Israeli Intelligence Hired a Clinical Psychologist. They Didn't Listen To Him

Speaker 1: 0:00

For months, there's been a critical question lurking behind the Israel-Hamas conflict. How did Israel's vaunted military and intelligence services fail to recognize the elaborate plans Hamas was making for its unprecedented, widespread attack on October 7th?

Speaker 2: 0:16

I think I'll just start by saying that, like a lot of people, I was astonished, stunned, at the failure of Israel's vaunted military intelligence agencies to give advanced warning about the Hamas attack on the 7th of October. I mean, that is their job, and it turns out that there were warnings but they weren't listening to. The feeling we got in Israel is that Hamas was deterred, there wouldn't be a war, and then everything came crashing down on the 7th of October.

Speaker 3: 0:45

Very early this morning, hamas militants from the Gaza Strip began shooting thousands of rockets at Israel and also infiltrating with their militants across the fence into Israeli communities. They came by air, by sea and by land.

Speaker 2: 1:00

We know how things have developed since then, and now we're on a full-on war. Dr Orfer Grossbard is a clinical psychologist who also has a PhD in conflict analysis and resolution from George Mason University. He's also the author of various books, including the critically acclaimed Israel on the couch the Psychology of the Peace Process. I was interested in talking to Dr Grossbard after reading an article he wrote called I was a psychologist at Israel's military intelligence. Here's why the unit keeps getting it wrong. That article was based on a period of time August 2021 until January 2022, six months where you worked as a psychologist in the research unit of military intelligence. You were also wrote that you were the only clinical psychologist in the unit and, to the best of your knowledge, psychologists haven't lasted in the system for very long. What I wanted to start off with is to ask you just on that why was it important for the research arm of military intelligence to invite a psychologist into their system?

Speaker 4: 2:04

I was invited in order to help them understand the enemy you know they call it usually work with western people and western patients and usually they don't work with other cultures, because other cultures usually don't come to the clinic. When you write a profile of an enemy leader, you need to adjust it to the cultural aspects of the enemy. So if you write a profile of Senwar, for example, Yiddio Senwar, who is the head of Hamas in Gaza.

Speaker 4: 2:33

Yeah, so there were many profiles of him, but you know it was written through western glasses without any cultural adjustment. Issues of honor, all kinds of manipulations.

Speaker 2: 2:45

Can you just describe what is the research unit of military intelligence? Why specifically were you asked to spend time there? The research unit is a brain of the intelligence unit. Information comes from 8200, which it listens in on the enemy, and then there's human intelligence from spies and that all comes into the research division and that's where they do the analysis.

Speaker 4: 3:08

Exactly. They get all the information from other units also, and then they give recommendations.

Speaker 2: 3:14

You get in there. August 2021. I think that's just after or just before another round of fighting with the Hamas or the Islamic jihad. There was a war in 2021. There's so many wars. Can you recall how you were first introduced to the group? Was there anything that was said about your presence there and what you were there to do? I was kind of a strange cookie.

Speaker 4: 3:36

They told me okay, you are different because you have a different view. That's the reason we want you. I define myself as cross-cultural researcher. They didn't have something like this. They're psychologists, but not cross-cultural psychologists, which look also at the way the enemy thinks.

Speaker 2: 3:52

I want to make sure I understand this right. A psychologist in a western country and you go for therapy and they take you through. There's a Freudian method, CBT my inclination is psychoanalysis.

Speaker 4: 4:02

That's the way I think. You try to understand the way the other person thinks. You have a little bit to extend it to different cultures because they have different emphasis. So if you look, for example, at traditional, collective cultures, so you know the leader is very important, much more than in the West, and you identify with the leader and there is a group pressure much more than in modern western countries. When you ask, for example, an average Palestinian, do you think that the Holocaust really happened? She will tell you really, it's your world, not mine. I don't know if it's really happened. If it's not happened, it's not so important For me. What is important is what the leader says and what the group says. We are in the West, are looking for something for the truth, but in those cultures collective, traditional, collective cultures you look always outside, not inside. It's a totally different way of thinking, To think in we term and not in I terms. Maybe a small anecdote will explain it.

Speaker 4: 4:59

When I got to the UN I got a heavy book about the intelligence and I was asked to read it before we start. So I looked at the book. I was shocked. The whole book was like a flowchart with all kinds of possible, very analytic, very logical. For example, Nasrallah has two options either doing that or that. If he does that, so he has another two options.

Speaker 2: 5:21

Hassan Nasrallah is the leader of Lebanon's Hezbollah.

