26 minutes
The failure to anticipate Hamas’s brutal attack on October 7 is multilayered and will be investigated for years to come. However, the preliminary consensus has blamed the konceptcia, the Hebrew word for paradigm, that guided the intelligence and security forces. With the advent of AI and its complex search algorithms, the resultant paradigm was shaped by an input imbalance that depicted Hamas transitioning from its jihadist past to a rational governance player. The politicization of the academic and lay Middle East discourse legitimized resistance to Israel, feeding the bias. Equally, the virtual absence of understanding of the military wing of Hamas and its role in Iran’s Axis of Resistance deepened the imbalance.
This article originally appeared in Volume 68, Issue 1, in February 2024.
The failure to anticipate the brutal attack of Hamas on the communities bordering Gaza is complex and multilayered and will be investigated for years to come. Preliminary reports indicate that the failure involved virtually every level of intelligence and the military. However, a consensus has already emerged blaming the konceptcia, the Hebrew term for “concept,” or a preconceived notion about the strategic reality. First used in the 1973 war, the term conveys why the political and military leaders missed the signs of the impending Arab invasion, the construct was subsequently broadened to describe the paradigmatic-level roots of intelligence failure.
A paradigm is defined as a way of understanding the physical and social world. However, the question of how paradigms form and shift is complex enough to elicit methodological problems, particularly once a paradigm is involved in acute failure to predict a violent conflict.
Paradigms in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
In his pioneering work on history of science, Thomas Kuhn argued that during settled times, a set of agreed upon principles are used to analyze a situation. These meta-theories or paradigms dictate what questions will arise, what forms of explanations will be accepted, and what answers will be recognized as legitimate. In his words, “they form the entire constellation of belief, values, and technologies shared by members of a given community.” In the wake of a severe crisis, the dominant paradigm is questioned, overthrown, leading to the birth of a new paradigm.[1]
While scientific paradigms are transparent with clearly demarcated differences between correlation and causation, social science paradigms are murky. One scholar used an image from Indian cosmology to describe a social science paradigm as the “visible platform supported by a pyramid of arbitrary assumptions, untested and indeed untestable hypothesis and imprecise measures.” Equally important, the members of a given social science community are not easily determined. In matters pertaining to foreign policy that impacts intelligence, this problem is most daunting because of the enormous number of potential members who share an interest in a particular domain, including practitioners, analysts, interest groups, academics, and journalists. [2]
Experts on the epistemology of foreign policy suggest that to identify the paradigm, the discourse of the entire relevant community should be analyzed rather than selected participants. A pioneering book in the field, Evidence, Argument, and Persuasion in the Policy Process, defined the policy community as all those who share an interest in a certain policy domain. When the book was published in 1989, the call to focus on the discursive process of the relevant community made good sense. However, the explosion of the World Wide Web on the internet as the main conveyer of information has complicated matters. The internet provides instant access to billions of pages of information that have been filtered through algorithms that drive the search engines. Of late, information is disseminated through artificial intelligence (AI) products such as Chat PGT or Bard.[3] A large, highly specialized literature has analyzed numerous biases introduced by the algorithms that select and funnel www data. First, bias is created when one idea/topic/concept is disproportionally weighted against another. In such a case, the weighting formula in the algorithm needs to be adjusted. However, when information on certain ideas or topics is not available, the resulting bias cannot be easily mitigated. The relative unavoidability of information creates the under- coverage bias, in the sense of missing an important part of the phenomenon being discussed. Inevitably, distortion of the narrative should be expected in this type of situation. Second, quality of data in the discourse varies from rigorous research appearing in respectable academic publications to conspiracy theories found in niche outlets and social media. Search engines use quality controls to assess the authority of the source, prioritizing legacy media or academic publications over output of dubious provenance such as conspiracy theories. Still, the in-between territory coupled with the freshness imperative of topical subjects may muddle the search. Third, relations and causations, two statistically distinct concepts, are regularly confused in the discourse, creating a host of problems. When correlation is mistaken for—or mispresented as—causation, it generates a “reality” that does not exist.[4]
Prior to the October 7 massacre, the absence of critical data on Hamas’ true character in the discursive space created an input balance. As a result, Hamas was portrayed as a national resistance movement virtually on par with Fatah, the leading member of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). Although the jihadist roots of Hamas were acknowledged, the lack of proper input cemented the paradigmatic view of the group as moderating its stance concerning the Gaza population.
Questioning the Dominant Paradigm
Four overlooked issues would have undermined the view that Hamas moderated its ideology and praxis.
