues according to their private sources of nutrition, ideological views and political priorities. In this respect, political decision-makers decide on the scale (operational-tactical-strategic) at which to use the intelligence services according to their political perspective and ideological agenda. Some former Israeli intelligence officers argue that Israeli military intelligence has recently shifted towards tactical intelligence at the expense of strategic intelligence and has traditionally started to think more in terms of counterterrorism tools and concepts.

Considering that intelligence should deal with urgent issues and the diversity of threats that Israel faces, it appears that Israeli intelligence prioritizes operational and tactical threats and is less concerned with important strategic issues that are not urgent. The most important reason for this can be said to be the demands of decision-makers for urgent and operational intelligence.  Focusing on the threats posed by actors such as Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran, the intelligence mechanism focuses only on the symptoms instead of producing information on the current state of these threats and the source of the problem.

In light of this information, it can be said that the Israeli intelligence culture focuses on action rather than producing high-resolution intelligence on the enemy, which is closely related to the threat architecture in which Israel operates.  Moreover, the fact that the Netenyahu government has an ideological, religious security and foreign policy significantly reduces the need for strategic intelligence. In this respect, decision-makers need to be pragmatic and sensitive to the reality on the ground in order to build policy in line with strategic intelligence. Using intelligence at the operational and tactical level, the Netanyahu government continues to throw sand in the eyes of Israeli society by committing massacres, as the Army spokesperson said. An intelligence tradition that is action-oriented and integrated into decision-making processes is in danger of becoming a useful apparatus of governments rather than serving the country.

 Intelligence and Security Analyst Dr. Hasan Mesut Önder