Just because George Galloway fashions a classic antisemitic plot about October 7th doesn’t mean there aren’t questions to be asked about Israel’s astonishing unpreparedness. Matti Friedman at the Jewish Review of Books reviews 06:29 by Amos Harel, a book still only available in Hebrew:
Since the Hamas invasion of Israel on the morning of October 7, 2023, the Israeli government has blocked an official inquiry into the massacre and its causes. As the war has metastasized across the region over nearly three years, simply keeping events straight has become almost impossible, a state of affairs that suits the people in power, who are also the people responsible for the disaster. Into this vacuum of information, just in time, comes 06:29 by Amos Harel—the staggering, infuriating, and illuminating new Hebrew account of October 7 and its aftermath….
Hovering over the events since October 7 the author sees, as many of us do, the ghost of a past war. Harel writes:
There wasn’t a military chief of staff or Mossad director who didn’t know the mythic story of the night between the 5th and 6th of October, 1973, the fateful hours before the surprise attack that started the Yom Kippur War.
That’s when Israel’s leaders and generals, and particularly the officers of military intelligence, misread all signs of an imminent attack. Just before the current war broke out, he tells us, the military chief of staff, Herzi Halevi, was actually reading a biography of Lieutenant General David Elazar, his predecessor from 1973. All of Israel’s leaders knew the story of what went wrong—and repeated it fifty years and one day later.
06:29 refers to the moment on the morning of Simchat Torah when waves of Palestinian jihadis crashed upon the unsuspecting agricultural communities on Israel’s Gaza border, some of which remain empty three years later. The Hamas fighters overran military bases, slaughtered families in their homes and cars, raped women, and murdered more than 350 young people at a rave. The attack ended with 1,200 Israelis dead and 250 held hostage in Gaza, including women, children, and the elderly. Harel describes what happened that day and some of what has happened since. But the most powerful section of the book describes what happened before, when the future might still have been averted.
There were warnings, but they were ignored by those who could and should have taken action:
At 1 a.m., the Shin Bet put out an internal document pointing to “a string of indicative, abnormal signs that indicate readiness for action.” In a terse telephone consultation, an intelligence officer at Southern Command noted this “abnormality” but added, fatally, that whatever Hamas was planning was “not imminent.” By the time of that consultation at 3:15 a.m., thousands of jihadis were already in position, and the meticulously planned operation that Hamas called “Al-Aqsa Flood” was just three hours away.
The chief of staff, Halevi, was woken up and held a telephone consultation with senior commanders—but incredibly, the chief of military intelligence wasn’t on the call, and neither was the commander of the air force. The army had decided Hamas was not interested in a confrontation, and all contradictory information was explained away. The junior commanders on the border itself, who were about to be attacked by Hamas fighters surging through more than sixty breaches in the supposedly impregnable fence, weren’t even informed of any of these consultations.
And so October 7th, the “Al-Aqsa Flood”, went ahead. A disaster for Israel, and a triumph for Hamas – especially given the extraordinary reaction: an explosion of antisemitism and demonisation of Israel across the west.
I have detailed only a small part of the information that Harel presents in 06:29. The story is not just an account of a war in the Middle East but of how any human system—an army, a company, a state—calcifies and becomes prisoner of its own misconceptions and bureaucracy before ultimately failing.
It’s true that Harel’s book is an Israeli account of the war—meaning that it’s an account of the real war as experienced by the Israeli side, not of the propaganda war that has been at the center of the experience of most readers in English. This is evident, for example, in Harel’s scant attention to the vast information campaign waged against Israel or to the “genocide” libel at the center of that campaign. In Israel, that libel has been taken up by some crank academics and hard-left journalists, including a few affiliated with Harel’s own newspaper [Haaretz], but is generally perceived to be a falsehood so obvious it need not be taken seriously. Harel briefly and politely dismisses the genocide charge in his book but doesn’t dwell on why it has been deployed or has proven so potent. The future English version could effectively expand on this. But it’s the intimate angle and the tight zoom of 06:29, the work of an Israeli insider, that gives this superb book its often unbearable intensity.
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