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Oct. 31, 2025 - Bannon's War Room
47:44
WarRoom Battleground EP 881: While Israel Slept
Participants
Main voices
s
steve bannon
17:28
y
yaakov katz
29:14
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j
jake tapper
00:10
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steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
This is the primal scream of a dying regime.
Pray for our enemies because we're going medieval on these people.
Here's not got a free shot at all these networks lying about the people.
The people have had a belly full of it.
I know you don't like hearing that.
I know you've tried to do everything in the world to stop that, but you're not going to stop it.
It's going to happen.
jake tapper ▲ ● ▼
And where do people like that go to share the big line?
MAGA Media.
I wish in my soul, I wish that any of these people had a conscience.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
Ask yourself, what is my task and what is my purpose?
If that answer is to save my country, this country will be saved.
unidentified
Here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
It is Thursday, 30 October, in the year of our Lord, 2025.
Thanks for sticking around for the late afternoon, early evening edition of The War Room.
We're going to do a special right now for one hour on, quite frankly, an extraordinary book, While Israel Slept.
I cannot give a book a higher recommendation to go out and buy immediately and then carve some time out.
Because once you start this book, you will not want to put it down.
You'll want to read it to the end.
Then you want to think about it, and then you're going to go back with your pen and underline.
And I hope this starts discussion groups around the country for a couple of reasons.
Number one, it is a shocking revelation of what actually happened in the lead up to 7 October.
Of the audience remembers, because we do the Saturday show, Jack Basovic, I actually got Jack away from the family.
We covered it live on that Saturday.
And it's still seared in the memories of people, particularly the brutality.
But what shocked us the most was how Hamas had such an organized, because I said this is not a terrorist attack.
This is not even a paramilitary attack.
This is a military attack.
Air, sea, land, over 40 miles.
That's what stunned us that day.
Now you can finally get your arms around it.
Yaakov Katz and Amir Bobat have really taken the first cut of history here in writing this.
While Israel slept, how Hamas surprised the most powerful military in the Middle East.
The only quibble I have with you, Brother Katz, is that I would add in the most, you know, one of the greatest intelligence services or combined services in the history of the Judeo-Christian West.
So I want to start, first off, and the reason this book is important, it's not just what happened on 7 October.
This is a warning to the United States of America.
Because when I read the book and started getting my arms around the critical path of what happened, it took me back to 9-11.
It took me back to the FBI and the CIA not cooperating each other.
It takes you back to, you think you got all this technology, you think you have all these smart people, and then you see just basic fundamental breakdowns of miscommunication, non-communication, ego, all of it.
And it's what exposed Israel and also some strategic choices that just come out to you as like, how could they possibly be thinking that?
Yakov, Yaakov, first off, go through your bona fides.
Why were you two guys the first guy to really take a cut at this?
And obviously, everybody or virtually everybody would talk to you.
So what is your background and why were people willing to come forward with some brutally shocking evidence?
yaakov katz ▲ ● ▼
Well, Steve, it's great to be with you and thank you for having me on the show.
Both Amir and I are longtime journalists in Israel.
I served for about 10 years as the military correspondent for the Jerusalem Post and went on to become the editor-in-chief of the newspaper for just over seven years.
I've written by now, this is my fourth book on Israel and military affairs inside Israel.
I've written about the bombing of Syria's nuclear reactor in 2007 by Israel, of Israel's military innovation.
And Amir, too, for the last 25 years, pretty much has been a military reporter for a Hebrew language website, one of the Hebrew language leading websites in the country.
So we have been covering the IDF and Israel's intelligence agencies for decades.
And like everyone, I think, we maybe in a more extreme way were shocked and surprised by what happened on October 7th, because we were in those briefings with the heads of the military, the heads of the intelligence agencies, obviously the political echelon, talking about the different variety of threats that Israel faces.
And you kind of talked about this in your intro.
No one can accuse Israel of being not vigilant or aware of the threats and challenges that it faces.
Since inception as a state in 1948, we have been under attack from enemies all along our borders, whether it was Syria or Egypt or Iran or Iraq or, of course, Hamas and Hezbollah in Lebanon.
But something happened here that led the country's political military establishment to believe that this war could be avoided, to believe that they could live alongside a genocidal, jihadist, anti-Judeo-Christian, Western value organization, i.e., Hamas, and that everything will be okay.
And it wasn't.
And that is something that we wanted to try to understand how we got to this point, very much because this will happen again.
It will happen to Israel.
It will happen to the United States.
You will have strategic surprises always.
And we look at what's happening in the world today.
Something is broken.
