In my original essay on the failed concepts that brought Israel to the catastrophe of October 7, 2023, I asked to focus on the big mental models that had failed, not the tactical and intelligence failures on that deadly Saturday morning. This isn’t because tactical failures are unimportant and weren’t fateful, but rather because they don’t tell the whole story. I specifically drew attention to four big conceptual failures and the way the interaction between them became so disastrous.

I thought (and still believe) that the most original contribution I was making was in my discussion of the fourth conceptual failure, that of the international community and its construction of anti-sovereign entities around Israel, each in its own way almost purpose-built to entrench and exacerbate conflict rather than mitigate or even resolve it.

I was disappointed that my critics in this symposium focused only on the first three concepts. Nevertheless I thank them for reading my essay and sharing their thoughts. I’ll address a few of their critiques directly, but first I should make some general comments.

Some of the respondents note that experience in the years leading up to October 7, 2023 seemed to justify Benjamin Netanyahu’s reliance on skepticism, deferral, and messaging. Granted. But we are not having a debate about the merits and demerits of his leadership in the before times, but taken as a whole.

Nearly all of the respondents treat the occupation and the settlement enterprise as the same thing or conceptually inseparable, though the dilemmas each one presents are different as are the putative costs and benefits. The suggestion made in several of the responses that a settler presence in Gaza could have prevented October 7 defies geography—Gush Katif was not a buffer between the Strip and Israel, and anyway would have just been the site of an even more terrifying massacre.

There is also a recurring failure to distinguish between the desire for a “two-state solution” and the imperative for Israel to consolidate itself on borders that are militarily, economically, demographically, and morally defensible. It is still possible to have a fully democratic state that is the national home of the Jewish people with a nearly 80-percent Jewish majority on something like 80 percent of the mandatory land. One realization of this vision is that the rest be a Palestinian state on the two non-contiguous territories of the West Bank and Gaza; this is what the Palestinians rejected in 2000–1, 2007–8, and 2013–4. But this is not the only one.

In addition, there is in what some of my critics have written a problem philosophers refer to as type-token confusion. I don’t claim in my article that because of Zvi Sukkot’s sukkah, forces were moved away from Gaza into the West Bank in a way that materially changed the outcome on October 7. I argue that the photo of Sukkot standing in front of semi-idolatrous sukkah while soldiers protect him in the middle of an Arab village already attacked by settlers tells a story of the state capture that this alternative brand of Judaism and Zionism has succeeded in carrying out. I don’t claim that the Qatari cash transfers are the reason why October 7 happened. I argue that they loom large in Israeli feelings of an ideological rude awakening because they demonstrate so many of the miscalculations of Netanyahu personally in dealing with the Palestinian issue, the region, the U.S., and the Israeli public.

Though I disagreed with much of what was written in the responses, there were four points raised by my critics that I partially or wholly agree with and which merit a deeper discussion than I can give here. First, Gadi Taub raises the issue of defense dominance of Israeli doctrine, that is, the emphasis on defensive and reactive measures, like the border fence and the Iron Dome, over offensive ones. This has long been a minor obsession of mine, and I devoted an entire week to the topic in a seminar I taught at Haifa University on Israeli national-security concepts several years ago. I haven’t raised it in my post-October 7 writing because, if anything, my views on the folly of defense dominance have actually moderated in recent years.

Fundamentally, I don’t believe a defense-dominant strategy can ever meet the security challenges Israel faces. The doctrine that guided Israel’s war-making in the first twenty years of statehood was the right one: wars need to be fought quickly and on enemy territory. Israel is a productive society while its enemies largely are not. Its small population cannot be fully mobilized without drawing down the economic and cultural output it needs to survive.

Defense dominance entered Israeli strategic thinking right after the Six-Day War in 1967, and even though it was outwardly abandoned after the disastrous miscalculations of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, it was never fully abandoned—and was central, most notably, to the 1985–2000 “security zone” concept in southern Lebanon. What changed after 1967, of course, was the occupation of territories and the need, especially for those who were not particularly religious or ideologically committed to right-wing Zionism, to justify holding on to that territory for security needs. A whole lexicon of defense dominance entered Israeli national-security discourse, most absurdly perhaps with the term “strategic depth,” as though we suddenly had Russia’s western expanse to trap Napoleon and the Wehrmacht, rather than a few kilometers of desert. And, of course, if we were ever to succeed in settling newly conquered land in a way that could give us a kind of demographic dominance there (mission impossible, but let’s ignore that momentarily), that “depth” would be lost unless some new territory could be conquered around it and serve as a new buffer.

