Jews Living in the West Bank Didn’t Undermine Israel’s Security or Empower Hamas

Shany Mor offers a critique of the konseptziyot (plural of konseptzia) that governed Israeli strategy before October 7, 2023. The Hebrew term “konseptzia” used to be shorthand for the assumptions that exposed Israel to its last security disaster: the Yom Kippur War, in 1973. The term connotes deadly groupthink. In the early 1970s, Israeli officials underestimated their Arab enemies’ intentions and capabilities; they did the same with Hamas before it massacred 1,200 Israelis last October.

Today’s Israeli right attributes the prewar Gaza konseptzia to naivete about Palestinian politics. Mor offers a competing account: assigning blame, on the left, to international organizations and the ideas of the 1990s Oslo process, and on the right to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli settlers.

Mor is careful to say he is not complaining about all settlers—just adherents of “ right-wing religious settler Zionism.” Mor then specifies two charges against them: “state capture” and the diversion of IDF manpower and resources to defending remote West Bank outposts. Now, whatever the prewar errors of Israel’s security services (not least their optimism about Hamas) they simply cannot be blamed on right-wing settler Zionism. But Mor’s argument suffers from errors more fundamental than a single misattribution of blame. Mor’s case against the konseptziyot is itself written under the influence of a konseptzia: the anti-settler konseptzia, which opposes Jewish communities in the West Bank as a moral stain and a burden, and a main source of Israel’s insecurity and delegitimation.