And we need to understand how to avoid this from happening.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
I want to go back, and if you can use some of the Hebrew words, because I can't pronounce them, but the word concept jumps off the page of you as you go through this.
The political, military, and intelligence elite had a different, they had a concept, and that concept was really focused on Tehran, Iran as the threat, and their proxies like Hezbollah.
And it seemed like Hamas, although in Gaza in the Muslim Brotherhood, in a mortal threat, the strategic concept was focused on that.
And we just, we've put this to bed.
We've got control of this, but we've got to focus on that.
Is that what's the Hebrew term you use?
yaakov katz ▲ ● ▼
So we call it the concepsia, which is basically just a play off the word concept.
I think, you know, maybe a better way to look at it is the prism or the paradigm through which Israel viewed Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
You know, I think also, I see the comparison that's often made to 9-11, but I just want to say something here.
I think it's more in a case, an example of Pearl Harbor.
9-11, definitely, when we look at the flow of intelligence that you mentioned, the problems with not enough information moving from one intelligence agency to the other.
But Pearl Harbor, more in the sense that back then, in the 40s, the late 30s, the United States knew that there was a war raging in Europe.
They knew that the Japanese were preparing for something and were already fighting in the Pacific.
But they thought that it couldn't reach their shores until it exploded on their shores in Pearl Harbor.
And Israel, for that sense, also thought, yeah, we knew of Hamas.
There were wars and operations fought every couple of years ever since Israel withdrew unilaterally from Gaza, handed it over to them, gave them an opportunity to build something great.
But unfortunately, they decided to destroy it and turn it into an Afghanistan-like territory.
But we thought that it would never happen.
We lacked the imagination, Steve.
And I think that's the big part of the story.
But this concepsia, this concept was very much based on what you mentioned, was the idea that when Israel looked at the threat matrix in the region, what it saw was the Great Iran, the greatest evil in the region.
By the way, a place where when they march down the streets of Tehran chanting death to Israel and burn Israeli flags in the same breath, they're chanting death to America and burning American flags.
Americans are well aware of Iran's involvement, not just the hostage taking back in the Islamic Revolution and the takeover of 1979 and that hostage crisis that the United States had to deal with back in the time.
And thankfully those hostages were released back under President Reagan, but also the assassination plots that we have seen repeatedly over the years by Iranian elements against U.S. officials, some of them from the first Trump administration.
So the Iranians have long been trying to undermine the West, to weaken Israel, to weaken America.
And they were working together with Hamas and with his Bilav course to build up this capability that has surprised Israel in a dramatic way on October 7th.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
I want to go back through the lead up to that and about because what shocked me, and I think I keep up with the Jerusalem Post and the Herats and the Times of Israel and other blogs, military blogs, but I didn't quite understand that there were warnings of this and there were people in that process that warned about it.
Go back, these young women who were threatened.
And I love the way that, because they're so, you know, they got a keen eye, right?
As women often do, they have a keen eye.
So these young, I guess, enlisted and junior officers are put in as actually the front early search radar for what's going on in Gaza.
They had warned people leading up to it.
And my point is that this wasn't totally like a caught by surprise.
You guys go through the step-by-step of the weeks leading up to it and then the like 24 hours, and you realize there were people that at least had an idea that something was amiss.
Talk about these young women that were threatened by court-martial for what they were identifying.
yaakov katz ▲ ● ▼
So these women, we call them in Hebrew tatspitaniot, which is the Hebrew word for basically surveillance soldiers or spotters, observers.
And their job was to sit in these frontline positions along the border with Gaza, their eyes glued to screens.
Each one has an area that they are responsible for to look at that peers over in Gaza.
And just to give people a sense, Steve, Israel did have a very sophisticated border barrier, multi-layered fence, phased array radars, electronic fence.
They had turrets with remote control guns on them if people started to venture too close to the border.
There were cameras, of course, that lined the border and other sensors.
And these women were in this role in the IDF and the Israel Defense Forces was to watch.
The joke was, and I had visited their bases numbers of times, that their joke was that if they saw a bee flying along the border, they would see it and they would identify it.
And they were supposed to look, did a bush that was in this place on Monday on Tuesday suddenly move here?
And what does that mean?
Is there now a rocket launcher there?
Is there a tunnel shaft there?
What's happening?
And they had a keen awareness and the ability to see things.
And, you know, you're right that in the IDF, they specifically chose women.
Jokingly, I'll say, you know, men, people like to say, have difficulty multitasking, and women can do that better.
But I think that women were able to definitely pick up a nuance that was unique.
