JEWISH JOURNAL
The American Jewish Community’s Grand Intelligence Failure
David Bernstein
October 5, 2024

…Just a few weeks after the massacre in Israel, Politico reported that mostly women IDF soldiers stationed on tatzpitaniyot or look-out posts warned that Hamas training camps were likely preparing for an attack against Israel. “A month and a half before the war, we saw that in one of the Hamas training camps they had built an exact, scaled model of an observer’s position, like the one we operate. They started training there with drones to hit the [machine gun] shooter,” a female soldier said. Their warnings went largely unheeded because the intelligence community had embraced a “Conceptzia”: a widely held conception that Hamas was adapting to the duties of governance and had no incentive to confront Israel. Of course, the Oct. 7th Conceptzia turned out to be illusory, the outgrowth of groupthink that filtered out any contradictory evidence, one that ultimately rendered Israelis along the border sitting ducks. READ MORE