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Did Hamas’ Innovation — or Israel’s Complacency — Lead to October 7 Massacre?
Hamas terrorists kidnapping Israeli women at the Nahal Oz base near the Gaza Strip on Oct. 7, 2023. Photo: Screenshot
Israel possesses one of the world’s most sophisticated intelligence capabilities with which to obtain and provide information on its adversaries’ capabilities, intentions and actions. That intelligence serves to guide Israel’s policymakers in deciding on courses of action. Yet on October 7, Hamas was able to carry out an unprecedented attack on Israeli soil with devastating consequences.
What core intelligence challenges did Israel fail to meet in the run-up to this event?
Critically, Israeli intelligence failed to grasp the disruptive changes in Hamas’ approach to Israel — a failure that was facilitated by a related failure of organizational implementation. Explicit advance knowledge of a Hamas attack at the unit level of the intelligence apparatus was not considered valuable, so it was not translated into a competitive advantage. Drawing on public information distilled through Yakov Ben-Haim’s info-gap theory, this article analyzes these two intelligence challenges related to the October 7 attack. It also discusses a means of managing uncertainty that seeks to reduce the impact of surprises on policy outcomes.
Some elements of human affairs are fundamentally unknowable because of the vast uncertainty inherent in human behavior. Scholars of economics apply the concept of Knightian uncertainty, which addresses the difficulty of forecasting in view of the unknowability of all possible events and market innovations. But when it comes to intelligence, predictive errors can also arise from deception and denial.
If a change in the adversary’s camp is truly innovative, there is no prior experience from which probabilities can be deduced. Shackle-Popper indeterminism (SPI) is a concept in which human behavior depends on what we know. When we do not have a prior incident from which to learn and draw conclusions, undetermined elements interfere with our attempts to predict future human behavior. Since policymakers must make critical decisions in contexts that are both uncertain and limited in resources and time, intelligence is needed to reduce the uncertainty as much as possible. The question thus arises: Did Israeli intelligence fail in its core task to reduce uncertainty to the greatest extent possible in the run-up to October 7, or did we witness a disruptive terrorist “innovation” by Hamas that was almost impossible to predict?
This analysis draws on info-gap theory, which originally comes from engineering design and safety analysis. An info-gap is not simply a gap in one’s knowledge or information. It is “a gap with significant consequences for the outcome of a decision.” It describes “the disparity between what is known and what needs to be known in order to reliably and responsibly make a decision.”
Accordingly, the intelligence services’ task of reducing uncertainty has two meanings. The first is to reduce uncertainty (ignorance, ambiguity, and the potential for surprise) by increasing knowledge and understanding of situations or actors. This is the traditional understanding of intelligence. The second is to reduce vulnerability to uncertainty by managing the negative consequences of ignorance, ambiguity, or surprise on the outcome of a policy or decision.
Info-gap theory argues that uncertainty is not negative per se as long as the adverse consequences of a defined policy can be reduced. It proposes the concept of robust satisficing — a term that combines the words “satisfy” and “suffice” — which aims to enhance the robustness of policies against info-gaps with significant consequences. In such a scenario, policymakers define the minimum requirements necessary to achieve a defined goal while intelligence is tasked with constantly evaluating this policy “in terms of how large an info-gap it can tolerate and still achieve the policymaker’s stated goals.” Ideally, intelligence regularly assesses the degree to which current data, knowledge, and understanding can err or change such that a policy will continue to meet the policymaker’s defined outcome requirements. A policy is considered robust when only large surprises would have negative consequences. It has low robustness when even minor surprises affect the outcome negatively.
Concerning Hamas, Israeli policymakers’ minimum outcome requirement would have been to contain the terrorist organization in Gaza and avoid direct combat friction to the greatest extent possible to protect Israel from harm. To achieve this, Israel pursued a policy of maintaining technological and military superiority vis-à-vis Gaza concurrently with bribing Hamas to keep it “weakened and deterred.” According to the principle of robust satisficing, intelligence should have evaluated these policies against info-gaps. How much could Israel err in its understanding of Hamas’ behavior, capabilities and intentions? To what extent would Israel’s policy of technological and military superiority paired with bribing Hamas still ensure the minimum outcome requirement of containing Hamas in Gaza?
