“What happened is the sad result of a difficult and prolonged process that spared no area of our lives.
Our real problem, painful as it may be, is to conduct a penetrating reckoning with ourselves.
We all created this process.
No one is blameless, and I do not exclude myself.
Each of us contributed to it in his own field.
If everyone now piles onto intelligence and turns it into the scapegoat, that will be a superficial and misguided approach.
Intelligence may possess the most current and accurate information, but if the meaning attributed to it is wrong, that information is worth very little.” Those words sound as though they were spoken after Oct.
In fact, former Mossad director Meir Amit said them shortly after the Yom Kippur War.
They capture the disturbing resemblance between what had been Israel’s defining national trauma for half a century and the catastrophe that eventually displaced it.
The similarity lies not only in the surprise and devastating opening blow.
In both cases, the failure extended beyond intelligence to decision-makers and reflected assumptions embedded more broadly across Israeli society.
That repetition is especially jarring because the trauma of 1973 never disappeared from Israeli memory.
Quite the opposite.
It became a foundational warning, particularly within the intelligence community, shaping doctrine, professional skills and generations of instructions about what analysts must and must not do.
For half a century, Israelis largely believed those lessons had been absorbed.
Senior defense officials reinforced that confidence in speeches marking the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, only shortly before Oct.
7, insisting that both professional practice and ways of thinking, particularly within intelligence, had fundamentally changed.
Then came Oct.
The comparison is not exact.
In important respects, the failure of 2023 was even more severe.
The Hamas-led attack brought a massacre, mass abductions, deep penetration into Israeli territory, destruction of communities and lengthy evacuations.
The nature of the surprise was also different.
On the eve of the 1973 war, Israeli leaders were holding urgent discussions about the possibility of an attack, and by the final day the assessment that war might be imminent had become increasingly prominent.
7, by contrast, the attack itself came as a strategic surprise, not merely its timing.
So did its scale, its principal theater and the central role played by Hamas, an enemy Israeli officials had widely regarded as relatively weak and deterred.
Uri Bar-Joseph, one of Israel’s leading scholars of the Yom Kippur War intelligence failure, draws a sharp distinction.
“In 1973, there were many voices inside Military Intelligence warning of the danger, and then-intelligence chief Eli Zeira ignored them,” he says.
7, it was not only the head of Military Intelligence who was wrong, but most of the directorate.
This was intolerable conformity at the top of the military, and it apparently existed at lower levels as well.” Israel is hardly the only country to have suffered more than one surprise attack.
But the question remains unavoidable: How could so many familiar errors and weaknesses return after 50 years of agonized discussion? One possible answer is that much of the lesson-learning after 1973 became ritual rather than genuine internalization, self-examination and reform.
“The Yom Kippur trauma should have created a protective belt against another warning failure,” Bar-Joseph says.
“In practice, five decades later, it turns out the legacy of the war was largely ceremonial and that there was no deep study of the roots of the failure.” The Agranat Commission, established by the government in November 1973 as a state commission of inquiry, was tasked with examining the intelligence available before the war, how it was assessed and the IDF’s preparedness.
Another possibility is that Israel learned the wrong lessons, or allowed crucial ones to fade.
One such lesson concerns intimate knowledge of the enemy’s culture.
Over the five decades and one day separating the two October failures, the character of Israeli intelligence changed dramatically.
Skills once considered indispensable to understanding “the other,” above all command of the enemy’s language and culture, steadily lost status and were increasingly regarded as old-fashioned.
As those capabilities eroded, analysts became more detached from the societies and movements they were supposed to understand.
In their place came increasingly abstract theoretical discourse, attempts to turn intelligence assessment into something resembling a systematic science governed by analytical models, a stronger focus on operational needs and, in recent years, growing faith in technology and the ability to process enormous quantities of information.
That problem surfaced again this year in the examination of the handling of “Jericho Wall,” the Hamas attack plan that had reached Israeli intelligence well before Oct.
(res.) Roni Numa, who was appointed to examine the handling of the document, said in June that he was astonished by the belief that technological systems could replace human language expertise.
“I was quite amazed to discover that on Oct.
7 there were very serious people who thought you could replace signal-intelligence personnel with a technological device called STT, Speech to Text, which converts speech into text,” he said.
“Instead of having an Arabist who understands the language, understands the culture and knows how to interpret what he hears, they thought a machine could replace him.” The result recalls Henry Kissinger’s observation that it is possible to know far more while understanding far less.
Locked inside the conception Three years after the Oct.
7 massacre, Israel has accumulated enough investigations to describe much of what went wrong.
The IDF’s own overarching review of its Oct.
7 inquiries identified six principal causes: a conceptual failure in how Gaza and Hamas were understood an intelligence failure failure to address the Jericho Wall plan defective organizational and operational culture a persistent gap between the threat and Israel’s response and flawed decision-making on the night of the attack.
The military also concluded that significant warning information had existed but was not properly analyzed.
Yet Israel still has no state commission of inquiry equivalent to the one created after the Yom Kippur War.
As of September 2026, the government has declined to establish one, and in July told the High Court that such a commission should not be ordered before the coming election.
The government instead pursued legislation for a differently constituted investigation, a model opposed by the parliamentary opposition.
In my view, the evidence accumulated so far shows that Oct.
7 was not merely an intelligence error.
It was a broad national failure involving political leaders, senior defense officials and parts of the media and academic establishment, all participating in an echo chamber in which the prevailing conception about Hamas hardened over time.
The failure was not fundamentally about technical problems such as who received which update or which senior officer was awakened during the night.
Its deepest source was a profound misunderstanding of the enemy.
Nor did it begin during the night between Oct.
It developed over years, becoming an intellectual lock so powerful that by the morning of Simchat Torah it may already have been almost impossible to break.
Journalist Amos Harel captured that lock-in in his book “06:29,” describing an intelligence system that kept digging for additional information during the night but failed to stop and interpret what it already possessed.
The system was active, senior officers were awake and consultations were taking place, yet the outcome was paralysis and a return to familiar assumptions.
In both 1973 and 2023, Israel misread the enemy’s intentions, but in opposite directions.
Before the Yom Kippur War, intelligence failed to understand that Egyptian President Anwar Sadat was planning a more limited operation than Israel assumed, designed largely to break the diplomatic status quo.
7, Israeli assessments assumed that if Hamas initiated a major move, it would probably remain relatively limited.
What Israel failed to grasp was that the attack was conceived on a vastly broader scale and was rooted in an ideological worldview far removed from the rational restraints Israeli analysts had projected onto Hamas.
Both cases also featured severe underestimation of the enemy, sometimes bordering on contempt, combined with deep confidence in Israel’s ability to detect and defeat any attack.
In 1971, the Israeli comedy troupe Hagashash Hahiver mocked Egypt’s supposedly absurd plan to cross the Suez Canal.
Half a century later, when the possibility of a Hamas attack from Gaza was raised with the head of Military Intelligence, his reported response was: “Let them come.” The conception before Oct.
7 rested on several interconnected layers.
At the conceptual level was the failure to understand the logic of a radical organization that Israel increasingly believed was becoming more pragmatic because of the responsibilities of governing Gaza.
That went hand in hand with an assumption that economic incentives could bend ideology to material interests, essentially projecting Israeli logic onto Hamas.
At the operational level came overconfidence in the border barrier and underestimation of the scale of any possible attack.
Israeli planning envisioned a relatively limited infiltration and tended to assume that a major confrontation, if it came, would result from miscalculation rather than a deliberate....
