Paradigm lock-in and strategic surprise: explaining Israel's October 7 intelligence failure

Israel's failure to anticipate Hamas's deadly 2023 assault, despite the existence of multiple credible warnings, represents one of the country's gravest intelligence failures. This article explains how and why intelligence organizations discount such warnings during protracted conflicts. It argues that the October 7 crisis resulted from an ideational cascade in which elite governing paradigms became institutionalized and biased the judgments of intelligence officials and analysts. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu framed Hamas as an operationally manageable and militarily coercible actor, denying the group's political agency. Drawing on a cognitive-cultural neo-institutionalist framework, the article traces how this governing paradigm was institutionalized within Israel's intelligence and military organizations and shaped how analysts interpreted warning signs. The analysis shows that protracted conflict, organizational permeability, and technological overconfidence reinforced this process. The findings demonstrate how governing paradigms can produce epistemic capture by pre-classifying threats before evidence is evaluated, with broader implications for understanding why intelligence organizations fail to recognize their adversaries’ changes in strategy.