Mossad's Former Chief Calls the War in Gaza ‘Useless'

The Atlantic

2 days ago

In John le Carré novels, the spies often lie and keep secrets even when they don't have to, because it's a 'mentality,' le Carré once explained, a way of living 'you never shed.' So it was notable when 250 veteran Israeli intelligence officers recently signed their names to an open letter demanding that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu throw away his plans to escalate the war on Gaza. The war, they wrote, 'doesn't contribute to any of the declared objectives, and will lead to the death of hostages, soldiers and innocents.' At least six other similar petitions have circulated, signed by reservists, retired officers, and veterans from various branches of the Israeli military. 'That's the first time that's happened in Israel,' says Tamir Pardo, our guest on Radio Atlantic this week and one of three former Mossad directors who signed the open letter.
After my interview with Pardo, in Tel Aviv, he asked me to emphasize one thing: His position on the war does not make him a 'leftist,' he said. And I could see his point all around me in Tel Aviv, where opposition to the war has spread far beyond the Israeli left, and far beyond the families of the remaining Israeli hostages. In a recent poll, 70 percent of Israelis said they don't trust the government, and about the same portion said they want a deal with Hamas to return the hostages and end the war—something the government has resisted even in this latest round of cease-fire talks. The protests are not, for the most part, focused on the suffering of Gazans, as protests are in other parts of the world. They're primarily about returning the hostages. But Pardo and others made clear to me that they believe the war is not serving Israel in any way. They want it to end.
The latest cease-fire proposal includes an exchange of hostages, living and dead, for Palestinian prisoners. Israel has promised a temporary cessation of fighting but, as of yet, no commitment to end the war. In this episode, Pardo, with his decades of experience fighting terrorism, explains his perspective on how the war unfolded, what went wrong, and what should happen now.
[ Music ]
News clip: It's been 100 days since the attack by Hamas in southern Israel.
News clip: — 100 days of grief and protests—
News clip: Israel and Hamas have been at war for six months.
News clip: It's been exactly a year—
News clip: One year after the horror—
News clip: It's been nearly 600 days since Israel's war on Gaza began.
News clip: — 600 days since Hamas militants staged their murderous attack on October 7. Six hundred days, and they are still holding 58 Israeli hostages.
Hanna Rosin: The war continues day after day, month after month. Now over a year and half old, though, it feels like it's at a new breaking point.
News clip: In Gaza, concerns of famine grow, which is why chaos broke out at the opening of an aid-distribution site in Gaza that's run by a U.S.-backed group.
News clip: Israel imposed a total blockade on humanitarian aid and commercial supplies to Gaza on March 2.
Rosin: This week, there's a temporary cease-fire proposal on the table. The potential deal involves releasing 10 living Israeli hostages and the bodies of 18 dead.
News clip: Hamas did not explicitly accept or reject the offer, but it said it was prepared to release 10 living Israeli hostages and 18 dead ones in exchange for a number of Palestinian prisoners.
Rosin: Israel has already agreed to it, and Defense Minister Israel Katz warned Hamas that it must agree or, quote, 'be annihilated.' But Hamas leaders are so far hesitating. The main sticking point is the same sticking point as always: Hamas doesn't want a 30-day or 60-day or a 90-day cease-fire. They want a promise of an end to the war.
I'm Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. And that's a question a lot of people have. When will the war end? What will it take? And what happens to Gaza when it does?
[ Music ]
Rosin: I happened to be in Tel Aviv visiting a sick relative when news came out about this latest cease-fire proposal. I haven't been here since October 7, and when I arrived, I was struck by one obvious thing: In the U.S. papers, I read about what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is or isn't doing, or what other officials in the Israeli government are saying about the war.
In Tel Aviv, what the government wants or says seems irrelevant, or at least totally drowned out by what the people want. The gap between the government and the people seems enormous. The country feels like it's choking on despair and frustration with its own government and the lack of an end to this war.
To be clear, what drives the protests here is different than in the U.S. Protesters only rarely hold up pictures of, say, children killed in Gaza. Mostly, they spotlight the hostages and the government's betrayal in leaving them there.
And I didn't have to go far to see this discontent. My plane landed, and the flight attendant, in a smooth flight-attendant voice, said, ' Tachzir otom abayita achshav ' ('Bring them home now').
And then the plane burst into applause.
I went to an ATM machine at the airport, and as my money shuffled out, an automated voice said: 'Bring them home safely.' I arrived at my aunt's apartment building, and a big sticker covered the entryway: netanyahu is dangerous. Her street has been renamed by another sticker: netanyahu traitor street.
