Oren Solomon – Kan Reshet Bet Interview

You are listening to “Beit HaNivcharim”, the ideas everyone is talking about, from Kan Reshet Bet.

Brigadier General (res.) Oren Solomon, hello.

Good morning. Former head of combat operations in the Gaza Division, head of the division’s war debrief team, and a member of the senior forum of former public servants.

I want to quote you: “They tried to sabotage me, to silence me and the other officers.”

You wrote that the former Chief of Staff, Herzi Halevi, ran a systematic campaign to cover up the investigation. You wrote that you discovered information being hidden from the political level.

This is only part of what you published yesterday, after the IDF Spokesperson released a statement clearing you of the accusations. Tell us first: what were the accusations?

It was not an indictment, only suspicions. One morning in March there is a knock at my door. A team from the Military Police investigative unit enters the house. They raid my home. Some of my children are there.

That is how this whole affair begins. They search the house and seize every storage device I have.

When I ask what the suspicion even is, because I do not understand, they tell me: it is classified.

You need to understand, I did not tell the suspicions to anyone, not even my family. That is how I am. I keep the rules and keep things to myself.

The suspicion was that I had inserted an external drive into the computer I worked on.

When I heard that, I laughed. Really. It is absurd to even say such a thing.

I will explain briefly. I do not do things like that. I did not do it and I do not do it. On the contrary, I am the commander who makes sure those things do not happen.

The computer is not my private computer. It is a computer in the war room used by thirty or forty officers and soldiers who enter with permission as part of their duty. Could it be that someone did something there? It is possible. But it certainly was not me.

And you told them that, obviously?

Of course. Throughout the investigation and throughout everything that happened I cooperated fully. I told them: friends, check, investigate.

I also told them about other unusual incidents that happened over the years. I always reported those to the IDF information security officer, including cases where people entered my room. Officers would come and say to me: this person went in, that person went in. Every such incident I reported.

In the end this whole investigation, in my view, was contaminated. That is the correct term in the military legal system. It was a process intended to incriminate me in anything possible.

Why?

Not only because of this specific affair. That is exactly the important part.

The entire investigation was opened following an instruction by the previous Chief of Staff, Herzi Halevi, and the head of information security. That officer is known as the Chief of Staff’s arm for “eliminating” officers. When they want to bring someone down, they tell him: open an investigation.

It is the same head of information security who took the equipment of the Rafah communications officer before the war. There are many questions that need to be asked about him.

This is a huge affair. The moment he says “open an investigation” the whole system moves. In everyday language it is called fishing.

Why did they go after me? Because even before the debriefs I was already leading substantive, professional criticism about the way Halevi conducted the fighting.

I was one of the very few in the IDF who did that. Throughout all stages of the debriefs I led criticism of the process itself, of the contamination and the whitewashing of those debriefs.

In March I told him these things directly, looking him in the eyes. Already in January I had sent him a written document. Apparently, once he received that document, he called that same head of information security and told him to open an investigation against me over that alleged external drive.

There are many debriefs, not only yours. Why did you become the target?

Because my debrief is, in my view, the only one that can honestly be called real, substantive and professional. It is the only one that asks the core questions.

If I skip over hundreds of slides and thousands of hours of work, there is one key question. What did the Chief of Staff do on 7 October, in the first six hours after the attack began?

The answer is: lack of functioning, paralysis, confusion.

I detail all of that in the debrief.

People ask me: was there betrayal, was there malice? I say no. What I saw was professional failure. But the failure was very severe.

You also had a personal conversation with him about this, right?

Yes. I went into his office. We sat about twenty minutes. He called me in. I told him that the debriefs do not tell the truth. That they do not give the people of Israel answers about where the IDF was.

His reaction, as I saw it, was shock. He looked at me and several times said: really, really?

When it came to the issue of a cover up, he remained silent. There were things I told him that clearly surprised him, but when it came to the whitewashing itself he was silent.

I will give a full account of that conversation another time. What is more important is what I said there, because that is the heart of it.

My main point is this: we failed. We made grave mistakes. The IDF did not function. And the person at the top is clear.

I am pointing at the scale of the failure and the lack of functioning. What is worst, in my eyes, is the attempt to cover it up, and on top of that, the attempt to sabotage me and silence me and other officers.

So you are saying that the system here, or many people inside it, joined together in order to incriminate you and bring you down, because you presented a debrief that did not make the former Chief of Staff look good.

You will agree that this is a very severe accusation. Are you saying this as a guess, or do you have data and information? And if you do, are you going to act on it?

I have data and information. As I said, I am acting so that these things will be clarified by legal means, according to law. Obviously I will not detail it all here.

You asked if I will sue. This is not about a civil lawsuit. That is a separate matter. I am talking about something much more serious.

There are law enforcement bodies in Israel. If I use terms from the Dreyfus affair and the Bus 300 affair, because that is the analogy in my view, then it is clear what needs to be done here.

Some will say that Halevi resigned, so he took responsibility. If he took responsibility, how can he also be the one covering things up?

Let us set the record straight. For a year and a half, Halevi ran the entire debrief process. He personally led it to its conclusion. Along with him on the team were several generals, including Major General Finkelman.

