Israel’s catastrophic security failure on Oct. 7, 2023, in which Hamas carried out a surprise attack against a woefully unprepared military (despite ample signs that it planned to attack) can only be grasped by understanding the conceptzia, or worldview, that underpinned the mindset of Israel’s security establishment.
The roots of that conceptzia was the topic of a panel led by author, historian and public intellectual Gadi Taub at the inaugural JNS International Policy Summit in Jerusalem on Monday.
Taub opened the discussion with a brief lecture explaining the worldview that drove the Israeli military thinking. He then pointed out the similarities between the conceptzia and “woke” concepts in the West. A panel discussion followed.
Taub described the behavior of Ronen Bar, the head of Israel’s Internal Security Service (Shin Bet) just before Oct. 7, as the conceptzia in action.
“We now know what happened on the night before dawn broke on Oct. 7. It was not just a mistake in analyzing intelligence data, but a whole worldview that led the chief of the Shin Bet, Ronen Bar, to interpret accumulating signs of the gathering storm exactly backwards,” said Taub.
Bar viewed Hamas’s preparations for attack as a counter-reaction, a nervousness on its part toward the possibility of an Israeli attack. To put Hamas at ease, Bar didn’t raise the alert level or call for bolstering IDF defenses in Gaza bases. He also didn’t disperse the Nova Music Festival.
“It seems that Bar was bent on reassuring Hamas that Israel was harboring no ill intent. He did this by exposing our jugular,” said Taub.
Bar believed Hamas was becoming more moderate. He was one of the main advocates for encouraging moderation with economic incentives, Taub explained.
The suspicion Bar should have reserved for Hamas, he turned on the Israeli right, as investigations of “settlers” ramped up under his leadership, he continued.
It’s also the reason Bar didn’t warn Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu until the morning of the attack, although Bar had been monitoring Hamas movements all night.
“He probably worried that the hawkish prime minister would sound the alarm, thus reinforcing what he thought was Hamas’s fear of an Israeli attack,” Taub surmised.
“Miscalculation was their explanation for previous rounds of violence, which they thought were Israel’s fault,” Taub said of Bar and those who shared his worldview.
“In Bar’s mind, the Israeli right is the problem, and the Palestinians are the solution. The Israeli right is the enemy of peace, and Hamas is our future partner,” said Taub. “He was standing on the night of the attack, like all other nights, with his back to Gaza and his face to the Jewish settlers in Judea and Samaria.”
Taub connected Bar’s approach to the worldview currently affecting the West.
“Any sober observer of the international scene will recognize the underlying conception in which such views are anchored. We can say a woke conception for short. Or we can say the post-colonial studies, Edward Said view, or we can say identity politics or multiculturalism. All these lead directly to the same view of the conflict. Israel, being Western, is ipso facto the guilty side, and the Palestinians are naturally the colored victims,” he said.
“Trained in post-colonial studies and versed in identity politics, hostility to Zionism is not just instinctive to the woke, it is the litmus test by which they decide who is on the right side of history,” said Taub.
Netanyahu is aware of these dangerous conceptions, he continued, which is why he defines the war as a clash between civilization and barbarism—to refute the worldview that Israel is a colonial aggressor.
Netanyahu touched on this idea during his address to the JNS conference on Sunday, saying, “We’re here in Jerusalem about a kilometer away from David’s capital, which was established 3,000 years ago. We are not foreign interlopers. We’re not the Belgians in the Congo. We’re not the Dutch in Indonesia. We’re the Jews in the Jewish homeland—Judea.”
A four-person panel joined Taub: Amiad Cohen, CEO at the Herut Center; Gregg Roman, director of the Middle East Forum; IDF Maj. (res.) Shay Kallach, founder of Netzach Israel; and MK Simcha Rothman, chairman of the Knesset’s Constitution, Law and Justice Committee.
According to Roman, the conceptzia was allowed to flourish because no one challenged individuals like Bar about the wisdom of pursuing economic concessions for peace. For temporary calm, Israel allowed hundreds of millions of dollars “to underwrite” seven fronts against it, he said.
Instead of seeking calm, Israel should wage “absolute warfare” and force the enemy’s surrender, he said. “We don’t ‘mow the lawn,'” said Roman, referring to an Israeli term for eroding, but not destroying, an enemy’s capabilities. “We salt the earth.”
Israel’s security conceptzia, said Cohen, is rooted in attitudes that go back to the state’s early days, noting the word “defense” in the Israel Defense Forces.
“The conception started by defining the Israeli armed forces as the Israel Defense Forces. Think about it. It’s not an attack force. It’s a defense force,” said Cohen.
The name itself signals a discomfort with waging war, he continued. It sends the message that it’s immoral to pursue victory, that “we’re here only to defend our local shtetl.”
Kallach, a former fighter pilot, agreed that to root out the conceptzia requires a deeper change in the public consciousness. Israelis need a sense of destiny and an understanding that they didn’t return to their land after 2,000 years of exile simply to create a safe haven.
“I call on the Jews of the world to move from a consciousness of apology, of safe haven, to a consciousness of destiny, a consciousness of ownership,” said Kallach.
For his part, MK Rothman said that he had been focused on legal, not security issues, and had always assumed that the security forces knew what they were doing. After Oct. 7, he said he understood that the rot he had witnessed in the legal system had affected other parts of the Israeli establishment.
That rot, he said, stems from a lack of accountability and responsibility. To restore accountability requires a system stressing the rule of law, with the elected government empowered by the voter to make the decisions in a clear and transparent way, he concluded.