Why did October 7 Happen?

Groupthink, Bias, Careerism and Moral Failure Led to Disaster

I have been out for a few weeks – visiting my daughter and family who are teaching Hebrew in a Jewish day school in the New York area.   I little time to write but had plenty of time to think about a gnawing question that still remains - why was the IDF was not prepared for October 7?  More specifically, with all that happened on October 6 and the night between the 6^th and 7^th – why was there so little sense of urgency amongst the General Staff?  So much information has leaked out over the last few months that a clearer picture of what information was available and what the reactions of senior commanders were that gives us a better chance of understanding why things failed so spectacularly.

We won’t rehash everything but here are a few items that have leaked out:

-          On the night of Oct 6-7, over one hundred (some reports of up to 1,000) Hamas fighters changed their SIM cards from Palestinian to Israeli ones (how they got Israeli ones is another question).   The General Staff of the IDF was informed about this.

-          The Southern command on the same night requested from the Air Force that the attack helicopters that were on call be moved to bases closer to the Gaza border.   They were not.

-          The Golani brigade which was awakened at 11pm was then told not to come close to the border fence and were sent back to their beds.

-          On the day of October 7 the air force was not activated until 2pm.  We were always told that jets were in the air patrolling 24/7 – I guess that was not true.

-          No one was kidnapped from Kibbutz Kfar Aza until 9:30am – a full three hours after fighting started.  That shows the importance of the tardiness of the air force.

-          None of pre-attack information was told to the civilian/political leadership to whom the General Staff has a legal obligation to report. 

-          An ex IDF officer (a Lieutenant) was arrested and charged with espionage for pretending he was a major.  He allegedly stole classified information and passed it on to others.  His case has been kept in wraps and few of the details are out.   His name and the names of those he passed this information to have been sealed under court order.  Those who know details say it is the biggest espionage case in Israel’s history.   The prosecution wanted him committed to a mental institution but the accused has refused, saying he is sane. There is more speculation on this case than there are known facts.

We can go on and on but we all understand the picture.  Warning signs were lit, and they were ignored.   Things have happened that are being kept secret.   Leaks are being made in order to provide a level of CYA, when possible.   This is true of the senior military and political leadership. 

All that being said – why did this happen?  

We will give 5, often interrelated reasons, for the utter failure of the military command to pick up on these clear signals.   True enough, often what is clear to us after the fact is not so clear before.  We all misinterpret signals and afterwards we hit ourselves and say “how did I not see this?”.  But it does not seem like this is one of those cases. 

Let’s review the possible causes.

A Fifth Column

The least likely, if not the most obvious, is a “fifth column” – it is most obvious because it seems so absurd that senior commanders of the IDF can seem so incompetent.   It is least likely because it is hard to imagine that there are actual traitors in senior positions in a country where 350,000 reservists showed up for duty within days – most within hours – of the attacks.  

This would come down to the “conspiracy theory” crew and the targets would be those who announced during the protests against the judicial reform of 2023 that they would not serve in the IDF reserves if called.  Most of those who publicly announced this or who allegedly announced this were pilots in the Israeli Air Force or intelligence– both units which failed utterly on October 7 and the lead up to it.  Furthering this conspiracy theory is the announcement from one of the leaders of the protest movement, Shikma Bressler, in September, to the fact that soon Bibi will have no Air Force and no Army.  Apparently, her husband is a senior officer in the Shaback (General Security Services) which makes this theory even sweeter.   The fact that Ehud Barak, former prime minister, defense minister and IDF Chief of Staff all but called for a civil war in an interview on 60 Minutes and encouraged 18 year olds not to show up for their draft and for reservists to refuse to serve furthers this theory.   Barak, while not now calling for reservists to refuse to fight has been at the forefront of the movement to overthrow the current government – it is not clear if he means by democratic of non-democratic means.

All that being said, it is hard to believe that Air Force pilots or base commanders sat on their hands while their fellow citizens were being slaughtered and kidnapped.   For all their defects, even those that refused to come to reserve duty showed up when called once the war started.    While there are many reasons to think that part of the Hamas timing was due to Israel’s political situation at the time and their belief that Bressler’s statement would come true – there is really no reason to believe that when crunch time came – and it came with a vengeance – that people did not show up or purposely avoid combat in order to help bring down the government.   That being said, one point being bantered about is that many of the Air Force pilots were not fit to fly since they missed their mandatory weekly flights that maintain their readiness.  However, that might explain a lack of pilots in the days after the start of the war, but not the eight hour delay that there was on that fateful day.

The issue with the “spy” case mentioned above contributes to this conspiracy theory – and the quicker the courts allow this issue to be totally brought to the public, the quicker faith will be restored in the leadership.

