The reports in American media that the Mossad supposedly “encouraged” the protests against the judicial overhaul in Israel will undoubtedly provide the prime minister and his supporters with new fuel in their efforts to quell the demonstrations.
Such reports will find a receptive audience among a good portion of the public, and are certain to be echoed repeatedly by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s various mouthpieces. Since the Mossad does not have an official spokesperson, it was the prime minister’s spokesperson, Topaz Luk, who issued the denial Sunday morning on behalf of the espionage agency, calling the reports “false and baseless.”
Let’s start with the kernel of truth in this story. Someone did, in fact, manage to hack into the computer network used by U.S. intelligence and steal original, authentic documents.
This is the cardinal sin in this affair and it attests, once more, like the Wikileaks saga and the leaks by Edward Snowden, that even the most well-defended data systems in the United States are not unbreachable. The report about the Mossad is just one marginal item in a much larger leak of documents that primarily have to do with U.S. and NATO involvement in the war in Ukraine.
The main aims of whoever obtained this information are to drive a wedge between the U.S. and its allies, sow confusion and chaos, and undermine belief in the real facts. Furthermore, this actor doctored the documents to serve his purposes, but displayed some negligence in how they went about it. Their professional hacking is tainted by ideology and politics.
An excellent example of this is a document that says the number of Russians killed in the war is 17-18,000, even though previously published American and NATO intelligence estimates have put the total at up to 200,000. In other words, even when cyber warfare agents from most probably Russian intelligence want to show off their skills, they try to do so without angering President Vladimir Putin.
In the past, the KGB excelled in psychological warfare and spreading disinformation. Russian espionage agencies (and others) have maintained these skills to this day, but for this type of warfare to be effective, there must be a seed of truth around which the layers of lies can be wrapped.
As for the documents concerning the Mossad – a thorough reading of them reveals that everything written there is already well-known and has previously been reported in Israel countless times. We know that many security officials believe the judicial overhaul defined by many Israelis as a regime change, as well as the as the reaction by the protest movement, is weakening Israel.
Israel’s enemies see it the same way, even if they’re wrong, and we witnessed the repercussions of this over the start of Passover and through the weekend on every one of Israel’s frontiers – Gaza, the Golan, Lebanon, and the West Bank, which are being targeted by terrorists. We also know that the Americans are closely monitoring events in Israel. To reach the conclusion in the document, they don’t need classified intelligence sources.
Most probably, the U.S. intelligence community is not bugging its Israeli counterpart. But, as always, intelligence communities like to take known information from open sources and rephrase it to make it look like it’s secret. And so the vicious circle is completed: the Israeli media reports on what’s happening, U.S. intelligence reads, sees, hears, and authors reports that are classified as secret; the papers are hacked and edited; and they’re leaked online and to the world’s leading media outlets.
Everyone living in Israel knows that the protest movement against the judicial overhaul is authentic, spontaneous, and decentralized, without a main headquarters. Everyone who lives in Israel knows that the heads of the security establishment are not the ones leading the protests.
At most, they are being left with no choice but to heed the sentiments of the protesting public. Bear in mind that the IDF chief of staff and air force commander have been insisting that the protests should be kept out of the ranks of the military; and the Shin Bet chief has forbidden his employees from taking part in the demonstrations, not even as anonymous citizens.
Although the Mossad chief did permit his employees to participate in the protests without exposing their names or jobs, he did stipulate an exception to this permission: It didn’t apply to anyone who serves in a command or managerial role with the rank of department director and above. Most of the protesters from within the security forces are volunteer reservists and former security officials from the Shin Bet and Mossad, along with pilots and members of elite units, all of whom have signed open letters.
According to the leak, the U.S. intelligence report was prepared on March 1. This is, in fact, also the date when the first letter, signed by hundreds of retired Mossad personnel, including five former Mossad chiefs, was published. A similar letter was published a week later.
Taking the report on its own, without any contextual analysis or qualification, inflates the importance of the information out of any reasonable proportion and adds to the sense that holds greater or hidden significance. The fact that respected newspapers abroad are not hesitating to insinuate with their reporting that the Mossad encouraged the protests attests to a major lack of understanding on their part about the processes affecting Israel and the depth of the crisis it’s experiencing, with its basic democratic values being imperiled.
No less disturbing is the certain knowledge that there are those in Israel who will try, yet again, to exploit partial and largely false information, originally designed to serve foreign interests, in order to advance their own political agenda.
Netanyahu’s rivals say that he and his son, Yair, believe in conspiracy theories. The perennially suspicious Netanyahu has already scolded the heads of the security establishment for allegedly letting the protests continue to have a presence within their organizations and berated them for an allegedly weak response to them.
The latest reports will only give him and his son additional fuel for their theories. Netanyahu’s ministers, and his faithful followers, will certainly not believe the Mossad’s denial or explanations that its actions are not affected by politics. This affair is about the very heart of the great rupture Israel is undergoing.
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