The Problem with Israel

Before the delegation had even landed, the verdict was already in. Pro-genocide. Propagandists. Journalists who traded their credibility for a plane ticket. That was the word going around about the Filipino media group that went to Israel, and it did not soften while we were there.

You do not answer that kind of accusation with a statement. You answer it with what you bring home.

So here is what we brought home.

The man in the room

We sat down with Danny Citrinowicz. He spent twenty-five years in Israeli Defense Intelligence, in a succession of command positions. He headed the Iran branch of its Research and Analysis Division, the unit responsible for telling the Israeli government what Iran is and what Iran will do, and he served as that division’s representative posted to the United States. He speaks Hebrew, Arabic, and English. He is now a senior researcher in the Iran and Shi’ite Axis Program at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, a nonresident senior fellow with the Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative at the Atlantic Council in Washington, and a familiar face to anyone who watches CNN during a Middle East crisis. He has previously been a senior fellow at the Institute of Policy and Strategy and at the Abba Eban Institute at Reichman University.

In other words: for a quarter of a century, this was the man whose job was to know Iran better than Iran knew itself.

He opened by telling us that his institute is funded by private donors and that he speaks for nobody but himself. "I won’t have a piece of paper saying I know determined things need to determine on behalf of the state of Israel." Then he did not give the delegation a defense of Israel. He gave us a demolition of it.

And he allowed himself to be recorded. Nothing that follows was said in the safety of an off-the-record aside, or softened by the deniability of a background briefing. He said all of it into a running recorder, in front of foreign journalists, knowing every word of it could be quoted back at him and at his government. That is not a small thing. It is the difference between a man venting and a man testifying.

Nobody handed us a script. If they had, this is not the script they would have written.

Credit where it is owed. This trip was arranged by the Embassy of Israel, and the instruction to the delegation was explicit and it was repeated: write what you want, report what you see. No one asked to review a question in advance. No one asked to see a draft. No one sat in that room to supervise the answers. This commentary, including the parts that are going to sting, is the evidence that they meant it. A government that wanted stenographers would not have put this particular man in front of us.

What he actually said

"This war was a failure, strategically." That is his sentence, not ours. Operationally, he said, there were major successes. Strategically, a failure. He reminded the room that he had said so from the very beginning, when almost nobody in Israel wanted to hear it.

He walked us through how it started. A year ago, on the night of June 12, Israel struck Iran for the first time, and it struck because a window had opened that had never been open before: Hezbollah degraded, Hassan Nasrallah and his replacement Hashem Safieddine killed, Assad gone in Damascus so Israeli aircraft could cross Syria unopposed, and, for the first time in history, a green light from an American president. "Something we never had in the past," he said.

Twelve days. Thousands of centrifuges destroyed at Natanz. Fordow, buried under a mountain near Qom, could only be reached by the Americans, so Israel waited on Trump until the last moment. And the moment the shooting stopped, Iran began rebuilding its missile production, because those missiles are largely indigenous, built on North Korean blueprints and Chinese chemicals. "We cannot mow the lawn in Iran," he said. The country is too big and it is too far.

So Israel concluded that the next war could not be about hardware. It would have to be about the regime itself. And on February 11, Netanyahu walked into the White House with a plan to topple it: kill Ali Khamenei, strike the Basij and IRGC headquarters, send Iraqi Kurds across the border to take cities in western Iran, and hope that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad emerges as the new leader.

His verdict on that plan, delivered to a room of Filipino journalists, was that it was amateurish. "Those who thought about that have no understanding about Iranian culture, resilience, history."

And on the killing of Khamenei, the first time in history Israel has killed the leader of another country, he was harder still. Khamenei was no pacifist and no Zionist, he said, but he was cautious, the one man in the system afraid to cross the nuclear line. Now his son Mojtaba, more radical, holds the levers. "Mojtaba would never have been elected unless we killed Khamenei." His summary: "This war gave a lifeline to this regime."

Thirty-nine days of war followed. Iran struck the Gulf states and American positions, threatened Hormuz, went after tankers, and did not capitulate. The regime survived. The ceasefire produced a memorandum so vague that nobody can say who actually controls the straits. Iran is not enriching today, he said, but it retains the capacity to build a bomb if it decides to. And the one man who was most afraid to make that decision is dead. "Worse than everything," he said, "we left a very extreme regime in Iran."