Speaker 4: 5:25

Yeah, exactly. So I looked at it and asked him that's the way Nasrallah thinks. Well, he's emotional, he's defensive, he's on or he's willing to destroy Israel Many things, everything is very logical. The people there in the unit are quite young, talented people and they were chosen, you know, after many, many exams. But in analytical thinking and everything is analytical, I'm, as a psychologist, was amazed because that's not the way people think.

Speaker 2: 5:54

They plunk a thick binder and they ask you to please read this. This is how we think. This is how Military Intelligence Research Division operates. This is how we think about the enemy, and you're seeing a lot of arrows and flowcharts. It's logic, right, and you're looking at this and thinking, okay, but I'm missing the emotional, psychological element. Correct, Exactly exactly.

Speaker 4: 6:15

I was much older than most of the people there. You know, the high ranks were maybe in their 40s. I was in my 60s. It's also helping me not to see things in black and white. You know, young people tend to see things in black and white. Also, there are missing women in the high ranks. Women sometimes don't get into ego struggles like men. And the last thing that was missing there, there is diversity. There were no Bedouin's Drows' religious people and I think in such a place it's very important.

Speaker 2: 6:43

What you're describing here. It's a homogenous, heterogeneous, heterogeneous and I said that Arrows and more religious people and the lack of women. And we know now. There were warnings about the Hamas preparations and plans for the October attack. A few of these warnings were brought forward by women and women officers and these warnings didn't make it up the chain, or if they did make it up the chain, they weren't taken seriously, they weren't acted upon. Can you just take us into anything that you saw in your time that you kind of think, okay, I'm not surprised by that.

Speaker 4: 7:16

I was surprised that in such a place, when you're looking for creativity and new thinking, people were trying to please their superiors. I didn't hear voices that raise questions or don't agree. In one case at least, one high rank told me after the discussion. I want to kick myself because I didn't say what I wanted.

Speaker 2: 7:39

I'm kicking myself. I should have said something.

Speaker 4: 7:41

Yeah, yeah. And my impression was that she was not the only one. I mean, the atmosphere was that you agree with what is said. Even new projects are suggested and people just agree. That's the reason. Finally, I left the unit because they brought me to bring something new and I felt after half a year that they waste my time.

Speaker 2: 8:01

Yeah, we'll go into the end of that journey. I still want to take the listeners into the beginning of that journey, august 2021,. This organization realizes, potentially, that it has some blind spots. It invites a shrink to come in, and then I read in your story that offices they told you many times what to say and how to say it. For example, not to say in broader forums that the research unit is a closed group whose members parrot each other and there's a group thing there. The whole point of bringing you in was to analyze that right, to put the research division on the couch, so to speak.

Speaker 4: 8:35

You know, there are a group that's running together for a long time, for years. I wanted to tell them you're a closed group, beware of it, okay. So my boss told me don't say it, it's insulting. I insisted on saying it, I said it in a broad form and accepted it, but I felt it wasn't real, the acceptance. Nothing was done to change it.

Speaker 2: 8:56

Hmm, We've seen this cloud before, in the Yom Kippur war in 73, where the intelligence exists but the organizational structure doesn't allow other ideas, opposing ideas, to come through. Because what like take us into that process?

Speaker 4: 9:15

After the Six Days War that started well, after six years, and he said I'm doing it to rehabilitate Egypt's honor, we thought no one really will, dare you know, fight us. But it was exactly the opposite, because we humiliated Egypt, so he had to rehabilitate Egypt's honor. The same was here with Hamas. For him, it's more important that damage she inflict on me than his advantages or what he gets. So it's exactly the opposite of thinking.

Speaker 2: 9:44

The humiliation aspect of what Hamas did. Not only did they break through our defenses and kill our soldiers, murder people, just barbaric, terrible, terrible things. They live streamed them. Can you put them on the couch just for a second? And where does that come from?

Speaker 4: 10:02

I think everything is about education from very young age. They are not psychopathic. Some leaders here in Israel say because psychopathic or antisocial character. It's a deviation from the normal. You don't give pathological titles to different culture. Education is everything. I heard some records of Palestinians that killed Jews and he's so proud of it and he's in a foyer and he tells his parents what he did and how he killed them and so on, and you listen to that and you understand it.

Speaker 2: 10:35

That's about education from a young age. It sounds like you're saying that military intelligence, in the way they were thinking, in the way that they were analyzing the enemy, hardly took any of that stuff into consideration Exactly.

