Israeli complacency, pride comes before a fall and failure to be the Good Samaritan instead of the robber

FROM:  https://newlinesmag.com/argument/how-changes-in-the-israeli-military-led-to-the-failure-of-october-7/#:~:text=Despite%20their%20oversight%20of%20Gaza,phone%20calls%20from%20the%20front.

Overreliance on technology, dehumanization of Palestinians and incompetence left a once-effective force unable to prevent Hamas’ assault

James Rosen-BirchJames Rosen-Birch is an organizational scientist, start-up founder, technologist and writer based in Toronto                      20 May 2024

Five final paragraphs:

"This status quo was unacceptable to Hamas, who embarked on a two-year plan for an operation aiming not to destroy Israel, but rather to shock it back to the negotiating table with leverage gained through hostage-taking. As later reports showed, within three days of the initial attack Hamas had offered to return all civilian hostages in exchange for Israel foregoing a ground invasion.

Yet neither side understood the degree to which Israel’s national security capabilities had degraded, nor how Israelis would react to having their national self-image shattered by the attack. As Hamas fighters made their way into Israel, expecting fierce resistance and martyrdom at the hands of a vastly superior opponent, what they found instead was minimal resistance and an army so caught by surprise it was willing in a handful of cases to fire on its own civilians.

Senior officials, themselves caught by surprise with no explanation for how such an attack could occur, quickly resorted to threat inflation to skirt accountability, while deferring a formal investigation until after the conclusion of a hastily launched war of reprisal. The lack of official explanation as to how an attack of this magnitude could occur in the first place further panicked the population, creating the pretext for a level of retaliatory violence unprecedented in the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Yet, as the analysis above shows, no part of this was inevitable. To paraphrase the great military scholar Carl von Clausewitz, the purpose of military action and, by extension, military technology, is to create the conditions where diplomacy becomes possible, not to eliminate the need for negotiation altogether. An organizational science analysis shows clearly how Israel’s substitution of technology for politics, dehumanization of Palestinians, and growing corruption inside its security and political establishment had set the stage years in advance for the disaster that struck on Oct.7.

The Gaza “showroom” once bragged about by Saar Koursh has now collapsed (see first para of Rosen-Birch piece). Instead of showcasing Israel’s technological prowess and military might, the Gaza Strip has become a monument to Israel’s institutional decay, indifference to international norms and accelerating global isolation. What new order will emerge from the ruins of the current war is not yet clear. But the belief that Israel could enjoy safety while dismissing, ignoring or suppressing a captive Palestinian population, caged in by surveillance technology and brutal security policies, has been exposed as a costly illusion — paid for in both Israeli and Palestinian lives."