Beyond Groupthink: Strategic Blindness |
Why Israel’s failures are not informational—but psychological
A recent excellent essay on groupthink by Emanuel Shahaf offers a clear and valuable account of a recurring problem in Israeli decision-making. It is a necessary starting point. But the phenomenon he describes can—and should—be taken one step further.
What is at stake is not simply groupthink. It is a deeper failure of interpretation rooted in psychological necessity.
Israel does not suffer from a lack of intelligence, expertise, or even contrary information. It suffers from an inability to process what it already knows—because doing so would trigger surges of anxiety tied to perceived threat, up to and including annihilation anxiety. At that level, interpretation gives way to defense. What has historically been called the Konseptzia is not merely an analytical framework that turned out to be wrong. It is a stabilizing structure. It organizes uncertainty into something manageable, reducing anxiety for decision-makers operating under extreme pressure. In this sense, it is not simply adopted because it is persuasive; it is maintained because it is necessary.
And anxiety is not a trivial variable here. It is notoriously difficult to recognize and even harder to confront. Many therapists fail to identify it in their own patients—not because it is absent, but because it is defended against, including by the therapist’s own........