Who pays for the pre-war intelligence failures

In late September, the president of the United Arab Emirates gets on the phone. According to the reporting, he spends forty-five minutes telling Benjamin Netanyahu that a major Hamas attack is coming. The Prime Minister's Office says it's a total lie, threatening lawsuits and insisting that call never happened.

I'm Maya.

And I'm Amos. This is another episode of Sixty One, a Daily Lion production, where we ask what kind of country Israel is supposed to be, one week at a time.

Pre-election maneuvering is forcing every faction to confront the unresolved intelligence and demographic failures of the past three years. Today's roundup: the fight over the Emirati warning, the midnight purge in Degel HaTorah, evicting the unauthorized outposts, and the math of the candidate lists. And then, for our members, we go deep on Yoav Kisch and the Fracture of State Education.

We start with the phone call. Roughly a week and a half before October seventh, UAE President Mohamed bin Zayed reportedly called Benjamin Netanyahu. According to a new investigation by Shlomi Eldar and Ruth Yuval, the Emirati leader directly warned the prime minister that Yahya Sinwar was planning a major move against Israel.

Forty-five minutes. That's what stops you. Bin Zayed didn't just pass along a vague message; the report says he spent three-quarters of an hour explicitly warning Netanyahu. And crucially, he never forwarded that specific warning to the IDF chief of staff or the head of the Shin Bet.

So who actually signs off on that version of events?

Nobody in the Prime Minister's Office. Netanyahu categorically denies the report, sending a formal warning letter that threatens a defamation lawsuit. He insists flatly that from the beginning of September until October seventh, no conversation took place.

You said he denies the conversation entirely, but his office goes a step further on the mechanics. They argue diplomatic calls with the UAE leader have to go through the Prime Minister's office using an Emirati representative. So they insist any real warning would have just gone through standard intelligence channels.

If the warning did happen, what does keeping it out of those intelligence channels buy him?

The center and left argue it buys him the ability to dodge an official commission of inquiry. The nineteen sixty-eight law requires a commission to be appointed by the Supreme Court president, which would guarantee independence. But Netanyahu is trying to set up a partisan committee instead, using his long-standing campaign against the court as an excuse to block the judges.

And the cost of dodging that inquiry is a complete breakdown of governance. A column in Ynet observes that warning intelligence isn't private property. When Golda Meir received King Hussein's advance warning two weeks before the Yom Kippur War, she passed it directly to the security establishment. The argument here is that an official commission would subpoena everyone present during the UAE call, from cleaners to the military secretary, which is exactly why the prime minister is blocking it.

The right sees this whole narrative as a manufactured trap. On The Israel Guys podcast, they look at the sudden pile-on of media reports and frame it as a power struggle, plain and simple. Military and intelligence officials are seizing on Netanyahu's impending departure to blame their own shortcomings on him, so they can leave their failures in the past.

A column in JNS Opinion notes that there's been no confirmation from Mohammed bin Zayed. And a column in Ynet Deot argues the report just feeds a left-wing conspiracy theory that he knowingly allowed citizens to be murdered. And as we said last week, Likud is already methodically deploying a military-treason narrative around October seventh to insulate Netanyahu and prepare supporters to reject any election loss as a deep-establishment coup.

And that brings us to the actual political price of this revelation ahead of the October twenty-seventh election. Netanyahu is campaigning on a record of pulling Israel out of disaster and attacking Iran. Meanwhile, his opponents insist he's unfit to serve because he ignored dozens of warnings.

But the price is zero. The electorate is completely entrenched. For the left, the warning is the smoking gun they already believed existed. For the right, these reports are just elite fabrications. That entrenched dynamic ensures the warning shifts nobody across the aisle.

The longest-serving lawmaker in the Knesset was fired this weekend while his voters were in synagogue. Moshe Gafni's been a lawmaker in the Knesset since nineteen eighty-eight, but he was abruptly ousted from the top of the United Torah Judaism list. A column in Ynet Deot highlights the timing of the move. The news broke minutes after midnight on Saturday night, right while Gafni and tens of thousands of his potential voters were reciting the Elul Selichot prayers.

