Former Mossad Chief, Efraim Halevy, urges caution as Israel sets out to destroy Hamas

The Times, 13 October 2023

Many thousands of Israeli troops are massing on the border of Gaza. The prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, has called for the elimination of Hamas. An invasion of the terrorists’ stronghold could start within days.

However, from Efraim Halevy, a British-born elder statesman of Israeli intelligence, comes an appeal for his government and military leaders to take a breath and not rush into a ground war that could be “adding agony to agony”.

Halevy is a former director of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, and a veteran spy and diplomat who has helped to resolve some key crises in the Middle East. There has been speculation that he was the model for the character of George Smiley in John le Carré’s novels.

He suggested that a full ground assault on Gaza was not the right move at this time and said many of his countrymen agree with him.

“You cannot simply say, ‘OK, how many people do Hamas have? A thousand? Two thousand? We have to send in 3,000 or 4,000 or 5,000’. If the end result of this is going to be that we are going to lose even more people, beyond what is reasonable in terms of the conditions of battle, I think we will be adding agony to agony. So we have to be careful.”

He claimed that although there is overwhelming support in Israel for military operations to continue, only a minority think it should lead to the taking of a heavily defended and booby-trapped Gaza.

Many believe, he said, that entry into Gaza “would not be a move that would bring about the desired results”. “To enter Gaza City certainly would have more danger for Israel than advantage,” he said. “The price in life and injury could be enormous. I don’t want to second-guess what they will do. All I would say is that there are many people who believe that this is not the time to do that.”

He warned that preparing for war on that scale took considerable work. “If they really want to plan it properly, they need more time. And time is not on our side.”

However, he defended Israel’s decision to tell 1.1 million people to flee north Gaza: “It tells those who want to save their lives not to risk their lives and also, in terms of international law, I think this is a safeguard against future accusations that Israel has committed this or that or the other.”

Halevy, 88, who emigrated to Israel from London as a teenager and rose through the ranks of intelligence and diplomacy to serve as the director of Mossad from 1998 to 2002, then as a national security adviser, is an intellectual with an unassuming manner which led to speculation in the Israeli media that he was the model for Smiley. Halevy did meet Le Carré once but says he does not think he influenced the writer.

Since retiring from Mossad he has gained a reputation for speaking his mind. Halevy previously advocated talking to Hamas and said he knows of some sort of dialogue between United States officials and the group, but said any hopes he had of finding a peaceful solution evaporated this week. “This event is really beyond the pale,” he said.

There has been speculation that secret negotiations are taking place over the hostages.

“Hamas is saying that they are not going to negotiate the issue of exchange of prisoners before the end of the war,” Halevy said. “How this will pan out I do not know. But they will be out of electricity; have an extreme shortage of water; and are losing all the money that they have been paid working in Israel. There is a question [of] how long they will be able to survive this.”

The UN has warned that the situation is certain to deteriorate and others have called Israel’s blockade inhumane. Rishi Sunak said it was important to take all possible precautions to protect ordinary Palestinians and facilitate humanitarian aid.

Halevy said Hamas was behaving like an extension of Islamic State. “So when you are talking about a group of that nature, the rules of the game are different than in normal warfare. When you ask what is humane or inhumane, one has to take that into account.”

Asked whether avoiding the deaths of more Palestinian children and abiding by international law to avoid war crimes was important, he said: “It’s important to consider but it is very difficult to consider, given the fact that they’ve killed so many children and in manners which are almost impossible to describe.”

Going in to rescue the hostages and to destroy Hamas presents politicians with huge dilemmas, he said. “Imagine if we launched a big operation which would result in [the hostages’] deaths, and if it also results in an even higher toll for Israel of people killed in battle. What will be the results if the cabinet comes to the public and says, ‘Well, we won the war and we believe that destroying Hamas is worth any price’? I would not like to be one of those raising your hand for such a position.”

The situation required creative thinking, he said. When he was Israel’s ambassador to the European Union, he formed a bond with the late King Hussein of Jordan during secret meetings. In 1997 Mossad botched an attempt to assassinate the leader of Hamas at the time, Khaled Mashal, in Jordan.

