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October 7 Was an Intelligence Catastrophe; Humility Will Be Required to Repair It
An Israeli soldier stands guard at moshav Netiv HaAsara which borders the Gaza Strip, in the aftermath of the deadly October 7 attack by terrorists from Palestinian Islamist antisemitic terror group Hamas, in southern Israel, November 19, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Amir Cohen
Israeli intelligence failures — particularly those leading to the failure to warn of a large-scale attack, as suffered by Israel in the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023 — are typically followed by the creation of investigative committees that scrutinize intelligence processes, highlight gaps and vulnerabilities, and recommend mechanisms to prevent future failures.
But without a profound cultural shift within the intelligence organization and its personnel — specifically, the integration of humility into the organizational DNA — these mechanisms will not deliver the desired outcome.
Following the end of the current war, and after it receives its historical name (which probably will not be its current name, “Swords of Iron”), a State Commission of Inquiry will likely be established, and be tasked with providing accountability for the events leading up to the Hamas attack on the Jewish state on October 7, 2023.
One of the commission’s main areas of interest will be intelligence, which has been at the center of discussion in the weeks since the barbaric attack by Hamas. The Commission of Inquiry will investigate intelligence collection systems, research and analysis processes, the relationship between agencies in the Israeli intelligence community, the warning process and flow of information, the connection between the intelligence and political echelons, and more.
As always, after the committee examines the sequence of events, it will highlight positive aspects and strengths — but, as is often the more central aspect of such a commission’s work, it will primarily focus on the intelligence lapses that affected operational preparedness and contributed to the Israeli failure to anticipate and prepare for the Hamas attack.
The commission will make recommendations in various areas and address deficiencies in action that need to be overcome, as well as aspects related to responsibility and authority, organizational structure, and work processes among different apparatuses and units in the Israeli intelligence community. Some of the commission’s findings, it can be assumed, will concern the faulty “conception” or consensus within the intelligence community preceding the Hamas attack, similar to that found by its predecessor to have existed prior to the Yom Kippur War 50 years ago.
Within this framework, solutions and mechanisms challenging intelligence discourse will be offered. This occurred in the past with the establishment of the institutionalized “Red Team” (“Ipcha Mistabra“), which was tasked with generating alternative thinking to that of the consensus intelligence assessment; and the “Different Opinion” mechanism, which allowed any intelligence officer to present his or her assessment to the intelligence echelons regardless of rank or command hierarchy. However, none of these measures prevented the massive intelligence failures of October 7.
Research literature in the field of intelligence, both theoretical and empirical, is filled with learned and in-depth analyses of how intelligence agencies fail in their assessments. Sometimes there are gaps in collection and there are almost always gaps in analysis; together they adversely affect operational preparedness. Many have analyzed the cognitive biases leading to assessment failures. Some have focused on developing mechanisms to overcome these biases, such as structured analytical techniques, creating processes with built-in challenges to fundamental assumptions, diversifying those involved in intelligence work to present interpretations from different perspectives, and so on.
These ideas may be good, but none of them will lead to the necessary improvement without incorporating the fundamental component required by intelligence personnel and organizations: humility.
As long as the culture of the intelligence organization and the individuals who comprise it fail to internalize this characteristic into their professional DNA, the technical mechanisms designed to generate discourse challenging fundamental assumptions and prevailing interpretations — visible though they may be on the surface — will be limited in terms of their weight and influence on the final product of the assessment.
What does humility mean in this context? Maimonides defined humility as “the middle road between arrogance and self-abasement.” In other words, it does not require one to be hesitant or evade professional responsibility (self-abasement). For generations, intelligence personnel have been educated to express their opinions, innovate, and think, and rightly so. The role of intelligence is to generate statements that contribute to operational assessment and enable decision makers to prioritize, decide, and navigate at all levels, from the national level to the military tactical field level. Humility in this context does not mean creating an intelligence system that lacks backbone and self-confidence and hides behind convoluted and ambiguous formulations.
The reality is more complex. Humility means refraining from arrogance — that is, it is a constant conscious choice to enter into unsolved or dissonant areas despite the natural instinct to avoid such areas. Faced with the natural tendency of humans (including the author of this article) to gravitate towards harmonious places where one is on solid, familiar ground, intelligence humility requires, as expressed by an educational sage, “to agree to dwell in the realm of questioning.”
