Israeli Press
Maariv columnist calls Mossad dismissals a smokescreen over October 7 blame
Graphic: Times of Palestine
Original Reporting
Mossad chief Roman Gofman's removal of two of the agency's most senior officials is not housekeeping but narrative-building, the Israeli daily Maariv's military affairs columnist Avi Ashkenazi argued on Sunday.
Gofman announced the dismissals without detailed explanation, and the agency's own statement tied them to work-plan considerations rather than to Iran. Opposition figures quoted in the paper answered that "Netanyahu has corrupted the Mossad too".
In Ashkenazi's telling, the timing is the point. Gofman served until recently as Benjamin Netanyahu's military secretary and championed a Mossad plan aimed at toppling Iran's leadership — a plan Ashkenazi describes as over-ambitious, and one that collapsed when Turkey's president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, warned Donald Trump off it.
Removing senior professionals now, the columnist writes, lets a new story settle in before the third anniversary of October 7: a story in which the professional echelon alone carries the failure. The Mossad, he concludes, is walking the path of the police, the Shin Bet and the army — state institutions turning, in part, into assets of the ruler and his party.
Ashkenazi adds a detail Israeli readers registered: no state commission of inquiry has been established, and the chief of staff, Eyal Zamir, has yet to convene the decorations committee for the war's fallen soldiers — because opening that file, he writes, means opening wounds the government wants shut before an election.
Israel goes to the polls on 27 October.
