Hamas’ surprise attack on Israel occurred over a year ago, but it will be a long time before we can list all the consequences. What we know already is devastating. Hamas killed about 1,200 Israelis and took 251 hostages back to Gaza. Israel’s response was a ferocious war in Gaza, a combined air and ground offensive that devastated Hamas but also killed thousands of Palestinians and provoked international dismay. In a show of solidarity, Lebanese Hezbollah intensified its rocket attacks into northern Israel, forcing many civilians to flee south. After almost a year of border skirmishes and artillery strikes, Israel invaded Lebanon, where it fought for nearly two months before agreeing to cease fire. Meanwhile, Israeli forces have repeatedly clashed with Palestinians in the West Bank, effectively creating a third front in its ongoing war. And it has traded air and missile strikes with Iran, which has long served as patron from Hamas and Hezbollah. US officials scrambled to prevent Israel’s conflict with Iran from becoming a wider war. As of this writing, their efforts seem to have paid off, though the collapse of the Assad regime in Syria has injected new uncertainty into the region.
H-Diplo | Robert Jervis International Security Studies Forum
Article Review 173
Janice Gross Stein, “Bringing Politics Back In: The Neglected Explanation of the Oct. 7 Surprise Attack.” Texas National Security Review 7: 4 (2024): 74-93.
Review by Joshua Rovner, American University
23 January 2025 | PDF: http://issforum.org/to/JAR-173 | Website: rjissf.org | X: @HDiplo
Editor: Diane Labrosse | Commissioning Editor: Diane Labrosse | Production Editor: Christopher Ball
Hamas’ surprise attack on Israel occurred over a year ago, but it will be a long time before we can list all the consequences. What we know already is devastating. Hamas killed about 1,200 Israelis and took 251 hostages back to Gaza. Israel’s response was a ferocious war in Gaza, a combined air and ground offensive that devastated Hamas but also killed thousands of Palestinians and provoked international dismay. In a show of solidarity, Lebanese Hezbollah intensified its rocket attacks into northern Israel, forcing many civilians to flee south. After almost a year of border skirmishes and artillery strikes, Israel invaded Lebanon, where it fought for nearly two months before agreeing to cease fire. Meanwhile, Israeli forces have repeatedly clashed with Palestinians in the West Bank, effectively creating a third front in its ongoing war. And it has traded air and missile strikes with Iran, which has long served as patron from Hamas and Hezbollah. US officials scrambled to prevent Israel’s conflict with Iran from becoming a wider war. As of this writing, their efforts seem to have paid off, though the collapse of the Assad regime in Syria has injected new uncertainty into the region.
October 7 horrified Israeli leaders. The intensity of their response was a function of the grotesque violence on display, to be sure, but it also reflected a real sense of shock. After years of building elaborate defenses around Gaza, Israeli officials seem to have believed that Hamas was no longer a serious threat. They were confident that physical barriers and a high-tech surveillance network, combined with border checkpoints, were more than enough to keep Hamas at bay. Their concerns were elsewhere.
Because the degree of surprise affected the nature of Israel’s response, understanding the causes of surprise is essential. Students of intelligence, strategy, and Middle Eastern politics should scrutinize arguments about why Israel was caught off-guard, even while they wrestle with the consequences. Janice Gross Stein’s article is the best place to start. Stein has written a thorough and thoughtful account of the events preceding 7 October, drawing on an impressive range of theories and an unusually perceptive grasp of domestic politics and bureaucratic behavior.
She argues that human psychology and organizational culture conspired against vigilance. Israeli officials fell victim to well-known cognitive biases that prevented them from accurately interpreting worrisome news. Stein documents the many studies finding that people including political leaders, do not like information that is inconsistent with their beliefs and worldviews, and they tend to ignore or misunderstand it. In addition, technological superiority can lead to overconfidence and reduce the need to pay attention to looming threats. Stein argues that this problem was compounded by the organizational culture in some parts of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), which did not encourage dissent, especially from lower-ranking personnel. She notes that male chauvinism may have made things worse: young women in border observation posts issued warnings about Hamas, but they were not taken seriously.
