The American Jewish Community’s Grand Intelligence Failure

In May of this year, I was listening to a prominent U.S.-based military analyst recount Israel’s intelligence failures of October 7th to a group of American rabbis, and it hit me: We American Jews also experienced an intelligence meltdown in the wake of the massacre—our failure to predict the eruption of hostility after Oct. 7th. And like Israelis, American Jews must still go through a reckoning.

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.

When I speak to American Jewish groups about the spike in antisemitism in the past year, I like to ask the audience to raise their hands if they were surprised when, on Oct. 9th, 31 student groups at Harvard blamed Israel for the massacre committed by Hamas on Israeli citizens. Almost every hand goes up. I ask if they were surprised by the campus encampments that prevented “Zionist” students from entering university buildings or by social media memes lionizing Hamas terrorists on hang-gliders. Again, almost every hand goes up.

Why were American Jews caught so off guard by the eruption of hostility on college campus and even high schools?

Because our communal institutions and leaders had embraced a delusive Conceptzia that blinded them, and us, to the mounting threat of extreme antisemitism on the left. They saw antisemitism on the right as the real threat and antisemitism on the left as a mere nuisance, one that could be managed if American Jews simply strengthened their alliances with progressive groups and educated them of the dangers.

Our leaders were asleep at the wheel as massive ideological shifts swept through our institutions, reprogramming the minds of young people, shutting down discourse, corrupting organizational cultures and fueling a wave of antisemitism. Many quietly recognized disturbing trends and had an inkling of the troubles ahead but did little to prepare the community for the predictable onslaught. Most played along with the political fads of the day.

Rabbi David Ingber, the founding rabbi of Romemu, waxed poignantly that “liberal Jewish groups have not really done the inner work of understanding how they and we unwittingly and with the best of intentions countenance the decentering of Jewish concerns,” allowing the “language of oppressor and oppressed … into the discourse that then led to this kind of combustible reality on Oct. 8.”

When Israel’s vaunted Unit 8200 failed to detect the Hamas attack on Oct. 7th, the unit appointed Dani Harari, a commander known for his integrity to conduct a probe. “This isn’t just about finding a scapegoat or assigning blame. It’s about understanding the systemic vulnerabilities that allowed this to happen and ensuring we’re better prepared in the future,” stated one official of the unit. “It’s an opportunity to strengthen our operations, to foster a culture of continuous improvement and adaptability,” Harari said.

We American Jews need a similar probe into our systemic vulnerabilities so that we too can foster a culture of continuous improvement.

We American Jews need a similar probe into our systemic vulnerabilities so that we too can foster a culture of continuous improvement. But so far, I’ve seen little sign of such internal reflection. And while many Jewish organizations will now openly acknowledge that an oppressed-oppressor ideology that paints Jews as oppressors has indeed taken hold, they stop short of taking it on in colleges, high schools and radical DEI programs that pervade our educational institutions.

This year, Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, happens to fall just a few days after the one-year anniversary of Oct. 7th. What were our collective failures that left American Jewry vulnerable, blissfully unaware of the growing hostility? I fear Jewish leaders haven’t even asked themselves the question.

David Bernstein is the Founder and CEO of the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values and author of “Woke Antisemitism: How a Progressive Ideology Harms Jews.”