Who actually signs off on a midnight purge like that?

In their telling, it was engineered by David Shapira, a powerful faction apparatchik who already controls the movement's newspaper. He pushed Gafni out to install his own associate, Yaakov Asher, as the new movement chairman. The writer sees this as a deeply cynical backroom power grab, not a genuine ideological shift, warning that Degel HaTorah's creating a new wave of resentment among Lithuanian voters because of the humiliating way the two veterans were deposed.

To call it just a power grab assumes the faction can afford to keep running the exact same way. Asher represents no real change from Gafni, meaning this new leadership is clinging to the status quo at the exact moment the Haredi public feels entirely besieged, with political and legal doors closing ahead of the October coalition negotiations. That identical posture makes the entire shakeup impossible to sell to voters.

Besieged because the old political model just failed its core test. As we said last week, the High Court struck down the draft freeze nine to zero after the government mounted no legal defense, deliberately engineering a grievance campaign while offering an unworkable study-or-serve compromise. Without that freeze, the traditional rabbinic leadership has nothing to protect its base. On the Ask Haviv Anything podcast, Rabbi Yehoshua Pfeffer noted that authorities have actually started arresting yeshiva students for evading the draft, which is an entirely unprecedented step.

It's genuinely striking to see the state use handcuffs after seven decades of looking the other way. Pfeffer argues authorities share the blame for this deadlock because they spent seventy-five years taking one approach, leaving Haredi society entirely unprepared for a sudden reversal. But the frustration over that failure is now fracturing the political map. Pfeffer notes there are now four distinct alternative Haredi parties attempting to run in this election cycle.

Right, and the writer specifically highlights groups like Motti Leitner's HaTzibur HaHaredi, which are expected to gain strength from voters who are sick of the rule of political apparatchiks. And in that conversation they discussed that the demand for integration is already there when the frameworks exist. More than four thousand Haredi candidates applied for just four hundred and fifty spots in the military's technological intelligence training track. If thousands of young men are already trying to enlist, then who's left defending the absolute isolationist line?

The old factional machinery, which is why they're replacing their leadership in the middle of the night. Because those new factions are making a fundamentally different argument about what the community needs. The average Haredi household takes in two thousand to four thousand shekels a month net in state benefits. These new parties are rejecting the traditional formula of just bargaining for those welfare payouts, advocating instead for secular core subjects so Haredi families can achieve actual economic self-sufficiency.

Pfeffer argues the deepest divide in Haredi society now is simply between those who identify as Israeli and those who don't. For the old guard, putting on an army uniform is terrifying because it means swapping a sub-communal identity for a shared Israeli one.

The purge in Degel HaTorah shows that entrenched politicians are trying to solve a historic crisis of integration by just swapping out the names on the letterhead. The state is demanding military service, the grassroots base is demanding economic independence, and the traditional leadership's offering a backroom coup that leaves the exact same policies in place.

The American diplomatic pressure over the West Bank just yielded a concrete directive. The Prime Minister's ordered the military to take down unauthorized settler outposts across the territory. This comes right after the US Ambassador met with Palestinian Americans and publicly denounced violent settlers as terrorists who need to face severe consequences. We saw this start to build in August twenty twenty-six, when those settler sieges in Qusra drew direct intervention from the ambassador, prompting the military to take down encampments then.

The scale here is specific, with reports that the eviction orders targeted around a hundred outposts across the territories. But the price of doing this is an immediate fight inside the cabinet over sovereign authority. The Finance Minister confirmed the instruction to evict places built in Areas A and B. He's publicly opposing the decision, but he's using the moment to boast that the coalition's made huge strides in advancing settlements in Area C. There are currently three hundred and forty outposts in the West Bank along with a hundred and forty-six settlements formally recognized by the authorities, so evicting a hundred is a massive logistical operation.