Stein’s analysis does not stop there, and she has good reason to take the argument further. A focus on psychology and organizations might leave the impression that Israeli political leaders had little role in the disaster, and that they were one step removed. Such an impression would be misleading and incomplete. Stein argues that Israeli leaders, especially Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, subtly discouraged Israeli intelligence from challenging the prevailing wisdom about Hamas. Netanyahu’s aggressive policy in the West Bank relied on the assumption that Gaza would remain calm. While the government did not force officials alter their views, it sent signals about the kind of analysis it would be more or less willing to receive. Such signals can skew intelligence so that it aligns with policy preferences, reinforcing policy beliefs and making policymakers more vulnerable to surprise.[1] This kind of indirect politicization also reinforces the psychological and organizational problems described above. Indeed, Stein’s article is illuminating precisely because it does not claim a single cause for a complex failure.
Politicization only matters if there some dissent in the first place. In this case, two senior intelligence officials warned that large domestic protests over a controversial judicial reform plan might encourage Israel’s foreign enemies to strike. In March, Brigadier General Amit Sa’ar, the head of the research division of Military Intelligence, specifically mentioned the danger of a three-front war, suggesting that Hamas might still pose a danger to Israeli security. Ronen Bar, the head of Shin Bet, the Israel Security Agency, issued a similar warning in July. “War is coming,” he told Netanyahu (88).
The prime minister’s response, in Stein’s account, was a strange blend of carelessness and anger. Netanyahu apparently was “bored and indifferent” to warnings, according to opposition leader Ya’ir Lapid, who was present during a military briefing in August (88). The political background to the briefings offers a clue as to why. The major issue in Israel prior to 7 October was a judicial reform bill, an effort so controversial that it provoked massive daily protests for months. Intelligence officials worried that foreign adversaries might try to exploit Israel’s deepening crisis. From Netanyahu’s perspective, however, their concerns may have seemed overwrought. The consummate political survivor, he had weathered many domestic crises in his career. This was just another one; connecting it to a looming three-front war probably sounded like hyperbole.
Netanyahu may have taken comfort from the fact that many other intelligence officers supported his belief that Hamas was no longer a pressing threat. Stein reports that intelligence collection efforts were reprioritized “as military and intelligence officials became more convinced in the late spring of 2023 that Hamas was deterred” (85). If this was the case, then the warnings from Sa’ar and Bar may have sounded idiosyncratic and unserious. Netanyahu may have wondered if the warnings spoke to legitimate security concerns, or whether they reflected the intelligence leaders’ preferences in debate over judicial reform. Stein suspects the latter: “He regarded the warnings as inappropriate interference by the intelligence community in the political agenda of his government. From the prime minister’s perspective, it was not the government that was politicizing intelligence but rather the intelligence community, and he did not like it” (88).
Policy fears of politicization from below have a long history in Israel and elsewhere.[2] Intelligence leaders can influence public debates because they control secret information. Because most individuals are impressed by secrets, they give spy chiefs the benefit of the doubt. Policymakers know this, so they have reason to worry that their public views are out of line with intelligence assessments. Policymakers also worry that intelligence leaders will make common cause with the political opposition, something that may have gone on in this case, and which might help to explain why Netanyahu shifted from carelessness to anger. He had previously taken solace in the idea that Hamas was not a serious problem, and his sanguine view has been supported by what looked like an intelligence consensus. Now, in the midst of a major political controversy, intelligence leaders were telling him the opposite. And what they were telling him was contrary to the core beliefs of his coalition. He may have assumed that their motives were political.
In this telling, Netanyahu discounted the warnings of senior intelligence officials because he did not think that they represented the broad view of the intelligence community. Rather than taking the dissent seriously, he sided with a potentially larger pool of intelligence officers who came to a different conclusion. Indeed, Stein reports that with exception of the late dissenters, the “political priorities of a radical right-wing government meshed seamlessly with the estimates of senior military and intelligence leaders” (84-85). If this is correct, it would explain both Netanyahu’s dismissal of warnings before 7 October and his efforts to politicize intelligence thereafter. From his perspective, the warnings were substantively wrong and politically dangerous; he thus ignored the substance and acted on the politics.
These are all recent events, and gaps in the documentary record force us to make inferences based on partial information, as Stein acknowledges. But one thing is clear: there was no single Israeli intelligence position on Hamas before the war. Front-line observers and high-level officials warned that the group was becoming more active, but many (perhaps most?) of the intelligence rank-and-file held to the belief that Hamas could not pierce Israeli defenses, and that it was deterred from trying anyway. This suggests a curious division of opinion, in which very junior and very senior officials were concerned, but most of those in the middle were not. Historians might help determine whether that observation is correct, and, if so, organizational theorists might help explain it.
