The Competing Philosophies Behind Israel's Approach to October 7th
Unfortunately for us, philosophy tends to produce more questions than answers.
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Philosophy is a discipline that thrives on questions more than answers.
Unlike many fields that seek concrete solutions, philosophy is centered on the exploration of ideas, encouraging critical thinking and reasoned argument rather than conclusive truths.
This intrinsic nature of philosophy makes it distinct from sciences or mathematics, where answers are often clear-cut and universally accepted. In philosophy, the journey of questioning, debating, and contemplating various perspectives holds more value than reaching a final, irrefutable conclusion.
One of the key reasons philosophy is not about right and wrong answers is its focus on fundamental questions that often lack empirical verification. Instead, these questions invite endless interpretation, discussion, and re-evaluation, fostering a landscape where multiple, often conflicting viewpoints can coexist and be explored.
Such is the case with the two competing philosophies guiding Israel’s decision-making — and the commentary surrounding it — since the October 7th Hamas-led massacres.
On one hand, you have the more liberally minded philosophy which suggests that Israel’s supreme intelligence community should have forecasted October 7th and worked to prevent it.
And perhaps it was on Israel’s radar. According to the Israel Defense Forces, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu received four communiques from the Military Intelligence Directorate in the spring and summer of 2023 warning him about how the country’s enemies were viewing the upheaval in Israeli society (regarding the controversial judicial reforms at the time).
What’s more, a document compiled within the IDF’s Gaza Division less than three weeks before October 7th warned that Hamas was training for a large-scale invasion of Israel during which hostages would be taken en masse. Titled “Detailed raid training from end to end,” the document was circulated on September 19th and was reportedly brought to the attention of at least some senior intelligence officials, but apparently ignored.
This liberally minded philosophy purports that the State of Israel is ultimately to blame for the October 7th failures, and it is the Israelis’ mess to clean up, including doing whatever it takes to return the abductees. If that means ending the war in Gaza, so be it.
Folks who side with this philosophical version will also point to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s policy to purposefully overlook Qatari payments to Hamas as a way to weaken the Palestinian Authority in Judea and Samaria (also known as the West Bank), thus creating two rival Palestinian factions and a less-likely path to a Palestinian state.
Netanyahu indicated in his memoirs that he thought the Hamas issue was a manageable challenge, and that Israel would lose too many soldiers in a ground incursion in Gaza. Netanyahu was invested in this thesis and linked it to his preference for maintaining the schism between Hamas in Gaza and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank.
Yet Hamas has told Israel from day one what their stated mission is: to destroy the Jewish state. Israel fell for what we call in Hebrew the conceptzia — that under the heavy burden of governing the Gaza Strip, economic inducements towards Hamas would prompt it to moderate its foundational belief that Israel is an illegitimate entity whose very existence must be extinguished and its citizens murdered.
Israel presumed that radical elements which rise to power are exposed to new constraints and thus moderate themselves. However, as history shows, such elements sometimes behave in the opposite way: Rising to power allows them to accumulate more resources to realize their ideological vision, as proven by Hitler, Khomeini, and ISIS.
The last two and a half years have widened the gap in Israel’s perception of Hamas, namely that it was striving to improve the fabric of life in Gaza, especially through the promotion of civil projects, the infusion of capital, and more permits for Gazans to work in Israel. All this was based on the Israeli assumption that these initiatives would surely create public pressure on Hamas in the event of deterioration, thus preventing military escalation with Israel.
Although it was clear that Hamas was an enemy of Israel, there was no real debate about its capabilities. Israel defined the organization as deterred, and possibilities for it to attack were usually regarded as limited military action.
How much of this conceptzia was built on strategic deception by Hamas, and how much by wishful thinking from Israel and other Western countries? The answer, likely, is both.
As they say: When people tell you who they are, believe them. Hamas told Israel who it was for decades, and Israel decided to hear something else. Accordingly, the Hamas-led October 7th massacres are more a result of Israel’s miscalculations than Hamas’ caliphate-driven, genocidal, antisemitic intentions.
This would be the equivalent of scolding the stove for burning a child after the child climbed onto the kitchen counter, fully aware that the stove was turned on and sizzling.
On the other hand, you have the more conservative-minded philosophy which suggests that, regardless of who did what, the Hamas-led October 7th massacres happened and must urgently be dealt with. As they also say: There is no reason to cry over spilled milk.
