Brilliant 4D chess move by Yossi Sariel: he's cleverly feigning a mistake, aiming to exit his role without formally resigning. This "mistake" provide his superiors with a pretext for his departure, all while sidestepping the events of October 7.
It seems to me that any blunder can be described as "brilliant 4D chess move" by those insisting that they did not mess up and it is us who do not see the game.
Based on the events that have been taking place from October 7, neither party is capable for any form of strategizing. Let alone "brilliant 4D chess moves".
Especially since the book was publicly meant to be released using his initials YS in the first place. It's not like he really wanted to keep this a secret.
The real 4D chess, is in writing a thought leadership manual for computerized mass murder occurring right now, and being able to extricate yourself from any responsibility by just resigning.
How many countries have been at war with their neighbour for 75 years post-WW2? How many wars have a body count that's tilted 20:1 in favour of the stronger side?
"It's just war" might win you glibness points online. Just be careful not to use it when referencing say, attacks on Warsaw ghettoes in the 1940s. After all, anybody there could have been part of the resistance, could they not?
"Deaths per bomb dropped" was probably somewhere in the Nuremberg defense lawyer's arsenal, but left out because the Allies could just point to the mass starvation that was directly related to bombing. Plus ca change....
> This "mistake" provide his superiors with a pretext for his departure, all while sidestepping the events of October 7.
I am not convinced that the Mossad, a competent intelligence agency from what I have read, did not actually know what was going to happen. The October 7th attack gave a perfect political justification for wiping out as much of Gaza as possible.
Read the article from Maariv that is linked in the parent article.
Quite eye-opening. The plans were known for two years, but the hubris blinded them.
Another recent, very painful article is this one - https://www.haaretz.co.il/magazine/2024-04-04/ty-article-mag...
Exhibit A: Yom Kippur war. They had convinced themselves that Egypt would wait on armament deliveries, so their obvious preparations for war, troop movements, and massive exercises next to the border were not a problem. Syria's obvious troop movements and cancelling of leaves weren't a problem either because obviously Syria wouldn't attack without Egypt, and Egypt would obviously wait for more Soviet shipments of armaments. Spoiler: they both attacked, and although defeated later on, demonstrated that Israel wasn't as invincible as everyone had thought, and it resulted in Sinai being returned to Egypt and normalisation of relations between Egypt and Israel (thus long-term a victory for Egypt, even if they had their asses handed to them, militarily).
Exhibit B: Lillehammer affair, where Mossad mistook a random Moroccan waiter for a high level Palestinian leader, and killed him.
Exhibit C: Assassination attempt against high level Hamas leader, Khaled Mashal which was a failure and seriously jeopardised the relations with Jordan.
For the October 7 attacks, we simply don't know if it was a political decision to let the attacks happen, or if hubris convinced Israel/IDF/Mossad that the intelligence can't be true.
Many people in the Israeli government have been quite explicit about Hamas’s actions being useful to them as a pretext for doing so, too.
So, while I am not arguing that is is the case, it is not at all implausible (especially if the underjudged the scale or likely impact of the attack) that they might allow an unusual attack that was likely to be pretextually useful to occur to provide an excuse to bring the hammer down, even before considering the specific, personal pressures on Netanyahu and how he might view an excuse for a justified war as a means to deflect them.
Given his position, is revealing his identity really that great of a move for an uneventful retirement? The reduction in personal security (given that many people might want revenge on him or extract information) seems like a bad trade.
He already explicitly wanted to publish the book with his actual initials. It would have been quite easy for adversaries with just general public information to get from the initials to the person, right?
So perhaps revealing the full name doesn't make much of a difference, which is why it could just as well have been "accidental" (quotes intented).
Huh? It just reads as very basic conjecture about the motives of a public move. If Israel is like any other country when such things happen, there should be lots of articles in their press wondering the same thing.
