Engaging with Ehud Neor: Disengagement and The October 7th Intelligence Failures

Ehud Neor is one of the writers you must read to understand the Israeli Right. He has a gift for writing beautifully. I greatly enjoy reading his postings on his blog, A Pisgah Site, even when I disagree with his conclusions. 

Ehud, from the Right, and I, from the Center-Left, disagree on many of the issues facing Israel today. We met some time back. Ours is an "argument for the sake of Heaven," not in the form of verbal combat but of an ultimately cooperative effort to arrive at truth. We may not get there, but our Jewish tradition teaches that this type of argument has moral value even if it continues long after our time. 

In Jewish tradition (see the famous text from Eruvin13b:11), Rabbi Hillel's school of thought generally prevailed in Talmudic legal arguments about interpreting Jewish Law because it was more prepared to honor and respect the deep thought of its rival, Rabbi Shammai's school. I find Ehud does that. I try to do the same.

My subject today is a response to Ehud's brief reflection on the withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 and its relevance to our current situation. In his recent post "Behold, the Irrelevance of Antisemitism," which I heartily recommend reading, Ehud described the Disengagement as "the original sin that led to Oct 7." I acknowledge and respect the way Ehud lives his principles. He believed in the settlements in Gaza and lived there with his family for years. They were among the refugees whose lives the Disengagement upended. 

He bases his assessment of the Disengagement as an "original sin" on the recent IDF report, whose conclusions were published in Hebrew on the IDF website and summarized in an excellent article by Emanuel Fabian in the Times of Israel. 

Ehud misreads the report's published findings, drawing an over-broad conclusion from the discussion of the intelligence failure: "the IDF had absolutely no humint sources inside Gaza. When the Jews lived in Gaza, there were thousands. Nothing like Oct 7 could have happened." 

Both parts of Ehud's conclusion are incorrect. There was no IDF finding of a total inability to gather HUMINT. Moreover, the failure of October 7 did not derive from an absence of data.

In October 2024, Swiss researcher of military strategy Michel Wyss published an excellent summary of what we know about Israeli Oct 7 intelligence failings. The IDF findings largely confirm his analysis. I am not able to spot essential differences. He contextualizes the material in discussing the problems of surprise attacks in general. "One of the primary tasks of any intelligence service is to avoid strategic surprise. Yet, as numerous case studies from Pearl Harbor to 9/11 illustrate and as conventional wisdom holds, surprise (and thus failure to anticipate it as such) is almost inevitable."  

Wyss notes: "It is generally believed that Israel has a sophisticated network of human sources in Gaza, and an Israeli media report recently claimed that 'Israel uses thousands of informants in Gaza to gain information needed to locate and eliminate senior Hamas officials and terror infrastructure.' At the same time, there are some indications that in recent years, Israel may have increased its reliance on technical means, and that the overall quality of intelligence collection on Hamas' intentions has declined."

In other words, while Israel moved to greater dependence on technological intelligence sources, the failure of Israeli intelligence agencies on Oct 7, 2023, was not simply a result of a lack of human intelligence data. It represented a failure to evaluate the data accurately. Wyss's article, written by a scholar of the study of Intelligence work, suggests that this sort of misevaluation of data is a constant danger in strategic intelligence work. Even without the Disengagement, the challenge would have existed.

I suspect that the decline in the use of HUMINT, which is labor intensive, had little to do with the Disengagement and the absence of Israelis living in Gaza as Ehud suggests. It had other sources. A transition to over-reliance on technical means that fit well with the economic obsessions of Netanyahu governments since 2009.

Americans who follow the Trump-Musk government cuts may want to consider the Israeli example as an argument against cutting the government bureaucracy to the bone resulting in no one being available during emergencies.  This obsession exerted its influence on military evaluators. Ideally, these would be politically disinterested people only concerned with analyzing the security data. However, the wind blows in a certain direction, and military evaluators are human beings subject to their environments' influences. Following it back to its source, we find the Prime Minister. His economic obsessions created a delusion of seemingly containing expenses while providing adequate security. Oct 7 revealed the conceptual failure.