Ex-intel chief: We know almost all about Nasrallah
Biniyam forced to spend a month apart from mother before procedure
The IDF knows almost everything about Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah, but could still be reprised by an unwanted escalation with him, former IDF intelligence analysis chief Brig.-Gen (Ret.) Itai Brun told The Jerusalem Post on Monday.
Brun was reacting to a combination of an unusual Yediot Aharonot story on Friday in which current officers, many of who served under him from 2011-2015, revealed aspects of their classified assessment of Nasrallah along with the Hezbollah chief’s rejection of that article’s claims.
“The IDF knows a lot about Nasrallah. Nasrallah knows this and knows a lot about Israel, but there could still be an escalation which is different from how he usually acts,” said Brun, referring to the idea that leaders can act unpredictably even after a period in which they follow a consistent pattern.
He said that the message from IDF intelligence through the article seemed to be: “We know everything – you are exposed. Your organization is exposed. We have information superiority.”
Further, he said that IDF intelligence could be using the article to respond in this latest series of exchanges.
Describing how in January, IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Aviv Kochavi threatened Nasrallah to try to deter him from any escalation and the Hezbollah chief’s counter threat that he has surprises for Jerusalem in the case of war which could shock Israelis, Brun said this could be the IDF’s answer: “you can’t surprise us.”
The article describes Nasrallah as obsessed with reading Israeli media coverage, with his image in Israel and in Lebanon in general and with maintaining extraordinary levels of micromanagement and control of the Lebanese state.
Moreover, the IDF intelligence officers in the article give the impression that they have tremendous penetration and insight into Nasrallah’s inner circle, method of operations and intentions.
To that extent, the intelligence officers suggest Nasrallah is very deterred and intimidated from any broad conflict with Israel and much more conservative about taking gambles than he was earlier on in his 28-year reign over the Lebanese terror group.
Brun, who likely formulated significant portions of the classified file during his service, confirmed that Nasrallah, “is very interested in the Israeli public, government, IDF and what they say about him” as well as his “reading obsessively everything we write and stories about him having Israeli newspapers nearby him.”
However, he said that, “Nasrallah’s main knowledge doesn’t come from reading, but from Hezbollah’s conflict with us over 28 years.”
The former top military intelligence official said he calls the current version of Nasrallah – “Nasrallah 4.0.”
Similarly to the current IDF intelligence officials quoted in the Yediot article, he said the Hezbollah leader is now “a supporter of the status quo. He has designed the rules of the game [in Lebanon], so now he doesn’t want to have the rules broken.”
He added Nasrallah “has changed into a more careful, wary and deliberate actor” before making significant moves regarding Israel.
In addition, Brun confirmed that Nasrallah “is overworked and spread thin” in trying to handle all the different levers of power after his main military planner, Imad Mughniyeh, was assassinated in 2008, reportedly by Israel and the US.
He argued that a deep understanding of past habits is good, but is just that – a leader’s past habits – and is not a perfect indicator of their future conduct.
“I think it is not right to learn from this that we know exactly what Nasrallah will do... leaders do not have operational codes,” which perfectly predict when they might act against their usual pattern.
Brun listed off a series of examples of leaders and countries acting unpredictably, including Anwar Sadat, Mikhail Gorbachev, Barack Obama and Donald Trump.
He said that though he had not necessarily participated in such an article of sharing classified intel during his IDF service, that he had participated in conferences and that, “the world has changed. There is logic to doing it with the proper caution. So many things today are publicly revealed.”
Six-year-old Biniyam Tesfahun Maru of Ethiopia successfully underwent a life-saving open-heart surgery at the Sylvan Adams Children’s Hospital at Wolfson Medical Center in Holon on Sunday evening, a spokesman for the NGO Save a Child’s Heart told The Jerusalem Post on Monday.
Dr. Lior Sasson, head of the Pediatric Cardiac Surgery Unit at Wolfson and the surgeon that operated on Biniyam, told the Post after the surgery that “we are very glad that Biniyam was brought to us in time to fix his heart defect, save his life and enable him to grow up like all other children.”
After all but a select few flights to Ben-Gurion Airport were grounded in January due to the emergence of alarmingly infectious new variants of COVID19, SACH was able to arrange for Biniyam to fly to Israel on a special Jewish Agency immigration flight so he could receive treatment for a life-threatening cardiac defect on February 12.
A last minute coronavirus diagnosis, however, meant that Biniyam’s mother, Shashitu Andebrt Tizalu, had to wait more than two weeks to recover before she could board a flight to be with her son. She was forced to quarantine for another two weeks before finally reuniting with him on March 8, only a day before he was hospitalized to prepare for surgery.
The month apart affected both Biniyam and his mother greatly, said Tamar Shapira, deputy director of SACH.
When asked how it was to board the flight without his mother, Shapira said “It wasn’t easy for him. Biniyam had his mother up until the last second and then, suddenly, they told him to board the flight alone.”
Shapira said Biniyam became very attached to Shira, an Ethiopian-Israeli Jewish Agency
guide who escorted him during the flight and took care of him during quarantine, saying he had become like “one of her own children.”
“They got very attached and, when they finished the quarantine, she had to go back to her family, she has kids of her own,” Shapira said. “He took it very hard.”
Biniyam was taken to the SACH Children’s Home, where he joined a group of more than 20 other children from Tanzania, Zanzibar, Ethiopia and Ghana, most of whom didn’t speak the same language as he did.
