In April, 250 former Israeli intelligence officers signed their names to an open letter of protest asking Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not to proceed with his plans to escalate the war on Gaza. One of them was Tamir Pardo, head of Mossad, Israel’s equivalent of the CIA, from 2011 to 2016. Pardo, with his decades of experience fighting terrorism, explains his perspective on how the war unfolded and what Netanyahu’s real motivations are behind continuing it. -- Get more from your favorite Atlantic voices when you subscribe. You’ll enjoy unlimited access to Pulitzer-winning journalism, from clear-eyed analysis and insight on breaking news to fascinating explorations of our world. Atlantic subscribers also get access to exclusive subscriber audio in Apple Podcasts. Subscribe today at theAtlantic.com/listener. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is the current state of the war in Gaza?
It's been 100 days since the attack by Hamas in southern Israel.
100 days of grief and protest.
Israel and Hamas have been at war for six months.
It's been exactly a year. One year after the horror.
It's been nearly 600 days since Israel's war on Gaza began.
600 days since Hamas militants staged their murderous attack on October 7th. 600 days and they are still holding 58 Israeli hostages.
The war continues day after day, month after month. Now, over a year and a half old, though, it feels like it's at a new breaking point.
— 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.
— Israel imposed a total blockade on humanitarian aid and commercial supplies to Gaza on the second of March.
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Chapter 2: Why do former Israeli intelligence officers oppose the war?
Certainly not if you also want to bring the hostages home. 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 say they've been renamed Netanyahu is a traitor street. There are posters. It's a very common position here to criticize Netanyahu. Why aren't the hostages home, in your opinion?
Whose fault is that?
Our fault, Israel's fault. On October the 8th, it was 24 hours after October the 7th, and I said to my friends within the old boys club, I said, 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.
Chapter 3: What does Tamir Pardo say about the effectiveness of the war?
You cannot defeat the Hamas and bring the hostages back on the same priority. You have to choose. And our government preferred to kill than to bring the hostages.
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?
Because those people, children, women, civilians, and soldiers as well, were kidnapped because of our fault as a state. The armed forces in every country is responsible for the safety of those civilians who are living in the country. And this war, the results of October the 7th, 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. It's different. What's the difference? 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 the 7th. 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 that we are solving at the end of the day. Okay, yes, okay, we killed 70, 90% 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're gonna have a very big problem there in Gaza.
Because I think that when you're gonna have 2.1 million people that don't have no housing, no job, no water, no electricity, no healthcare 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 know how we were able to solve it i'm not expecting uh let's say americans to solve the problem i'm not expecting egypt to solve the problem we are there so we'll have to solve the problem and you created the problem and we created the problem
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Chapter 4: How do protests reflect public sentiment in Israel?
So recently you signed an open letter saying end of 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?
Yeah, that's the first time that it's happening in Israel.
First time that what? What exactly?
That so many veterans... that 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 a damage, a huge damage to the state of Israel, okay, by what we're doing. We are accomplishing nothing.
After the break, Pardo explains what he thinks is the real reason Netanyahu is staying in this war.
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In the street protests, there's one particular chant that comes up over and over.
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Chapter 5: What is the significance of the open letter signed by Mossad veterans?
In the first decades of its existence, Israel was regularly at war. The 1948 Arab-Israeli War, Suez War, 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.
Palestinian hijackers are still holding more than 250 hostages and an Air France jet at Enebi Airport in Uganda.
A flight from Tel Aviv to Paris was hijacked. The plane and its hostages were taken to Idi Amin's Uganda.
101 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.
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.
The daring Israeli raid into Uganda still leaves unanswered many questions.
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.
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.
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Chapter 6: Why does Tamir Pardo believe the war is 'useless'?
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 7th broke that promise.
What happened in 1976, people were kidnapped, not because of we neglected something, we forgot something. October 7th 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 have to pay is bring them home. And then find a way to solve the problem using the stick, but only after bringing them home.
Pardot has decades of calculating when and how to use lethal aggression and to what end. And here's how he does the math on this war.
I remember before the war... And you can go and check the figures. IDF, Israel Defense Forces, estimated that there are between 20 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
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Chapter 7: What should be the priority according to Tamir Pardo?
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 commander of brigades, platoon, 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 Klachnikov, an AK-47, and kill a soldier here and there, but... The main power, 90% of the power was finished more than nine months ago. So enough. Enough. At the end of the day, the Hamas is not only a military power, 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.
And so why didn't it unfold that way? Again, Pardot is blunt.
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's 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.
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, Pardot's not sure that Netanyahu even has any post-war strategy anywhere.
What is your post-war strategy? in Lebanon? What is your password strategy in Syria? What is your strategy versus Iran? Okay, using the stick, using the stick, thinking that by using the stick you're going to solve problem? It's wrong.
You need to negotiate.
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Chapter 8: How is the situation in Gaza affecting Israel's future?
It was wrong.
That one went too far? Why?
It's not too far. It's wrong. What do you mean? No one... Even Smotrich and Ben-Gurion 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 are not killing, even fascists in Israel are not killing babies for fun.
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, quote, the leading extremists in Israel's most right-wing government in history.
They're both West Bank settlers and they both want Israel to reoccupy all of Gaza, to renew Israeli settlements there and to, quote, encourage Palestinians to emigrate. Do you believe these are war crimes?
Look, I hope not. I hope not. But fighting in a place like Gaza, 364 square kilometers, in this small place that squeezed more than 2 million people, fighting using all means, warfare capabilities, many civilians are getting killed, unfortunately. That's the reason in war, in such a place, it should be very, very short. War? Short. Short.
Because as time is passing, many, many more civilians getting killed. Many more civilians lose their 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.
It would be hard to avoid a war crime.
It's going to be very hard. Okay? And that's what worries us. Should worry every Israeli.
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