How Israelis Probe Their Failings

“In the post-October Israeli reality, things are illuminated many times more brightly.”—Aharon Amir, “Toward the Second Republic,” April 1974

Ever since Israelis first learned on October 7 that disaster was upon them, their minds have been awhirl with questions. Why was the government so slow to respond? How was the border breached with such ease? How did Israel’s all-knowing intelligence apparatus—whose “contribution to U.S. military intelligence,” as the late senator Daniel Inouye once put it, “is greater than all NATO countries combined”—fail to see this coming?

In the nine months since, enough revelations have come to light to allow a partial response to such questions: border security was left to technology rather than to manpower; a recklessly thin military force was fielded in the Gaza envelope; the warnings of intelligence analysts and the suspicions of field observers were chronically disregarded.