As in 1973, Israel’s defense establishment failed to update its understanding of its adversary in 2023.

Since 2023, it has become routine for Israeli political discourse, in the days leading up to October 7, to apportion blame for the disaster. The most horrific attack on Jews since the Holocaust is commonly ascribed to an illness called “the conceptzia” (the concept). What is the conceptzia? It is the conceptual framework that Israeli leaders and senior members of the country’s intelligence and defense communities adopt to guide their thinking about national security. Once adopted, it leads decision-makers to reject or ignore new information that does not accord with the framework (a process that, at the individual level, psychologists call “cognitive dissonance”). In Israel, it is enough to accuse someone of laboring under a conceptzia’s delusions to win an argument concerning intelligence or national security matters. No further explanations, let alone evidence, are needed. 

Exactly 53 years have passed since the last time that Israelis blamed a conceptzia for a national security failure. The coordinated Egyptian-Syrian invasion on the morning of October 6, 1973—a calamity known to Israelis as the Yom Kippur War and to Arabs as the Ramadan War. During the months leading to that dramatic event, Israel’s intelligence community assessed that their Arab adversaries would not attack until they acquired the airpower and tanks necessary to match Israel’s superior air and armored forces. In the absence of any data indicating that Egypt and Syria were even close to matching Israel’s superiority in these realms, all indications that the military forces of the two countries were preparing to cross the Suez Canal and the Golan Heights were rejected as incredible. 

One of the first studies of the 1973 surprise, conducted in the late 1970s by Brig. Gen. (ret.) Zvi Lanir, a veteran of Israel’s Military Intelligence Directorate, differentiated between two kinds of surprises: “situational surprises” (simple failures to anticipate developments), and “basic surprises” (when an important development occurs despite a widely-accepted theory or conceptual framework, according to which the relevant development could not and would not happen).     

So, what conceptzia did the Israeli intelligence community adopt in the months and years before October 7, 2023? First, it assumed that Hamas was a rational actor that could calculate risks and costs; that it was well aware of the preponderance of power that Israel enjoys; that its focus was on stabilizing its rule over Gaza; and finally, that as long as its minimal requirements for sustaining this rule would be met, it would not take measures—like a major attack on Israel’s southern communities—that might endanger such hold.  

This conceptzia was not merely theoretical; rather, ever since Hamas took control over Gaza in 2007, the framework became the driver of almost all decisions and measures that Israel implemented in its conduct vis-à-vis that area. Thus, Israel took care of Gaza’s water, fuel, electricity, and environmental needs. Moreover, Gazans who required medical procedures that could not be provided in Gaza were often treated and cared for in Israel, through a process coordinated between the Hamas-led Gaza Ministry of Health and Israeli hospitals.  

Equally dramatic was the care Israel took of Gaza’s budgetary needs, lobbying for and facilitating Qatar’s financial support of Gaza and allowing up to 20,000 Gazans access to employment opportunities in the communities of southern Israel, some of the same communities that thousands of Gazans brutally attacked on the morning of October 7. Indeed, this Israeli approach had some semi-farcical features. Thus, as the Israeli Shekel continued to be the basis of many deals in Gaza, any transaction involving the use of cash required an exchange of currency carrying the face of a different Israeli or Zionist leader.  

The conceptzia, to be sure, was never intended to make Gaza prosperous. Israel deemed the possibility of a successful Hamas-ruled Gaza too dangerous, since it would encourage West Bank Palestinians to emulate it and replace the Fatah-led secular-nationalist leaders with Hamas or a more Islamist political formation. Instead, Israeli measures were designed to achieve a more modest objective: to sustain a minimal level of quality of life in Gaza that most Gazans could accept as just tolerable, hence reducing their motivation to challenge their Hamas-led regime.  

Two additional phenomena were common to the 1973 and 2023 conceptzias and further contributed to their resilience. First, in both cases the conceptzia served a grand-strategic purpose. In the first case, it supported a new defense doctrine called “defensible borders.” This doctrine was adopted soon after Israel’s triumph in the 1967 Six-Day War but was driven by the trauma of the weeks prior to the war, when many Israelis feared that the Nasser-led Arab war coalition threatened their very existence. 

A little more than two decades after the Holocaust, Israel feared that its pre-1967 territory was indefensible from external attack. Consequently, the Israeli government insisted its troops should not withdraw to pre-1967 border positions even in exchange for peace. What precisely that meant was never clarified; what appeared instead was a broad consensus that Israel’s future borders could not return to their pre-1967 lines and that until the neighboring Arab states accepted these parameters, the IDF should station its troops comfortably along its post-1967 positions.

Similarly, the pre-October 7, 2023 conceptzia was meant to serve a grand-strategic objective of Israel’s Likud-led governing coalition: to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state and ditch the two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict. What better evidence could there be that such a solution was no longer viable if the separation between Gaza and the West Bank became permanent? That, indeed, is what explains the remarkable propensity of some of Israel’s most right-wing leaders to argue prior to the horrors of October 7 that Hamas was an asset and its hold over Gaza could be tolerated, as it would not incur a high cost for Israel. To believe this, Israel’s defense and intelligence communities needed to convince themselves that Hamas was a rational actor that could calculate costs and would continue to be deterred by Israel’s power preponderance, of which Hamas was fully aware.