Hamas as ISIS
Hamas was a well-known Islamist group whose 1988 Charter promised a holy war to liberate Palestine “from the river to the sea” from the Israeli occupation. However, according to major databases –LexisNexis, Google Scholar, and JStor – no link between Hamas and ISIS, the jihadi group specializing in spectacular acts of violence, appeared before October 7. In the aftermath of the attack, comparisons between Hamas and ISIS cropped up in the discursive universe, but most were of the rhetorical variety, with little factual data to support the contention.[5] To understand the assault, a closer look at the affinity between Izz ad Din al Qassem Brigades and Al Quds Brigades—the military wing of Hamas and PIJ respectively—to Abu Mussab al Zarqawi is essential. Al Zarqawi, a Palestinian terrorist who split from al Qaeda and escaped to Iran in 2001, was sheltered and tutored by the Quds Force (QF), the foreign operation branch of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). After moving to Iraq, the QF helped him found what later became the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Al Zarqawi was an enthusiastic follower of the two books known as “the jihadi bibles:” Jurisprudence of Blood and The Management of Savagery. The writings provided an Islamic justification, fatwah, for a wide array of brutal acts, including killings, torture, rape, decapitation, burning alive, among others, that al Zarqawi implemented with great zeal. If anything, subsequent ISIS commanders like Abu Baqr al Baghdadi improved upon his performance.[6]
Following al Zarqawi’s death in 2006, Hamas and PIJ eulogized the “fallen martyr” and vowed to continue the struggle against Israel in ways that would profoundly shake “the Zionist enemy.” As a new cohort of hardened leaders came to fore, ISIS-like performative violence became popular among the military commanders. By all measures, Mohammed Deif, who took over the Qassem Brigades in 2002, was known for extremism. In 2006, after criticizing Hamas’s “mild” terror tactics, he threatened to establish an al-Qaeda/ISIS cell. Although Deif reconsidered leaving, he compensated by launching some of the most horrific terror attacks in Israel. The Qassem Brigades commander was a favorite of Qassem Suleimani, the QF chief, who, before his death in early 2020, launched a plan to strengthen the military power of Hamas and PIJ.[7]
Deif’s public proclamations were rare but highly radical. In 2010, he declared that the Qassem Brigades are well prepared, the “enemy [Israel] is going to a path of extinction and (zawal) and Palestine will remain ours . . . from the (Mediterranean) Sea to the (Jordan) River.” Ignoring the ambiguous language of the 2017 reinterpretation of the Charter, he boldly stated that the single goal of Resistance is the liberation of Palestine. Yahia Sinwar, the political head of Hamas in Gaza, shared Deif’s conviction that the end- game was the liberation of Palestine although his public expressions were more restrained.[8]
Behind the scenes, the Religious Scholars Association of Palestine in Gaza, a notoriously hardline group of clerics headed by Marwan Abu Ras, proffered Salafi-style justifications for a jihad against the Jews. Abu Ras had a close connection with the Ahl al Bayt World Assembly, an ecumenical outreach run by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The Palestinian jihadist travelled occasionally to Tehran; his speeches reflected the Iranian propaganda line which accused Jews of all that was wrong with the world.
On one occasion, he charged the Jews of “recruiting prostitutes, AIDS infected women to lure Arabs,” adding that the “filthy globally hated Jewish nation will be eliminated.” Hamas’s journal, Falastine Al-Muslima amplified these views. Hiding behind his immunity as a cleric, Abu Ras hosted meetings of top Hamas political and military leaders in his house. Saleh al-Raqab, a senior official in the Association and a professor at the Islamic University of Gaza, was even more closely involved in indoctrinating the military wing of Hamas. He was also said to issue a fatwa prior to the attack on October 7.[9]
Tactically, the Qassem Brigades’ elite Nukbah Force (NF) that perpetuated the massacre trained in the ISIS terror protocols. This should have come as no surprise because the NF absorbed many of the Palestinians of Jaish al Islam (Army of Islam), one of the ISIS groups that operated in the Sinai Desert as Ansar Bait al Maqdis (ABM). When Egypt degraded AMB in 2019, Mohammed Dormosh a close associate of Deif’s, escaped with his Palestinian contingent to Gaza.[10]
On the fateful day, the special force used the entire gamut of ISIS tactics—rape, beheading, burning alive, and kidnapping of civilians in the settlements along the Gaza envelope. The Civil Commission on October 7 Crimes revealed that the terrorists were instructed by the commanders to engage in rape and sexual mutilation to “humiliate the enemy.” An Israeli report submitted to the United Nations related that “female soldiers were shot in crotch, vagina, and breasts” and their faces were disfigured. For good measure, some of the infiltrators carried the black flags of ISIS into the battlefield. It was later revealed that some had handwritten notes urging the beheading the Jews because they are “a disease that has no cure, except beheading and removing the hearts and the livers.” After the October assault, al Raqab published a manifesto asking Allah to “to grant victory to the jihadist warriors” and “guide their strikes and fire upon the Jews’ throats.”[11]
If al Raqab advise harkened to ISIS, Hamas’s deep antisemitism drew inspiration from Nazi ideology, an eliminationist not merely a performative attack on the Jews.
