The latest broadside from former Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) director Ronen Bar against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu includes some fascinating new details and discussion.
The most focus has been on whether Bar had Netanyahu's phone number and whether the prime minister in the past has always taken Bar's calls or sometimes ignored them.
These are great anecdotes, and the fight over them shows the depth of miscommunication and enmity between the men; The Jerusalem Post will unpack them to explain what they really mean.
But the main point from the start is that all of this is a sideshow.
Netanyahu wants the debate to focus on the night before the invasion, but that is a straw man.
The October 7 disaster was a decade or more in the making, especially with contributions of failures by both the political leadership and the entire defense establishment after the 2021 war with Hamas and during the internal Israeli fight over the judicial overhaul.
The phone call that wasn't
More on that in a moment, after explaining the phone drama.
Presidents and prime ministers do not have their phones attached to their brains while they sleep.
For that reason, national security staff are nearby and designated to receive middle-of-the-night calls to wake them if needed.
In Netanyahu's case, I already reported in my new book, IN THE WAR ROOM, that a Shin Bet official, under Bar's orders, called Netanyahu's wake-up staff at 6:13 a.m., 16 minutes before the invasion started.
The head of the wake-up staff, Netanyahu's personally selected military secretary, Maj. Gen. Avi Gil, Netanyahu's personally selected military secretary, decided not to wake him up.
This is not the fault of the Shin Bet.
Gil was Netanyahu's personal appointee to make these exact decisions for him: when to wake him up in the middle of the night.
In that sense, Bar did not need to complain that Netanyahu did not give him his personal phone number, because Netanyahu would not have picked up such a call while sleeping.
Bar's unnecessary attack on this issue was made because of Netanyahu's unnecessary defense: they did not call me on October 7.
No one called Netanyahu personally because the procedure was to call his staff, which was done.
In that sense, it is somewhat disturbing that Netanyahu withheld contact information from the Shin Bet chief, and it could show he never trusted him because Bar was appointed by Naftali Bennett.
When push comes to shove, who is responsible for October 7?
But it is immaterial to who is responsible for October 7.
Netanyahu, the IDF, the Shin Bet, and all officials in their positions going back 10-15 years are responsible because they all participated in propagating the idea that Hamas was contained and deterred.
They neither pushed to see whether cutting a peace deal with Fatah in the West bank would sufficiently weaken Hamas to cause it to be less of a threat, nor did they attack Hamas in a stronger way to topple it militarily (or assassinate its top leaders), nor did they leave enough soldiers on the border to defend against a ground invasion which they were sure would never come.
These were the true October 7 failures of Netanyahu, the IDF, and the Shin Bet.
Add on that all of them misread the 2021 war as an Israeli win, when Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar viewed it as a validation of his strategy to ignite a multi-front war against Israel.
Moreover, add to that that they all mishandled the judicial overhaul internal fight in a way that led to the country being viewed as more vulnerable to attack by Hamas.
Relations between Netanyahu and top defense establishment figures were so bad in July 2023 that he refused to receive certain critical intelligence briefings, lest they expose him to various potential criticisms after the fact.
At the end of the day, whatever happened on the eve of October 6-7 was a tiny part of the story; whether Netanyahu gave his cell phone number to Bar or not does not impact the bottom line, and the person who the prime minister chose to decide whether to wake him up decided not to because he, like everyone else in Israel, could not imagine that Hamas would actually do what they did a short while later.