Taub is right that this is more than just a tactical failure but speaks to a general Israeli security orientation that belongs in a discussion of failed concepts like the one I tried to advance in my original article. So why didn’t I bring it up? Well, the truth is, this is one area where I have become a lot less certain in recent years, and especially since October 7. Professors I studied with as a student drilled into our heads that things like missile defense provided illusory protection and actually made wars likelier and longer, something I used to believe, but don’t anymore, at least not in the context of Israel and the terrorist armies on its borders. I still think an Israeli security doctrine that focuses on short offensive wars rather than fortifications and depth is best, but I have come to appreciate that that alone isn’t enough.

Second, Amnon Lord raises another important point in his critique of my essay, which is the difficulty political leaders have in making policy revisions when doing so would mean admitting an idea they are politically identified with and under attack for having advanced was wrong. Lord and I are in agreement about the fateful consequences of this difficulty in the years 1994–1996. An embattled Labor government, under relentless criticism for the Oslo deal, couldn’t afford to backtrack even as all of the assumptions and promises of dealing with Yasir Arafat came to naught. Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination made something difficult into something impossible: any policy revision wouldn’t just be an admission of error, it would now be a kind of concession to murder and incitement.

I’m not sure I agree with Lord that the same phenomenon was in play regarding the Lebanon withdrawal in 2000, as no one involved in that was in any senior decision-making post in the years that followed as (apparent) problems developed, though I accept that this was partially relevant for the Kadima government’s flatfooted responses to Hamas’s rise to power after the Gaza withdrawal, the 2006 Kerem Shalom raid in which Hamas abducted Gilad Shalit, and the inconclusive first Gaza war in 2008–9.

This is, obviously, as good an argument as any for regular changes of government, something Israeli democracy was pretty good about producing from 1977 to 2009. But there is a flipside to this, as I point out in my original article. It’s not just that politicians associated with a bold policy initiative gone wrong will be reluctant to make necessary policy revisions: the opposite problem can occur too, and politicians who inherited a policy they opposed but cannot reverse have very little incentive to make it work. This was certainly the case for Netanyahu and the disengagement. He was never invested in making Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza a success, and his coalition partners were determined that the withdrawal from the settlements of the northern West Bank not be seen as a success. The key diplomatic achievement of the disengagement, the assurances of the 2004 Bush-Sharon letter—in which the president explicitly did not rule out small Israeli annexations beyond the 1949 armistice lines in a future final-status agreement—were frittered away in the early months of Netanyahu’s return to power in a pointless confrontation with the new Obama administration over settlement construction that demonstrated, despite Lord’s claim to the contrary, that the Iran issue was absolutely not Netanyahu’s top strategic priority.

Third, Taub asks us to take seriously the Arab claim against Israel and to consider the Palestinian ethos and the Palestinian cause as it is framed by Palestinians themselves (elites and the broader public) and by the cause’s inordinately large and passionate supporters in the West and beyond. He insists on taking seriously “their theology of hate, their deep-seated racism, and the depth of their barbaric sadism.” He warns against projecting onto it materialist conceptions of human nature or particularist lessons from the unique story of Jewish national liberation in the last century.

This remains a challenge both for Israelis and for Westerners trying to advance a solution to the conflict that often doesn’t address the actual conflict but what they wish the conflict was. (The best post-October 7 example is the push to recognize a Palestinian state by Spain, Norway, and Ireland). There is nothing in my essay or in any of my writing that would indicate that I have closed my eyes to the essence of anti-Zionism as an ideology or a program of action.

Fourth, Rafi DeMogge is right to resist an imagined “end state” of a historical problem, against which any observed state needs to be measured. I agree with this wholeheartedly, just as I resist imagined “initial states” of purity. Claims and counter-claims in this conflict often rely on some pure state or other, where everything before is just legitimate history and everything after is some kind of perversion (see under: percentages of “historical Palestine” that are partitioned away).

He and Evelyn Gordon both argue, correctly, that we assess political conduct inside the domain of the possible, taking into account imperfect information, domestic political constrains, iterated strategic interaction with enemies, and the need to account for the preferences and pressures of allies.