Hamas between Performative and Eliminationist Antisemitism
Modern Palestinian antisemitism drew from several traditions starting with the writing of Hassan al Bana and Sayeed Qutb. Both Qutb and Khomeini were deeply influenced by radio transmission of Nazi propaganda during WWII. Haj Amin al Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, was encouraged enough to travel to Berlin to disuses a Final Solution for the Jews of Palestine. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the architect of the Islamic revolution in Iran, relied on al Bana and Qutb to articulate a Shite version of the antisemitic ideology. Iran, which created a vast antisemitic propaganda industry translated into Arabic and more than thirty other languages, dominated the discourse.[12] Hamas echoed the Iranian-supplied literature calling the Jews the evilest people in the universe. Jews were said to be highly ethnocentric and hostile to other races and ethnic groups. They were accused of being greedy, rapacious, craving for power and domination, bloodthirsty, liberal, sexually promiscuous, inveterate schemers, fanatics, megalomaniacs, arrogant, and belligerent, “hateful and loathsome people” to be avoided, “source of all evil,” and the “most pestilent and harmful species for humankind.” As such, they were a disease that had to be eradicated, along with their collective embodiment, the Jewish state. [13]
Historians of the Holocaust pointed out that blaming the Jews for all that was wrong in the universe was “redemptive” in the sense that eradicating them would cleanse and redeem the world. As Adolph Hitler stated in his infamous 1920 speech: “We are animated with an inexorable resolve to seize the Evil [the Jews] by the roots and to exterminate it root and branch.” It took the Third Reich until 1939 to acquire the means and the opportunity to turn this performative rhetoric into an eliminationist reality that saw the murder of six million Jews. By and large, Hamas’s antisemitism and anti-Zionism has been dismissed as performative. Such a reaction was unsurprising, given that Iran’s incessant threats to wipe Israel off the map were explained as “domestic mobilization” or competition with the Sunni Arab majority. Unable or unwilling to fathom that the Islamists in Tehran or their proxies would destroy Israel given the means, leading international relations experts legitimized the performative theory of antisemitism. According to the eminent strategist, Edward Luttwak, this “performative hostility” was a selling point to the Sunnis: “we hate the Jews more than you do, and that is what really matters.”[14]
After the October 7 massacre, the discourse on Hamas grew darker, especially when Arabic language copies of Hitler’s Mein Kampf were found in Gaza. In the new view, the terror group was said to exhibit “messianic violence” that came close to the Nazi-type eliminationist antisemitism. The post-massacre consensus held that, after acquiring appropriate means, Hamas would destroy the Jewish state. As on cue, Ghazi Hamad, a member of Hamas’s political bureau, confirmed that “we will repeat October 7 attack until Israel is annihilated.”[15]
Much as Hamas glorified violence toward enemy non-combatants, it also expected the Palestinian population under its control to endure extreme hardship to help with the “resistance.”