Former US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld spoke about the concept of the “unknown unknown.” In the realm of things that humans do not know, the simpler area is things we know we don’t know (the “known unknown”). In other words, we know there is a gap in information, so we understand that attention should be given to either fill the gap or at least be cautious in our decision-making due to incomplete information. These are areas where, from an intelligence perspective, there is often a high awareness, such as coverage gaps or accessibility gaps, and they are mostly an integral part of the intelligence assessment processes.
The more challenging problem is in areas where we don’t know what we don’t know (the “unknown unknown”). These are interpretations of existing pieces of information that might be considered peculiar or unusual. This also involves the consideration of scenarios that not only would not be defined as a possibly dangerous course of action in military assessment but would not even be considered scenarios to be evaluated. These are the “unknown unknowns” from which intelligence surprises often come.
In many cases throughout history, and apparently also with the recent Hamas attack, information was available, and there were even some who were willing to think in a dissonant way about it that contradicted the more comfortable interpretation. But in retrospect, the entire security sector and intelligence community failed to create a situation where the information received the correct interpretation and/or was translated into operational readiness in accordance with that interpretation.
As described above, in the Israeli intelligence community there are many mechanisms ostensibly designed to allow a variety of interpretations, and it is reasonable to assume that interpretations willing to accept existing information did arise. However, the results teach us that humility, the basic component that can provide the proper attention to conflicting interpretations, was lacking in the system. Humility is a fundamental characteristic that affords the willingness to break systemic thought patterns and be open to interpretations that are not the consensus and likely will require a profound change in perceptions and actions.
It should be emphasized that there is no intention of letting any hypothetical scenario divert military force employment and deployment from end to end. It is self-evident that these processes should be built and prioritized in the face of an assumed scenario, based to a large extent on intelligence and geo-strategic analysis. However, an organizational and personal spirit of humility will lead to a significant tuning of the development of these scenarios, their diversification, and the addition of shadings that the absence of humility prevents from appearing. Finally, it should always be remembered that intelligence cannot be a condition for operational preparedness but should support and assist it.
An examination of the lessons learned from the intelligence failures discussed by the Agranat Commission, which investigated the Yom Kippur War, reveals that two of the main factors that contributed to the failure in assessment were a lack of humility, as defined in this article, and an overinflated confidence in the assessment of our forces’ capability to stop the threat. There was also found to be conformism in intelligence assessment. Even though there was, on the surface, room for different opinions, they didn’t influence the final and official “Israeli Military Intelligence Corps position.” For all the mechanisms intended to “save” the organization from being captive to a conception, both existing and those to be established in the wake of the current war, the intelligence community needs to be trained and educated to approach intelligence assessments through a lens of humility.
Dr. Natanel Flamer is a senior lecturer in the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at Bar-Ilan University and senior researcher at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies (BESA Center). He is the author of “Hamas Intelligence Warfare Against Israel”, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. Dr. Flamer specializes in intelligence, terrorism, and asymmetrical warfare in the Middle East. A version of this article was originally published by The BESA Center.
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Watchdog Launches Campaign to Warn of Pro-Hamas Faculty Groups Fueling Campus Antisemitism
A pro-Hamas demonstrator uses a megaphone at Columbia University, on the one-year anniversary of Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack, amid the ongoing Israel-Hamas conflict, in New York City, US, Oct. 7, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Mike Segar
Higher education antisemitism watchdog AMCHA Initiative has launched a “National Campaign to Combat Faculty Antisemitism,” which aims to bring awareness to the correlation between increases in antisemitic incidents on college campuses and the presence of Faculty for Justice in Palestine (FJP) chapters that act as “foot-soldiers” for the anti-Israel movement.
As The Algemeiner has previously reported, FJP is a spinoff of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), a group with links to Islamist terrorist organizations. FJP chapters have been cropping up at colleges since Hamas’s massacre across southern Israel last Oct. 7, and throughout the 2023-2024 academic year, its members, which include faculty employed by the most elite US colleges, fostered campus unrest, circulated antisemitic cartoons, and advocated severing ties with Israeli companies and institutions of higher education.
