“In Palestine I had been met every day by evidence of the Jewish blindness to the Arab problem," asserted Richard Crossman, British Labour MP, who served on the 1946 Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry. “I was constantly reminded of the gallant politics of Vienna Socialists in 1934. There was the same misguided reliance on foreign aid, the same underestimation of the enemy, the same blind assurance that a cause which is right is also strong."
That blindness returned with devastating force on October 7.
The deepest failure before the Hamas massacre was not that Israel lacked information. It was that Israel had information, much of it from those closest to the danger, and explained it away. The warning signs were on screens, in field reports, in intelligence documents, in Hamas training exercises, and in Hamas’s own ideology.
The clearest example is the tatzpitaniyot-the young female surveillance soldiers assigned to watch the Gaza border. They were the eyes of the army, noted Hadassah Magazine. In the months before October 7, they warned that Hamas was behaving differently. They saw increased drone activity near the fence. They saw Hamas training against models of Israeli positions. One soldier reported seeing a replica of a Merkava tank.
Their warnings were passed up the chain of command. They were ignored. When the attack began, Hamas used the methods the soldiers had already seen rehearsed. Fifteen female soldiers were killed at the Nahal Oz base, and six more were abducted to Gaza; one of them, Ori Megidish, was later rescued by IDF forces.
This is not hindsight. The soldiers saw what was coming. The system refused to believe what they saw.
The same pattern appeared inside Israel’s elite intelligence apparatus, according to The New York Times. Israeli officials reportedly obtained Hamas’s “Jericho Wall" plan more than a year before October 7. It described a large-scale attack that resembled the massacre: rockets, drones to disable cameras and defenses, and terrorists crossing into Israel by paraglider, vehicle, and on foot. Israeli officials reportedly dismissed the plan as aspirational.
In July 2023, an IDF Unit 8200 (cyber) analyst warned that a Hamas exercise resembled the Jericho Wall plan. Her warning was also explained away.
Hamas did not need Israel to know nothing. Hamas needed Israel to believe the wrong thing.
That wrong thing had become doctrine:
Hamas was deterred. Hamas wanted stability. Hamas was interested in governing. Hamas could be restrained by work permits, Qatari money, and economic relief.
This, in a nutshell, was the fatal conceptzia: not merely a mistaken intelligence estimate, but a psychological and political need to believe that Hamas had become rational in the way Israelis wanted it to be rational.
Why do intelligent people refuse to believe terrorists when terrorists explain themselves openly, asks philosopher Sam Harris?
Part of the answer lies in mirror-imaging. Analysts assume adversaries think as they do: that they value prosperity over martyrdom, stability over honor, compromise over victory, and material improvement over ideology.
Richards Heuer, a former CIA analyst, warned that foreign behavior often appears irrational only because analysts have projected their own values onto foreign leaders rather than understanding the adversary’s logic.
Another part is motivated reasoning. Psychologist Ziva Kunda showes that people are more likely to reach desired conclusions when they can construct seemingly reasonable justifications for them. In Israel’s case, the desired conclusion was clear: Hamas was deterred; Gaza could be managed; work permits would moderate the population; Qatari money would buy quiet.
This was not only analytical error. It was emotional and political avoidance. Israeli society was tired of war. Parents did not want their children fighting endlessly in Gaza. Political leaders did not want to say that the enemy across the fence remained committed to Israel’s destruction. Security officials did not want to admit that years of containment had produced not moderation, but a disciplined, better-funded, and more patient enemy.
There is also bureaucratic groupthink. Psychologist Irving Janis used the term groupthink to explain how decision-making circles protect a consensus from inconvenient facts. In Israel, this pathology already had a name from 1973: the conceptzia. The tatzpitaniyot warned. Unit 8200 warned. Jericho Wall warned. Hamas’s training warned. Hamas’s charter warned.
Lower-ranking soldiers and analysts connected the dots. The system rejected the picture.
This is the danger of explaining away terrorists. It turns evidence into noise, ideology into rhetoric, military preparation into posturing, and evil into a misunderstanding.
The most basic rule of national security should be this: when a terrorist movement tells you what it wants, and how it plans to accomplish its objective, believe it.