Palestinian Civilians as Hamas’s Human Shields
Hamas’ use of human shield was firmly rooted in the novel approach to asymmetrical conflicts developed by the Iranian Islamist regime. Having determined that it could not win a conventional war against a superior power, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) adopted a strategy based on The Koranic Concept of War by Brigadier General S.K. Malik, an Islamist who served on Pakistani General Staff. Malik argued that unlike Western military tradition, Islamic warfare is rooted in jihad, the holy war. Jihad encouraged terror attacks against enemy non-combatants but also demanded that Muslim civilians should sacrifice their lives to protect the fighters. In other words, Koranic warfare required Muslim civilians to become de facto human shields. The IRGC’s interpretation of Malik was not without its detractors, but Ayatollah Khomeini and his successor gave their blessings to the use of Muslim human shielding.[16]
Embedded among non-combatants was a crucial power multiplier for nonstate actors battling a regular army. International Humanitarian Law (IHL)— the Hague Convention of 1899, the four 1949 Geneva Conventions, and the two additional protocols of 1977—made it illegal to embed among civilians to gain military advantages. The Conventions were clear that if one side of the conflict, say a non-state actor, chose to embed, its opponent was still required to protect civilians from “disproportional harm.” Decades of debate on proportionality produced no consensus, except a vague notion that the number of civilian causalities should not be “excessive.”[17]
The IHL-savvy IRGC strategists considered hiding among non combatants, a significant force multiplier for its proxies because it forced the Israel Defense Force (IDF) to err on the side of caution in targeting civilians. Hassan Abbasi, the head of the Center for Borderless Doctrinal Analysis, used a soccer- game analogy to point out “that we will play in their [enemy field] by our rules of the game.” Tactical embedding was included in the syllabus of the Center for Asymmetrical Warfare at the IRGC’s Imam Hussein University.[18]
Hezbollah, the model proxy of IRGC, was the first to implement the embedding tactics. In the late 1980s, Brigadier General Mir Faysal Baqr was put in command of a large tunneling project for Hezbollah. Tehran paid for North Korean engineers to create a network of tunnels, storage, and command centers. Tunnels were dug under private houses and public spaces, including schools, mosques, and hospitals. Efraim Halevy, a former Mossad chief, commented that hiding in populated areas gave Hezbollah a large measure of immunity, given that international law obligated the IDF to minimize harm to non-combatants. The tactic paid off during Second Lebanon War, when the significant number of non-combatants constrained the Israeli military, enabling Hezbollah to claim victory. Abbasi was elated, writing that “Hezbollah skillfully used different places including the mixing of military forces with civilians rather than just military bases.”[19]
After the IDF withdrew unilaterally from the Gaza Strip in 2005, the Iranians hastened to turn the territory into a “mini-Lebanon.” Imad Mughnieyh, Hezbollah’s military chief, conceived of the idea of constructing the tunnel system in Gaza: after his death in 2008, Qassem Soleimani took over working closely with Mohammed Deif. Following the original North Korean guidelines, tunnels were built in densely populated areas, emphasizing collocating with hospitals, schools, and mosques. Distinct from the small smuggling tunnels that existed since the early 1980s, the new network was equipped with the latest in tunnel technology, according to experts in tunnel warfare. Soleimani visited Gaza several times to inspect the project and encourage Deif, according to Brigadier General Abdelfattah Ahvazian, a senior official in the Quds Force. The ID discovered and destroyed some of the tunnels during Operation Protective Edge in 2014. [20]
Sensing the Israeli trepidation about tunnel fighting, compounded by the international protest over the disproportional killing of Palestinian civilians, Soleimani encouraged Deif to double down. The IDF dubbed the resulting system the Metro: a highly impressive network of some 500 km of tunnel, containing command posts, storage facilities, firing pods, and even manufacturing facilities. Mohammed Bagheri, the chief of staff of the Iranian Armed Forces (Artesh), would later brag about the system, calling the tunnels the largest of its kind “weapon of war.” Ironically, it was the military implications of the tunnel system that monopolized the discourse on Hamas at the time. Several reports discussed the “sophisticated tunnel network” as part of the asymmetrical warfare strategy and the difficulties that the IDF, unprepared for tunnel warfare, had encountered. Some analysts noted that the trans- border tunnels enabled infiltration into Israel to kidnap hostages.[21]
Tunnels aside, embedding held a considerable advantage when, in the inevitable Israeli reprisals, Hamas like Hezbollah, fudged the number of civilian causalities. The medical authorities, part of the Hamas-run administration, did not release separate counts for non-combatants. A 2014 NATO Strategic Command report called the strategy a “win-win” for Hamas, notably, because “Israel paid a heavy price in the international arena and its public image suffered tremendously.” Arab Barometer, a research network that polled Palestinians, found that, over time, there was an increased unhappiness with Hamas governance in general and human shielding in particular. However, few dared to protest because of the fear of punishment, a calculation shared by the Gaza journalists who were tolerated as long as they towed the official line.[22]
Generally, there were few complaints about human shielding in Gaza. The U.S. Congress held a hearing on the topic and Rep. David Schweikart wrote a letter to Navi Pyllai, the UN Commission for Human Rights, blaming her for ignoring the problem. However, the matter gained little international traction. In early 2023, in a highly unusual step, the Islamic Fatwa Council (IFC) based in Najaf, issued a fatwa against civilian shielding, The IFC charged Hamas with violating the laws of the Holy Koran, adding that the group “bears responsibility for its own reign of corruption and terror against Palestinian civilians in Gaza.”[23]
With little international outcry, the organization perfected the military mobilization of public and private spaces, including all major hospitals in the Gaza Strip. The extent of the set- up was only revealed when the IDF launched a ground invasion of Gaza following the massacre. Unlike in 2014, however, the image of Hamas as a responsible caretaker of the population suffered reputational damage. The spokesmen for the group struggled to explain why civilians were barred from sheltering in the tunnels. Residents questioned the daily numbers of dead and wounded released by the health authorities, with most media outlets noting that the Department of Health in Gaza was controlled by Hamas. [24]
Overseeing a large captive, potentially sacrificial, population went beyond military advantages. Running the Gaza Strip gave Hamas access to enormous financial resources.