And it's an operation the Finance Minister actively works against. He publicly backs the people who establish wildcat farms, which makes enforcing the law a political crisis. As we said last week, the Defense Minister proposed moving West Bank settler enforcement to the civilian police alongside settlement expansions. But the reading from the left is that this lawlessness wasn't just created by the current cabinet. They argue the Supreme Court is suddenly acting shocked by police inaction, asking why they don't see people behind bars. The argument is that this shock is completely disingenuous, because the justices themselves routinely rejected petitions regarding military demolitions of roads and structures.

So the court's asking why the police do nothing, but the left argues the court built the very legal vacuum the police are operating in. They say that by giving the army a green light for almost every move across the Green Line over the years, the judiciary created an atmosphere of absolute impunity. If the courts and the military both defer to the political echelon, then who actually controls law enforcement on the ground?

Right now, the people who want this lawlessness see it working. The center looks at this and sees a broader collapse of domestic governance. They argue that three patterns of semi-chaotic disruption have emerged, from the West Bank to the draft to organized crime. They note that the National Security Minister seems to have a pretty limited attention span for actual municipal policing. Because the coalition is entirely dependent on its extreme flanks, law enforcement is paralyzed across multiple fronts. They predict this partisan paralysis is bound to play a role in the October elections.

Wait, but what does that mean for the evictions ordered today? The structural reality is that Jerusalem issues these orders to appease Washington, but the enforcement's entirely hollow. Ministers officially condemn settler violence, though perpetrators are rarely arrested and even less frequently prosecuted. The eviction orders manage the immediate diplomatic crisis, but the people carrying out the violence still face an administration that refuses to put perpetrators on trial.

The deadline for candidate lists just passed, and thirty-eight parties are officially running. Thirty-eight. But the only number that actually matters right now is three point two five percent. That's the electoral threshold, and it forced a frantic wave of last-minute mergers just to avoid wasting votes. On the center-left, the opposition managed to consolidate, with both Meretz and Balad securing safe spots inside larger alliances. And Gadi Eisenkot's Yashar party is now consistently pulling twenty-two to twenty-four seats in the polls. That positions his list to potentially emerge as the largest faction.

The irony here is that Avigdor Liberman raised that threshold to three point two five percent back in twenty fourteen specifically to stop the Knesset from fragmenting, and it's done nothing but threaten the established blocs ever since. Netanyahu built his career on managing this exact math, but this week he struggled to discipline his own camp. He forced Bezalel Smotrich to pair off with the libertarian Moshe Feiglin. They officially merged their list on September first with that of Zehut. It was a desperate move to get Smotrich to run in a single list and clear the threshold. But National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has rebuffed Netanyahu's calls for his Jewish Power party to merge.

Wait, with his external partners fracturing, what's the internal cost to Likud's own slate? As we said last week, Netanyahu used eleven reserved list spots to shield his loyalists and squash rivals like Nir Barkat. An argument from the right contends that party-leader reservations are legitimate only if they bring in proven policymakers or major electoral stars. But instead, these reserved spots push back worthy candidates selected democratically in the Likud primaries.

He's managing that cost through timing. Another reading from the right argues that leaving disappointed politicians to discover their exclusion at the last minute traps them. When a candidate knows for certain that they're out, they're free to defect, but Netanyahu paralyzed them by waiting until alternative political homes vanished. And then there's the one thing both blocs actually agree on. Beyond Yoaz Hendel's new list, every party stocked its slate with post-October seventh figures.

Likud reserved its own spots for Elisha Medan, a wounded soldier, and Talik Gvili, the mother of slain hostage Ran Gvili.

Which brings us back to the math of the right-wing splinters. On Think Twice with Jonathan Tobin they discussed how Netanyahu's eyes are heavily on Ofer Winter. The historical precedent here is nineteen ninety-two, when the Likud bloc lost five Knesset seats because of lists that didn't pass the threshold. If Winter refuses to merge and runs alone, who actually absorbs the damage?

The entire right-wing bloc pays for it. Assuming the Arab parties stay outside the coalition arithmetic, any governing bloc needs to win sixty-one of the remaining one hundred and seven seats. The election won't be decided by a massive ideological shift, but by whether unaligned right-wing factions clear the threshold or inadvertently hand the opposition a majority.