Speaker 4: 10:49

They project their analytical thinking on the enemy and they think the enemy thinks like them. They don't understand that the enemy thinks differently, but from the intelligence you expect to do it and they don't do it. It's quite difficult to get into the mind of different culture.

Speaker 2: 11:05

The picture that you're painting is a group of mostly young people, highly analytical, highly intelligent, who have a lot of responsibility on their shoulders, placed on them. They miss that not because the intelligence wasn't there and the signs weren't there, but because the culture of the organization did not allow opposing voices space, although people told you in private conversations that you were on the right track, but they just couldn't bridge that gap into the collective forms.

Speaker 4: 11:36

Exactly. There is another thing Often analytical people don't have developed social skills. I hope, for example, are much better than us in social skills. Look at what Iran does All kinds of manipulations, lies. It's a different way of thinking To lie is legitimate.

Speaker 4: 11:55

Very legitimate From their point of view. Lying is sometimes telling you what you want to hear, pleasing you. Why should they get into conflict with you if they can just change the facts a little bit or something? It's a group thinking that in order to survive that you have to adjust yourself to the group. Instead of truth, you are talking about relations. We are saying he's a liar, so it's kind of demeaning. But for them it's adjusting to the group and keeping kind of good relations. This analytical people in the intelligence. They don't have social skills. They were brought up in small nuclear families and it's very different than to be raised with 10 brothers and sisters in a tribe. You learn how to get to know with the group, so those sorts of skills are much more developed.

Speaker 2: 12:45

Right, I want to go a little bit deeper. Let's put military intelligence on the couch for another second here you wrote that military intelligence personnel were engaged in rationalization, a defense mechanism intended to provide practical justification for emotional positions, and they believed that these justifications were actually, I guess, their best analysis. This was almost the truth, and that you try to point out this tendency. Can you unpack all that for us? We talked a lot about Senua.

Speaker 4: 13:15

Some of them followed Senua very, very precisely, His behavior, what he's doing. They tried to learn him for years you know all the details and to follow him exactly. Some of them had a big picture of him in the room, to identify with him, to understand him. And in such a situation you develop emotion to this person, that you are intimately related to him. So I asked them what they feel. Tell me the truth, I mean what you really feel towards this person. So I remember the first one said that he admired or appreciated Senua very much Because he is very sophisticated, he's very clever.

Speaker 4: 13:55

Another guy surprised me. All of them are very high ranks. He told me when I close my eyes and think about him he looks like a warm father and I could understand him. You know if you get into his skin and maybe he is very warm to the people around him, to his closed group, and those people identify with him. So he felt he is a warm person. The third person told me I pity him. All the time he is on the run and we are trying to catch him and so on. I pity him. And the last one told me I hate him and I don't understand my disorder.

Speaker 4: 14:30

Some of them say we can't do anything to him, he's not a god. He said to me what they mean they can't do anything to him, he's not a god, we can eliminate him, and things like this. Everyone has a recommendation what to do with Senua, and their recommendations were according to the feelings. And then they called the rational thinking and they explained it in a rational way. But the reason was emotional and we call it rationalization, in which you explain emotional biases by all kinds of arguments. Some people call it cognitive dissonance. I told them look, it's very important for you to listen to your feelings, Because that's what directs you to what you think is your logical decisions.

Speaker 2: 15:14

It's contrary almost to the way that I perceive the research directorate and military intelligence. Don't let your emotions get in the way. Make a non-emotional decision a rational decision.

Speaker 4: 15:25

It's very interesting what you say. Also, in the clinic we know that there is not something like only rational thinking. Always there are emotions. When you say, be detached from your emotion and just think in a rational way, I in psychology think it's impossible. I would say differently. I would say be aware to your emotions and then you can eliminate emotions that are not in place. But first of all you should be aware of it and then your decision will be more rational.

Speaker 2: 15:54

It seems to me that the overriding emotional driver there is not to make mistakes. Is that right? If you were counseling this patient, what would be their psychological issues?

Speaker 4: 16:05

First I would say that, be aware that you are not omnipotent, you are too much optimistic, irrigant, exactly, intelligence can never predict a war. It happens to us twice, in Yom Kippur and in Stober's Semmels, why you can't predict a war. What happened in Yom Kippur? And now it's the same. In Yom Kippur, sadat recorded his army and we thought he's going to start war. And we recorded our army and every time we do it it costs us 10 million dollars. And then he released them. At the third time he did it, we recorded his army and he started war.