Hamas’s Finances: Governance Built on Corruption
The literature on non-state actors involved in governance has been inconclusive. Some studies suggest that national resistance movements provid reasonable governmental services while others argued that civilian management was secondary to their goals. The “good governance” groups were said to be driven by the so-called “triadic connection” of power, legitimacy, and public interest. In other words, some insurgencies that came to power, tried to deepen their legitimacy by catering to interests of the civilians under their rule. Other groups used their power to further “extra institutional objective,” such as an ideological crusade or a holy war not necessarily shared by the population. [25]
Hamas entered the political process in 2006 and, after expelling Fatah a year later, became the sole ruler of the Gaza Strip. The group did not change its ideology of waging jihad on Israel and it confiscated a large share of the Strip’s budget for its “extra-institutional objectives.” It is impossible to estimate the sum of money that the organization received since 2006 but it is estimated at billions of dollars. Hamas’s government official budget was 2.5 billion dollars annually, some 65-70 percent of the Strip’s GDP. This sum compared favorably with the 3 billion dollars of the West Bank where it represents 20 percent of the GDP. Several income streams have been identified.
The Palestinian Authority’s (PA’s) annual contribution of 30 percent of its budget went toward educational, health and municipal services. EU, and individual countries, including the United States, and Australia, international organizations and NGOs provided millions of dollars in additional income. Under an agreement sanctioned by Israel, Qatar contributed more than $1.3 billion since 2011. The United Nations disbursed almost a billion dollar annually, mostly through UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). The Iranian regime was a lavish funder of the al Qassem Brigades, including cash brought in suitcases to Gaza, and military hardware. Hamas had a virtual monopoly on the local economy, generating additional streams of revenue. The organization taxed heavily the traffic in the smuggling channels and received bribes for a large array of services, including provision of medical aid and exit permits to Egypt. Hamas had a large investment portfolio and dabbled in crypto currency to avoid sanctions.[26]
Still, Hamas siphoned a large portion of the donations, forcing most Gazans under the poverty line. While expenditure for the underground infrastructure and other military expenses has run into billions of dollars, more surprising was the scale of fraud. After all, Hamas won the 2006 election in the Strip under the banner of fighting the corruption that pervaded the PA. Reports published after October 7, noted that the net worth of top leaders like Ismael Haniyeh, Khaled Mashal, and Musa Abu Marzuk runs into billions that paid for their lavish lifestyle in regional capitals. In addition, some 1,700 senior officials allegedly made millions from the tunnel economy and extortion and racketing. Most of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad functionaries lived in Rimal, an exclusive neighborhood of Gaza City referred to as the “Beverly Hill” of Gaza. Despite evidence to the contrary, most observers gave Hamas good grades on governance. Setting the tone was Sara Roy, a senior researcher at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard University. In a 2013 book, Roy, a veteran pro-Palestinian activist, praised Hamas for its “community restoration and civic restoration” and “its potential for moderate accommodation and change.” Earlier on, Khaled Hroub, director of the Arab Media Project at Cambridge University, presented a sympathetic portrait of Hamas that was waging a “just struggle against a powerful imperialist colonialist enemy.” At the same time, it has “demonstrated pragmatism” to the point of “hovering” around accepting a two-state solution. Tareq Baconi while a visiting fellow at the Middle East Center at Columbia University, published the frequently quoted book Hamas Contained. The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance. Baconi, a prolific pundit, emphasized that Hamas was “pacified” to the point of embracing ‘good governance.’[27]
These and similar assessments nourished the belief in “peace through prosperity,” the theory that Hamas would prioritize the welfare of its citizens above its radical ideological platform. The theory took hold in respectable think tanks such as Carnegie Foundation for Peace and many of the human rights NGOs. Zaha Hassan, a Carnegie fellow, contended that the “inhumane [living] conditions” in Gaza are related to the cycle of violence that can be stopped by the lifting of the blockade and creating a “physical connectivity” between the Strip and the West Bank. [28]