The incident almost led to the suspension of the Israel-Jordan peace treaty but Halevy suggested to Netanyahu, then in his first stint as Israel’s prime minister, that Israel release the jailed founder of Hamas, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. Netanyahu initially rejected the plan before agreeing and saving the peace deal. “What we need to find here is extraordinary thinking,” Halevy said. “We have to find a non-conventional solution.”

Citing a newspaper poll that suggests support for Netanyahu is collapsing in the wake of the terrorist attacks, he added: “Netanyahu is being blamed.”

Israel has been deeply divided over Netanyahu’s plans for judicial reform, with huge protests and many military reservists threatening before the attacks not to report for service.

“Maybe we had . . . blame for all of this happening because of the internal crisis in Israel. The picture which Hamas must have drawn was Israel was in a state of constitutional disintegration and military weakening. From their point of view, this was the right time, which they never had before, to deal us a blow that we had never even contemplated.”

The prime minister’s tone has been wrong when speaking to the nation on television, he said. “One would have expected in a crisis like this, the leader not using time to describe all the atrocities committed by the enemy but rather to try to calm the scene and to get a feeling of togetherness.”

When we speak by video call, Halevy, who lives in Tel Aviv, has just visited two families that lost children serving in the armed forces following the attacks. “The reaction was, of course, great pain. But the reaction also was that the leadership has lost its legitimacy.”

Because he is no longer in the intelligence service, Halevy is reluctant to speculate on why Israel failed to detect Hamas planning for the attacks. “I will say I was surprised — and many others were surprised,” he admitted.

Mossad is responsible for external intelligence so does not directly oversee Gaza. Nevertheless, it is striking that when Halevy recently had a long discussion with a senior figure at Mossad, they discussed many intelligence issues but “didn’t spend one minute on Gaza”.

His view is that Iran did not initially co-ordinate the attacks but “they may cash in on this”. However, he is reasonably optimistic that a wider war can be avoided. “All the players in the Middle East do not want to enter into a conflagration which will be costly. And I think that the world powers are the same.

“I think the Iranians, who more or less have succeeded in creating a relationship with Saudi Arabia, with the Chinese being the mediators, have achieved something very important for them and they don’t want to spoil that by suddenly getting into a war. All of these main players are in a position today that they do not want to enter a war.”

Halevy emigrated from London in 1948 and brings a historical perspective. Asked if these have been the darkest days in Israel, he reflected that he arrived at a time of war. “I came to Palestine, as it was, a month before Israel came into being. In the war of independence, we lost over 6,000 people.” By some estimates, even more Arabs died.

“Jerusalem was under siege and there was a shortage of water; rations were handed out from trucks. We had battles on the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv road, where we lost two or three hundred people in a very short time. One has to be careful in comparisons.”

He shared an uncle with Sir Isaiah Berlin, the late philosopher, and they saw each other regularly. Berlin, who was a diplomat in Washington during the Second World War, later had a private dinner with President Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis. The president wanted to pick Berlin’s brains, Halevy said, on what he could offer Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet premier, so that he could survive the confrontation without having to surrender everything.

This taught Halevy a key lesson: in every situation, there are ways “to reach the proper conclusions, however unacceptable your enemy” may be. “Even in the days of Hitler, there were always certain discussions that took place under that kind of a formula, saying, ‘What can I do to help my enemy, so that he will not cause more damage?’”

Efraim Halevy, CV

Born: December 2, 1934

Education: Hackney Downs School; Hebrew University law faculty, graduated M Juris cum laude. Secretary-general of the national union of students (1955-1957).

Career: Joined Mossad in 1961, carrying out missions abroad before rising to deputy director. Ambassador to the European Union, 1996-1998. Recalled to lead Mossad (1998- 2002). National security adviser to the prime minister (2002-2003). Head of centre of strategic studies (2003-2011). His memoir, Man in the Shadows, has been translated into ten languages, including Arabic.

Family: Married with two children, six grandchildren and one great-grandson.