The Issue of Bias

The second possibility is what my bio-statistician wife calls “bias”.   My wife spends her working life trying to eliminate bias from clinical trials of drugs and medical devices and is a big believer in double blind clinical trials.   For example, if you analyze a double blind trial (where one group gets the drug and the other a placebo – but no one involved knows who got which) and you see that one patient had a headache you can’t make any assumptions regarding its relation to the drug since you don’t know if the patient received the drug or a placebo.  If you know what the patient took you would be biased in assuming that the headache was or was not caused by the drug.  The argument from “bias” means that all information and data is interpreted to support your bias.    In this case the bias was fourfold:

1.       Hamas is interested in enjoying the power of governing Gaza and its talk about destroying Israel is just talk.

2.       Hamas senior members own beautiful seaside villas and would never risk that for the sake of a far-off dream like conquering Israeli military bases and villages, let alone destroying Israel.

3.       Israeli generals and other officers think of their post-military careers (as most people think of their next job).   The most lucrative of these careers are either in high-tech companies as senior managers or CEO’s or at Western funded think tanks and these demand a certain competence and ideological bent, respectively.  In the argument from bias, “keeping the quiet” was what showed your competence as a General and “acting diplomatically” instead of militarily showed your ideological bona-fides.   

4.       The fourth aspect of bias is “groupthink”.   In this case the sitting generals pick their successors and will nearly always pick those who they trained and trust.  This has a certain logic to it but when push comes to shove there is no diversity of opinion sitting around the general staff table.    Very few one star generals get promoted to two star (the highest rank before Chief of Staff) who do not agree tactically, ideologically or politically with the existing General Staff.  As a matter of fact, 11 of the last 14 IDF Chiefs of Staff started the army in the same unit – Paratroopers.   That leads us to think that the bias in picking successors could lead to groupthink and a radical bias in interpreting data.

Arrogance

This leads us to the third possibility that led to this disaster – one of arrogance.   Arrogance is what could have led to the bias.   The arrogance here is of course that one knows with 100% certainty what is in the mind of another person.  Its like the social scientist who explains every societal event as per his theory as all data always points that way (if interpreted properly); or the evolutionary scientist who is sure that each and every aspect of each and every individual’s behavior can be explained by evolutionary theory – forgetting that we can all be reduced to electrons, neutrons and protons which have not changed since the big bang. 

There is an arrogance that your theory is correct and therefore all data must be in support of it.  This played out perfectly on the night of October 6/7 when the head of IDF Intelligence and member of the General Staff, General Aharon Havila was not awakened for a 4am call (after being on an earlier one).  When asked about this later he stated that even if he were awakened he would have said it was an exercise and not an attack.  To show the level of arrogance here – he stated that not only would new data have not changed his mind, he wouldn’t even have demanded of his direct reports to analyze the new data further.

This combination of bias and arrogance is what led not only to the breakdown of common sense leading up to 6:29 AM October 7, but in the lax attitude of commanders who decided that Saturdays were less dangerous than Wednesdays and therefore masses of soldiers can be sent home for the weekend or the holiday and that the air force can be all but grounded for the holiday.   No doubt Hamas knew not only of the political divide in the country but in the fact that the military commanders were arrogant to the point of negligence. 

There is a footnote to all of this arrogance and bias and that is that Israeli generals, like I fear generals in most Western armies, have turned into diplomats and politicians.   If you listen to the public statements by them over the years you would get the impression that they are not warriors but members of the diplomatic corps.  That their jobs are to keep things quiet and not to prepare for, let alone defeat the enemy in war.   This, combined with the constant lectures from their predecessors (like Ehud Barak as well as the groupthink in the INSS think tank) on how it is their country and the politicians don’t represent “real” Israel could very well have led them to ignore their duty in notifying the political leaders that there were indications that Hamas could try to take over certain villages and military bases.

The mantra of the anti-reform movement that “we are the army and we are the economy” may certainly have biased the General Staff to purposely not inform the Defense Minister and Prime Minister.

Political Failure

While this does not relate to the actual failure in “real time” you can’t discount the political consensus that was formed by three major political figures – all of whom were known for their security bona-fides and they are Ariel Shaon, Ehud Barak and Benjamin Netanyahu.    Sharon and Barak can be said to have created the circumstances that led to October 7 by their unilateral withdrawals from Gaza and Lebanon respectively.   This withdrawal without negotiation – meaning without getting so much as a pound of tomatoes in return for complete withdrawal, created in the minds of Hamas and Hezbollah the notion that making life miserable is enough to get Israeli’s to surrender.   While both Sharon and Barak were sure they could force the issue by sheer will and create a better security environment on their own, both were based on the “small, smart army” that became the mantra of all security people from then on. 

This “small, smart army” shut down 6 combat divisions (a combat division would be roughly equivalent to an Army Group in US lingo), put over 2,000 tanks out of service and pushed the IDF to near total dependence upon technology, the judgement of IDF Intelligence officers in analyzing the vast amounts of data available and on the air force.

