Between Two Failures: "We Haven't Learned Enough from the Failure"

Fifty years and one day separated the October 1973 failure from that of October 2023. The trauma of the Yom Kippur War was not erased from public memory, but the mistakes and shortcomings repeated themselves in a complete surprise. Intelligence did not deeply analyze the roots of the failure, and three years after the disaster, understanding of the enemy and the region has not fundamentally improved.

Fifty years and one day separated the October 1973 failure from that of October 2023. The trauma of the Yom Kippur War was never erased from public memory, but the mistakes and shortcomings repeated themselves—in complete surprise, and with more severe consequences. The article quotes Meir Amit, former Mossad director, who said after the Yom Kippur War that "if everyone now climbs on the intelligence and sees it as a scapegoat—that would be a superficial and misguided approach," words that seem as if they were said after October 7. The similarity between the two failures is staggering given the fact that the trauma of 1973 was never erased from Israeli memory. The 2023 failure was more severe than that of 1973, both in terms of the scale of casualties, the massacre, the mass abductions, and the deep invasion into Israeli territory, and because the surprise in 2023 was absolute. Prof. Uri Bar-Yosef explains that in 1973 there were voices in Military Intelligence that warned, but on October 7, not only the head of Military Intelligence was wrong, but most of the division's personnel. Three years after the October 7 massacre, and despite the fact that a state commission of inquiry has not been established, it is possible to outline the sources of the failure: it was not merely a mistake of intelligence, but a national failure. Former head of Military Intelligence Aharon Zeevi-Farkash says: "I am very troubled. We must ensure that the lessons are learned and instilled, a task we always struggle with."