Summary
Overreliance on advanced intelligence and technology can create a dangerous illusion of control.
When decision-makers treat intelligence as certainty rather than guidance, they risk strategic blindness—especially against ideologically driven enemies who defy rational cost-benefit logic.
True national resilience is not the ability to predict every threat, but the capacity to withstand surprise through humility, preparedness, and the assumption that systems can fail.
Intelligence should support judgment, not replace it; resilience comes from preparing for the worst, even when information is incomplete or wrong.
Imagine driving in total darkness, in torrential rain—yet you feel calm. Why? Because Waze is on. It tells you, “In 100 meters, turn left.” It shows you every traffic jam and every speed camera. You trust it so completely that you stop looking through the windshield. You drive by the screen, not by the road. You turn left—and suddenly, boom. Someone has dug a pit, and you plunge into an abyss. Waze calmly announces, “Recalculating route,” but the car is already wrecked. This is the story of Israeli intelligence on October 7.
Israel’s intelligence “Waze”—the Shin Bet and Military Intelligence—was the most advanced in the world. It could pinpoint “where every sack of cement was going and which tunnel it was destined for.” Israel was so mesmerized by the screen, by the technological ability to know what was happening inside Sinwar’s headquarters, that it forgot to look at the Gaza bakery, which suddenly asked to prepare hundreds of pita breads, or the barber shop in Jabalia that, on October 4, was suddenly flooded with dozens of Nukhba operatives getting haircuts to look sharp before joining their 72 virgins.
The Sin of Hubris: Intelligence as a Glass Wall
For years, Israel’s national resilience was built on the myth of knowledge and intent.
“We struck them hard and they are deterred,” former director of the Shin Bet, Nadav Argaman, declared in May 2021 after Operation Guardian of the Walls. “They want an economy, not a war,” the political leadership told us, echoed by commentators in the studios.
Then, on October 7, “Al-Aqsa Flood” came crashing down on Israel’s head.
The information was there. The noncommissioned officers shouted warnings. The female observers saw the training exercises live on their screens.
The catastrophic error that led to this disaster was Israel’s excessively rational lens, rooted in Western logic—the belief that people act to maximize personal and family welfare. That is how Israel’s value system works. The intelligence community and the political leadership refused to look squarely at, and truly understand, the jihadist fanaticism that had taken over the entire arena, including a polity called Gaza.
Israel built a resilient “wall of glass:” extremely strong, dazzling, a marvel of technology—yet terrifyingly fragile. The moment the underlying conception cracked, everything shattered. Israel treated intelligence as an insurance policy, rather than as a recommendation.
In Arabic they say: “Al-ḥadhar lā yunjī min al-qadar”—caution does not save you from fate.
Israel’s military and political leadership came to believe that intelligence provided immunity from fate. If they knew the enemy’s intentions, they thought, they could prevent it. They forgot that true resilience is measured precisely on the day you do not know.
The Pendulum: From James Bond in Tehran to Blindness in Damascus
Consider the contrast. The Mossad, with Military Intelligence support, carried out near–science-fiction operations against Iran and Hizbullah.
Israeli intelligence knew which bolt was loose in a centrifuge at Natanz, and even how Nasrallah likes his baklava. Intelligence services around the world rightly marvel at Mossad’s operational brilliance.
But these achievements also exposed a profound and dangerous imbalance between Israel’s intelligence agencies—between the Mossad and the Shin Bet—and they blinded Israel. This is because Israel must also look soberly at its environment.
Who foresaw the collapse of the Assad regime? Within five days—rehabilitation. Jihadists raced unimpeded toward Damascus in pickup trucks. The Russians left. The Iranians fled. Syria disintegrated in a matter of days.
Did Israel read the map in real time? The honest answer is no.
Why? Because Israel’s intelligence instinctively searches for logic. But an enemy willing to sacrifice everything for a murderous ideology does not operate according to the logic of an Oxford-educated scholar of international relations.
The Marines in Fallujah: The Lesson of James Mattis
To understand what resilience under uncertainty really means, consider U.S. General James Mattis. In 2003, at the height of the chaos in Iraq, he commanded a Marine division and sent his troops into the streets of Fallujah. He knew his intelligence was limited. He knew he could not distinguish with certainty between terrorist and civilian.
He gave them an order that distilled the essence of resilience:
“Be polite. Be professional. But have a plan to kill everyone you meet.”
He did not tell them to wait for intelligence to identify the enemy.
He told them to act professionally while assuming that reality could flip at any moment. This is not a cruel order. It is an order of resilience—of refusing to let complacency get you killed.
Israel must adopt a permanent assumption: the enemy will always surprise you. He will always have a new trick—something you have not yet imagined.
What True National Resilience Requires
- Capability denial: Do not wait to understand how an enemy plans to use a capability—destroy it simply because it exists.
- The assumption of blindness: The military and society must be prepared for the morning when the screens go dark.
- Humility and recognition of limits.
The Lesson: Resilience of Steel, Not of Screens
No one knows what the investigations will ultimately conclude, but the clearest and most distilled lesson is this: national resilience must never rest on intelligence as its sole backbone.
True resilience is the ability to absorb a blow you did not anticipate and respond with force—because you prepared for the worst-case scenario, not the “reasonable” one. National resilience is not the ability to predict the future. It is the ability to survive it even when you did not predict it.
Intelligence is an extraordinary supporting tool—but it is not Israel’s compass. Israel’s resilience will return only when it replaces overconfidence with operational humility. It must invest in intelligence. Use Waze. But it must always—always—keep both hands on the steering wheel and its eyes on the road.
Because in the end, when Waze gets it wrong, only your hands on the wheel will save you.