The question we asked

The delegation asked him directly what the early intelligence got wrong. He did not deflect. He said he knew the answer.

"I came every day to the office thinking that I know everything about Iran. But actually, I saw only a glimpse. It’s like a thousand pieces of puzzle. Intel gives you 500, 600. They never give you the thousand. When you have this kind of superiority, you’re becoming with a lot of hubris."

Then the line worth carrying out of that room: "We forgot the basic foundation of intelligence. Culture, language, resilience, history. Just look at the Shiites in Iran history. They never capitulated. Never. So why should they capitulate now?"

And then the part that should trouble anyone who has ever sat in a meeting where the boss had already made up his mind. The intelligence people, he said, were afraid to speak their minds. There was groupthink. It was hard to challenge the assessment because the war was what the Prime Minister wanted, and the Mossad sits closer to the Prime Minister than military intelligence does. The new Mossad chief has since removed two department heads. There is no institutional devil’s advocate, he said, "not in the Mossad, not in the IDF." And this: "the system rushed into the war knowing that maybe it will be the unique, only opportunity to push Trump into war."

That is the problem with Israel. And the point needs to be made precisely, because it is not the problem its loudest critics usually name, and it is not the problem its loudest defenders are willing to hear.

Israel is extraordinary at knowing where a man will be at three in the morning. It is remarkably poor at knowing what a nation will do at nine. It can find a general in a bunker under a country of ninety-four million people, and it could not find, anywhere inside its own system, one person willing to say out loud that Kurdish militias and a former president polling nowhere were not going to remake Iran. That is not a failure of collection. That is a failure of listening. A state that will not tolerate a devil’s advocate inside its own war room will not tolerate one outside it either. Which is, in cruder language, what its critics have been saying for years.

Where the bashing was wrong, and where it was not

Nobody in that delegation is a lawyer, and this is not a ruling on whether what happened in Gaza meets the legal definition of genocide. That question belongs to courts and to the people trained for it.

But notice this. Nobody had to raise Gaza in that room. He raised it himself, unprompted. Israel’s legitimacy in the world is eroding, he said, and "not because of Iran." Because of October 7, and "mainly what happened in Gaza." The bipartisan support Israel once enjoyed in Washington is gone. Normalization with Saudi Arabia is dead, and he was blunt about the reason: not Iran. "It’s only because of Palestinian issue." The Gulf states blame Israel for a war that shattered their sense of security and sent expatriates packing from Dubai, Doha, and Riyadh.

When a country’s own former intelligence chief tells a room of foreign journalists that his country’s problem in Washington is now a bigger threat to it than Iran, that is not propaganda. That is a warning said out loud. And it was said out loud because there were journalists in the room to hear it.

Why this is a Filipino story

The delegation also put to him the question that matters most at home: eighty-five percent of our energy comes from the Middle East, and we are ten thousand kilometers away. What is the worst that can happen to the Philippines?

"You cannot beat geography," he said. Hormuz and Bab el-Mandeb are not going to move. And Iran demonstrated something that should concern every archipelago: it closed sea lanes without a navy. "It doesn’t matter if you have ships of a thousand sailors. You need one missile and one drone."

Then the arithmetic that should end every comfortable assumption about the American security umbrella. An Iranian missile costs about a hundred thousand dollars. The Arrow interceptor that stops it costs five to seven million. A ten-thousand-dollar drone launched from Iraq destroyed a THAAD battery in Jordan, and THAAD batteries were pulled out of South Korea to backfill the Middle East, which means a cheap drone in Iraq degraded the defense of a treaty ally facing North Korea. Ukraine is short of Patriots for the same reason. American production lines, he said plainly, cannot sustain a long war. There is a glass ceiling. Consider what that means if Beijing moves on Taiwan next year, and then consider what it means for us.