In September, AMCHA published a groundbreaking new study which showed that FJP is fueling antisemitic hate crimes, efforts to impose divestment on endowments, and the collapse of discipline and order on college campuses. Unlike many studies on campus antisemitism, AMCHA Initiative researchers drew their conclusions from quantitative rather than qualitative, data, which tend to rely on anecdotes and self-reported responses. Using data analysis, they said they were able to establish a correlation between a school’s hosting an FJP chapter and anti-Zionist and antisemitic activity. For example, the researchers found that the presence of FJP on a college campuses increased by seven times “the likelihood of physical assaults and Jewish students” and increased by three times the chance that a Jewish student would be subject to threats of violence and death.
FJP, AMCHA’s researchers added, also “prolonged” the duration of “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” protests on college campuses, in which students occupied a section of campus illegally and refused to leave unless administrators capitulated to demands for a boycott of Israel. They said that such demonstrations lasted over four and a half times longer where FJP faculty — who, they noted, spent 9.5 more days protesting than those at non-FJP schools — were free to influence and provide logistic and material support to students. Additionally, FJP facilitated the proposing and adopting of student government resolutions demanding adoption of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement — which aims to isolate Israel culturally, financially, and diplomatically as the first steps towards its destruction. Wherever FJP was, the researchers said, BDS was “4.9 times likely to pass” and “nearly 11 times more likely to be included in student demands,” evincing, they continued, that FJP plays an outsized role in radicalizing university students at the more than 100 schools — including Harvard University, Brown University, Princeton University, the University of Michigan, and Yale University — where it is active.
AMCHA is now converting scholarship to action by sending over 170 presidents of colleges with an active FJP chapter a letter, signed by over 120 nonprofit and academic groups, which outlines the imminent threat FJP poses to Jewish students and university life. Signed by groups such as Alliance of Blacks and Jews, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, and the World Jewish Congress, the missive calls on college presidents to create “safeguards” which protect not only the physical safety of Jewish students but the university’s mission to be a haven for scholarship and the pursuit of truth.
“The primary mission of FJP chapters is to promote on their campuses an academic boycott of Israel — a boycott whose implementation denies your own students and faculty crucial educational opportunities and academic freedom and can’t help but incite animus and violence towards Jewish members of your campus community,” the letter says, noting that FJP is the project of the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) group, which is affiliated with Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine — all internationally designated terrorist groups.
It continues, “Faculty members should be free to speak their mind and to advocate for the positions that they support. However, it is essential for universities to establish robust safeguards and enforcement mechanisms to prevent those faculty members from using their academic positions and departmental affiliations to promote ideologically motivated activism that directly targets their own students and colleagues — your own campus community members — for harm.”
On Tuesday, The Algemeiner spoke with AMCHA founder and executive director Tammi Rossman-Benjamin about what inspired the new campaign. She explained that since last Oct. 7, experts and media outlets have focused their energy on tracking and reporting on the outrageous behavior of pro-Hamas students — as well as the administrators who coddled them — but neglected studying the extent to which their teachers use the classroom to inflame their passions against Israel and Jews. For example, she noted that one of the most insidious behaviors of pro-Hamas professors is instructing students in methods for concealing the antisemitic roots of anti-Zionist activism by denying that Zionism is a component of Jewish identity at all. Such a rationale, she said, arms pro-Hamas students with an ostensible academic argument which, despite being contrary to the opinions of the vast majority of the world’s Jews, allows them to engage in antisemitic behavior while denying that they are doing so.
Using a phrase popularized by millennials, Rossman-Benjamin said that this strategy is effectively the act of “gaslighting”: the insistence that an account of one’s observed behavior is fictional or imagined even as they continue it, causing them to question their sanity and perhaps concede, unsuspectingly, to further victimization.
“One of the important functions of these groups is to give academic legitimacy to the notion that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism, and that’s a hugely important trope being trafficked on campuses right now,” Rossman-Benjamin said. “So when scholars say that ‘anti-Zionism is not antisemitism,’ how could it be otherwise? When faculty, [anti-Zionist] Jewish faculty say that ‘Zionism has nothing to do with Judaism,’ who is anyone to say otherwise?’ When faculty are the ones to say that Jews who report being subject to antisemitism that is motivated by anti-Zionism are in reality bad actors attempting to quell free speech of pro-Palestinian activists, who can argue with that? If a faculty member or organization claims that, it seems true to someone whose knowledge of the issue is only surface level. Essentially, what they are doing is giving academic legitimacy to gaslighting.”
