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Source: https://jcfa.org/the-glass-wall-how-israel-turned-intelligence-into-an-insurance-policy-and-failed/
How Western Logic Brought Disaster upon Israel
(Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs) Oded Ailam - Israel's intelligence was the most advanced in the world. But in the week before Oct. 7, 2023, it forgot to look at the Gaza bakery, which suddenly was asked to prepare hundreds of pita breads, or the barber shop in Jabalia that, on Oct. 4, was suddenly flooded with dozens of Nukhba operatives getting haircuts to look sharp before joining their 72 virgins. "We struck them hard and they are deterred," former director of the Israel Security Agency, Nadav Argaman, declared in May 2021. "They want an economy, not a war," the political leadership told us. Then came the "Al-Aqsa Flood" on Oct. 7. The catastrophic error that led to this disaster was Israel's excessively rational lens, rooted in Western logic - the belief that people act to maximize personal and family welfare. That is how Israel's value system works. The intelligence community and the political leadership refused to truly understand the jihadist fanaticism that had taken over Gaza. Israel's intelligence instinctively searches for logic. But an enemy willing to sacrifice everything for a murderous ideology does not operate according to Western logic. Israel must adopt a permanent assumption: the enemy will always surprise you. He will always have a new trick - something you have not yet imagined. True national resilience requires capability denial: Do not wait to understand how an enemy plans to use a capability - destroy it simply because it exists. Assume the possibility of blindness: The military and society must be prepared for the morning when the screens go dark. National resilience must never rest on intelligence as its sole backbone. True resilience is the ability to absorb a blow you did not anticipate and respond with force - because you prepared for the worst-case scenario, not the "reasonable" one. National resilience is not the ability to predict the future. It is the ability to survive it even when you did not predict it. The writer, former head of the Counterterrorism Division in the Mossad, is a researcher at the Jerusalem Center.