Countless Israeli assumptions lay scattered amid the ruins of the communities near the Gaza border devastated by Hamas’s October 7 attack.
Among the most prominent: Hamas is deterred; a small, technologically smart army is all Israel needs to defend its borders; monthly Qatari payments to Hamas will ensure quiet.
These assumptions were held not only by the country’s most senior politicians but also by top security officials, including the sharpest minds in Military Intelligence and the Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet). These assumptions, and many others, collectively formed what is known as the conceptzia, or Israel’s organizing security principles.
As was the case 50 years earlier, before the Yom Kippur War, the reality was interpreted in a way to make it fit within these guiding principles, within this conceptzia.
For instance, when Hamas terrorists were seen training for the very type of attack they later executed on October 7, it was not viewed as a dress rehearsal for an invasion but rather dismissed as merely theoretical training for an imaginary scenario.
Few took it seriously. After all, hadn’t Hamas just bargained to get more permits for Gazan workers into Israel? That is not exactly the way an organization behaves if it is gearing up for a full-blown war.
Except it was, and the permits were part of a sophisticated ruse. But few saw it coming or read the signs correctly because they were all locked into the same conceptzia.
That conceptzia, a word coined by the Agranat Commission of Inquiry into the failures of the Yom Kippur War to describe the groupthink that paralyzed Israel before the war and blinded its military leaders to what they should have been able to see, will be thoroughly investigated when a state commission of inquiry begins to delve into the colossal intelligence and military failures that enabled the October 7 attacks to take Israel entirely by surprise.
The complete collapse of the conceptzia and the failure of many previously held assumptions have far-reaching societal implications that go beyond the October 7 collapse. For if all the experts proved so fatally wrong on October 7, why should their assessments – or the evaluations of any military or intelligence officials – be trusted now? When the experts fail so miserably, the reflexive reaction is to no longer trust the experts.
This is precisely the argument National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir used on Monday in criticizing the recommendations from the Shin Bet and the IDF to allow Israeli Arabs free access to the Temple Mount on Ramadan, which begins on March 10.
An ad-hoc forum of nine senior ministers met Sunday to discuss the matter. While it was agreed that access for West Bank Palestinians to the Temple Mount would be restricted to those over 60 or under 10, the question of limiting Israeli Arab access was still to be determined. Though tens of thousands will be allowed access, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – according to multiple reports – agreed with Ben-Gvir that access should be restricted. However, no decision was taken regarding the exact criteria.
Shin Bet, IDF position
The position of the IDF and the Shin Bet, as well as the police, was that West Bank Palestinians above the age of 60 should be allowed to pray at the site, while Ben-Gvir wanted to bar them altogether. Regarding Israeli Arabs, the IDF and Shin Bet recommended free access; the police wanted to regulate it to those over 50, while Ben-Gvir wanted to limit Israeli Arab access to those over 70.
When Ben-Gvir’s position was not accepted, he blasted the conceptzia.
Writing Monday on X, formerly Twitter, Ben-Gvir had this to say: On October 3, “they requested that I not go to the Temple Mount because they were afraid of Hamas, and I respected their request.” Four days later, the “greatest slaughter of the Jewish people since the Holocaust” took place. On February 19, he wrote, “Their conceptzia returns.”
At the Otzma Yehudit faction meeting in the Knesset on Monday, Ben-Gvir defended his position, not adopted, to bar all West Bank Palestinians and all Israeli Arabs except those over the age of 70, saying: “A gathering of tens of thousands of haters, a victory celebration on the Temple Mount, is a danger to the security of the country.”
Then he added the kicker: “The same voices that told me that the Mount should be opened to all Arab Israelis are the same voices that told me that Hamas is deterred.”
In other words, Ben-Gvir said that those opposed to his stand on this issue were the same ones who were locked into a conceptzia before October 7, and if they were wrong then, they must be wrong this time as well. This is a harbinger of an argument that he – and others – will use frequently in the months ahead.
The days when the opinions of the Shin Bet and IDF would carry the day simply because Shin Bet and IDF officers were offering their opinions are over. That is not necessarily a bad thing.
The danger now is that the past tendency to follow the advice of military and intelligence experts blindly will now be replaced by an inclination not to follow anything they say because they were so severely mistaken on October 7.
That, however, bodes ill for the country since someone’s expert opinion will need to be trusted – decision-makers need to rely on someone’s advice.
The Temple Mount/Ramadan conundrum is a case in point. A decision needs to be made about who and how many people should be allowed there. The IDF, Shin Bet, and police are best equipped to give an opinion. Yet when their position clashed with Ben-Gvir’s, he criticized them for still being prisoners of the conceptzia, highlighting the recurrence of past failures to justify his stance.
Relying on past failures to discredit expert opinion, however, is flawed. Just because Military Intelligence and the Shin Bet failed spectacularly in predicting Hamas’s savage Simchat Torah attack does not mean that from now on, all their estimations are worthless.
One of the lessons of October 7 is that the opinions of experts – the conceptzia – needs to be continuously and strenuously challenged. However, this need not be taken to the other extreme. Challenging expert conclusions is essential, but it doesn’t mean that these opinions should now forever be discounted, nor that non-expert opinions, like those of Ben-Gvir, are now inherently correct.