In turn, Hamas’ rationality was inferred by Israelis from the manner in which Hamas leaders conducted themselves in many interactions, including some that failed. Such interactions included the Hamas-Fatah negotiations conducted in Israeli prisons in May-June 2006 that produced the so-called “Prisoners’ Documents”; Hamas’ negotiations with Israeli authorities that resulted in the infamous 2011 Gilad Shalit deal that released Yahya Sinwar, the architect of the October 7 attacks; and finally, the more recent negotiations facilitated by Egyptian intelligence over a long-term Hamas-Israel armistice agreement (the Hudna). The cumulative effect of these experiences was to convince Israelis that they understood Hamas; it took October 7 to disprove that proposition.

What messages did Israel miss during the years and months leading to the 1973 and 2023 debacles? In 1973, Israel misread Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s intentions, allowing him to launch a war that Israeli intelligence assessments had deemed unlikely. Sadat had signaled that Egypt was willing to pay a high price to end Israel’s occupation of its sovereign territory in the Sinai Peninsula and to avert the existential threat embodied by the IDF’s positioning of its forces along the Suez Canal, just over 60 miles from Cairo. That message, communicated by Egypt’s decision to relocate a million of its citizens from the canal area and open the 1970–71 War of Attrition, fell on Israeli deaf ears.

Sadat also adopted a more limited grand strategy, abandoning Egypt’s previous goal to decisively defeat Israel for a “war of limited aims.” A more limited Egyptian military campaign combined with other Arab powers’ exercise of the “oil weapon” could cause the Israelis sufficient pain to convince them that Egypt would never accept its Sinai occupation and restore Egypt’s sovereignty over the peninsula.

Moreover, Sadat revolutionized Egypt’s military at the operational level. If Egypt could not build an air force that could match Israel’s, it would deny Israel air superiority by building a robust mobile anti-air defense. Similarly, if Egypt could not build a tank force capable of matching Israel’s, its armed forces would saturate the battlefield with masses of infantry and vehicles carrying anti-tank rockets and missiles.

Both solutions had limitations: Egypt’s ground forces had to avoid advancing beyond the range of its new, robust mobile air-defense umbrella, and its infantry had to expose themselves by advancing within range of Israel’s tanks. However, these constraints were not debilitating because the required changes matched Egypt’s more modest grand strategy.

Israel’s failure to comprehend the extent, meaning, and ramifications of Hamas’ strategic evolution in the years prior to October 7, 2023 was equally fateful. What Israel failed to understand in this case was that Hamas’ failure to reach a Hudna with Israel and lift “the siege” of Gaza (that Israel and Egypt imposed after Hamas took control of Gaza in 2007) meant that its leaders’ were willing to pay a very high price to lift the siege by other means.

Israel also failed to appreciate Hamas’ transformation of its military arm from an insurgent force to a more professionalized army of platoons, battalions, and brigades. This new command structure enabled greater coordination and the adoption of a modest combined-arms approach. Better coordination allowed Hamas to do what Israel considered impossible: breaching the fence separating Gaza from Israel in more than 100 locations almost simultaneously on October 7. Hamas also deployed drone and marine units to circumvent Israeli barriers. Finally, Hamas’ tunnel system turned out to be far more extensive and elaborate than Israel had previously assessed, providing it with the capacity to sustain itself throughout a prolonged Israeli military assault.  

As with the 1973 strategic surprise, the combined effect of Hamas’ changes to its modus operandi in the years before October 7 gave it a multi-layered capacity to spring a “basic surprise” on Israel. Moreover, in both cases, Israeli intelligence agencies refused to abandon their conceptzias even when an adversary made little effort to hide its strategic and tactical transformations. This was definitely the case with the higher echelons of the Israeli intelligence agencies’ arrogant dismissal of reports from young female IDF soldiers monitoring Hamas activities on the other side of the fence, as well as other reported warnings about an imminent attack.

The analysis provided here should not be taken to mean that the construction of conceptual frameworks (conceptzias) must be abandoned. Such frameworks are necessary to make sense of the flood of data that intelligence agencies collect every day and night. Instead, two lessons should be drawn: first, avoiding “basic surprises” requires repeatedly questioning and re-examining the premises and assumptions on which these conceptual frameworks are based. 

Second, it is not enough to create elements within an intelligence community that are tasked with questioning the validity of the adopted conceptzias. Rather, given the proven resilience of such frameworks, we must cultivate such bodies and provide them with additional defenses against those who feel threatened by the necessary questioning. Otherwise, another “basic surprise” is only a matter of time.

About the Author: Shai Feldman 

Shai Feldman is the Raymond Frankel chair of Israeli politics and society at Brandeis University’s Crown Center for Middle East Studies. From 2005 to 2019, Shai founded and served as director of the Crown Center. From 1997 to 2005, he served as head of Tel Aviv University’s Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies. He was a senior research associate at the Jaffee Center and, from 2019 to 2022, he served as president of Sapir College in Sha’ar Hanegev, Israel. Since 1997, he has also served as a board associate of Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.

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