Translating to something between “governing assumption” and “preconceived notion,” it regained prominence in local vernacular following Hamas’s invasion of southern Israel five decades later.
Since Oct. 7, 2023, conceptzia has become a polemical catch-all for blame over the calamity. This broad use of the term has created the impression that there was a single overarching conceptzia, with disagreements reduced to who was ensnared in it.
But in truth, there were two.
The first conceptzia belonged to the generals, intelligence chiefs and other senior figures across the security establishment, who believed that Hamas was sufficiently deterred and uninterested in fighting. This was not a passive misreading of the enemy, but a delusion born of arrogance, negligence, and willful blindness.
Worse yet, rather than treating their belief with caution, these officials bet our children’s lives and our national sovereignty on the conviction that Hamas would not dare mount a full-scale assault.
The second conceptzia was a function of the first. It was the belief not that Hamas was deterred, but that Israel’s security apparatus would never be so negligent as to stop guarding the country altogether. That they would never bet our lives on their own perceptions of the enemy. That whatever their politics, they would never be so reckless as to abandon the basic duty of defense. That they were, at the very least, doing their jobs.
This second conceptzia was no less incorrect than the first, but it was certainly more understandable, even in hindsight. It was shared by most of the Israeli public because it reflected the baseline assumption any society must maintain with respect to its military-that those entrusted to guard the state are actually guarding it.
It is this second conceptzia to which Israel’s political echelon had succumbed in the lead-up to Oct.7. Any prime minister, however skeptical of his generals, must operate on the premise that the security apparatus is fulfilling its most basic duty.
A prime minister cannot personally interrogate every intelligence report or oversee every unit in the field; he has to govern on the basis that those charged with defense are carrying it out. Otherwise, no government would be able to function.
Of course, the political echelon has a responsibility to scrutinize the security establishment. And to be sure, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at times echoed the defense establishment’s language about Hamas being deterred.
But there’s a meaningful difference between acknowledging deterrence as a temporary condition-wrong as even that may have been-and enshrining it as a permanent truth, divorced from contingency.
It was the military that did the latter, sanctifying its assessment and treating it as a license to lower its guard. The generals continuously and emphatically insisted that they had Gaza under control-that even a fly could not move in the Strip without them knowing in real time. It was this illusion that inspired the national policy of “managing” Gaza with the help of Qatari cash.
What we learned on Oct. 7 is that the defense establishment was not merely less competent than it should have been. Remarkably, it was less rooted in reality than the average citizen.
It would have been troubling enough if climbing the ranks produced only modest gains in awareness of the enemy. What we discovered instead is that advancement required possessing (or adopting) a mentality that made commanders less aware. The higher they climbed, the more misinformed they became.
This is not to suggest that the problem was stupidity. Far from it - what the generals weaponized for their own self-deception was none other than intellect itself. Smart people have a marked tendency to reinforce their own pre-existing beliefs. Since some of those beliefs will inevitably be wrong, smart people end up entrenching egregious assumptions with a high degree of confidence.
The generals’ self-deception spawned their own conceptzia and, in turn, the public’s. But these two governing assumptions do not carry equal weight. One was the product of the arrogance of the unelected, who forsook their mission and left the country and its citizens unprotected. The other arose from the misplaced trust that the people and the elected leadership placed in the aforementioned unelected.
Both conceptziot collapsed on Oct. 7, but only one amounts to betrayal.