Speaker 4: 16:42

And in Israel they said this clown that's the way they call it when we're talking about ero got. This clown won't waste a 10 million dollars every time he does this exercise. So what happened with Senor? It was the same. They train themselves to conquer the keyboard, said all kinds of Israeli places, but the trade all the time and they can easily change from exercise to war. The soldiers don't know it, but the leader can decide, like this, you know, in a short time. So the intelligence can never really predict. Intelligence is very important for many things, but we have to be much more modest in this regard.

Speaker 2: 17:20

If we look at, the surprise attack of the Egyptian and Syrian armies was 1973. And actually following that war there was a commission of inquiry and one of the recommendations was to establish in military intelligence a devil's advocate unit, a red team to challenge the thinking of the research division and military intelligence. That was established but that seems to have failed.

Speaker 4: 17:47

I knew this group, these people and also the intelligence that didn't appreciate this approach, and they were right, because I mean, you can't persuade someone in things you don't believe in. For example, think about yourself. You get a job to persuade other people inside in a different way of thinking. You have to believe in this different way of thinking in order to persuade others, and it's not just an exercise that you just say. You have to deeply believe in it in order to be able to persuade, but you don't think that way.

Speaker 2: 18:20

I'm hardwired that way. I think I was born like that, built in devil's advocate, and I think this is why I went into journalism. The assessment of military intelligence before the war broke out was that Hamas didn't want to war. I want to just to check that with you again that the people who made up the devil's advocate unit within military intelligence. They weren't the right people or they weren't listened to or they didn't believe in what they were saying exactly.

Speaker 4: 18:46

You are from the devil's advocate group and you are asked to show the group that they are going to attack us, but you don't really believe in it. So you say, okay, look, maybe this and that, and you give what kind of argument, but you don't seriously believe in it. So how can you persuade others? You have to really persuade others in order to change their mind. If you believe that the Hamas is the third and now I ask you to send me differently, it won't be persuasive.

Speaker 2: 19:16

So it's not enough for the devil's advocate team to present a different analysis, different data, different way of looking at the warnings and the intelligence. They also need to persuade.

Speaker 4: 19:28

Exactly. I want to change it from intellectual exercise, prosthetic, to think differently, to really understand the way the enemy thinks, and from there you can suggest different views not exactly the opposite, but different views, which is much more complicated. If you understand how the enemy thinks, you don't need the devil's advocate, for example. He thinks in honor and humiliation, so you understand these things differently than you. The devil's advocate, it wasn't a good idea. And also the intelligentsia don't appreciate this group. They don't give it a place.

Speaker 2: 20:01

Yeah, they don't appreciate the group because they don't like for their assessments and recommendations to be challenged.

Speaker 4: 20:09

That's also true. But more than that, they felt throughout the years that this group is not persuasive. I mean, they suggest all kinds of things but, by the way, no one accepts. Throughout the years, no one has never happened that the intelligentsia accepted their views, you see, so it was redundant.

Speaker 2: 20:27

You wrote something which I found really interesting. Military intelligence actually needs people who harbor a slightly depressive tendency Research shows that the perception of reality by that group is better than that of the average person in order to do battle against uncontrolled optimism. Anxious individuals and those with a tendency to minor paranoia could also combat the euphoria. How does that work? You know?

Speaker 4: 20:51

most of us have the mistake of being more optimistic. We don't think about death, for example. We live as there is no death. Depressive people not real depression. People who are a little bit depressive have better reality testing than the others, because people tend, in order to live, to be a little bit more optimistic than the reality. Now, in the intelligence, the young people are very talented, arrogant a little bit, so they're still more optimistic. Now. Depressive people also think about the possibility to fail. They have more guilt feelings, they don't feel that so bright and this makes them more modest. And they don't speak about pathology, of course. They speak about fine lines, you know. And the same with paranoia. If you are a little bit paranoid, you suspect the enemy more than we have done now.

Speaker 2: 21:39

It's interesting to note that Yahya Sinwar, hamas leader, who spent a lot of time in Israeli jail I mean, he learned Hebrew, he learned about Israelis, he learned about the psyche of Israelis and that how he operates now is playing with our minds, humiliating us. If he was on your couch, how would you describe the way he operates?

