But it is very strange that the Israeli authorities did not react to the initial breach of the border barrier in Gaza. It was not just a single fence - they had seized land for a quarter of the kilometre, a buffer zone within Gaza, and it was closely covered with surveillance towers. Nothing moved, in the zone, without being seen in Tel Aviv. Well - not until Oct 7. And then the Hamas operatives began blowing up the surveillance towers, which should have triggered every sort of alarm, but did not. Meanwhile they are rushing over the fence, and hopping over on little kites, etc.
The IDF was not summoned until people in Israel started calling for help. This is extraordinary, and an explanation is needed. I suppose there will be an enquiry, after the war.
People with a predisposition on how the world works get into positions where they are expected to react to reality instead of some internal view of how things MUST be. I’ve seen this in corporations where, when things turn south and actions need to be taken, they are not. That’s because the things happening contradict and invalidate the preexisting view of how things MUST be. This is one thing that frightens me about putting, say, trans people into positions of power and authority. You already know that those people can create and live inside of their own special reality. What does that mean when they are expected to respond to changing conditions and those changes threaten their preestablished view of how things MUST be?
One of the most dangerous things you find in any organization is holding people to goals and objectives. The goal, in this case, is to minimize the number of cross border incidents, then the obvious way of meeting that is to simply not report or respond to such incidents. I don’t know what happened here, but it’s quite obvious the failure is on the interpretation side of the equation. All the evidence was there and obvious. It had doubtless been reported up the chain. But somewhere along that chain somebody said, “No, that can’t be. The people reporting are overreacting.” And, likely, the information stopped right there. That is a danger of hierarchical systems. Hierarchy is great for organizing things but can block feedback to the top.