And unfortunately, they had been warning for weeks, if not months, that something strange was happening on the other side of the border.
There was more training.
There were more senior Hamas commanders coming to the border.
They were doing things that they had not been doing in the past, and they warned, they brought it up to their top commanders.
And their commanders said, You don't understand.
Hamas does not want war.
That's what our intelligence is telling us.
You stay in your tactical seat because we, on the strategic level, we really see the full picture.
And the tragedy, Steve, is that on October 7, when Hamas crossed in and invaded and went straight away for those frontline positions and stormed them, 15 soldiers in that base were murdered.
Six of those women were taken hostage.
One of them was miraculously rescued by the Israeli forces about five, six weeks into the war, but five of them spent almost 500 days in Hamas captivity.
And that profound tragedy is striking.
But I'll say one other thing, because this is, I think, important for us to remember.
This was a sophisticated border barrier.
I had been a few years ago to Korea, and I went to the D up to the DMZ.
And you thought you saw something that was also quite impressive.
And the Israeli border on the barrier on the border with Gaza to people who have been there over the years look like an impenetrable barrier.
And I know that the United States thinks a lot about these issues of walls and borders and faces similar challenges potentially on its borders.
And that's not enough.
A big wall does not prevent your enemies from potentially penetrating it.
It's something.
It's an obstacle.
But if we really want to deal with these challenges and threats that we face, we have to go deeper.
We have to go to the core of where they come from.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
So you had these spotters, and they kept kind of warning, hey, something's going on here.
We don't know what it is, but there's activity, more activity, maybe some of these commanders.
They were essentially dismissed by and large.
And the tragedy is five of them were eventually taken captive as part of the very moving part of this story.
But to go back to the day, you've got October 7th, but the day before the 6th, two things happen early in the evening.
Number one, Israel is so classified that you can't even use the name of the system.
But so the Israelis have a system in Gaza that is like the state of the art.
Not just do you have physical barriers, you actually have a surveillance system that's a state of the art.
The very name of it's classified.
That goes out either from a cyber attack and or a power outage.
You don't know what.
I think this is six or seven in the evening.
At the same time that you guys are picking up, or intelligence, and I think it's military intelligence picking up where there's a concentration of, I guess, cards for phones, of real concentrations.
So walk us through early, it's like six or seven in the evening, two events happen that start going up through the system to alert the system something's up over in Gaza, right?
And tell me about the initial response to that.
yaakov katz ▲ ● ▼
You know, what shocked us, I think, when we were working on this book was the flurry of activity that actually was going on between October 6th and the morning of October 7th.
The attack commenced at 6.29 a.m. in Israel on October 7th that morning.
But so much was happening for almost 24 hours preceding the attack.
There was the SIM cards, about 100 Israeli SIM cards.
So just so our viewers and listeners understand, in Gaza, there's a different cellular network than the one we have in Israel.
And suddenly, the Israeli intelligence agencies discover that 100 detect, that 100 Israeli SIM cards have now gone live inside Gaza.
Now, that means one of two things.
Either suddenly 100 Israelis are now in Gaza, that would not be a good thing.
That Palestinians in Gaza are switching out their Palestinian SIM card for an Israeli SIM card because they plan to cross into Israel, maybe as part of an attack.
Then, when they looked back, though, they saw that the Palestinians, someone in Gaza, had done this a year prior, much less, maybe about 30 to 40 SIM cards.
But maybe this is the annual oil checkup of SIM cards.
So maybe this is just part of what they did last year.
They drilled, they practiced.
Now, again, they're practicing.
Later in the evening, as you mentioned, that system goes down.
It was jittery to begin with.
It was very sensitive.
It often malfunctioned and had problems.
And for now, at least, the Israeli military has ruled out the possibility of a cyber attack that actually took place, but we may not know.
But for the now, that is not something that the Israelis say was possible.
But really, the system, because of its sensitivity, would come on and come off.
So that was a problem.
And then throughout the night, Israel started to pick up other signals.
It started to see, for example, that rocket launchers were being uncovered inside Gaza.
It started to see that would indicate maybe they're planning to launch rockets.
They started to see that those underground bunkers, and let's remind people, Steve, that under Gaza, there's the Gaza above and there's the Gaza below.
There's the Gaza of about 350 miles of tunnels.
Take the New York subway and the London Underground put together.
That's what runs under Gaza.
These are tunnels that are used by Hamas to launch rockets from, to store weapons, to run operations from, to eventually keep hostages, the 251 that they took from Israel inside.
So all of this is their, this is where they operate, underground.
And we start to see that they are preparing some of these bunkers for their top commanders.
