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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   4760 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 5, 2023

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while not actually seeming to know much of anything about the place

I think you are seeing it in too black and white. Israel knows a lot about the place. But counting million-sized populations which have a hostile government with a little interest in the welfare of the citizens, and people living in semi-legal arrangements best described as "middle ages with iphones" does not really make the task easy. It's not an on-off switch - either you know all, or you know nothing. It's you may know a lot, but there's even more of it that you don't know. If anything, the amount of knowledge served Israel intelligence very badly - they knew so much they severely overestimated just how much they know, and thought they know exactly how the enemy thinks. That led to a chain of decisions - in the hindsight proven to be spectacularly bad - that enabled the current catastrophe. It wasn't the problem of knowing nothing, it was a problem of becoming arrogant and complacent.

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