Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.
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Notes -
"IDF" is not a good term here. While some of the people responsible are top of the IDF command, it's by no means ends there. Pretty much all Israeli establishment has been captured in the worldview that allowed it to happen, and sole dissenting voices have been dismissed as kooks. Israel military intelligence has a special "contrarian" unit whose sole task had been to produce scenarios challenging the established way of thinking and poking holes in established paradigms. Sort of advocatus diaboli. They weren't able to make a dent in the wall of denial that something like Oct 7 is possible even in theory. And it's hard to call it "incompetence" per se - many of the people involved were highly knowledgeable, smart and competent professionals - but within the limits of their world model. Escaping those confines is hard for any person, and it turned out that this particular world model, while very attractive - in fact, so attractive that many people still cling to it right now, unable to part with it even with the benefit of the hindsight - this model is spectacularly wrong. How to prevent it from happening again is a very hard question, I am not sure Israel will find an answer, though I sincerely hope they do.
On the other hand, Hamas spent 18 years meticulously organizing and preparing for this kind of attack and followup confrontation with the IDF. It's not random that IDF can not locate the hostages, or eliminate Hamas in one sweep, and not because they are a bunch of bumbling fools - they aren't. Hamas made a lot of preparations for this exact scenario, including developing a system of underground communications, storages and munitions, and associated warfare paradigm that still has no adequate answer from the IDF side. It's not to say Hamas is now stronger than the IDF, they are not, by far, but they came prepared and successfully exploited - and continue to exploit - the weaknesses in IDF's military approach, be it sensitivity to casualties from both sides, or unwillingness to stay on the ground for a prolonged period of time, or vulnerability to propaganda efforts targeted at the wokes in Europe and the US.
So it was both. Hamas did their homework, for 18 years, and Israel didn't and completely ignored what Hamas has been doing, because it didn't fit their worldview. The result was the catastrophe of October 7.
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