This week, Israel marks fifty-three years since the Yom Kippur War, and the anniversary lands with a weight it has never carried before, because on October 7, 2023, we watched history repeat itself with terrible precision.

Fifty years apart, on the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, Israel’s intelligence services and strategic planners were caught catastrophically off guard. In 1973, it was a doctrine of static defence and a fatal assumption, “the conception,” that the Arab armies lacked the will or capability to change how they fought. In 2023, it was a mirror image of that same arrogance: a belief that Hamas had been deterred, boxed in, contained behind sensors and fences. Both times, we were wrong. Both times, the enemy exploited exactly the blind spot our own certainty had created.

And both times, when the strategic and doctrinal failures of the state left a vacuum, it was filled, at terrible cost, by the courage of individual soldiers.

In October 1973, the last line between the Syrian army and the........

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