Israel’s next strategic surprise may not be a war - opinion

After Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, Israel will enter another period of remembrance, this one marking the massacre of October 7, 2023.For Israelis of my generation, the proximity is especially haunting.Yom Kippur evokes prayer and repentance. It also carries the memory of October 1973, when Egyptian and Syrian forces launched a surprise attack that caught Israel dangerously unprepared and led to one of the bloodiest wars in the country’s history.Half a century later came October 7.The circumstances were very different. But an uncomfortable connection links the two catastrophes: in both cases, what Israel believed shaped what it knew.The aftermath of Hamas's Nova music festival massacre in Re'im, southern Israel, on October 7, 2023. Picture taken November 2, 2023 (credit: Arie Leib Abrams/Flash90)That distinction should concern every intelligence service and every national leader.I have spent much of my professional life around Israel’s defense and intelligence establishment. Over the years, I have learned that strategic surprises rarely arrive in the form we expect. They can be catastrophic. They can also be hopeful.And certainty can be the greatest danger of all.Peres asks National Security College graduates if they predicted USSR collapseI remember a 1996 meeting between former prime minister Shimon Peres and the graduating class of Israel’s National Security College. Peres had just lost the election to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and was in a somber mood.He asked the officers a simple question.He had, he said, dozens of books on the Soviet Union in his library. Now that the Soviet Union no longer existed, what was he supposed to do with them?Then came the more serious question: Had any of them predicted its collapse? Had their commanders?Silence.The dissolution of one of the world’s two superpowers had transformed the international order. Yet much of the global intelligence community had failed to anticipate the speed and scale of what was happening.I remember another surprise.In August 1990, I was attending the wedding of Amnon Lipkin-Shahak, then head of Military Intelligence and later IDF chief of staff.During the ceremony, word arrived that Saddam Hussein’s forces had invaded Kuwait.The invasion would lead to the Gulf War and, for Israelis, to something previously almost unimaginable: Iraqi ballistic missiles falling on Tel Aviv and other Israeli cities.Yet another surprise followed. Israel had prepared extensively for the possibility that Iraq would use chemical weapons. Gas masks were distributed to the population.The chemical attack never came.Fears of Egyptian deception before Sadat's 1977 Jerusalem visit Intelligence failures extend beyond failures to anticipate wars.In 1977, Egyptian president Anwar Sadat announced that he was prepared to travel to Jerusalem.Only four years after Egypt and Syria had surprised Israel on Yom Kippur, Egypt’s president proposed standing before the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, and speaking about peace.Israel’s military leadership was deeply suspicious. Some feared deception.But Sadat came.That surprise ultimately helped produce the peace treaty between Israel and Egypt, one of the most consequential strategic achievements in Israel’s history.This is the part of intelligence work that receives too little attention.Governments spend enormous resources asking, "Where will the next threat come from?"They spend far less time asking: Where might the next opportunity come from?History contains both kinds of surprises.Israel failed to foresee the fall of the shah of Iran and the rise of the Islamic Republic, despite its deep military, intelligence, and economic relationship with Iran at the time.The Oslo process developed through secret negotiations that surprised many inside Israel’s own political and security establishment.The Arab Spring toppled governments that had seemed entrenched.And Bashar Assad remained in power for years after senior Israeli officials publicly predicted that his regime was about to collapse. It eventually fell in December 2024.I have known many brilliant intelligence professionals. Even for them, prediction is difficult.The problem is fundamental.Human beings interpret information through assumptions.Intelligence organizations do the same.Before the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Israel possessed important information about Egyptian and Syrian preparations. But that information was filtered through what Israelis came to call the “conception,” a deeply entrenched analytical framework about when and under what conditions Egypt and Syria would go to war.Before October 7, 2023, Israel again possessed warning signs and pieces of information.The catastrophe exposed how that information was interpreted through assumptions about Hamas, its intentions, and its willingness to risk a full-scale confrontation.That is why I have developed a small tradition over the years.When a new head of Military Intelligence takes office, I try to remind him of something simple:You see only what you see.You hear only what you hear.You know only what you know.And you understand only what you understand.There are always things you do not see, hear, know, or understand.For an intelligence officer, acknowledging this is a mark of professionalism.Israel today possesses extraordinary intelligence and technological capabilities. Its security establishment operates satellites, cyber systems, sophisticated surveillance networks and advanced missile defenses. It must monitor threats thousands of kilometers from Israel, around the clock, across multiple fronts, in an age when artificial intelligence is transforming both intelligence collection and warfare.These capabilities are essential.But technology can also create an illusion of omniscience.A country that can watch an enemy from space may still fail to understand what is happening on the ground.A military equipped with some of the most advanced technology in the world can still be surprised by paragliders, drones, tunnels and tractors.That should be one of the enduring lessons of October 7.Intelligence requires the disciplined questioning of assumptions alongside the accumulation of information.And the lesson applies to opportunities, too.On this Yom Kippur, Israel’s intelligence and political leaders should continue asking the question they are trained to ask:Where might the next danger come from?But they should add another:Where might the next opportunity come from?Israel’s next strategic surprise could be another war. It could be a dangerous political transformation in a neighboring country. It could be a technological or military development we have failed to anticipate.But it could also be something entirely different: a diplomatic opening, an unexpected regional realignment or an initiative for peace that today seems impossible.No intelligence system can eliminate surprise.The goal should be to prevent confidence from becoming blindness.That requires technology, expertise, and constant scrutiny.Above all, it requires humility.