Hence why a ground operation in Gaza was the only plausible option, and Israel’s job in the Strip became two-fold: to return the abductees, and remove the threat that led to October 7th. Everything else is noise.
This line of thinking also means taking care of those behind the attacks. Indeed, on April 1st, at an “Iranian consulate building” in the Syrian capital of Damascus, Israel allegedly killed several Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commanders, including two generals (one of whom was considered an “architect” of October 7th). And during January, an Israeli drone assassinated Hamas deputy chairman Saleh al-Arouri in Lebanon.
There is also the bigger-picture threat emanating out of the Islamic Republic of Iran, which presumably sanctioned October 7th to disrupt Israeli-Saudi normalization that would have seen the Saudis — Iran’s arch-rivals — receive a “civilian” nuclear program from the United States. (Notice the quotation marks if you have not already.)
Israel is now in a position whereby it has international legitimacy to conduct a preemptive campaign to degrade another Iranian octopus tentacle — Hezbollah in Lebanon — which comes with an added bonus: By diminishing Hezbollah’s very real threat to Israel, the Jewish state builds more leverage for if and when it wants to take military action against Iran’s nuclear program.
Yet many Israelis believe that Netanyahu does not have the guts to authorize a military operation against Hezbollah because the terror group can put up a serious fight against Israel, the results of which could make Netanyahu less popular in the upcoming Israeli elections.
After all, if you are Netanyahu, why enter into a foray with Hezbollah if the “international community” is going to force you to fight with two hands behind your back, precisely like they have done with the IDF in Gaza?
In recent weeks, Netanyahu has been making increasingly more implications about running again for prime minister in the next elections. His statements revolve around the dramatic need for him to continue leading the country even after the next general elections, despite — and perhaps because of — the terrible national tragedy and disgraceful failures of October 7th.1
Netanyahu believes that Israel is in the midst of a war which will last for many more years, and that only he is fit to lead this challenge. But can Netanyahu be fit for political office after such a terrible national tragedy and disgraceful failures happened on his watch?
Such is the discipline of philosophy, which thrives on questions more than answers.
“Despite Oct. 7, Netanyahu is determined to run for reelection, and certain he can win.” The Times of Israel.
It seems to me that for 75 years, we've been operating around a “philosophy” which ponders: “How to survive the ongoing attacks from Muslim enemies while we build a thriving economy and live like any other successful Western country?”
Such a philosophy might have given us a decent standard of living until now and kept our enemies from overrunning us, but the cost – in terms of loss of life, disability, internal socio/political divisiveness, military insecurity and political/economic isolation from the rest of the world has been devastating. We Jews are great at uniting to fight an immediate attack, but we are lousy at agreeing upon a “national vision” for ourselves which will lead to true security, prosperity and peace.
I propose that a blueprint for a national vision does exist. It’s in the Torah, which was given by G-d. In previous posts, I suggested various elements of such a vision – but I’m not going to repeat them here. Instead I call upon Israel’s religious conservatives: leaders and influencers like Yishai Fleisher, Ben G’vir and yes, Bibi too. His experience is valuable even if his actions have not always been effective. A Torah-based vision for Israel’s security, economy and social issues must be studied and implemented in a way that sets firm national standards but does not trample on the freedom to do what we want in our own homes and other private spaces.
I’m afraid that without such a national vision, we are doomed to remain a vassal state of the US; fooling ourselves that we are doing okay. If the nations of the world ever decide to welcome us it will be as a truly independent country, doing what G-d wants us to do: be a light unto the Nations. Yes, even to our enemies.
There's philosophy and then there's dogma: a lot of the high tech border defenses, which led Israel to reduce the number of soldiers on the border, were breached by Hamas. For example, the surveillance cameras were disabled by accurate sniper fire before they breached the fence, blinding the system.
The dogma was in believing these defenses were adequate without making a concerted test, like setting up a test defense inside Israel and a competition among army units to try to breach it. In software "white hat" hackers constantly try to break through cyber defenses and use the lessons learned to improve them.
A much more rigorous approach to developing defenses is needed, one that will try every conceivable way of breaking them without regard for the self-esteem of the designers. Replace dogma with hard facts, lessons learned and constant improvement.