Which brings us to Netanyahu who has responsibility for three aspects of the failure – buy-in on the “small, smart army” concept and the idea that quiet with Hamas could be bought were the first two elements.  This allowed Hamas to arm and build their way to the October 7 attacks while not giving the IDF the firepower it needed to destroy Hamas quickly if needed.    The third and most important failure and one that is totally on Netanyahu is his failure to connect the dots and see that Hamas had become an Iranian proxy.   He fell for the trap that stated that while the smaller and less powerful Islamic Jihad was backed by Iran but Hamas, was independent of them and could be bought off.  Netanyahu, the Iran expert (and we should add his favorite Mossad chief, Yossi Cohen to this group) missed the signals that tied together Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas.

Moral Failure

However, in addition to what we have written there was a moral failure shared by the political and military leadership ever since the Gazan war of 2014 – known in Israel as “Tzuk Eitan”.   This started the same as all the wars with air force bombings in response to rocket fire from Hamas.  The same old line of “Hamas won’t admit it, but we have caused them much pain” gave the IDF and the government to excuse to declare victory where there was none in the previous engagements.

But Tzuk Eitan was different.   The tunnels (which were known about but ignored from 2004 onward) were finally used by Hamas.    Suddenly, the defense troika of PM Netanyahu, Defense Minister Moshe “Bogie” Ya’alon and IDF Chief of Staff Benny Gantz were forced to bring ground troops into Gaza proper in order to locate and destroy the “attack” tunnels that directly threatened Israeli towns and villages.     Even this was done only after the pressure of Naftali Bennet and other members of the Security Cabinet. 

But the moral failure occurred on the last day of that war when, during a UN declared cease fire, brokered by Barak Obama, Lt, Hadar Goldin was killed along with two other soldiers - but his body was kidnapped by Hamas.   Once that happened the IDF went into action with heavy artillery fire until they reached the gates of the hospital that he was reportedly taken to.   There was, as yet, no indication that Lt. Goldin was killed but there was strong intelligence that he was in that hospital.  Regular and special forces were waiting for the order to enter the hospital and look for him but the IDF Chief of Staff, Benny Gantz, refused to allow the army to enter the hospital – in spite of the fact that there were no Hamas fighters guarding it.    This was a decision supported by Netanyahu and Ya’alon, causing the IDF to do what it had never done before – voluntarily leave one of its own on the battlefield.   Less than one day after that the IDF was ordered to withdraw, declaring that the tunnels were destroyed and there was no longer a need for ground troops in Gaza proper.

As the Goldin family has pointed out over the last decade this changed the IDF, as its leadership (and the political leadership) lost touch with the soldiers and the junior officers by breaking the unwritten pledge of “never leave a solider on the battlefield”.    This “small, smart army” was being turned from a “people’s army” to a professional one.  While this might work in a country like the US with a population of 300 million, it could never work in a country whose population is less than 10 million and who faces a possible 5 front war. 

If we want to reduce the October 7 failure to one thing – this would be it – the moral failure of a country’s leadership and its responsibility to its soldiers and its people.  The military and political leadership betrayed the people by betraying its soldiers.  It left Lt. Goldin and Sgt. Oron Shaul (whose body was taken earlier in the war) in Hamas hands and made almost no effort to return them.  

The “repentance”, to use a religious term, of the political and military leadership from the moral failure of 2014 is to return those soldiers (and the two civilians taken right after the war) as well as the hostages currently remaining in Hamas hands while simultaneously destroying what is left of Hamas in Gaza.   After that is done, the country will demand that all the leadership retire quietly to the dessert so as to let Israel rebuild its country – militarily, economically and morally.   By leadership I mean all the Prime Ministers, Defense Ministers and IDF Chiefs of staff since the start of the century. Israel, morally, can never accept another civilian death emanating from Gaza and Israel, morally can never rest until all hostages, everywhere  - alive or dead – are returned to their country and their families.

But this is for Israelis to do – not for Biden or Blinken.    They see only one side of the moral equation and therefore they are not willing or don’t care about the moral cost of leaving Hamas in power.  This is a cost that will be paid not only by Israel but by the West in general and the United States in particular.  October 7 is the fault of Hamas totally – but the moral failure of Israel’s elites (of the left and right, political, military, religious, intellectual, judicial and civil) and the betrayal of its people -especially those who lived at the border with Gaza - compounded the tragedy.  The failure of Israel’s elites coincides with the failure of the West’s elites.   The first step in fixing this failure is the defeat of Hamas and the return of all hostages – those living and those not living.

The moral cost of leaving hostages in the hands of Hamas or of leaving Hamas alive and kicking in Gaza is too strong for Israel – and the free world - to bear.