I happened to arrive at the end of May, on the 600th day of the war. I was taking a bus that day, and the driver stopped in the middle of the road and said, 'Sorry. Can't move. Everyone, get off,' because the streets were clogged with hundreds of protesters, most of them wearing shirts that, in large block letters in English, said N-O-W. 'Now,' as in: Bring back the hostages now. But also end this war. Now.
Rosin: 'Six hundred days of darkness,' he says. 'Six hundred days, and there is no light at the end of this war.'
Protester: (Shout in Hebrew.)
Rosin: 'Enough of this war,' someone shouts in the background.
Protester: (Speech in Hebrew.)
Rosin: 'How long will we live in a country that's at war?'
Protester: Bring all of them back now.
Protesters: Now!
Protesters: (Chanting.) Bring them home.
Rosin: So those are the streets. And there's one more thing boiling over, something fairly new in Israeli society, which makes this anger at Netanyahu and the war seem wider than usual.
It's coming from the military itself. Veterans of the Israeli Defense Force, pilots, medics, military leaders en masse from everywhere have been asking Netanyahu to stop the war. In April, more than 250 veterans of the Mossad, Israel's equivalent of the CIA, signed an open letter asking Netanyahu to bring the hostages home, even if that means ending the war.
Spies don't usually sign open anything. This letter included three former Mossad chiefs. And while I was in Israel, I sat down with one of them.
Tamir Pardo: We are already 600 days after October 7. And we have five divisions deployed in Gaza. And I don't see an end to that war.
It is useless. It's accomplishing nothing. Nothing. I'm not talking about those people who are living or dying in Gaza. I'm talking about Israel. From Israel's point of view, it's a waste of time. What we're doing—waste of lives, waste of money, wasting the future.
Rosin: This is Tamir Pardo. He's 72 and retired now, but he spent his life in the Mossad, which he ran between 2011 and 2016. He was running the agency when it began placing booby-trapped walkie-talkies into Lebanon, and reportedly planned a string of high-profile assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists.
In other words, he spent his life fighting against terrorism, exactly what Netanyahu's government claims to be doing in Gaza. In theory, he very much believes in the mission.
Pardo: The responsibility of the Mossad is to avoid our enemies [obtaining] nuclear weapons, whoever they are, wherever they are. My responsibility was to stop any terrorist attempt against Israelis that are outside the state of Israel, or from terrorists that are trying to hit us from abroad.
Rosin: That description, vague as it is, cements a certain image of deterring terrorism, but not endless fighting. One thing Pardo said to me over and over again is something he thinks Netanyahu has forgotten: War is not the endgame.
Pardo: At the end of the day, when I'm thinking about my children, my grandchildren, I would like that they're going to live in a safe country, but in a peaceful country.
And in order to achieve peace, from time to time, you have to use your sword. But I don't think that you can solve the problem with your sword. What's happening here now in Israel, it's insane.
Rosin: The exact meaning of insanity changes depending on who you ask. For many in the international community, even longtime allies of Israel, it's the situation on the ground in Gaza: the killing of civilians, the failure to deliver aid, the widespread starvation of innocent people.
For many in Israel, it's the hostages. A promise between Israeli citizens and their government has always been that they will keep them safe, and if one of them should end up in danger, the government would rescue them. Six hundred days has crushed that promise.
For Pardo, it's practical: War requires a goal. And Pardo doesn't believe Netanyahu's stated goal of destroying Hamas is a realistic one, certainly not if you also want to bring the hostages home.
Rosin: So today is the 600th day that the hostages are held. There's protests everywhere. I was surprised when I got here. In Tel Aviv, all the streets, they've been renamed Netanyahu Is a Traitor Street. You know, there are posters everywhere. It's a very common position here to criticize Netanyahu. Why aren't the hostages home, in your opinion? Whose fault is that?
Pardo: Our fault, Israel's fault. On October 8, it was 24 hours after October 7, and I said to my friends within the old boys' club, 'Mossad: Bring the hostages home now. Don't start a war. Negotiate and bring the 251 hostages home now. Then solve the problem.'
That was the biggest mistake of the state of Israel, because those hostages should have been released weeks after.
You cannot defeat Hamas and bring the hostages back at the same—the same priority. You have to choose. And our government preferred to kill than to bring the hostages.
Rosin: Now, as someone whose job it was to fight terrorists, why is it so clear to you that the first priority shouldn't have been to fight the terrorists?
Pardo: Because those people—children, women, civilian, and soldiers as well—were kidnapped because of our fault as a state. The armed forces in every country [are] responsible for the safety of those civilians who are living in the country.
And this war, the result of October 7 was because our armed forces, they failed to do it. Now bring them back, and then punish those who did it. And I'm saying punishing, not revenge—different.
