The Failed Concepts That Brought Israel to October 7

One year ago today, an armed force of at least 3,000 men managed to penetrate a hostile border, overrun fixed and mobile defenses, commandeer army bases, and occupy for long hours a broad swath of Israeli territory in which they went house by house and village by village killing, burning, mutilating, raping, and abducting. For Israel, this was both an intelligence failure and a combat failure. A plot involving so many fighters and such careful and rehearsed action should not have been missed by military intelligence, and a territorial invasion, even with the element of surprise, should have been successfully resisted by a standing army well before the horrors of that Saturday reached their unfathomable nadir.

This essay will not look at either the intelligence or the combat failures. Lesson-learning in both of those domains should be straightforward enough. Beyond those limited tactical failures, however, are larger conceptual frameworks that were vigorously held onto in the years leading up to October 7 and that have not yet been entirely abandoned. These mental models weren’t just products of ignorance or applications of prejudice. They were comprehensive conceptual toolkits for assimilating new information and processing policy dilemmas. On October 7, they failed completely. An honest appraisal of them is crucial for any postwar policymaking.

Tactical lesson-learning is relatively easy because it doesn’t require us to abandon cognitive conceptions that we might have a heavy moral investment in. There might be a personnel investment, but personnel can be replaced, especially following a crisis. Bad ideas are different. Dislodging them often involves parting from something central to ourselves.