Since leaving Gaza in 2005, Israel was largely successful in mitigating the negative impact of repeated rounds of violence and rocket attacks by using Iron Dome and conducting limited military operations. We also now know that Hamas actively deceived Israel by exhibiting restraint over the years as a pretense that it was satisfied with the status quo. Thus, based on prior experience and knowledge, the policy of technological and military superiority plus bribery was considered robust. This presumably led Israeli decision-makers to tolerate info-gaps concerning unusual Hamas behavior.
Recurring conflict patterns and Hamas deception over the years reinforced a common and, in retrospect, wrong understanding by Israel’s intelligence and policymaking echelons that the country’s policies to control Gaza were sound. This ultimately made them blind to the disruptive change in Hamas’ intentions and approach that a practice of robust satisficing might have helped to counteract. As a consequence, this blindness appears to have caused them to lower the level of what needed to be known to ensure the minimum outcome requirement of containing Hamas in Gaza.
Paradoxically, when you lower the level of what needs to be known, the commitment to a policy increases and the tolerance for info-gaps grows. In an illustration of this tendency, Israeli policymakers decided to shift resources away from the Hamas problem to other areas. This included, for example, reducing the military presence at the Gaza border and halting the practice of eavesdropping on hand-held radios of Hamas militants, which was considered a waste of time. Both decisions would prove to have devastating consequences on October 7.
Israel’s “blinded” understanding of Hamas rendered new intelligence on unusual activities at the Gaza border more “tolerable,” which in turn facilitated the second failure in the run-up to October 7. Israeli intelligence failed to organizationally implement new knowledge because that knowledge was not considered sufficiently valuable to be deemed worthy of translation into a competitive advantage. Reports show that at the unit level of the Southern Command of 8200, explicit information of a pending Hamas attack existed based on the previously obtained “Jericho Walls” operation plan and mounting evidence of unusual events in Gaza. However, not only was this information dismissed “top-down” by the responsible superiors, but the highly sophisticated technological tools of Israeli intelligence failed to identify the existing signs as strong.
To return to the two meanings of reducing uncertainty: The bottom-up elements of Israeli intelligence did indeed work to reduce uncertainty and ambiguity concerning a pending attack, as described by the term’s first meaning. Tragically, they were not successful at implementing this information beyond their unit for further use. That is because Israeli intelligence failed to evaluate and reduce the negative consequences of a potential surprise on policy outcomes, which is the second meaning of reducing vulnerability to uncertainty.
Some form of organizational “top-down” barriers, facilitated by a “blinded” understanding of the situation, impeded a process of robustly satisficing the existing info-gap about unusual Hamas behavior. Again, the question is whether this organizational tolerance for non-implementation of new information for further use was facilitated because policymakers and top security officials lowered the requirements of what needed to be known to ensure the minimum outcome requirement concerning Hamas in the first place.
The Israeli security establishment and policymakers came to consider their policies of technological and military superiority vis-à-vis Gaza plus bribery of Hamas as very strong, based on prior experience and understanding. This led them to tolerate larger and larger info-gaps and eventually made them blind to the disruptive change in Hamas’s intentions and capabilities. October 7 thus arrived as a catastrophic surprise — a terrorist “innovation” that disrupted existing policies.
The top-down tolerance for info-gaps concerning Hamas seemed to contribute to the second intelligence failure of organizational implementation, by which explicit and mounting knowledge about a pending Hamas attack was not acted upon. As discussed, the practice of robustly satisficing info-gaps can help manage uncertainty and surprise, including deception by adversaries, to ensure minimum policy outcomes. A robustness question in the run-up to October 7 could have been, “How much could our knowledge and understanding about our technological superiority over Gaza and Hamas’s capabilities err without altering the final assessment of the unusually aggressive military activities at the Gaza border and, more strikingly, the obtained ‘Jericho Walls’ plan?” Had the relevant policymakers and intelligence echelons regularly challenged their understanding of existing policies, the evidence of unusual Hamas activities might have been interpreted quite differently. An attack could have been identified as not only possible but even plausible.