For a year and a half they managed the process until they finished it and signed it off. You know in what format they concluded it? An event presenting the debriefs to the entire senior IDF officer corps.

Needless to say, I was not invited. Not by accident. That is part of what I call whitewashing and blurring.

He managed that process. He contaminated, influenced and blurred it. Call it whatever you want. He led it all the way until he signed it in a way that minimized his own share and the share of others in the failure.

Only once public criticism and political criticism grew, and a new defense minister was in office, did he resign. In my modest opinion, he resigned because otherwise he would have been fired.

But according to what you are describing, the current Chief of Staff is also standing alongside them, or at least cooperating with them.

I do not want to get into that question too deeply. I have not attacked the current Chief of Staff. I will only say this.

Is there one community, one locality, one Nova survivors’ group, one group of bereaved parents, who were presented with the IDF debriefs and said: we were convinced, you are right, we accept this? One such case? Check me.

Second, why did the current Chief of Staff, Herzi Halevi’s successor, take an unprecedented step and appoint a committee headed by Major General Yoram Turjeman to examine those same IDF debriefs that Halevi and the other generals had already signed?

Do you need me to explain why? They did not consult me. But they opened that committee because they understood that not only Brig. Gen. Oren Solomon is saying these things. Maybe I am the only one saying it openly, certainly from my position as head of the debrief team, not some random person in the street.

Turjeman’s committee says the Gaza Division debrief that I led is thorough and methodologically sound. It describes what the division and its brigades did on 7 October.

But all the other debriefs at the General Staff level, the Operations Directorate, the Southern Command, the Nova debrief, the Air Force debrief and so on, are lacking to a very great degree. I am not saying they are pure lies, but they are missing crucial parts and need to be investigated again.

So there is at least one branch in the IDF that, in your view, did investigate itself properly?

I divide it into two big parts.

First, the debriefs that dealt with the communities, the outposts and the fighting at the actual battle sites. Those were mostly done well. They dealt with the tactical level and with the facts as we could know them and cross check them reasonably. There are about five debriefs that in my view still need corrections. I am not saying they are lies, only that they need fixing.

Second, the Gaza Division debrief that I led. I can testify about my own work, but Turjeman’s committee also says the same: it is a thorough debrief with a clear investigative method, that describes what the division and the brigades did on 7 October.

All the other higher level debriefs, the ones I listed before, are very lacking and need to be redone.

I want to go back to your claim of persecution and a frame up. If they wanted so badly to incriminate you and bring you down, why did they close the case? As you said yourself, they opened it, investigated, decided that it was not you, and closed it.

Look, in the end, when there is an attempt to build a case out of nothing, it is hard to do. There are cases where people are framed out of thin air, but here there was nothing. They tried.

They carried out a raid on my home, a full search. They turned the place upside down and found nothing. They took all the media, my phone. I asked for a polygraph and I passed a polygraph.

What else can you do? At some point it is clear that it is not me. I know that I did not do these things, and not only in that case, in no case.

Today I can laugh about it a little, but it was very painful. My children had already gone through the Nukhba attack not far from home. My son fought at Nova. Then they experience a raid by IDF soldiers at our house. The children cannot sleep at night, they sleep next to me, they are afraid. They understand what this means.

You cannot tell me the IDF has not lost its mind. It is a disgrace.

All of this, so that no one will dare say there is suspicion here and doubts here. I will demolish all of these claims, one by one. I am only waiting for someone from the IDF Spokesperson or from the military prosecution to say officially how serious this was, and I will break it down into pieces that any listener can understand.

In my eyes this is a huge and grave event that must be investigated, not only because of the terrible failure itself, which of course must be investigated, but also because of what was done here afterwards.

Let me ask a very blunt question. Is it possible that part of what you are saying now comes from anger and hurt over what they did to you, and what your children saw during that raid on your home?

No. Do not confuse things.

Hamas did the first massacre. And then, in effect, the state did a second wrong, by raiding my home and opening an investigation whose purpose was to put me in prison for fifteen years, strip me of my rank, for supposed security offenses.

For thirty five years I served in the army and in the Prime Minister’s Office. My wife slept next to someone who carried very sensitive secrets, and throughout that time nobody knew what I knew. That is absolute. I passed five Shin Bet polygraphs in the course of my roles. None of my close friends know what I worked on. I never leak.

So no, there is no confusion here. Black on white: they tried to neutralise me. I kept it quiet. For a year and a half I acted within the IDF system. I wrote everything. I reported everything through internal channels.

Nobody heard any of this from me in public. Only now, after a year and a half in which they did this to me, and my name and photo were exposed because of the investigation, I decided to take it out into the open.

There is something very important here. You need the ability to expose the truth outside that system, so that the public conversation will deal with it, and so that decision makers and official watchdogs who are supposed to check these things in depth will engage with it seriously.

I have a feeling that people will be talking about what you said here today, Brigadier General (res.) Oren Solomon, with phone calls, testimonies, everything.

As I said, I have a feeling people will talk about it. Thank you for having me.

Good news and a happy holiday to the people of Israel. Amen.

Thank you.