RUTHFULLY YOURS

When you suddenly get innumerable emails from people wanting you to see the same story, you know it’s an important one. In this case, it’s the story of the young women who, with three tanks, fought a 17-hour-long furious battle against Hamas terrorists, saving an entire community through their actions. Their triumph is an important counterpoint to the women who were ignored in the lead-up to the October 7 attack. Some are blaming sexism, but I have another theory.

The tank battle took place at Yated, a community that sits near the Egyptian and Gaza borders at the southernmost end of the Gaza Strip. This video shows the women explaining how they responded to the attack and what they did. They are matter of fact, saying that they were completely focused on the task at hand, which was to fight the terrorists swarming into Israel:

It’s worth noting that, even as the women are getting the respect they deserve for their impressive military feat, there is a story emerging that part of the reason Israel was caught unprepared was that commanders ignored warnings from female “spotters,” many of whom died on October 7, saying that they saw unusual Hamas activity along the border.

The current narrative is that this failure resulted from command sexism. That’s possible. Israel is the most enlightened country in the Middle East, with full women’s rights and innumerable strong women. Still, many people in Israel are the descendants of the approximately 900,000 Jews expelled from Arab lands after Israel’s creation. Unlike the Zionist Europeans who moved to Israel before and after the modern state’s creation, all of whom were very modern in their attitudes towards women, these emigrants came from conservative countries and might have reflected those values and passed them to their children.

However, to the extent the report originated in Haaretz, a hard-left publication, I take the claim of sexism with a grain of salt.

A more likely cause, in my opinion, for not taking the warnings seriously may have been complacency. After all, the attack was the first major attack since the Yom Kippur War in 1973. As James B. Meigs wrote of the Israelis, it’s possible that “they forgot to be afraid.”

Meigs has spent years studying the events leading up to man-made disasters, and he sees what happened in Israel repeating a familiar pattern, one in which “People working in a hazardous environment notice small signs of trouble, pass those warnings along to their superiors, and then…nothing.” Examples abound, including the Titanic, the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, and the Challenger.

The nature of the world is disastrous, whether because of natural disasters or because manmade systems fail. Regarding the latter, the big ones in the 1970s (the Challenger, Chernobyl, Three-Mile Island) led sociologists and psychologists to try to figure out why, despite indications that problems were brewing, no one addressed them in time.

It turns that [O]rganizations gradually ‘drift into failure’ in the words of disaster theorist Sidney Dekker. During long, accident-free periods, businesses and other institutions tend to reduce manpower and trim safety margins, all in the name of efficiency and focusing on their “core mission.”

Frontline groups get inured to the little things. While you and I might panic over something (as I do whenever an airplane starts bouncing), experienced people will assume it’s normal. Young doctors are taught not to assume worst-case scenarios. “If you hear hoofbeats outside the window, it’s more likely to be a horse than a zebra.” The same is true in jobs that carry high risks.

With that in mind, Meigs writes,

Looking at October 7 through the lens of disaster science reveals how Israel’s military and political leadership developed an overly optimistic mental model of the threats that surrounded them. They forgot to be afraid. Worse, Hamas’s attack planners deeply understood Israel’s weak points and blind spots.

Israel’s drift into failure began long before October 7. Prime Minister Netanyahu and military leaders believed the threat from Hamas was mostly contained. With the Iron Dome missile-defense system in place, they came to see occasional rocket barrages from Gaza much the way NASA viewed booster leaks: as a manageable problem rather than an existential threat. A high-tech fence and automated listening posts had mostly eliminated incursions across the border. With Hamas seemingly quiescent, the IDF was able to reassign most troops from the Gaza frontier to other missions.

Fifty years after the Yom Kippur War, Israel believed it had things under control. What will save Israel is that Israelis have been reminded that they don’t have it under control, that they face an existential threat, that the world is not at their back, and that their citizenry is made up of women like those in the tank crew that saved Yated.