All of this, if you put it together, leads one to believe that something is happening.
But in Israel, the intelligence officials and the military officials are torn.
Is this a drill or is this an attack?
And we got to understand something.
Gaza, like we said before, a long-time threat, Hamas, a long-time adversary.
This is not something that never happens.
There are always every few weeks, once a month at least, some indication that something might be happening.
And there's always a state of awareness and alert and vigilance.
But here, the commanders made the existential, the crucial mistake, where they leaned more on the option of a drill than on the option of an attack.
And I think that what they missed here, to an extent, was not the information, because the information we had now we know, we lack the imagination, we lack the ability to piece it together to understand what was really happening and what these enemies were really after.
And they were planning something that was greater than anything possible that Israel imagined could happen.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
Just for nomenclature, so the audience can understand it.
You had the Mossad, right?
The legendary Mossad.
You then have the IDF military intelligence.
I think that's Amman.
Is that how it's pronounced?
unidentified
Correct.
yaakov katz ▲ ● ▼
Yeah.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
Aman.
And then you have what, Shinbet?
So you have three.
And I want to make sure the audience gets.
And by the way, you've got to read the book.
You read the book, you won't put it down.
But the timeline, because what shocked me, and having done live coverage of it with Basobik, is that when these two events of the cyber, either cyber attack or the system just fails because it's got some issues, and the SIM cards, as I think of six or seven o'clock the night before, from six or seven o'clock until the attack happens at 6.29 a.m. the following morning.
This book, you cannot put it down.
You're just flipping pages and reading that because it was the senior most people in the Mossad.
I mean, it started earlier, but all of a sudden, by midnight, you've got everybody coming from there, coming from there, because it was a holiday weekend.
You got people coming in.
I mean, the intelligence command centers are staffed.
There's reports going out.
They're on conference calls.
And I think it's 2 o'clock in the morning.
They actually put the nation, it's 2 or 3 in the morning.
They put the nation on high alert.
I mean, people realize that something might be up here and eventually they decided to, they deferred to, hey, maybe a drill, but at some point in time, hey, this may not be a drill.
We want to mitigate the risk here.
Let's go on alert.
That time from seven in the evening, the night before, all the way to it goes to high alert is, is it people not talking to each other?
Because you've got the, you know, look, Mossad, as you know, for better and worse, is this mythic creation, right, that runs the world, right?
And you see the pressure they're under, and you've got eight hours or almost nine hours where they're deciding and thinking.
And it's not that they're waking guys up in the middle of the night.
They're getting on conference calls.
You've got the junior officers who are the best of the best.
They're all showing up at the command centers.
The apparatus is alert and something's up.
It's either a drill or a misdirection play, or this could be big.
And some of the guys say this could be really big, sir.
yaakov katz ▲ ● ▼
So let me make a little order here.
Israel has three key intelligence agencies, like you mentioned.
The Mossad is pretty much the equivalent of the CIA.
And we've seen, for example, I'm sure that many of our listeners and viewers remember the Pager attack, the Bieper attack that was launched against Hezbollah, which was incredible.
The beginning of the 12-day war against Iran with the elimination of their nuclear facilities, which started with the elimination and decimation of their top military leadership and their top scientific leadership, also part of Mossad had a hand in that.
So Mossad mostly focused outside of Israel, almost completely.
It doesn't do anything inside Israel.
But under the structure of the intelligence agencies, Mossad also does not deal with Gaza, does not deal with Hamas in Gaza.
That falls under the purview of what's known as the Shinbet or the Shabak is another term that's often referred to.
It's the Israel Security Agency, the ISA, and it is responsible for countering Palestinian terrorism.
In addition, Amman, which is the Hebrew acronym for military intelligence under the IDF, is responsible for all fronts and all threats.
It's the largest of the organizations, but it also is the one that kind of translates the intelligence and gives it for an operational use to the actual fighting units of the military, whether it be the Air Force, the Navy, or the ground forces.
So the two players here were the Shinbet and military intelligence.
And you're 100% right.
I mean, what we do is we go into detail hour by hour.
They were all on the phone talking to one another.
The heads of the IDF were on the phone call looking at the data, looking at the intelligence, trying to assess what's happening.
The head of the Shinbet goes from his house back to headquarters just north of Tel Aviv in the middle of the night at about 3 a.m. because he feels something is off.
He convenes his division commanders.
He actually dispatches a small team of his own commandos down to the border with Gaza.
They were just a handful of people.
They were nothing that could stand up to what was coming across the border.
And you see that there was this level of alert.
There was this concern.