Rosin: What's the difference?
Pardo: I don't believe in revenge. You have to punish, and you have to find out and kill all those who did what they did on October 7. Okay? Full stop. You don't have to destroy Gaza, because it's meaningless.
I think that we are creating—in the last 20 months, we are creating more problems [than] we are solving, at the end of the day. Yes, okay, we killed 70 or 90 percent of those, let's say, terrorists that are living in Gaza, but we killed many more civilians. And the day after, when we'll see that day after starts, we are going to have a very big problem there in Gaza.
Because I think that when you are gonna have 2.1 million people that don't have no housing, no job, no water, no electricity, no health-care system, we will have to solve the problem. No one else will have to solve it. We will. And then we are creating such a problem that I don't know how we will be able to solve it. I'm not expecting, let's say, Americans to solve the problem. I'm not expecting Egyptians to solve the problem. We are there, so we'll have to solve the problem.
Rosin: And you created the problem.
Pardo: And we created the problem.
Rosin: So recently, you signed an open letter saying: 'End the war in Gaza,' as did hundreds of other Mossad, Shin Bet, generals. Have you seen that level of open protest before? I mean, does something feel different about that to you?
Pardo: Yeah. That's the first time that it happened in Israel.
Rosin: First time that what—what exactly?
Pardo: That so many veterans, with their experience, are watching what's happening here in Israel, and there is an understanding that we are taking the wrong path. We are creating damage, a huge damage, to the state of Israel, okay?
By what we're doing, we are accomplishing nothing.
[ Music ]
Rosin: After the break. Pardo explains what he thinks is the real reason Netanyahu is staying in this war.
[ Break ]
Rosin: In the street protests, there's one particular chant that comes up over and over:
Protesters: (Chanting in Hebrew.)
Rosin: Ad shechem hozrim kulanu chatufim. 'Until they're back, we're all hostages.'
[ Music ]
Rosin: It's easy to understand why the family and friends of any individual hostage are raging in the streets of their government for failing to rescue the person they love. But to understand why the average Israeli so deeply identifies with the hostages, why they are still out protesting 600 days later, you have to go back into Israeli history.
In the first decades of its existence, Israel was regularly at war. The 1948 Arab-Israeli War, Suez War, the Six-Day War, the Yom Kippur War. And then in 1976, a terrorist event happened that in many ways still defines the relationship between Israelis and their government.
News clip: Palestinian hijackers are still holding more than 250 hostages and an Air France jet at Entebbe Airport, in Uganda.
Rosin: A flight from Tel Aviv to Paris was hijacked. The plane and its hostages were taken to Idi Amin's Uganda.
News clip: One hundred and one hostages released today were flown to Paris, but another 110 are still being held at the airport at Entebbe, Uganda. About 85 of them, Israeli nationals. The Palestinian hijackers with some non-Arab accomplices now say they will execute the hostages on Sunday unless their demands are met.
Rosin: In what was a rare approach for the time but afterwards became a global counterterrorism model, IDF commandos raided the airport and rescued the hostages.
News clip: The daring Israeli raid into Uganda still leaves unanswered many questions.
News clip: Political leaders and editorialists over most of the Western world and some of Asia were delighted with Israel's bold and successful rescue of the civilian hostages in Uganda.
Rosin: The details of the operation are extraordinary: Huge planes flying low over the Red Sea, two Land Rovers and a Mercedes painted black to pose as Idi Amin's presidential convoy, and Israeli soldiers operating thousands of miles from home with no hope of backup.
The only member of the IDF team killed was Yonatan Netanyahu, leader of the raid and the older brother of Benjamin Netanyahu. The story of his brother's death became a key point in Netanyahu's political rise.
It was also a key moment in Tamir Pardo's life. When I was asking him how well he knew the prime minister, he said this:
Pardo: I knew his oldest brother, Yoni Netanyahu. He was my commander in the unit that I served in 1976. Unfortunately, he was killed less than one foot from me at the Entebbe raid.
Rosin: Inside Israel, the raid at Entebbe cemented a promise: Yes, Israeli citizens are always vulnerable to terrorist attacks, but the government will always— always —rescue them, no matter how hard they are to reach. For many Israelis, October 7 broke that promise.
Pardo: What happened in 1976, people were kidnapped, not because we neglected something, we forgot something. October 7 is because we broke our obligation towards our people. The state of Israel betrayed the first thing that the IDF exists for: to defend our civil people. What happened there was a disaster. There were 2,000 people that managed to break into Israel because we neglected our duty. And that's the reason: When you did it, you have to pay the price. And the first price you had to pay is to bring them home, and then, find a way to solve the problem using the stick—but only after bringing them home.