“They tried everything, he wouldn’t leave his room,” Shapira said. Until, Shapira said, one day at the home, a sevenyear-old boy from Zanzibar named Ibrahim, “heard that there was a little boy upstairs who is sad and doesn’t want to come down, so he went upstairs.”
Ibrahim reached his hand towards Biniyam and gestured at him to get up and come with him, at which point Ibrahim “gave [Biniyam] his hand, got him out of his bed and they walked out together. Since then, they’ve become best friends,” Shapira said, adding that this is especially impressive considering the two can’t even speak the same language.
Shapira said that within a few hours of meeting Ibrahim, Biniyam was already playing with the other children and had begun to finally show signs of joy.
However, Biniyam’s most emotional day since arriving was the day he was finally reunited with his mother. Shapira said that they waited until only two minutes prior to the meeting before telling him that it would be happening, so as to not cause him needless anxiety beforehand.
When they finally told Biniyam
the news, Shapira said “He sort of listened, but he didn’t move his face, say anything or react in any way.”
An Ethiopian nurse who accompanies the SACH children to Israel for life saving procedures and treated Biniyam, told Shapira that when she asked Biniyam why he wasn’t happy to hear the news, he told her that “until I see her, I won’t believe it.”
Shapira described what happened when his mother finally arrived, saying “she went into the home and within seconds grabbed him into her arms and he began crying.”
When asked how the separation affected Biniyam’s mother, Shapira said “it was very, very hard for her.”
Shapira, a mother herself, said that she can’t fully claim to speak on Shashitu’s behalf, adding that “I can’t even imagine how difficult this was for her.”
“Having a child in such a life-threatening condition is unbearable. Add to that the knowledge that you live in a place which doesn’t have the medical capabilities to save the life of your child,” Shapira said. “Then, of course, having to send him, not being able to be with him and know what was going to happen. It’s all very, very hard.”
She said when she spoke to Shashitu, she was very grateful, repeatedly thanking her and SACH for taking Biniyam in and treating his heart condition for free.
Biniyam is now recovering at the Sylvan Adams Children’s Hospital, with his mother by his side.
SACH is a humanitarian organization, based in Israel, which works internationally to save the lives of children from partner countries with disadvantaged healthcare systems.
Shapira concluded the interview by saying: “Our core value at Save a Child’s Heart is tikkun olam – doing good to repair the world and believing that every child deserves the best medical care, regardless of race, religion, gender, nationality or financial status.”
Since being founded at Wolfson Medical Center in 1995, SACH has saved the lives of more than 5,700 children from 62 countries, around half of whom are Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza.
In addition, SACH has, to date, brought more than 140 healthcare professionals from around the world to train in Israel, so they can create “centers of excellence” in their home countries, wherein they can independently provide more advanced treatment to children.
SACH’s humanitarian activity is made possible thanks to the support of donors in Israel and abroad, mainly Morris Kahn, the Azrieli Foundation and the Arison Foundation.
Sixty-nine percent of Israel’s workforce, or 2.7 million workers, will need to acquire new professional skills to remain relevant in the workforce, according to the State Comptroller’s Report released Monday afternoon.
However, the report found, the current environment for professional training programs is lacking, and the government should work to encourage greater participation, the report said.
The fast pace of changing technologies stands to make many non-academic and low-skilled workers redundant in the labor market as their jobs become automated or eliminated, the report said. Therefore, embracing lifelong learning programs is worthwhile for all adults, whether employed or not.
However, the Comptroller found, current training programs available are seen as cumbersome by most people. Existing programs don’t actually train many workers, and don’t include their employers in the process.
In addition, retraining programs are perceived as expensive, and 25% of adults who want to participate in such programs say they don’t for financial reasons. Furthermore, the report found that the wide range of different programs available in the market, with no clear leader or source of information, makes it harder for people to choose a program and sign up for it.
In 2018, just 53,000 people took part in various training and tech programs, at a time when 600,000 jobs, or 15% of the entire labor market, were considered at risk of disappearing in the coming years. The Haredi and Arab sectors suffer from the biggest lack of job training.
Meanwhile, the report found that the problem of missing workforce skills actually starts in school. Some 29% of youth in each grade of school don’t participate in academic learning or paid training programs. The level of English taught in high schools and in training programs is not sufficient for the workforce, and 40% of 12th graders either tested in the Bagrut matriculation tests at the low English level of three units (out of five) or didn’t take the English test at all. Both problems are more prevalent in areas with weak socioeconomic representation, and are likely to harm students’ abilities to join the workforce in the future, the report said.
The report concluded that the government doesn’t have a plan for encouraging more people to get professional training, and recommended that it gets more involved by adapting training programs to market needs and offering incentives for employed and unemployed people to continue learning. This is more relevant than ever in light of the coronavirus crisis and the damage sustained by numerous sectors of the economy.
In a separate report focusing specifically on jobs in the hi-tech sector, the State Comptroller noted that while that sector produces 12% of Israel’s GDP, the country suffers from a chronic lack of supply of trained technologists.
Here as well, the report said, the problem starts with education. Of students that began their university or academic studies in math and technology fields, 22% don’t finish their degree within six years, and 20% graduated with a different degree than they had started.
In addition, there is a lack of qualified teachers for math and science subjects in the universities, and the high school education system isn’t maximizing students’ potential to prepare for work and the army with technology and math studies, especially in the periphery, the report said.
The report noted that just 31% of people working in hi-tech jobs are women, and only 4.9% are Haredi or Arab. It recommended developing more training programs for hi-tech, especially in the Arab and Haredi sectors. The State Comptroller called to add more technology and science teachers in the universities, and to work to reduce dropout rates for those fields.