But what happened was where the Israeli military made the ultimate mistake, Steve, was when they looked at the intelligence and they said, okay, we understand that something might be happening, but we have our forces along the border.
We don't anticipate this will be anything too big for those forces to be able to manage.
And if we put them and we, for example, metaphorically turn on the spotlight and shine a light into Gaza or throw some helicopters up there and they're spinning their rotters and now Hamas knows that we know that they're doing something, you have two things that might happen.
One is if it is a drill and they're not going to attack, but now they think we're going to attack, then they might attack.
That was concern one.
Concern two was if it's a drill and they're not planning to attack, they now will know that we know about the drill and they will reverse engineer to try to find out about the system, for example, the classified one.
How do we know what's happening?
So we could be burning our intelligence sources.
And that was a mistake.
It was, you know, I think a strategic mistake, but it was a mistake that will happen.
These mistakes are made when it comes to intelligence.
What we discovered, though, unfortunately, was that some of the intel got stuck in the pipeline.
And this is true also we know about 9-11.
unidentified
Yes.
yaakov katz ▲ ● ▼
Of where one agency had information, was not sharing it with the other agency.
And after 9-11, you, of course, had the 9-11 Commission, which established the DNI, the Directorate of National Intelligence, which had the goal, whether it's working is a separate question, but had the goal of putting together all of the different intelligence agencies in the United States to coordinate better, to work better, to ensure that no information is lacking from one another.
One of the recommendations that we do make in this book is to consider the prospect of establishing a similar entity for Israel, or at least, at the very least, breaking down the bureaucracy and the red tape that hinders sometimes that flow of intelligence between the different agencies.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
We're going to take a short commercial break.
A book, whether you're pro-Israel or you're not pro-Israel, whether you're part of Israel first or you're part of America first or somewhere in between.
This is the first cut of what I'm sure eventually will be a major commissioner investigation.
But first off, it reads like a novel.
If you just want to get something you cannot put down while Israel slept is the book.
And we have Yaakov Katz is with us.
We're going to take a short commercial break.
Of course, with what's happening in the Middle East, you saw President Trump.
He did it live last night, 10 p.m. to 1 a.m.
I want to thank everybody for the coverage.
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unidentified
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yaakov katz ▲ ● ▼
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steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
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yaakov katz ▲ ● ▼
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steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
Yaakov Katz, the book is While Israel Slept.
Everyone should get it.
Just carve some time out because when it arrives at your house, you're not going to put it down.
Whether you know zero or whether you think you know a lot, because I thought I knew a lot and I understood I knew virtually nothing.
That's the kind of book it is.
Yaakov, two things.
We're at three o'clock in the morning, so on high alert.
We're going to get to the run-up to it, but I got to go through two things.
Number one, particularly if you're in the United States and removed from the region, I had an opportunity in 19, was it 79, early 1980?
I was on the first, you know, part of the first carrier battle group that arrived in the North Arabian Sea for the Iranian hostage crisis.
And the place was like, you know, the landscape of the moon.
I just told my parents later, I said, you can't understand how far away it is and how alien it is.
It's like being on the moon.
But at least legendary is that half of Hamas is on the payroll.
What shocks me here and concerns me as an American for our own system is that, and your books have all been about high-tech.
You and Bobot have written some amazing books on Israel's technology superpower.
You just talked about Gaza.
You got a system that can look at everything.
You got, you know, you got in-depth, intelligence in depth, defense in depth, these spotters who are brilliant and can spot things.
But at no time in this, maybe I'm missing it, no time in this, which I thought was the key of whether it's Mossad or Shinbed or whatever, human intelligence, informers, guys that are on the payroll, right?
Either for patriotic reasons or just for cash money, that never comes, you never see that arrive.
Is that something that the technology has just lulled people to sleep?
Is it not something that's a huge part of activity?
Because I keep arguing all the time here in the United States, particularly in our efforts in China.
You know, a couple of dozen years ago, we lost, I think, 20 of our intel agents in the CCP to a leak.
And I don't think we've ever recovered from that.
And you can tell our intelligence on the CCP and the China is not great.
Is that one of the things happened here?
Are there not guys on the payroll?
Did they just flip and wouldn't give you the information?
Or does the technology lulled you guys to sleep?
yaakov katz ▲ ● ▼
Well, I think it's a combination of a number of things, Steve.
I think on the one hand, when we look at this, what I call the policy of containment, it had a couple of legs to it.
One was definitely the technology.
We had Iron Dome, which was able to intercept missiles that were coming in from Gaza and shoot them down.