Rossman-Benjamin explained that in addition to denying their antisemitism, anti-Zionist faculty argue that it is protected by the intellectual and academic freedoms granted to professors. However, promoting ethnic hatred, in her view, disqualifies anti-Zionist professors from those protections and privileges, as they are the exclusive rewards of legitimate scholars who advance knowledge and thereby reduce prejudice and bigotry. She added that if university presidents cannot make such an important discernment then lawmakers must intervene and do so on their behalf.
“Congress should come in and tell universities to put in place and enforce safeguards and that they will lose their federal funding if they don’t,” she concluded. “If they don’t, I’m afraid that, in short order, universities in the United States will no longer be welcome to Jewish students or faculty.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Sia Dedicates ‘Titanium’ Performance to Nova Survivors at Star-Studded Jewish Event
Sia performing at Anti-Defamation League’s 30th annual “In Concert Against Hate” on Nov. 18, 2024. Photo: Provided/Getty
Grammy-nominated Australian singer Sia performed on Monday night a slow rendition of her hit song “Titanium” in honor of survivors of the Nova music festival massacre that took place in southern Israel last year.
The performance took place at the Anti-Defamation League’s 30th annual “In Concert Against Hate,” a star-studded event inside the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC. It included remarks by America actor Blair Underwood and performances by Israeli singer Eden Golan of her original song “October Rain,” which she had to rewrite with different lyrics to perform at the 2024 Eurovision Song Contest under the title “Hurricane,” and a rendition of “Oseh Shalom” by the National Symphony Orchestra. The event’s emcee was Jewish-American actor Ben Stiller and attendees included Jewish activists, philanthropists, and Jewish leaders.
Sia, who originally recorded “Titanium” with producer and DJ David Guetta, dedicated her performance on Monday night to survivors of the Hamas-led terrorist attack that took place at the Nova music festival in Re’im, Israel, on Oct. 7, 2023. The song includes lyrics such as “Machine gun, fired at the ones who run…” She sings in the chorus: “I’m bulletproof, nothing to lose/Fire away, fire away/Ricochet, you take your aim/Fire away, fire away/You shoot me down, but I won’t fall/I am titanium.”
Sia was introduced on stage by Nova survivor Danielle Gelbaum, who said the singer’s music “gave me the opportunity to know that I will dance and I am dancing again. And tonight, we will dance again.” Gelbaum said on stage that her first time seeing Sia in concert was in Israel in 2016 with her older sister, who also survived the Nova music festival terrorist attack last year. She had the opportunity to met Sia earlier this year at an exhibit in Los Angeles dedicated to the deadly Nova attack. Survivors of the massacre — in which hundreds were murdered and 40 others were taken as hostages — also joined Sia on stage after her performance, which was accompanied by the National Symphony Orchestra.
The singer last performed in Israel in 2016 and was one of hundreds in the entertainment industry who signed an open letter in 2022 rejecting a cultural boycott of Israel. Sia met with Golan backstage at the event on Monday night and the Israeli singer shared a photo of them together on Instagram.
During his opening remarks on stage, Stiller talked about the rise of antisemitism in the world and joked about hiding his Jewish heritage — before he began listing the several Jewish characters he has played on screen. “It’s a very tough time in the world right now. So much anxiety, uncertainty. So much hate in the world,” he said. “But tonight we’re going to battle hate with a healthy dose of hope.”
Music executive Scooter Braun, whose clients include Justin Bieber and Ariana Grande, was honored at Monday night’s event with the ADL’s Spotlight Award, for his work in bringing an exhibit about the Nova massacre to the United States. The grandson of Holocaust survivors, he said, “I grew up with the idea of ‘Never again.’ Never again will we walk to our deaths; never again will we be scared.”
“That training — I never thought that I’d have to put it into my everyday life, into my work,” added Braun, whose maternal grandparents met at an ADL event. “These Nova survivors have given me the greatest gift. Because my whole life I was taught ‘Never again’ and something changed after I met these kids. Because they live by this mantra, ‘We will dance again’ … I want to say, again we will be strong, and again we will be proud and again we will dance. Again and again and again.”