But when they, along with Lord and Taub, come to assess Netanyahu’s decisions they engage in the kind of magical thinking we might normally associate with day traders: gains are an expression of the trader’s unique wisdom; losses are because of a down market. The dilemmas and constraints Netanyahu faced are because of Oslo and the disengagement and the left, but never because of him. One might think that he wasn’t prime minister for fourteen of the last fifteen years.

It’s true that Netanyahu came to power with a complicated political inheritance (who doesn’t?), and that he never asked for either Oslo nor the disengagement. He also didn’t ask for a Palestinian cause as pathological as it is nor for the kind of global hypocrisy that holds Israeli actions to a standard separate from that of any other country at war. But these are the real constraints he as an Israeli prime minister has to navigate, and he has been the one in charge for so long and has so refashioned domestic politics and Israel’s international alliances that it seems childish to blame everyone else. He leaves his successor, whoever it might be, a more difficult inheritance than Rabin or Sharon left him.

Taub cites Isaiah Berlin’s “Churchill in 1940” in trying to attribute the strengths of Israeli civil society after October 7 to Netanyahu, but I think this gets the whole thing backwards. Leaders of free societies in the Anglo-American sphere were able to tap into reserves of social power because Depression-era reforms had created societies of unusually high equality, social solidarity, long-term thinking, and shared purpose. The Israel that was invaded on October 7, 2023 had had so many of these bases for social solidarity ransacked by crony capitalism, resentment and paranoia in privatized media, and a corrupt social bargain whereby Israeli taxpayers funded a haredi community that eschews national service as well as practical or liberal education—and undermined even further by the establishment of a caste of citizens outside of sovereign Israel, receiving lavish government subsidies and exempt from the basic restraints of law and obligations of citizenship. These destructive processes were turbocharged in the ten months leading up to the October 7 massacre, leaving Israel more vulnerable and more divided than it had ever been just as the barbarism beyond the horizon was preparing to pounce. Netanyahu’s actions in just the past few days in advancing more welfare exemptions for Haredim not serving in the army and firing the defense minister as the country awaits an Iranian attack—amid two new criminal investigations into alleged security violations by his own staff—show just how much he has not changed, and cannot do so.

DeMogge and Evelyn Gordon both argue that the vices I identify in Netanyahu’s strategic decision-making—skepticism, deferral, messaging—aren’t vices at all because they seemed to work for so long. This is precisely my point. The reason Netanyahu stuck this mode of strategy was because of the positive feedback he was getting. Right up until the morning when they didn’t work anymore. But October 7 really did happen, and our assessment of his methods of processing events can’t simply ignore that or engage in hypotheticals that deny this knowledge. Netanyahu’s decisions are wise or reckless against events as they are unfolding, not against an imaginary pause button we push on October 6.

DeMogge further misunderstands the point I made about the northern West Bank before and after 2020. He criticizes me for “drawing far-ranging conclusions from a single case study,” when the comparison I have made is not a case study at all. On the contrary, I compare three chunks of territory Israel occupied after 1967 along the variables of civilian Israeli presence and freedom of action for the IDF: Gaza with no settlers and no IDF, the northern West Bank (Jenin sector) with no settlers but with the IDF, and the rest of the West Bank with settlers and the IDF. He writes that it is “unsurprising that there are fewer attacks against Israelis in areas where there are fewer Israelis,” but this triviality is not my point. I was measuring the attacks on Israelis coming from these three places. There are no Israelis inside Gaza, and yet Gaza was not only a base for rocket attacks on Israelis for more than twenty years now, but also where the most murderous attacks on Israelis ever was conducted from.

During the years before the Homesh resettlement, the worst violence against Israelis came either from Gaza or from those parts of the West Bank where the disengagement did not happen—mostly Hebron, but occasionally also the Nablus area, not coincidentally the two areas where the presence of ideological religious settlers is most felt.

DeMogge, Gordon, Lord, and especially Taub at least engaged with the claims made in my essay. I don’t quite know what to make of the response co-written by Avi Bell and Cole Aronson. They are right that I see the settler enterprise as both a burden and a moral stain. But their defense of the settlements is a mix of wordplay, shifting historical starting points, and category errors. The framing of the whole question about settlement in the West Bank as one regarding “property and residency rights” in “liberal societies” is completely alien both to what opponents of West Bank settlement claim and to the broad and variegated claims made by its serious supporters,

If Israel is to learn the serious lessons it must from the events of the past year, neither its right nor its left can afford to ignore mistakes just because they were made by political allies.