So that wasn't a strategic threat.
It didn't have to drag us every time into a war, every time a missile was fired our way.
And when they would pop out of Israel, pop outside in Israel through tunnels that they dug across the border, like they did back in 2014, we built an underground wall and a system that could detect tunnels.
By the way, the system that Israel developed is actually used by the United States Army, also along the border with Mexico and the southern border in the United States, right?
So this is a system that is probably the most sophisticated in the world to detect when someone is digging a tunnel, where it is being dug, and even so sensitive it could tell you what tool is being used to dig that tunnel.
So that technology is super impressive, but what it does is it makes you, gives you a false sense of security.
It makes you feel like you're impenetrable.
And we know, you know, how many people crossed into Israel on October 7th through a tunnel?
Zero.
They all came above ground.
So while the tunnel technology worked and was great, it wasn't enough to stop this invasion.
But there was another thing there.
And this was what I call the bigger fish to fry piece of the policy.
We had Iran.
We have Hezbollah with 150,000 rockets and missiles.
A larger army, a larger military on our northern border.
So Hamas, Israel thought it could contain.
It didn't have to invest the same resources.
I mean, you look at the pager attack that Israel was able to launch against Hezbollah, right?
It's not just being able to put explosives inside a beeper machine or a pager, but how do you get Hezbollah to buy it?
You have to use human intelligence assets.
So we had him there.
We had them in Iran.
How come we didn't have them in Gaza?
And we see, I mean, you have hundreds and eventually thousands of people who run across the border.
Not one could call up their Israeli handler and say, hey, we're coming, get ready.
We didn't have that human, that human intelligence.
And I think that that blind spot is obviously something that's being fixed as we speak over the last two years.
But Israel fell asleep figuratively at the wheel because it thought that the technology was enough.
It thought that it had a handle and it was prioritizing wrong to some extent of those challenges.
But you mentioned the Chinese and you mentioned Iran as an example.
I mean, there was a report that just came out the other day of how China is helping Iran rebuild their missile capability, right?
You see what's happening in the Middle East.
This isn't just about Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, Israel.
This is a much bigger story.
These are about the forces that are anti-American, anti-West, that they focus often for the first stage on Israel because it's the easier target.
It's based in the region.
It's there.
It has borders.
It has the ability.
It's got Arab countries and terrorist groups that surround it.
So obviously that's going to be the first stage, but it's on the march to the West.
And when you look at the alliances and the relationships that exist there between the Chinese, for example, or North Korea for that matter, and Iran, and then definitely under the Assad regime back in Syria, we'll wait to see what happens with the new government that's now in place in Damascus.
But you get a sense that this is a much bigger adversary with much greater ambition, Steve, than what we think about when we just look at Israel solely.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
When you, I want to get to that side because you guys have some very specific recommendations.
So at 3 o'clock in the morning, the other question I've got about the human intelligence and why that didn't play a bigger role and why it's quiet.
As the attack unfolds, and this is why I said on the show live, and I'm very proud we talked about this, I said, this is not a terrorist attack.
This is not even a paramilitary attack.
This is a full-scale military attack.
It's over 40 miles.
You've got air, land, sea.
You got paragliders coming in.
And Hamas, with the Muslim Brotherhood, I mean, their reputations, they're not Hezbollah, right?
They're not the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.
unidentified
You know, how did they practice?
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
How do you practice a 40-mile air-sea land invasion that's not going to use the tunnels but come across?
How do you practice that?
Because over and over again, you have to get the timing right.
You have to get all that.
How did that happen?
And the only thing that we have that I warned about it was these young women who said, hey, this looks like there's more activity.
This had to be years in the planning, didn't it?
Not just the financing in the organization, but for them to hit basically all their marks when the balloon went up.
It had to have a very sophisticated planning to execute.
Did they not have it or did they have it and was just missed?
yaakov katz ▲ ● ▼
So they had it.
And there was even an intelligence report that came out back in 2022.
It was named Jericho Walls.
It was put together by some analysts, lower-level analysts in military intelligence in the IDF, and named Jericho Walls for the walls of Jericho from the time of the Bible.
As you remember, when Joshua enters the land of Israel and blows the trumpets, the shofar, the ram's horn along the walls, the walls come tumbling down.
And this was the figurative metaphor for how this barrier that Israel had built along the border could come down.
But, you know, we spoke about before the flow of information.
So this intelligence report that came out a few years before spoke of how one day Hamas might try to launch a cross-border infiltration with hundreds of people.
It could try to come by air.
It could try to come by sea.
It's planning to abduct and take people hostage.
