CANDID COMMENTARY State Comptroller Joseph Shapira has a lot to say about what went wrong in Gaza (Photo: Flash90)

I sraelis just wouldn’t be satisfied unless they could roll out of bed in the morning take their daily shot of espresso and turn on the news to hear the day’s political drama. This week was no exception.

State Comptroller Joseph Shapira released his oft-delayed heavily redacted report criticizing both the decision-making process and performance of Israel’s political and military echelons during Operation Protective Edge the 50-day military campaign in Gaza in 2014.

The report was one of Israel’s worst-kept secrets. Once Shapira handed Netanyahu and members of his security cabinet a preliminary draft last March the report sprang leaks pouring forth allegations that Netanyahu and his former defense minister Moshe Yaalon hid the full severity of the threat posed by cross-border tunnels dug by Hamas. The comptroller also leveled charges of serious failures in intelligence operations and procedures that combined to produce a stalemate with the terror group despite Israel’s superior military forces.

Netanyahu initially blasted the draft as politically motivated and marshaled his forces in the days prior to its final release to battle its repercussions.

As political drama the report is a healthy serving of raw meat for the anti-Bibi members of the media to feast on. It’s also a political tool in the hands of Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid both members of Netanyahu’s security cabinet back then who insisted they were kept in the dark during the operation. The report enables them to vindicate themselves and boost their credentials as Netanyahu’s heir apparent.

Public interest in the state comptroller’s report should focus on two core questions says Maj.-Gen. (res.) Gershon Hacohen a senior research associate at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies (BESA) and a former IDF commander with 42 years of active duty.

The first is whether the military campaign was truly necessary to achieve the government’s goal of deterring Hamas from firing missiles into Israel and infiltrating Israeli territory. The second question says Hacohen is more of a demand to explain an affront to national pride: “How did we find ourselves as a nation and a military ill-equipped to deal with the threat posed by Hamas’s grid of terror tunnels?”

That begs the question as to whether the state comptroller is the right address for those inquiries. Hacohen’s colleague at BESA Maj.-Gen. (res.) Yaakov Amidror — a former national security advisor to Netanyahu — says it is not. Amidror says the state comptroller is most effective at fighting political corruption. But when it comes to weighing in on military matters all he can do is determine whether procedures set by law or regulators have been properly followed.

Considering how unpredictable war is how quickly it can spiral out of control and the fact that lives are at stake sometimes procedures must be chucked out the window Amidror argues.