Speaker 4: 21:56

His personality is very impulsive and very aggressive. He was called in the jail the butcher from Chanyunas, okay, and he murdered many people who he thought that were cooperating with Israel. He murdered them with his hands. He was listening to Israeli news on television every evening and if someone was disturbing him in the cell in the jail he was very angry. He knows us very well. Arabs know us, lollotan. We know them because of the external locus of control. That's the way we call it. They have external locus of control. They think in we terms and we in the West have internal locus of control. We are centered inside ourselves and don't see the others. So, besides his talented abilities, his culture helps him looking outside and learning us. Sometimes we call it social skills, sometimes we call it manipulation, but they have these abilities that we in the West, more than West, don't have At the moment. We turn into analytical thinking, we turn into ourselves to science, analytical thinking, creativity, but we don't know the other.

Speaker 2: 23:02

I want to go back to the main building blocks of the story, which is you were invited by military intelligence to help them think differently. You very quickly started to see that this was going to be quite a challenge, and you noticed that specifically in private conversations with high-ranking officials who told you that they felt they couldn't say what they wanted to say in the open forum. Now, you were there for six months, at which point did you start thinking about leaving.

Speaker 4: 23:31

I was invited to remain there for many years. It was an open, totally open. And they also told me you are here, do what you want. Everyone has a job, but your job is to find what you want to do. So it started very good. It started very, in a very optimistic way. I was very glad they give me, you know, do whatever you want, you can meet whoever you want, and so on. And then I told my boss, I told him okay, this is my suggestion. What will you tell me? Not now. Politicians won't get it. Wait, be patient.

Speaker 2: 24:04

This kind of responsive many times you actually had gone and recommended a course of action that would have potentially broken, broken the mold, done something, let's say quite bold.

Speaker 4: 24:16

I wrote few documents, for example. They like to say all this is the reason you are here, it's great, but it was just talking because nothing really happened.

Speaker 2: 24:25

You are finding it difficult to do the job that they wanted you to do, and then your supervisor told you not to send the letter he didn't want me to send it off cause because it showed that there is all kind of disagreements in the unit and so on.

Speaker 4: 24:40

I came to make a change and they sent a letter.

Speaker 2: 24:43

You had your own practice. You were writing books. I have my own practice my own life.

Speaker 4: 24:48

I like writing books, my books, I just waste my time. And in the center letter and they told me okay, if you sent a letter, we can't go on together, keep on going together and then we're separated.

Speaker 2: 25:00

You had written a letter that says look, I came to do the job. You invited me to do this job to try and orient the thinking of this organization, to be cross cultural, to be more effective, to be more open, to not be as arrogant. There are things that are blocking my ability to do that and you sent this letter to the head of military intelligence. At the time I'm on caliva, who still had intelligence and he didn't respond yeah, I sent him the letter and I didn't hear anything from him.

Speaker 2: 25:27

You had your own practice. You were writing books.

Speaker 4: 25:29

I have my own practice, my own life, my, my. I like writing books, my books that I want to, and I waste my time. I just waste my time. And in the center letter, and it's okay if you sent a letter, we can't go on together, keep on going together and then we're separated.

Speaker 4: 25:46

And, as far as you know, no other clinical psychologist has been brought into the unit I heard that after me they took another psychologist, but I don't think cross cultural one, which is make all the difference. I mean good clinical psychologist or other kind of psychologist can help the organization be better, make the discussions more open and things like this, and help people say what they want without any fear. It's amazing to think that we don't learn our enemies notice very well, much more than we know them. That's part of the problem.

Speaker 2: 26:25

Israel failed in 1973. We failed 50 years later, in 2023, pretty much along the same fault line of military intelligence, not really understanding the psychological, emotional motivations and drivers of the enemy. Are we doomed to repeat this mistake because of who we are and how our culture is organized?

Speaker 4: 26:51

I mean, I'm going to tell you depressive response, I think so. I try to do what I can. What we need to do is to be more modest. No one can predict things, but if you understand that, you don't understand. All of us are very intimately related to our way of thinking in. Culture is, by nature, very narcissistic, so you know your way of thinking and very intimate, and maybe people around you that are coming probably from the same culture as you come, and it's very difficult to get into a different culture mine but if we try to do it, we understand that we don't understand and that's like a small modest. You see, the point is to be more modest, because if you are more modest you don't try to predict, you try to be prepared to anything and you behave differently.

Speaker 2: 27:44

Dr Gorspar, this has been humbling and important to hear your experience of being inside military intelligence and having tried to open their eyes and their minds and hopefully this episode and all the work that you're doing you're on the radio is and you've written articles and you managed to make some progress. I think it's supremely important.

Speaker 4: 28:06

Thank you, mir. Thanks to the listeners.

Speaker 2: 28:11

Thanks for listening to the Dejaganizer. For more episodes and ways to connect with me, please visit Dejaganizer podcom. That's Dejaganizer podcom.