"There's a stench of carrion in the room," said Israeli Chief of Staff Benny Gantz when he entered office, referring to the remains of an unprecedented battle that took place between his predecessor Gabi Ashkenazi and Israel's Defense Minister Ehud Barak. Well, the stench is still there, even after the Israeli state comptroller published an extremely detailed report on what he described as a "rift of mistrust" between the two offices known as the "Harpaz Affair." There is a direct link between the Barak-Ashkenazi clash and the harsh and unusual distrust expressed by the former chief of Shin Bet, Yuval Diskin, toward Barak and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Israel's former and current defense chiefs have very little trust in their political leadership.

The body of the Harpaz report relies on a treasure the State Comptroller's staff discovered: recordings of every single phone call made to and from the chief of staff's office. Such recordings were not found in Barak's office. The report describes at length the deteriorating relationship between Barak and Ashkenazi, in which a crooked officer, Boaz Harpaz, fed Ashkenazi and his aid with disinformation. Ashkenazi received a forged document from Harpaz, detailing Barak's alleged campaign against him and believed it to be true. However, the report fails to explain why and what exactly caused the two men, who for the first two years worked together in a reasonable harmony, to develop such mutual animosity, to the point where they could hardly function together.

The report focuses entirely on Harpaz' activity, but Harpaz was just a symptom, not the problem. Asked about the conduct of Ashkenazi's aid, the late chief of staff Amnon Lipkin-Shahak testified: "These are actions which are not supposed to be taken in a normal situation. But this wasn't a normal situation. It was madness." What was it that allowed such insanity to take over two of Israel's most respected generals? The comptroller preferred to limit his scope to the actual feud and not to seek its roots.

Several months after Barak entered the Ministry of Defense in 2007, Israel had reportedly destroyed a nuclear reactor built secretly in eastern Syria. Reports published outside Israel described how Barak tried to delay the Israeli strike despite the fact that the reactor was about to start operating. Cynics suggested Barak was trying to synchronize the strike with the expected resignation of then-prime minister Ehud Olmert, due to possible criticism from the committee analyzing the Second Lebanon War. It was in those discussions, prior to the strike, when Ashkenazi took an unusual, if not an insolent step: He refused to follow the common practice under which the military presents its operational recommendations to the defense minister, before presenting them to the cabinet. Fearing that Barak might force the army to change their recommendations, Ashkenazi insisted that Barak hear his recommendations together with the rest of the cabinet members.