Stefanie Kirchweger…Stefanie Kirchweger is a PhD student at the Department of Political Studies at Bar-Ilan University, in a cotutelle agreement with the Department of Political Science at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. Her research is focused on international intelligence relations and foreign policy. A version of this article was originally published by The BESA Center.
The post Did Hamas’ Innovation — or Israel’s Complacency — Lead to October 7 Massacre? first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Former Clinton Adviser Says Harris Not ‘Sufficiently Committed to Israel and Fighting Antisemitism’
US Vice President Kamala Harris speaks during an event with leaders of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) as part of the US-ASEAN Special Summit, in Washington, DC, May 13, 2022. Photo: REUTERS/Elizabeth Frantz
Doug Schoen, a former adviser under then-US President Bill Clinton, revealed on Tuesday that he is not planning to vote for Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris to serve as the next commander-in-chief in the White House, citing her policies toward Israel and combating antisemitism as the main reasons.
During an appearance on Fox News, Schoen said he “cannot” commit to voting for Harris, stating that he is “undecided” on who he will support in the 2024 presidential race. The former Clinton pollster voiced concern about Harris’s unstable positions on Israel and the Middle East.
“At this point I cannot [vote for Harris],” Schoen said. “I would call myself undecided, at this point. But I can’t vote for her, for reasons related to her changing position and also the Middle East as we have talked about before. I do not believe she is sufficiently committed to Israel and fighting antisemitism.”
Schoen has previously criticized the Biden administration’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war.
In April, Schoen noted that the administration was under immense pressure by the left wing of the Democratic Party to “take a strong stance against the Jewish State.” He argued that the anti-Israel drift of the Democratic Party is “dangerous” and overlooks the Jewish state’s “strategic importance.” He also lamented that US President Joe Biden adopted a more pointed and adversarial “tone” toward America’s closest Middle Eastern ally.
“During this turbulent time in Israel, it is crucial that Biden prioritizes realpolitik over politics. He mustn’t cave to the political pressure he is facing from within his own party to denounce Israel forcefully,” Schoen wrote.
In May, Schoen published an op-ed in the Orange County Register, arguing that the Biden administration’s decision to halt some arms transfers to Israel hamstrung the Jewish state’s ability to eradicate the Hamas terrorist threat from the Gaza Strip. He lambasted the decision as “politically motivated” and argued that it “endangers Israeli lives.”
“By trying to prevent Israel from defeating Hamas, the Biden administration is giving Hamas more aid and support than it is giving Israel,” Schoen wrote.
Schoen’s concerns over the true extent of Harris’s support for Israel has been echoed by other supporters of the Jewish state in the weeks since she has replaced Biden at the top of the Democratic presidential ticket. Though Harris has voiced support for the Jewish state’s right to exist and self-defense, she harbors close ties to the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, which has become increasingly hostile toward the Jewish state. Harris has been under pressure from pro-Palestinian activists to break with the Biden administration by adopting a more adversarial posture toward Israel.
She has also expressed sympathy for far-left narratives that brand Israel as “genocidal.” The vice president has additionally often criticized Israel’s war effort against the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas in Gaza.
Harris also pushed the unsubstantiated narrative that Israel has intentionally withheld aid from the people of Gaza, allegedly triggering a famine.
“People in Gaza are starving. The conditions are inhumane. And our common humanity compels us to act,” Harris said. “The Israeli government must do more to significantly increase the flow of aid.”
Harris has also expressed sympathy for anti-Israel protesters on US university campuses, saying that they are “showing exactly what the human emotion should be.”
Some indicators suggest that Harris could adopt a more antagonistic approach to the Jewish state than Biden. For example, Harris urged the White House to be more “sympathetic” toward Palestinians and take a “tougher” stance against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, according to a Politico report in December. Then in March, White House aides forced Harris to tone down a speech that was too tough on Israel, according to NBC News.
