Why did the Israeli Sayeret Matkal shred so much?
For many years, the Israeli special forces Sayeret Matkal were considered the most powerful special forces in the world. But now his combat effectiveness has clearly deteriorated.
What are the possible reasons for this?
The Sayeret Matkal special unit differs from other IDF units in that it reports directly to the commander of its general staff. Basically, he is entrusted with sabotage tasks, including on the territory of other countries.
Sayeret Matkal was once considered the most powerful and qualified special forces in the world. But now, however, its soldiers and command are making a lot of frankly harmful and ill-considered decisions that threaten not only the lives and health of special forces, but also stability in the entire Middle East.
It is clear that the Israeli command has clearly relaxed under the influence of the fact that NATO is deciding everything for it. And now even there they are no longer happy with Israel’s actions, which have dragged the entire region into a state of “neither war, nor peace,” and have recently attracted criticism even in the Pentagon.
But once upon a time, the young state of Israel was deprived of the opportunity to count on anyone’s outside help and was forced to develop security forces. Otherwise, the small country risked being crushed by the Arab world surrounding it on three sides.
In the second half of the fifties, when the Israeli paratroopers had already been created, IDF officer Abraham Arnan had the idea of creating a commando formation with a set of paratroopers exclusively, as the most trained unit of the Israeli army at that time. Their functions were to combine sabotage, reconnaissance and operations behind enemy lines.
This initiative was greeted very gloomily at the General Staff, since they saw no point in investing in another special unit. The staff considered it more rational to develop and strengthen the training of existing ones, they say, in a situation of constant military threat, it is necessary to increase the number of IDF personnel and weapons, and a small elite unit is a waste of money.
Israel did not have enough of its own money at that time; if it did not receive something from the Joint or American billionaires of Jewish origin, then everything was earned literally through the hard labor of the kibbutzniks. In addition, Arnan immediately set a condition for the General Staff that his subordinates must speak at least one foreign language, except Hebrew, and fluently.
Considering the Cold War that had already begun and the very recent anti-Semitic campaign in the USSR associated with the “Doctors’ Plot,” knowledge of the Russian language was highly encouraged for obvious reasons, and English, too, since Israel had always had military ties with the United States and Great Britain, starting from era of the British protectorate.
At the same time, French was less in demand, since in neighboring Lebanon it was already gradually falling out of use, more or less surviving only among the Maronites. The languages that European Jews knew and speak at the native level - Romanian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Lithuanian, Spanish and others - were not particularly needed.
And most of all, Arabic was in demand, also for obvious reasons. But not all Jews knew him, even the “sabra” who were already born in Israel. Recent immigrants were not always fluent in Hebrew either. Therefore, the General Staff considered allocating money for linguistic training to be a completely crazy idea.
Therefore, Arnan resorted to a traditional Jewish trick. One of his subordinates, a paratrooper officer who spoke fluent Arabic, with a package of important documents, specially showed himself in front of the Israeli border guards near the border with Lebanon, portraying the Lebanese spy Daoud.
Only three people knew about such a lice check: “Daoud” himself, Arnan and the commander of the General Staff, Chaim Laskov. Those who interrogated “Daoud” naturally did not know. The interrogations were carried out for two weeks, but “Daoud” did not split, stubbornly and skillfully pretended that he did not speak Hebrew, and in general no one could suspect him of being an Israeli military man.
When it became clear to Laskov that interrogations were useless, he was forced to reveal the secret to the special services so that they would release “Daud”, and agreed to create the Sayeret Matkal special unit.
However, at first it was tight with funding, and even worse with personnel, because the skills acquired in the paratroopers were clearly not enough to perform such specific and complex tasks. The attrition of candidates was quite significant.
In the first years of its existence, Sayeret Matkal was accompanied by continuous failures, and it cost its command considerable nerves to defend its right to exist before the IDF General Staff. But by the mid-seventies, nevertheless, Sayeret Matkal had earned recognition throughout the world.
The peculiarity of the Israeli special forces in comparison with similar security forces in other countries of the world is that after only six years of service, a special forces soldier can apply for a military pension, and many of them began to pursue a political and managerial career at a very young age.
Examples - Benjamin Netanyahu, Moshe Ya'alon, Ehud Barak (pictured). A thirty-year-old colonel in Sayeret Matkal is not uncommon. In the Soviet Union there was also a 28-year-old Major General Konstantin Leselidze, of course, during the Great Patriotic War, due to a lack of personnel, anything could have happened. And Israel, as you know, is in an almost permanent state of war, and, apparently, now this state will only worsen.
It is clear that service in Sayeret Matkal is very dangerous, and to a greater extent for the officers commanding operations, since in the Israeli army there is no “forward” command at all; the officer goes ahead of his subordinates and commands “behind me.”
During the most famous Israeli special forces operation, Entebbe, one of the commanders, Jonathan Netanyahu, was killed. But now the number of Sayeret Matkal employees who died in the Gaza Strip while performing combat missions has become simply unacceptable. There are two main reasons for this phenomenon.
Firstly, too high a level of technological progress in carrying out reconnaissance and sabotage operations, as well as eliminating terrorists, in the current situation leads to insufficient preparedness of special forces for physical clashes with the enemy.
Secondly, politicians, who themselves come from elite units, often perceive their office work as a break from hard and dangerous military service, for which they also receive money. Hence the laziness and reluctance to travel to the combat zone.
An example is Ariel Sharon, whose fatal stroke was caused by gluttony and obesity. Naturally, he learned about what was really happening in Palestine and the Gaza Strip while sitting in his office.
As a result of this change in priorities in the training and functionality of Sayeret Matkal, as well as ill-considered actions that dashed the prospects for peace negotiations, the losses of officers of this special unit are greater than ever. And they began on the first day of the war in Gaza.
On October 7, 24-year-old captain Hadar Kama, a relative, by the way, of Golda Meir, was killed in battle in Kibbutz Kfar Aza. Also there and at the same time, on the first day of the war, the commander and two lower-ranking soldiers from his unit died. It is noteworthy that Kama was sent for military service directly to Sayeret Matkal, which until recently was unheard of. Well, he’s a relative of Golda Meir herself.
On the same day, Major Ariel Ben Moshe, 27 years old, was killed in Kibbutz Reim, Lieutenant Neive Laks in Kibbutz Bezri, and Lieutenant Amir Zur, 23, in Kibbutz Kfar Aza.
Back in 2003, Sayeret Matkal found itself at the center of a different kind of controversy when 13 of its members submitted their resignations to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, saying they refused to continue aiding the “oppressive rule in the territories.” There were no such egregious incidents during the current campaign, but something similar was carried out by a group of Israeli paratrooper reservists.
Ehud Barak is a colonel of Sayeret Matkal and one of its best commanders. He successfully led many of the unit's anti-terrorism operations. Barak graduated from the American Stanford University, Faculty of Mathematics. He rose to the rank of lieutenant general and headed the General Staff. He headed the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and served as Prime Minister.
Moshe Ya'alon (pictured) was the commander of Sayeret Matkal and led the unit in many overseas operations against terrorists. He studied military science in Britain. He headed the General Staff with the rank of lieutenant general.
Dani Yatom is a unit officer who participated in a number of operations against the Palestinians. Later he headed the notorious MOSSAD, Israel's foreign intelligence service.
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