The defense minister did not see this report until weeks into the war after October 7th, not before.
This was something that, again, has to be fixed in the flow of information.
But Hamas was practicing in training and was even telling us, you know, when we go back, you know, another source of information, of intelligence, is what we call OSINT, open source intelligence.
And that should not be dismissed or undermined because that is something or underappreciated.
They often are communicating what they plan to do, right?
When you hear Hamas say, we're coming and we're going to kidnap and we're going to murder, and you, Israel, say, well, you know, we'll just build a bigger wall.
We'll deploy a few more soldiers.
We're not dealing with the problem at its core.
That problem is not going to go away.
You cannot defend yourself to death.
You do have to go on the offensive.
When you see the Iranians building long-range ballistic missiles that don't just cover Israel, because Israel's nearby, but can go into Europe and start to make their way towards the United States of America.
You get an understanding that this is about something bigger than just let's invade Israel, kill some Israelis, kill some Jews.
Because, you know, for these genocidal jihadist groups to want to kill Jews or Israelis, that's just called Monday.
This is what they want to do all the time.
But they do have political ambitions.
They want to spread regional hegemony.
And that was, I think, what we missed, was not understanding what's more deeper and at the core of what these ambitions are really about.
You can't just let this sit and simmer.
It won't go away on its own.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
The other thing that's shocking, and I want to get back to the IDF response, because that's also going to shock people.
What stuns me is that there seems to be, particularly in this aspect of it, no concept of which I argue that the MA movement has perfected because we didn't have resources for anything else for years, what I call narrative warfare or information warfare.
It's really back on its back.
When the balloon goes up, the Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood are so far advanced on driving the narrative.
And I don't want to get into who's right and who's wrong in here, right?
Because I know my audience is going to be blowing me up here in a second.
But the Israelis and the IDF have a blind spot for narrative warfare, communications, everything's kind of reactionary in its back foot.
How did that happen?
How did the Israelis not understand that in modern warfare, the narrative part, the information war, is as important and sometimes more important than the kinetic part?
yaakov katz ▲ ● ▼
Well, I think you're 100% right that the narrative warfare or information warfare is an integral part and is part of one of those fronts of any war.
You have the front in Gaza where those soldiers are fighting against Hamas.
You have the home front where those missiles are landing, whether they're Hamas missiles, Hezbollah missiles, Iranian missiles, and missile defense systems that Israel has developed, which are key to keeping us safe.
But you also have the public diplomacy front and that narrative.
And if we look at the world today, tragically, I think the world does not understand, for the most part, what has happened here.
I mean, you know, for example, when we look at Gaza, there is a tragedy that has taken place in Gaza.
I have no problem saying that.
The tens of thousands of people who have been killed is a great tragedy, and the devastation is tragic.
But I look at the question of who is responsible for that.
And I look at Hamas.
And this is documented.
I mean, go to those tunnels, Steve.
We've been there.
And we see in those tunnels how Hamas is fighting, what it's doing, where it's storing its weapons.
You go into homes in Gaza, and under children's beds, you see the rockets and the RPGs and the anti-tank weapons and the AK-47s.
They're keeping them in the same room where they might have a Mickey Mouse sticker on the wall and a nice pink girl's bed underneath.
You could have a cache of cachet of rockets and grenades.
You have the tunnels under every supermarket, mosque, school, UN compound, and home.
So when Israel is trying to defend itself and it sees a rocket launcher in a window or in a mosque and it blows that place up because it doesn't want that missile to be fired into Israel and kill potentially Israelis, and then there are civilians who do get killed.
I mean, is Israel not supposed to be able to fight?
Are our hands supposed to be tied?
And I think that we needed to do a better job explaining that 100%.
And we have failed at that.
But I think what the world is misunderstanding is the nature of this conflict today.
People, you know, what the Hamas understood was that having so many civilians killed, that's their job.
They want them to be killed so that the Western world falls into the trap of believing this falsehood that there was a genocide in the Gaza Strip.
And when they believe that, they crack down on Israel.
And that serves their greater purpose.
Even though so many people are dead, Hamas doesn't care.
Ask yourself a question, Steve.
How come they have all these tunnels underground Gaza?
I have a bomb shelter in my home.
Come to Jerusalem where I live.
And when there are missiles that go off, we go down to the bomb shelter.
So these tunnels underneath every home and hospital and school and supermarket in Gaza.
How come the Palestinians of Gaza are not allowed inside there?
Well, Hamas told us.
They said, no, it's not for the people.
It's for us, the commanders and the terrorists.
So what should we do in a war?
Should hands be tied?