Intelligence was heterogenous in another sense. Senior officials with Shin Bet and the IDF’s Southern Command and Gaza division were unconcerned about Hamas, and dissent was discouraged. The situation was different in IDF’s Northern Command, where there was apparently an open and productive debate about Hezbollah (86). This might seem odd. If organizational culture has powerful effects on personnel, we might also expect to see uniform pressures across the organization. But the Israel case is consistent with other research findings that powerful subcultures can arise within military organizations and across different services and branches within the same country.[3] This is not to deny the importance of organizational factors, but only to note that culture is complicated, and that scholars should approach it with care. Above all they should avoid the commonplace tendency to ask “what intelligence said” about any given issue, when it often contains multiple and competing assessments, some of which reflect different subcultures within national intelligence communities.
Getting to the bottom of the intelligence story before 7 October will require a great deal of persistence, given that the principals have obvious reasons to defend their actions. It will also take patience, given the number of agencies involved and the sheer volume of their assessments and reports. It is important to learn from the event, but scholars should expect that the lessons will be complicated, contested, and even contradictory.
Advocates of intelligence reform should also take care. It is easier to call for change when the causes of disaster are obvious, and when solutions are tailored to each problem. But in this case, as in other surprise attacks, the causes blend together. Efforts to improve warning processes to ensure the free flow of information ignore the cultural and political reasons why it still might be ignored. For example, we might imagine legislation ensuring that front-line observer reports move up the chain higher-level decision-makers. While this is possible in principle, such a chain would not affect the cultural and political reasons why it such reports might be ignored anyway. Legislatures like to reorganize government agencies, and technocrats like to tinker with processes, but as Stein puts it, “There are no technical or organizational fixes to the political roots of surprise” (74).
That said, there are other ways to think about institutional responses to disaster. The diversity of subcultures within the Israeli military and intelligence communities suggests that we can learn a lot be casting a wider net. Instead of focusing on failure alone (a common instinct for those who write about intelligence) we might learn more by exploring those who apparently fostered a healthy environment for disagreement and debate. Efforts to merge the literature on organizational subcultures with intelligence-policy relations might be interesting for scholars. Empirical work along these links might also provide aspirational models for intelligence reformers.
Finally, it is important to watch what younger Israeli military and intelligence officers take from their experiences before 7 October. We can imagine three possibilities.[4] One is that they become so disillusioned that they leave the field. Alternately, they remain in place but make no effort to alter preexisting organizational norms about dissent, either because the existing norms are appealing or because they think that pushing back is futile. The last scenario is the most hopeful from the perspective of intelligence reform. The experience of 7 October motivates their efforts to improve the quality of intelligence-policy relations, and senior officers and political champions intervene to protect promising intelligence professionals from being marginalized.[5] A growing cadre of smart and motivated officers might be able to slowly shift the culture of intelligence. This would not solve the problems of psychology and politics, of course, because these are insoluble. But a culture of dissent and open-mindedness might prove to be a partial bulwark against the danger of cognitive closure, and the pernicious effects of politicization.
Joshua Rovner is Associate Professor of International Relations at American University. His most recent book is Strategy and Grand Strategy (Routledge, 2025).
[1] Joshua Rovner, Fixing the Facts: National Security and the Politics of Intelligence (Cornell University Press, 2011).
[2] Uri Bar-Joseph, Intelligence Intervention in the Politics of Democratic States: The United States, Israel, and Britain (Penn State Press, 1995); and Michael Warner, “The Use and Abuse of Intelligence in the Public Square,” Studies in Intelligence 63: 3 (2019): 15-24.
[3] For examples, see Austin Long, The Soul of Armies: Counterinsurgency Doctrine and Military Culture in the US and UK (Cornell University Press, 2016); and Adam Yang, “Dreams of Victory: How Military Organizations Select Innovations Based on Warfighting Culture and Civilian Strategic Interests,” (PhD diss., American University, 2022).
[4] Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States (Harvard University Press, 1970).
[5] For a related argument about military innovation, see Stephen Peter Rosen, “New Ways of War: Understanding Military Innovation,” International Security 13:1 (1988): 134-168, at 141-143.