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One of the questions we repeatedly get from you, our listeners, is - "Where was the IDF on October 7th?" It's a topic that we have strenuously avoided. After the war, there will be a formal commission of inquiry that attempts to understand all that went wrong and why. There will be a time and a place for that.

And yet, as the war in Gaza winds down, and as Israel prepares for another possible war, this question re-emerges. What lessons can be learned? More and more journalists in Israel are exploring the topic. So, we are going to dedicate an episode from time to time in the weeks ahead to try to understand what these journalists are learning.

Our only caveat is that this is a difficult topic to explore - for all the obvious reasons. The information is uneven... there is still an element of fog of war.

When I was in Israel last week, I visited Ronen Bergman in his home in Ramat HaSharon, to have a long conversation about what he has pieced together.

Ronen is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine and Senior Correspondent for Military and Intelligence Affairs for Yedioth Ahronoth, an Israeli daily. Ronen recently won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on this war and the pre-war intelligence failures.

He has published numerous books, including:

“Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations” - https://tinyurl.com/mwbmchaj

And also, “The Secret War with Iran" - https://tinyurl.com/2p8sh9u


Ronen is also a member of the Israeli bar (he clerked in the Attorney General’s Office), and has a master’s degree in international relations, as well as a Ph.D. in history from Cambridge University.

Read Ronen's piece in The New York Times here: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/30/world/middleeast/israel-hamas-attack-intelligence.html