Israeli Intelligence Challenges
in an Age of "Unstable Stability" and Disruption

Israel faces an existential threat from Iran and its proxies Hamas and Hezbollah. As Israel’s enemies have become more capable and better armed, the need to monitor their activities has dramatically increased. This month’s speaker, Col Yaron Ben David, is one of Israel’s top Intelligence experts. Col. Ben David’s last position in the Israel Defense Forces was the Commander of the Central Collection Unit in the Israel Defense Intelligence (IDI), a center consisting of thousands of soldiers, officers, and civilians. Yaron was responsible for leading the intelligence collection and production process.

Col Ben David will give us an insider’s view of the threats and challenges that Israel faces in monitoring and defending against its enemies. He will give an overview of the main changes in the Intelligence ecosystem, the current mission of the Israeli Intelligence  and the challenges faced by the Israeli Intelligence community in the different threat arenas – namely Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, and related cyber warfare threats.

During the last decade, the Israeli Intelligence's ecosystem has gone through tremendous changes. The enemy has changed significantly, the operational needs and the expectations of leaders and commanders at all levels have changed, and the technological environment has dramatically transformed, too. In many ways, the main challenge faced by intelligence leaders today is that of performing in a constant state of change – unstable stability. The greatest danger is a situation in which there is a profound lack of alignment between how we perceive and describe reality and reality itself, known as a relevancy gap.

Colonel Yaron Ben David is an active Intelligence Officer in the Israel Defense Intelligence with more than 20 years of experience in different command and staff positions. Yaron has received the Israel Defense Prize, the Head of IDI's Award for Creative Thinking and the Head of IDI's Outstanding Officer's Award. He holds an MBA, a BA Summa cum Laude in Middle Eastern History and an LLB Magna cum Laude in Law from Tel Aviv University. He is currently a Wexner Israel Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, one of ten outstanding leaders in Israel’s public sector sent by the Wexner Foundation.

Talks in this series are sponsored by Brotherhood and include a delicious buffet breakfast of assorted bagels, smoked salmon, pickled herring, whitefish salad, tabbouleh, desserts and more. Breakfast begins at 9:15 am. The presentation runs from 9:45 am to 10:45 am and is usually followed by a question and answer session. Admission is $10; free to Brotherhood members. For more information, email brotherhood@templeisaiah.net.