But the severity of the national disaster on that day revealed the hollowness and recklessness of these elites. For Oct. 7 was not just an intelligence and operational failure of the armed forces. It was also an indictment of the antireform strategy: the scorched earth tactics that played fast and loose with our security by arranging mass walkouts of army reservists, as if we were not a nation surrounded by terrorists who clamor daily for our blood. Not least, it discredited the idea that civil servants were merely expert “gatekeepers,” as they have come to describe themselves, guarding the public interest against the excesses of ignorant and corrupt politicians.

Bar proved to be the very opposite of the responsible adult in the room. The pretense that he is saving us from ourselves rings hollow after he failed at his actual job—protecting us from our enemies. In fact, there is a causal link here: Bar failed to protect us from our enemies precisely because he was too busy saving us from ourselves.

Behind Bar’s self-image as a “gatekeeper” is a worldview, shared by the rest of Israel’s woke elites, which consists of two complementary elements: an almost religious attachment to the “peace process” and the so-called “two-state solution,” and a concurrent contempt for democracy which inherently distrusts the patriotic masses and the politicians they elect. The elites, our betters, are here to save the prospect of peace from the warmongering jingoistic hordes and their irresponsible political representatives.

The consequences of this view of Israel’s internal politics hardly stops at Israel’s borders, though—the result being a complete inversion of the observable realities of our region. Bar imagines our politicians as reckless, dangerous hawks, which also more or less requires him to imagine Hamas to be strategically moving to greater pragmatic moderation. He thinks of our government as wild and irrational, a view that is premised on imagining Hamas leaders as rational actors susceptible to economic incentives. Therefore, Bar could not imagine them starting a war, and his assessments in the months preceding the war consistently reflected that bias, even as he was haunted by the specter of Israel’s government starting one.

In other words, our chief of the internal secret service had everything exactly backwards. In the face of accumulating intelligence, Ronen Bar and Herzi Halevy were busy saving us from ourselves, not from Hamas. They were eager to prevent an escalation which they thought could be triggered by “miscalculation” on the part of their civil bosses. “Miscalculation” has become their watchword to refer to the danger of overreaction to raw intelligence data, which may plunge us all into a war they assumed nobody wanted—save perhaps those evil messianic, Kahanist, proto-fascists in our own cabinet.

Based on this bias, says former Shin Bet officer Yizhar David, the late-night meetings Bar convened at Shin Bet headquarters concluded that Hamas was raising its own level of readiness out of fear of an impending Israeli attack. It’s not hard to see why a self-appointed gatekeeper would want to keep such information out of the wrong hands. Why let a deplorable, warmongering prime minister interfere with the efforts by responsible adults to delicately defuse a possible “miscalculation”?

And here, says David, lies the answer to the most nagging question of all: Why did the chiefs not raise the level of alert, or at least quietly inform the soldiers of the possibility, however remote, of impending danger? Astoundingly Bar’s message to the IDF was a recommendation to leave the theater quiet, lest raising the level of alert would reinforce Hamas’ fear of an imminent attack and lead to accidental escalation. They kept the raw intelligence from the IDF units around the fence for the same reason they kept it away from the cabinet: to prevent escalation.

Bar’s bid to stay on as head of Shin Bet, in defiance of the law and the cabinet, and despite his colossal failure, is wholly reliant on the antireform coalition of gatekeepers. But not only has the gatekeeping philosophy taken a massive hit, the constellation that composed it is also falling apart: the flow of money to the protest movement from the Biden administration has been replaced by the new administration’s inquiry into the use of this money by the anti-Netanyahu forces; the widening of Netanyahu’s wartime coalition has made this government more stable; the need a wartime prime minister has for a head of Shin Bet he can trust is obvious to most Israelis; there’s a new IDF chief of staff, general Eyal Zamir, and a new chief of police who will not let the anti-Netanyahu permanent protest disrupt public life in the middle of a war. And here is one more sign of the new times: Nadav Argaman who threatened Netanyahu on TV with disclosing secret information has been summoned by the police for questioning on suspicion of attempted extortion.

There is still the confrontational, all-powerful attorney general, Gali Baharav-Miara, and, of course, the Supreme Court. They may succeed in fomenting more chaos, but they can’t rewind the clock to the pre-Oct. 7 status quo. Baharav-Miara is herself operating on borrowed time, and even the Supreme Court, the most important bastion of the juristocracy, is now being challenged—in a minor way, to be sure, but still symbolically important. The Knesset has passed a law that changes the composition of the committee that appoints judges, slightly augmenting the power of elected politicians at the expense of the lawyers’ guild.

Perhaps more important than all these changes is Netanyahu’s decision to lead the charge against the deep state. In doing so, he is now attempting to correct what was perhaps the greatest miscalculation of his long political career. For years he thought that he could make do with the defiant upper echelons of the security establishment, including insubordinate heads of security services, and with the imperial Supreme Court, with its juristocratic auxiliaries in the executive, including a politicized prosecution. That calculation proved detrimental to Israel’s democracy, to the right’s ability to govern, and to Netanyahu’s personal fate as a target of a politically weaponized criminal prosecution. He has now made the decision to tackle the problem at its roots, rather than skirmishing with the tentacles of the deep state over specific issues on an ad hoc basis.

Whether Netanyahu will succeed in reestablishing democratic sovereignty in Israel is dependent, to a large extent, on the outcome of the war. As things now stand, victory over the Iranian axis of evil has become the precondition for any new birth of freedom for Israel’s citizens.