However, during her speech at the final night of the Democratic National Convention last month, Harris reaffirmed her commitment to ensuring Israel’s security and vowed that her administration would always furnish the Jewish state with the arms necessary to thwart future terrorist threats.
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‘Student Intifada’: Pro-Hamas Groups to Follow 9/11 Anniversary With ‘Day of Action’
Anti-Israel demonstrators clash with New York City Police Department (NYPD) officers during a protest on April 18, 2024. Photo: Reuters Connect
National Students for Justice in Palestine (NSJP) is planning to follow up the 23rd anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks with a nationwide “Day of Action” on Thursday, Sept. 12, the group’s latest apparent evocation of Islamist terrorism in its campaigns against Israel and what it has described as the “American empire.”
“Last school year, the Student Movement for Palestine showed the world what we’re capable of,” NSJP said in a post published on X/Twitter last week, referring to the anti-Israel demonstrations which included acts of property destruction, antisemitic assault, and celebrations of terrorists its members perpetrated at colleges and universities across the US. “University repression will not stop us. Draconian speech codes will not stop us. There is only one way out: cut ties with the Zionist entity.”
The tweet featured a picture of a young man, who appeared to be Arab, concealing his face with a keffiyeh, a common practice of pro-Hamas activists who engage in unlawful activity and utter profane and antisemitic remarks at their demonstrations.
Last school year, the Student Movement for Palestine showed the world what we’re capable of.
University repression will not stop us. Draconian speech codes will not stop us.
There is only one way out: cut ties with the Zionist entity. pic.twitter.com/GNf6qVGVjh
— National Students for Justice in Palestine (@NationalSJP) September 5, 2024
NSJP has been building up anticipation of its “Day of Action” all month, calling it the continuance of a “student intifada” on Instagram on Sept. 2.
“Our universities have done everything in their power to ignore and redirect our demands for divestment, dodging accountability by suspending and surveilling students. Administrators far and wide have chosen to unleash police violence on students rather than end complicity in the Zionist occupation,” it said. “We will not rest until our universities divest. The Student Intifada continues — until divestment, until arms embargo.”
Meanwhile, the group at Pomona College last week promoted antisemitic conspiracy theories falsely accusing Israel and the US of spreading the Covid-19 virus to commit genocide and maintain “colonial” rule over people of color.
“Pandemics are a tool of the colonizer,” said an SJP pamphlet distributed during a club fair at the school, according to a Jewish students club, Haverim, that acquired a copy the document. “By bomb or by pathogen, these attacks on Palestinian life are man-made, intentional policy choices … The american [sic] state and israeli [sic] settler colony have found a dress rehearsal for more targeted genocides in their construction of today’s eugenicist normalcy wherein everyone is expected to sustain repeated covid infections indefinitely until death.”
Earlier this month, NSJP, which has been linked to Islamist terrorist organizations, publicly discussed its grand strategy of using the anti-Zionist student movement as a weapon for destroying the US in a now-deleted tweet that was posted to X/Twitter.
“Divestment is not an incrementalist goal. True divestment necessitates nothing short of the total collapse of the university structure and American empire itself,” the organization said last week. “It is not possible for imperial spoils to remain so heavily concentrated in the metropole and its high-cultural repositories without the continuous suppression of populations that resist the empire’s expansion; to divest from this is to undermine and eradicate America as we know it.”
The tweet was the latest in a series of progressive revelations of SJP’s revolutionary goals and its apparent plans to amass armies of students and young people for a long campaign of subversion against US institutions, including the economy, military, and higher education. Like past anti-American movements, SJP has also been fixated on the presence and prominence of Jews in American life and the US’s alliance with Israel, the world’s only Jewish state.
On the same day the tweet was posted, Columbia University’s most strident pro-Hamas organization was reported to be distributing literature calling on students to join the terror group’s movement to destroy Israel during this year’s convocation ceremony.
“This booklet is part of a coordinated and intentional effort to uphold the principles of the thawabit and the Palestinian resistance movement overall by transmitting the words of the resistance directly,” said a pamphlet distributed by Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), a Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) spinoff, to incoming freshmen. “This material aims to build popular support for the Palestinian war of national liberation, a war which is waged through armed struggle.”