Rosin: Pardo has decades of calculating when and how to use lethal aggression and to what end. Here's how he does the math on this war.
Pardo: I remember, before the war—and you can go and check the figures—IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) estimated that there are between 20,000 and 25,000 people that can use weapons in Gaza.
Nine months ago, the military spokesman said that more than 17,000 Hamas terrorists were killed. So think about how many were wounded. Let's assume that another 6,000 were wounded, and we know that more than 3,000 were in prison in Israel, we captured. So actually, the job was finished.
We killed all the generals, the leaders there, the commanders of brigades, platoons, whatever. Okay? So those who are still there, the vast, vast majority are those who were recruited after the war started. And they don't have any experience. Okay? But they can hold a Kalashnikov (an AK-47) and kill a soldier here and there.
But the main power—90 percent of the power—was finished more than nine months ago.
Rosin: So, enough?
Pardo: Enough. At the end of the day, the Hamas is not only a military power, a terrorist power, okay? It's a political power as well.
So thinking that you can erase political power by a military attack, that's wrong. That's wrong. And every civilian that is killed today, his brother, his son, his father will hold the gun tomorrow.
Rosin: And so why didn't it unfold that way? Again, Pardo is blunt.
Pardo: So I think that our prime minister today is trying to solve his personal problems—not our problems, his problems. And that was what he was doing from the first day that he was indicted, from the first day of his trial. He's not thinking about Israel as a state.
Rosin: Netanyahu was indicted on charges of bribery, fraud, and breach of trust in three separate but related cases. The prime minister has denied any wrongdoing, and says it's a witch hunt. The trial is still ongoing and has distorted Israeli politics in so many ways, one of them being the war in Gaza. There's criticism that Netanyahu has an incentive to keep the war going to distract from and delay his own problems, to keep lots of wars going. In fact, Pardo is not sure Netanyahu even has any postwar strategy anywhere.
Pardo: What is your postwar strategy in Lebanon? What is your postwar strategy in Syria? What is your strategy versus Iran? Okay? Using the stick—thinking that by using the stick, you're gonna solve the problem, it's wrong.
Rosin: You need to negotiate.
Pardo: Exactly. In order to solve problems, you need to negotiate. Negotiate when you have a stick in your hand. Use the stick if it's needed, but understand, at the end of the day, you should negotiate for an agreement. The point is that our government believes in using the sticks. Not one stick—sticks.
Rosin: It is unusual for a Mossad veteran to be so outspokenly critical against the government, but maybe not, in this case, surprising. Ehud Olmert, who's a former prime minister of Israel, last week accused his country of committing war crimes. Or as a hobby.
Yair Golan, the main opposition leader, accused the government of killing babies for sport. That one got the most attention outside and inside Israel, even as Golan tried to walk the statement back.
Rosin: Yair Golan famously said, 'killing babies for sport.'
Pardo: That was awful to say.
Rosin: That was awful?
Pardo: And it was wrong. I, I—
Rosin: That one went too far? Why?
Pardo: It's not too far. It's wrong.
Rosin: What do you mean?
Pardo: No one, even Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, are not killing babies for fun. Okay?
I don't agree. They're fascists. They are the KKK in Israel. They're fascists, but they're not killing—even fascists in Israel are not killing babies for fun.
Rosin: Let me give you some clarity about who he's talking about here. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, they are, as Atlantic contributor Gershom Gorenberg put it recently, the 'leading extremists' in Israel's most right-wing government in history. They are both West Bank settlers, and 'they both want Israel to reoccupy all of Gaza, to renew Israeli settlement there, and to'—quote—''encourage' Palestinians to emigrate.'
Rosin: Do you believe these are war crimes?
Pardo: Look—I hope not. I hope not. But fighting in a place like Gaza, 364 square kilometers—in this small place, there are squeezed more than 2 million people, fighting, using all warfare capabilities. Many civilians are getting killed, unfortunately.
That there is a war in such a place, it should be very, very short war.
Rosin: Short?
Pardo: Short.
Rosin: Mm-hmm.
Pardo: Because as time is passing, many, many more civilians are getting killed. Many more civilians are losing part of their families, losing their homes, losing everything. And to conduct a war for 20 months in such a small place, bad things are happening.
Rosin: It would be hard to avoid a war crime?
Pardo: It's gonna be very hard. Okay? And that's what worries us, should worry every Israeli.
Rosin: I asked Pardo to sum up what he thinks should happen next.
[ Music ]
Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Kevin Townsend and Rosie Hughes. It was edited by Claudine Ebeid. We had engineering support from Rob Smierciak and fact-checking by Michelle Ciarrocca. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.