In the eulogy he delivered at the freshly dug grave of Meir Dagan, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recalled that 15 years ago Dagan, then head of the Mossad, had shared with him a dire prophesy. According to Netanyahu, the man who had for years devoted himself to the fight against terror said that the fight against “terror will continue for another 100 years.” The prime minister promised in his March 21 speech, “Just as we beat it in the past, we will continue and we will beat it in the future.” Netanyahu went on to praise Dagan and said he had been aware of the dangers of radical Islam and saw in Islamist zealotry a tangible threat that cannot be ignored.

Dagan was indeed aware of the threats facing Israel. He was not a pacifist, no Peace Now movement member. In his last speech, which he delivered at a March 2015 rally at Tel Aviv’s Rabin Square, Dagan said, “Israel is a state surrounded by enemies.” He agreed that one must not, under any circumstances, be sanguine about the regional threats, but was quick to add, “Enemies don’t scare me. I am concerned about our leadership. … I am scared by the lack of vision and loss of direction.”

His comments generated vicious invective from the political right. Yariv Levin, then the head of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, said, “Meir Dagan’s irresponsible blabbering causes grave damage to the security of the state.” Levin accused the former Mossad director of being motivated by political interests, saying that his hatred for the prime minister had “blinded his ability to see things as they are.”

The man who devoted most of his life to safeguarding Israel’s security understood that the Mossad, the Shin Bet and the Israel Defense Forces have no solutions to a popular Palestinian uprising. Dagan, a retired general, was not the first senior defense official to doubt the ability of the strongest military in the Middle East to deal with stones and firebombs. Dan Shomron, the military chief of staff at the time the first intifada broke out toward the end of 1987, said, “One cannot fight against stones.” Shomron went as far as to hand his generals the book “A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962” by historian Alistair Horne.