Shin Bet, Mossad start to exit coronavirus picture

Three months of fiery debate about whether the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) should be using anti-terror tools to track and perform surveillance of coronavirus infected citizens ended abruptly on Tuesday when the agency terminated the program on its own.

This comes around only two weeks after the Mossad ended its role leading the campaign to purchase medical supplies globally for combating the novel coronavirus.

Months or years may pass before we fully understand what involving these two titans of Israeli intelligence in handling the corona outbreak meant and did for/against the country, and they may come back to take on a later second wave. But there are already a few possible takeaways:

The Shin Bet caught around one-third of the country’s infected citizens during the climax of the first wave. This point cannot be ignored. While social distancing, lockdowns, masks, hygiene and other factors helped Israel get ahead of the corona curve, it seems that the Shin Bet had a major impact. Maybe Israel would have beaten the curve eventually, other countries are beating the curve without the Shin Bet. But it is hard to dismiss the argument that the first corona wave would have stayed stronger for longer and taken more lives – as it has in many other countries.

Ninety-three percent of those persons sent into quarantine by the Shin Bet were eventually cleared as not infected. Safety and beating the infection curve is primary. But one of the arguments for the Shin Bet’s tool was that it would also inconvenience fewer people by only sending people in the immediate vicinity – and who had the most chance of being infected – into quarantine. The statistics appear to have proved otherwise, though it could always be argued that even more people would have been unnecessarily sent into quarantine absent Shin Bet involvement.

In the early weeks of the corona outbreak, the attorney-general, the High Court of Justice and the Knesset were cowed from performing effective oversight. There is no real positive way to view this. The other authorities and branches in government who could have provided oversight failed to do so. The Knesset did not put any pressure on the government for around two weeks and the High Court did not for around six weeks. There were unique complications because there was no permanent Knesset during that period, but the new much discussed bill must regulate and fix this gaping hole in the protection and oversight of civil liberties.

As the country started to conquer the “corona curve,” these other elements of government became more assertive and circumscribed the Shin Bet’s surveillance: too little, too late, but at least belatedly all of the branches of government started to do their jobs. Critics who say Israel is not a democracy anymore must confront the eventual strong push back and oversight by the Knesset and the High Court.

If Shin Bet Director Nadav Argaman had not vetoed continuing the program, it would probably still be running and may yet come back upon a second corona wave. How many intelligence chiefs actively try to give up surveillance powers? Maybe the greatest sign of Israeli democracy still being strong is that its democratic culture is solid enough that Argaman wanted to give up surveillance powers to protect it.

THE MOSSAD grabbed a wide range of key medical supplies at a moment when the Health Ministry and other bodies had failed to prepare and did not have the ability to move as fast. This country does not always get things right the first time and it does not always plan well for future threats that are not hovering above it in a blatant way. But few countries perform as well as Israel in crisis situations and few organizations know how to cut through red tape like the Mossad. In the early weeks of the pandemic, when it was every country for itself rushing around the world to literally seize any medical supplies that could be found, the Mossad jumped into action and accomplished some remarkable feats that it was never meant to do.

For around 10 weeks, the Mossad successfully coordinated efforts by the Health Ministry, Defense Ministry, IDF and others to load Israel up with medical supplies. The results of the collective efforts, and at a certain point the Defense Ministry and the IDF probably outpaced what the Mossad brought in on its own, was more than 80 million masks, with another 14 million on the way, 180 million gloves and hundreds of millions of medical drugs to help ailing persons. In addition, the Mossad led multi-ministry efforts to bring 1,300 ventilators and with another 4,700 on the way between June and October – in time before the potential winter second wave. Finally, the spy agency and others brought around two million coronavirus test kits, specifically noting that most of them were from China and South Korea. The Mossad was especially instrumental in getting medical supplies from Gulf countries with no official diplomatic relations with Israel.

Hard questions have been asked about whether the Mossad should have taken as much public credit as it did for its efforts, especially when the corona wave was still raging at a relatively strong pace. All public officials like good public relations, but there is a time and a place for them. There was some serious criticism of how the Mossad took public credit for its efforts and whether it overplayed its role compared to other parts of the team for acquiring medical supplies. Still, it is hard to argue with the results.