Iran’s assault on Israel’s interior front

This is the third piece in what has become, without my fully planning it, a series about a single question: what does it mean to wage war not against territory, but against the human capacity to make sense of the world? The first two pieces looked at blood — at Hamas’s deliberate use of bodily spectacle as a weapon of psychological and epistemic disruption. This piece looks at something sneakier, but no less consequential: the Iranian penetration of Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), and what it reveals about a new kind of warfare — one conducted not with bodies, but with information, exposure, and the slow erosion of the conditions under which thinking itself becomes possible.

The Iranian penetration of INSS — a six-year campaign of hacking, leaking, and alleged assassination plotting, now documented in over 100,000 stolen files — should not be understood as a routine cyber incident. It is more accurately described as an intrusion into the internal space in which thought itself is generated.

A think tank is not merely a repository of information; it is a living analytic environment — a space where ideas are tested, contested, revised, and symbolized before they take institutional form. To penetrate such a space is to gain access not only to conclusions, but to the processes — cognitive, emotional, and linguistic — through which those conclusions emerge. And cognition here must be understood in its fullest sense: not only........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)