The Yom Kippur Lesson Israel Still Needs After October 7

More than half a century ago, on Yom Kippur, Israel was taken by surprise. Egyptian and Syrian forces attacked, an intelligence conception that had seemed solid collapsed within hours, and a country that entered the holiday with a sense of security emerged from it into war. Since then, Yom Kippur 1973 has become more than a date. It has become the name for a particular kind of failure: a conception, warnings that were not properly understood, a leadership too confident in what it thought it already knew.

After October 7, it was almost impossible not to think of it. Once again, a holiday. Once again, a border believed to be secure. Once again, information existed but failed to become an understanding of what was about to happen. Once again, an entire system woke up inside a reality its assumptions could not explain.

The comparison is necessarily imperfect. The Yom Kippur War was a war between armies. October 7 involved the deliberate massacre of civilians, kidnappings, and attacks on communities. The political, military, and technological circumstances were entirely different. But one similarity is difficult to miss: in both cases, the failure did not begin when the enemy crossed the border. It began earlier, in the way Israel interpreted reality.

There is another difference between the two events, however, and it may matter more now.

After the Yom Kippur War, Israelis fought bitterly over responsibility, but not over the need to establish what had happened. The Agranat Commission was established in November 1973. It heard testimony, examined the intelligence available before the war and how it had been interpreted, and investigated the IDF’s preparedness. Its conclusions were fiercely disputed, particularly because it placed heavy responsibility on the military establishment while largely sparing the political leadership.

The commission did not end the argument. In an important sense, it made the argument possible.

Israelis continued to disagree about Golda Meir, Moshe Dayan, military intelligence, whether the war could have been prevented, and how responsibility should be divided. But there was now something against which those arguments could be made: documents, testimony, timelines, decisions. The state did not use the commission to settle once and for all who was to blame. It first accepted a more basic obligation: to know.

Perhaps that is why “the conception” survived for more than fifty years in the Israeli vocabulary. Not because everyone agrees on precisely what it was, but because a particular failure acquired a name. It became possible to ask how contradictory information was dismissed, how an assessment hardened into an assumption, and how confidence in Israel’s strength shaped the way it interpreted its enemies’ intentions.

That may be the more useful lesson of Yom Kippur now. We tend to speak about lessons as though they were instructions: do not underestimate the enemy, do not become trapped in a conception, listen to warnings, keep more forces at the border. But no state can function without conceptions. Intelligence is always an interpretation of incomplete information. Armies must decide which scenarios are more likely than others. Governments necessarily act on assumptions about the world.

The lesson of 1973 cannot be that Israel should never again be wrong. The fifty-three years since have already demonstrated the impossibility of that promise.

What a country can build are institutions capable of discovering, after catastrophe, how it was wrong. That sounds much less satisfying than “never again.” It may also be more important.

Without an accepted way to investigate failure, every political camp gets its own October 7. For one, it was the result of military refusal and protest; for another, of the government. For one, its origins lie in Oslo; for another, in the policy of managing Hamas rather than removing it. For some, the decisive failure was military; for others, political. Facts begin arranging themselves inside a story before the story itself has been tested.

Seen from that perspective, the Yom Kippur War suddenly looks not only similar to October 7, but strikingly different. There was politics then too. There were accusations, evasions, and attempts by powerful people to defend their names and decisions. Public anger at what became known as the failure was intense, and Golda Meir resigned in April 1974, shortly after the Agranat Commission issued its interim report, even though the commission itself did not hold her directly responsible.

But first, a place had been created in which the state was required to give an account of itself.

There is something fitting about confronting that difference on Yom Kippur. The day is built around the idea that self-examination is not the same thing as a confession of guilt. To examine yourself, you do not have to know in advance what you did wrong. Quite the opposite: if you have already decided who is guilty and of what, you are no longer conducting an examination. You are reading an indictment.

Fifty-three years after the Yom Kippur War, perhaps that is the difference worth remembering. In 1973, one conception collapsed. In 2023, others did. No commission of inquiry can guarantee that another will not collapse in the future.

Its value lies somewhere else: in the ability to turn a catastrophe we are already telling stories about into an event we are still willing to learn from.

Yom Kippur does not require a person to arrive with the answer. It requires the willingness to be examined before knowing what the answer will be.

Perhaps that is the least a country owes itself.