Anatomy of a Catastrophe: Willful blindness, arrogance, and terror denial
Hamas did not need Israel to know nothing. Hamas needed Israel to believe the wrong thing. The lesson of October 7 is that refusing to recognize war when it is being waged against you does…
Assessment
This opinion piece argues that the intelligence failure leading up to October 7 was not a lack of information but a cognitive failure: Israel believed a comforting falsehood about Hamas rather than confronting available warnings. The central stake is whether the security establishment and political leadership can break the pattern of wishful thinking that leaves a nation vulnerable to surprise attack. What bears watching is whether this analysis gains traction in official post-mortems or is dismissed as hindsight.