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US Sen. Chris Van Hollen Accuses Israel of ‘Ethnic Cleansing’ in Northern Gaza
US Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) speaks to media during a Senate vote, at the US Capitol, in Washington, DC, May 2, 2024. Photo: Graeme Sloan/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect
US Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) has slammed the Biden administration for continuing to support Israel and accused the Jewish state of committing “ethnic cleansing” in northern Gaza.
During a recent interview with anti-Israel journalist Mehdi Hasan, Van Hollen argued that Biden undermined “American values” by continuing to send arms to the Jewish state. He bemoaned Biden’s “deeply frustrating” refusal to break with Jerusalem and his support of the “super right-wing racist government” of Israel.
“I have, as you said, pushed the president to do a lot more. He’s essentially given [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu] and the super right-wing racist government of people like [National Security Minister Itamar] Ben-Gvir and [Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich] a blind check, right?” Van Hollen said.
The senator accused Israel of withholding aid from Gaza and only sending in a “trickle” of food and supplies into the war-torn enclave. He also lamented the so-called “indiscriminate” bombing of civilians in Gaza and suggested that Biden should not continue to send Israel more arms.
Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist group which rules Gaza, launched the ongoing conflict with its invasion of and massacre across southern Israel last Oct. 7. Israel responded with a military campaign aimed at freeing the hostages and dismantling Hamas’s military and governing capabilities in neighboring Gaza.
Israel says it has gone to unprecedented lengths to try and avoid civilian casualties, noting its efforts to evacuate areas before it targets them and to warn residents of impending military operations with leaflets, text messages, and other forms of communication. However, Hamas has in many cases prevented people from leaving, according to the Israeli military.
Another challenge for Israel is Hamas’s widely recognized military strategy of embedding its terrorists within Gaza’s civilian population and commandeering civilian facilities like hospitals, schools, and mosques to run operations, direct attacks, and store weapons.
Israeli Ambassador to the UN Danny Danon said last month that Israel has delivered over 1 million tons of aid, including 700,000 tons of food, to Gaza since it launched its military operation a year ago. He also noted that Hamas terrorists often hijack and steal aid shipments while fellow Palestinians suffer.
The Israeli government has ramped up the supply of humanitarian aid into Gaza in recent weeks under pressure from the United States, which has expressed concern about the plight of civilians in the war-torn enclave.
Beyond humanitarian aid, Van Hollen lambasted the Biden administration for refusing to “hold the Netanyahu government accountable” after it passed legislation last month to ban the controversial United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) from operating in Israel and stopping Israeli authorities from cooperating with the organization.
Since the start of the war in October last year, Israel has said that UNRWA has been deeply infiltrated by Hamas in Gaza, accusing some of its staff of taking part in the Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel. The Israeli government and research organizations have publicized findings showing numerous UNRWA-employed teachers were directly involved in the attack, while many others openly celebrated it.
Hasan asked Van Hollen if he agreed with the characterization of the Israel-Hamas war as a “genocide,” to which the senator responded that he “doesn’t know the answer to that.” However, the lawmaker asserted that Israel’s evacuation of civilians from northern Gaza is tantamount to an “ethnic cleansing” campaign.
Van Hollen, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, called on Democrats to “speak out more” on the ongoing humanitarian situation in Gaza. He cautioned that the incoming Trump administration could “greenlight” the Israeli government to expand settlement construction in the West Bank, a practice which he claims amounts to “pushing Palestinians off their land.”
In the year following the Hamas massacre of 1,200 people throughout southern Israel, Van Hollen has grown increasingly adversarial toward the Jewish state. On Tuesday, the senator announced that he would support a joint resolution to enact an arms embargo on Israel, accusing the Jewish state of causing a reprehensible humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
“Recipients of security assistance must facilitate and not arbitrarily restrict the delivery of humanitarian assistance into war zones where US weapons are being used, and American-supplied weapons must be used in accordance with international humanitarian law. The Netanyahu government is violating both of these requirements in Gaza,” Van Hollen said in a statement.
“President Biden has failed to hold Netanyahu accountable — ignoring US law and undercutting his own stated policies as well as America’s interests and values. Doing so undermines American global leadership and is a disservice to the American people, the people of Israel, and people throughout the Middle East,” he added.
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