In Israel, both the left and the right embraced the theory in a rare unity of ideas. The editor of the leftist Haaretz newspaper called on Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar to recognize Israel in exchange for a fully sovereign Palestinian state in the 1967 borders. The paper published a summary of a Haifa University research project claiming Sinwar abandoned his grand vision of liberating all of Palestine “from the river to the sea” for a “more modest and practical” idea of the said state. On the right, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was equally convinced that showering Gaza with money would keep Hamas quiet. Towards this end, Netanyahu sanctioned payments by Qatar and increased the number of Gazan work permits to about 20,000 a day. The Biden administration, working on a larger economic integration plan among American allies in the Middle East, lent support to the “peace through prosperity” vision. In 2021, Antony Blinken, the Secretary of State, announced a contribution of $360 million to the Palestinian people. Five days before the massacre, Jake Sullivan, the National Security Adviser, concluded that “the region is quieter than it was for decades.” [29] More consequentially, the paradigm became firmly entrenched in the intelligence and the security establishment. Major General Aharon Haliva, the head of Aman, Israel’s Military Intelligence, was a staunch advocate of the “conceptia.” In a May 2023 interview, he explained that Israel was encouraged by the Abraham Accords, adding that the new economic integration project proposed by the Biden administration would propel the region toward peace. He warned Hezbollah not to interfere with the progress made but did not mention Hamas. A former Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, noted that Hamas has “too much to lose” by “firing rockets” because of some twenty thousand daily workers permitted into Israel.[30]
Ironically, after the massacre, it was left to Hamas leadership to disabuse the belief that it prioritized civilians over its jihadi ideology. Mousa Abu Marzuk, a member of the political bureau, stated that the group had not built bomb shelters because 75 percent of the population were refugees and thus the responsibility of the United Nations. Abu Marzzuk also noted that Israel, the occupying power, had a legal obligation to protect the non combatants.
Conclusion
The AI shaped discursive environment contributed to creating a paradigm that viewed Hamas as a rational group transitioning from its jihadist roots to a “good governance” entity. The paradigm was so popular that over time it became the basis of the Gaza policy of “peace through prosperity” that Israel, with the support of the United States, adopted. The conceptia was so powerful that it blinded the IDF to the Qassem Brigades’ long-standing preparations for the violent assault.
A future commission of inquiry will look at the issue from the perspective of Israeli intelligence. However, it is not too soon to ask whether more could have been done to produce a counter-narrative based on the topics raised above. The answer to this question is complex. Israel’s legitimacy in the academic discursive community has deteriorated dramatically in the past few decades, not least because of the dominance of the neo-Marxist, critical paradigm in the social sciences. According to this version of reality, Israel is an apartheid, settler-colonial state built on ethnic cleansing and subjugation of the Palestinians. National resistance, even one using terror, is considered a legitimate form of fighting the oppressor. Although jihadism stretched the parameters of what would be normally considered national resistance, Hamas escaped the attention it deserved, especially if it could be “proved” that terror group was progressing towards normalization. Since the experts who espoused this theory were affiliated with Ivy League schools or prestigious think tanks, the algorithms trained to privilege sources of authority and quality embellished the “good governance” qualities of Hamas.
If the politicization of the social sciences created an input bias of one kind, the absence of analysis on the military wing of Hamas—headed by Mohammed Deif in close partnership with Yahya Sinwar—created another imbalance. Research on the topic requires a set of skills, mastery of counterterrorism and the knowledge of Arabic and Farsi—that few possess. For instance, the Combatting Terrorism Center (CTC) at West Point, a premier U.S. Army institute dealing with terror groups, did not include Hamas and PIJ among its areas of interest prior to October 7. Even in Israel, where research on Hamas and its military operations should have been a priority, the situation was not much better. There was only a handful of scholars and lay observers who studied the subject, but even they were surprised by the daring attack.
The October 7 attack has already entered the list of catastrophic intelligence failure, superseding the 1973 War and 9/11. This is, however, the first case in which the AI protocols shaped the controlling paradigm. More research is needed to understand how the discursive imbalance was created and how to correct it to avoid future intelligence failures.