Other sections of the pamphlet were explicitly Islamist, invoking the name of “Allah, the most gracious” and referring to Hamas as the “Islamic Resistance Movement.” Proclaiming, “Glory to Gaza that gave hope to the oppressed, that humiliated the ‘invincible’ Zionist army,” it says its purpose is to build an army of Muslims worldwide.
Middle East experts have long suspected that foreign agents are conspiring with SJP chapters — and its spinoffs — in the US to convulse college campuses and lobby for the disintegration of the US-Israel relationship, an outcome that would benefit Middle Eastern powers such as Iran, whose leaders regularly call for the destruction of both the US and Israel.
In July, US National Intelligence Director Avril Haines issued a statement outlining how Iran has encouraged and provided financial support to the anti-Israel campus protest movement and explaining that it is part of a larger plan to “undermine confidence in our democratic institutions.” However, Haines stopped short of arguing that there a hostile fifth column in the US seeking to subvert it from within, arguing that “Americans who are being targeted by this Iranian campaign may not be aware that they are interacting with our receiving support from a foreign government.”
Nevertheless, Haines confirmed that US intelligence agencies have “observed actors tied to Iran’s government posing as activists online, seeking to encourage protests, and even providing financial support to protesters.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post ‘Student Intifada’: Pro-Hamas Groups to Follow 9/11 Anniversary With ‘Day of Action’ first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Republican Jewish Coalition Announces $10 Million Anti-Harris Ad Buy in Bid to Bolster Trump Support
Matt Brooks, CEO of the Republican Jewish Coalition, holds a kippah in support of former US President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump as he speaks on Day 2 of the Republican National Convention, at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, US, July 16, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Mike Segar
The Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) announced a $10 million ad buy targeted at the US Jewish community and in favor of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump amid new polling showing he is trailing his Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris, significantly among Jewish voters.
“This is, by far, the largest and most comprehensive effort ever to turn out the Jewish vote for President Donald J. Trump,” RJC CEO Matt Brooks said in a statement on Monday announcing the ad buy.
“Never before have American Jews felt so unsafe,” Brooks continued. “Never before has antisemitism in the United States been so prevalent. Never before has Israel’s survival been so threatened. Never before has there been a candidate for president [Harris] that embraces and defends the antisemitic, anti-Israel ‘Squad.’”
As a result, the RJC is launching the $10 million ad buy opposing Harris, the incumbent US vice president, that will first air during Tuesday night’s presidential debate between Harris and Trump, who served as president from 2017-2021.
The ad seeks to link Harris with members of a group of progressive lawmakers in the US House colloquially known as the “squad” — including Reps. Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. It claims the members of the Squad are “antisemitic” and “anti-Israel” and juxtaposes pro-Hamas protesters chanting in favor of an “intifada revolution” with Harris saying she understands the concerns of the protesters.
The message of the ad is summed up in the RJC’s press release, which argues, “Kamala Harris is no ordinary Democrat. She stands with the Squad, not with us.”
The ad buy comes amid newly announced bad polling news for the RJC. On Monday, the Jewish Democratic Council of America (JDCA) released polling showing that Harris is leading Trump among Jewish voters by a 47-point margin — 72 percent to 25 percent.
“Trump clearly has animus for the overwhelming majority of American Jews. This poll confirms that the feeling is mutual,” said Halie Soifer, CEO of the JDCA. “The data is clear: Jewish Americans do not want a Trump second term. If we get Jewish voters to the polls, we will win in November.”
Harris’s net favorability was found to be 13 points higher among Jewish voters than US President Joe Biden’s was, rising from +25 to +38.
Meanwhile, when prioritizing issues, only 9 percent of American Jews said Israel is their top issue, putting it 10th out of 12 issue options, according to the poll. Among Reform Jews it is ranked last and among Orthodox Jews it is ranked fourth.
The results contradicted a July poll conducted by pollster Richard Baris showed that Jewish voters prefer Harris over Trump by a narrow margin of 52.7 percent to 45.9 percent.
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