Hamas did not hide its intentions. Its 1988 Covenant declares that “our struggle against the Jews is very great and very serious." It identifies Hamas as part of the Muslim Brotherhood, defines Palestine as an Islamic waqf that cannot be surrendered, rejects “so-called peaceful solutions," and declares: “Jihad is its path and death for the sake of Allah is the loftiest of its wishes."
Nor is this rejectionist logic confined to Hamas. The Palestinian National Charter describes armed struggle as “the only way to liberate Palestine" and frames liberation as a duty aimed at the elimination of Zionism.
The point is not that every Arab or every Muslim thinks this way. They do not. The Abraham Accords, pragmatic Arab states, and the loyalty of many Arab citizens of Israel prove otherwise. The point is narrower: Israel cannot build doctrine on the fantasy that rejectionist movements will trade their objective for wages, cash, or permits.
This fantasy is not new. In 1907, Yitzhak Epstein believed Arabs would benefit from Jewish immigration and development. Winston Churchill echoed the same hope in Jerusalem in 1921, urging Arabs to share “blessings through cooperation" rather than “miseries through quarrels."
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David Ben-Gurion once shared this hope. He believed Jewish development would bring material blessing to the Arab population and ease resistance to Zionism. Years later, he recognized the flaw. He had been naïve, he said, to imagine “that the Arabs think like us." By 1936, he understood that even if Arab leaders acknowledged the economic benefits of Jewish immigration, they could still answer using the old adage: “None of your honey and none of your sting."
Ze’ev Jabotinsky understood this clearly. In “The Iron Wall," he attacked the childish notion that Arabs would accept Zionism in return for material benefits. Every native population, he warned, resists so long as it has hope of preventing another national movement from achieving sovereignty. “As long as the Arabs feel that there is the least hope of getting rid of us," he wrote, “they will refuse to give up this hope in return for either kind words or for bread and butter."
Jabotinsky’s point was not that peace was impossible. His point was that peace cannot be built on self-deception.
Shimon Peres revived this delusion during Oslo, which resulted in the murder of 1,300 to 1,500 Israelis according to The Washington Institute for Near East Policy. While signing the Oslo Accords on the White House lawn, he remarked: “I could almost sense the breeze of a fresh spring, and my imagination began to wander to the skies of our land that may have become brighter to the eyes of all people, agreeing and opposing. On the lawn, you could almost hear the heavy tread of boots leaving the stage after a hundred years of hostility. You could have listened to the gentle tiptoeing of new steps making a debut in the awaiting world of peace."
The premise was fallacious, bordering on willful blindness. Economic development can support peace when the other side has accepted Israel’s permanence. It cannot purchase acceptance from movements that still view Jewish sovereignty as illegitimate and the Jewish people are evil. .
This distinction matters.
The issue is reality versus denial.
1. October 7 was the price of denial. The tatzpitaniyot saw the drones. They saw the training. Intelligence analysts saw the plan. Hamas published its ideology. Senior commanders nevertheless convinced themselves that Hamas was deterred, practical, containable, and more interested in governing than murdering.
Then Hamas murdered.
2. The same blindness now faces the West in Iran.
Iran is not Hamas. But Hamas is part of Iran’s strategic ecosystem. The Iranian regime has armed, financed, trained, and encouraged a proxy network that includes Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Houthis, and Shiite militias in Iraq and Syria. Iran’s leaders have threatened Israel’s destruction for decades. Yet every time the evidence becomes undeniable, many in the West find a new reason to explain it away.
They say Iran is rational. But prudence becomes denial when it refuses to confront the basic fact: the Iranian regime has spent decades building the ideology, infrastructure, and proxy architecture for regional domination and Israel’s destruction.
This should not be a partisan issue. Facing reality should belong to anyone who takes evidence seriously.
The West must not repeat Israel’s October 7 error. The lesson of October 7 is not that every problem requires war. It is that refusing to recognize war when it is being waged against you does not produce peace. It produces surprise, paralysis, and catastrophe.
Crossman’s warning remains painfully relevant. Righteousness is not strategy. Hope is not intelligence. Economic benefit is not ideological surrender. Diplomatic process is not security. And when terrorists-or regimes that sponsor them-tell us who they are, the first duty of leadership is to believe them and act accordingly.
Dr. Alex Grobman is the senior resident scholar at the John C. Danforth Society, a member of the Council of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, and serves on the advisory board of the National Christian Leadership Conference for Israel.