Or do you have to fight?
And this is a terrorist group that is out to destroy the way of life of the Judeo-Christian values and the way that we all live, whether it's in Israel or in the United States.
So what is to happen in the future?
God forbid such an attack happens one day somewhere else in another country.
And I think that you're right.
We need to explain this better.
We need to recognize this front of the war.
And Israel is neglecting that and needs to do a better job.
But I think we also have to ask ourselves a deeper question.
What has happened to the West, to the values, that people are misunderstanding who is the bad guy in this, who is evil, and who is right?
Who is the one that is trying to spare lives on both sides of this conflict, even when they are being attacked?
And that's Israel in this case.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
Okay, I want the audience to buy this book.
What I'm going to do, I want to have you back on for the IDF response, particularly from day one all the way through, but I can't do it now because we're running out of time.
I do want a couple of things to ask you.
Number one, you're pretty critical of the Netanyahu government.
Give me a couple of minutes.
Then I want to ask you, hey, particularly for people that supported Israel and never agreed with a two-state solution, you essentially have a two-state solution now with Qatar financing it and the Turks going to provide for security.
You are fairly critical of the Netanyahu government and the overall response and how this thing has gone on for a couple of years.
What is the key basis of your not attack, but of your analysis of the government's response?
yaakov katz ▲ ● ▼
Well, Netanyahu has been prime minister pretty much uninterrupted since 2009.
And I look at the policies that were put into effect under Netanyahu and this policy of containment.
And for example, I mean, something that is difficult to ignore is asking the Qataris and the two-faced role and the double role that they play in this region to send back in 2018 $30 million every month to Hamas in cash to Gaza to figuratively buy quiet.
That was a policy that was put into effect by Netanyahu, this idea that you can pay off your enemy.
And I understand what was at the foundation of it, this attempt to buy quiet, to kick the can down the road to avoid that war, because Israel is a country like, is a liberal democracy, is a country like the United States and like those in Europe that wants quiet and wants to grow and flourish as a society.
But that was a mistake.
I look at what Netanyahu's government did in the run-up to October 2023 to that attack when they were pushing through judicial reform, which, by the way, lots of the pieces of that reform I personally agree with, but I saw how it divided the nation.
And I learned from this that the unity or social cohesion is so important for the national security of our country.
Because when we're divided and polarized, we are distracted and we are not focused.
And our enemies can take advantage of that situation.
And that is to a large extent what happened with Hamas in the run-up to October 7th.
I think that Israel needs a reckoning when it comes to what happened on October 7th.
We need a commission of inquiry.
The book, I believe, is a good start.
And Amir and I did our best to try to piece this all together.
But, you know, we're two journalists, we're writers.
The access we get, which was phenomenal, I want to believe, is just scratching the surface of what a real state-appointed commission of inquiry could uncover.
And I hope that that is created because we have to learn the lessons to prevent this from happening again.
Because, like we said earlier, there will be strategic surprises in the future.
And I think that Netanyahu, we needed accountability.
We need a taking of responsibility because this, at the end, happened under his government and his watch.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
I would love to get you back next week sometime to talk about the IDF and the IDF response.
Very detailed.
Everybody should get this book.
Let's read it.
And next week, hopefully, we'll get Yakov Katz back or maybe the week after.
Are you coming to the United States?
Are you doing a book tour?
Where do people get access?
And particularly people that disagree with a lot that was said tonight, those are the folks I want to drill down into this the most.
So where do they go for your coordinates and social media?
And if you're giving any book tours here in the United States or any interviews, where do they go to find that out?
yaakov katz ▲ ● ▼
So yeah, been on book tour, continuing on the book tour.
And you can find me at my website, yakovkatz.com, myname.com, and you can find me there with interviews and with schedules and how to contact me.
And would love to hear from people, any questions they might have of more detail about this book.
But the book is available wherever books are sold here in the United States.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
So feel free to.
Particularly the part of the audience that disagrees with a lot that was said tonight.
I want you to get the book, read the book.
And Brother Katz has said he's available to take your inquiries.
And we'll reach out to him, hopefully, and get him back on next week.
Sir, thank you so much.
Appreciate you.
yaakov katz ▲ ● ▼
Thank you, Steve.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
We're back tomorrow at 10 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time.
It's going to be packed all day, four hours: two in the morning, two in the afternoon.
Tonight, the last 600 meters kind of has its DC premiere.
I'll be there with Michael Pack in the team, and that's that's going to play on the 10th of November, the 250th birthday of the United States Marine Corps.
It'll play at 10 o'clock, 10 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time with PBS.
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