He described Iranian cyber operations against water facilities in Minnesota and Michigan, attempts to alter chlorine levels, the same thing tried in Israel six years ago. He described influence campaigns flooding social media during the war, used not only to shape opinion but to recruit. And he noted, without any Filipino in the room raising it, that the Chinese run vast influence campaigns in the Philippines. That should sound familiar.

He was also candid about something the delegation did not expect. Israel’s relations with the Philippines, he said, are "highly problematic," and one reason is that Israel will not go far in condemning Chinese activity in the South China Sea, because Beijing is too valuable to Israel to antagonize. He said he hopes a new Israeli government rethinks that. The candor is worth appreciating. But every Filipino should sit with what it reveals about how alliances actually work when your sea is not the one on fire.

What we did not see

Here is the other half of the report, and it complicates the picture rather than settling it. In the days the delegation was on the ground, we heard no sirens. There was no chaos. No scramble to a shelter, no shuttered schools, no airport in disarray. Some cafés were full. The market was packed, people squeezed shoulder to shoulder in places. Traffic was ordinary. If you had landed knowing nothing, you would have concluded this was a country at peace.

That calm is real, and it belongs in the record. It is also, in a way Citrinowicz would recognize immediately, the most dangerous condition a country can be in. He had just finished describing a ceasefire resting on a memorandum so vague that nobody can say who controls the straits, an Iran rebuilding the missile lines it never stopped believing in, and a successor in Tehran more radical than the man Israel killed. None of that is visible from a crowded market aisle. A strategic stalemate looks exactly like peace at street level. And a population that has stopped hearing sirens is a population that will stop asking why the last war was fought, and who was wrong about it.

There were also Filipinos inside that calm. The ones we spoke with told us they intend to stay, and they gave two reasons. The pay, which everyone expects. And the healthcare, which nobody at home talks about: being looked after when they get sick, without the arithmetic of whether they can afford to be. That deserves its own reporting rather than a paragraph borrowed at the end of somebody else’s story, and it will get it in a separate piece. More details to follow.

But sit with what it means, because it is the most uncomfortable thing this delegation brought home, and it has nothing to do with Iran. Our countrymen have run the numbers, wages and hospitals together, and concluded that a country that was under ballistic missile fire a few months ago still looks after them better than the country they were born in. That is not a finding about Israel. That is a finding about us.

To the people who said we should not have gone

If this delegation had stayed home, none of this would be on your screen. There would be no admission of failure, no admission of hubris, no admission that killing Khamenei produced a worse Iran, no admission that Gaza and not Iran is what is costing Israel the world. The critics would have kept their certainty, and they would have had nothing else.

The problem with Israel is not that people criticize it. The problem is that by the time Israel is prepared to admit the criticism was right, the missiles have already flown, the leader is already dead, the successor is already worse, and the record is already written. The generals say it afterward. The politicians never say it at all.

And the problem with the press is that it can be talked out of the only thing it is actually for, which is being in the room.

Citrinowicz was one of several people this delegation interviewed. There were others, whose accounts do not all point in the same direction as his, and there were the Filipinos who have decided that this is where they are staying. Those interviews, and the others this delegation gathered, will follow in the reports to come. That is the point of going. You do not come back with one story. You come back with the argument as it actually sounds when the people having it are standing in front of you.

We went. Nobody was converted. Everybody was informed. There is a difference, and anyone who cannot tell the two apart has no business lecturing journalists about journalism.

The author was part of the Philippine media delegation that traveled to Israel. This is the first in a series of reports from that trip.

Note on sourcing

This commentary is drawn from a briefing and open question-and-answer session with Danny Citrinowicz, senior researcher in the Iran and Shi’ite Axis Program at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) in Tel Aviv, nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative, and former head of the Iran branch of the Research and Analysis Division of Israeli Defense Intelligence, held during the visit of the Philippine media delegation to Israel. He stated at the outset that he was speaking in a personal and analytical capacity, and not on behalf of the State of Israel. Quotations are taken from a recording of the session and lightly cleaned for readability without altering meaning.

Sources

Recording and transcript of the INSS briefing, on file with the author. Speaker profiles: Institute for National Security Studies (inss.org.il/person/danny-citrinowicz); Atlantic Council (atlanticcouncil.org/expert/danny-citrinowicz).