Israeli women soldiers' warnings dismissed on October 7, apparently partly due to sexism

[Jane3212]

( Note : I don't want this thread to devolve into a debate over Israel & Palestine. I hope everyone here can agree Hamas had to be fought against, whatever other opinions they have on the war and wider situation)
I've recently been reading different topics about Israeli women and I was shocked to read the extent to which the brave women lookouts on October 7 were dismissed, apparently partly due to gender potentially, though there were others reasons also (rigid military ideas of what an attack would be, for one). If they had been listened to, the situation could have been ameliorated probably even if too late to avert- and they'd been warning for months, so averting it probably could have been possible.

I'd long thought that the fact women soldiers serve on equal terms was a good point of the IDF, but it seems female soldiers face similar issues to other countries. It's made me want to investigate how far female soldiers' intelligence being ignored is a wider issue generally

Yes, there are severe problems with the Haredi men who enlist requiring stuff including strict sex segregation. They can usually have that, but there are still issues when they refuse to interact with women in other battalions leading to cancelled missions, or refuse to sit while women sing in ceremonies, etc from what I've read.

What do you mean 'their use of women'?

And which party do you mean? Likud? I don't like them but the really anti-women soldiers ones are the small extreme religious ones like the ones Smotrich and Ben-Gvir come from, I thought.

Unfortunately the Israeli electoral system allows tiny and sometimes extreme parties to wield great power- and Netanyahu refusing to keep up the cordon sanitare against them allowed that to happen.

I'm happy to discuss the parties' role in how IDF women are treated on this thread, just not happy to get into other topics.

This Times of Israel article is interesting. Women in the IDF have often been presented in quite a sexualised way online as part of PR efforts, and you have to ask who that benefits aside from a few influencers? Women serving? Other militaries where women serve don't tend to do that.

The IDF usually makes women serve together with men, battalions are only sex segregated if women are Orthodox (and I'd assume for the minority of religious Druze, Muslim, Christian women who join). This was intended to build camaraderie, a nice idea in theory, but not ideal when women are patronised or sexually harassed. Secular women afaik don't have the option of serving only with women.

https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/sexy-soldiers-ignored-warnings-how-gender-bias-fueled-oct-7th-massacre/

A couple of articles on the sexualisation of women serving via army PR, sometimes even including 'influencers' who use Onlyfans.

https://securitypraxis.eu/combatcuties/

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middleeast/6221714.stm

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/29768624251403864

https://www.shadowbannedmagazine.com/post/combat-cuties-sex-soldiers-and-the-new-digital-propaganda-war

I don't agree with all the claims in the articles but the 'strategy' seems sexist and furthermore illogical given the ongoing 'culture war' over the more strictly religious & the military. I've read some articles with Orthodox women who served but had to overcome a lot of family and community pressure, and the weird fetishised angle this PR portrays IDF women surely wouldn't help that..!

(These 2 are interesting, on ex Haredi women who decided to serve)

https://www.ynetnews.com/jewish-world/article/hkshwnnbwl

https://www.ynetnews.com/jewish-world/article/b1u5v00htbe

I don't see why they couldn't post videos without going for the 'thirst trap' angle. Are male soldiers portrayed that way...? 🤔7

Sorry, someone's following you? That's very wrong, MNHQ shouldn't be deleting posts if they don't break talk guidelines...

But these are general warnings. They should have led to a situation of high alertness but unless specific as to where and when almost impossible to prevent. (And it seems attacks intended in the North were either prevented or aborted for some reason.)
Knowing William the Bastard was likely to attack England because he wanted the throne did not do Harold II much good when he had to deal with Harald Hardrada in the North, along with his own treacherous brother, Tostig. He could have set up a system of beacons to warn of invasion in the south (but the logistics would be difficult and need to be done far in advance), but it wouldn't have got him south any faster (better to have been slower but one job of a Saxon king was to protect the people, who were being harried by William's lot).
So the general warnings that something was going on in Gaza - significantly not what was intended nor how - are not very helpful.
If women soldiers were not listened to when they said that insurgents were cutting wires, flying in on paragliders etc, then that is stupid.

Not the entire population, no. As in many democracies Israeli parties are elected on sometimes as little 35% of the vote; and in the case of Likud, the only way they could form a government was by joining forces with religious zionists of the more extreme right.

Nobody votes for the IDF - it is the national military defence force and all citizens ( including arabs, Druze and Christians) are expected to do national service ( with the exception of Haredis - and that has become very contentious)

Thanks, that's important info..

It's possible to criticise the Israeli army's policies or the actions of individuals, as in this thread, without condemning them for having an army!
On the Haredi issue, they could do civic service (and some women especially, who tend to be less isolated, do) but they tend to object to this too, or at least their community leaders do, who fear losing members. Arabs don't have to do civic service or military but some do civic (and a few military, especially Bedouins. One of the soldiers who died protecting the female lookouts was Bedouin).

https://tautrust.org/new-trend-survey-among-arab-citizens-of-israel-75-support-voluntary-non-military-civic-service/⁶

I would like to say that far right and far left have different but equally effective ways of discriminating against and exploiting women. It's not a left/ right thing. It's a male/ female thing.

I agree if it were only general warnings it would have been harder. They explicitly reported Hamas practicing with paragliders, cutting wires, and targeting tanks for months. The high command didn't lack the specifics or logistics to act-they refused to believe Hamas was capable of pulling off what the spotters were watching them rehearse.

We don't know the background. Hamas had been practicing military drills for years. It's too easy to look back in the retrospectoscope and say it was obvious what was about to happen, but it wasn't.

There's a glaring incongruity between the Hamas organization's deadly secrecy about the planned operation and the idea that of course everyone including Netanyahu knew what was about to happen.

Definitely Hamas kept the precise timing tightly secret. I'm certainly not saying Netanyahu or the generals knew it would happen on October 7 and deliberately let it happen—that's a conspiracy theory.
But the warnings from the lookouts were NOT routine. While Hamas held general drills for years, the specific activities the female lookouts (tatzpitaniyot) reported in the months leading up to the attack were completely unprecedented. They explicitly logged Hamas forces building mock-ups of Israeli tanks and border towers, practicing how to disable the exact cameras they were watching through, and rehearsing mass hostage-taking. The alarms they raised were ignored.
Israel already had the exact blueprint.
It wasn't just a matter of trying to guess what the drills meant. Over a year before the attack, Israeli intelligence obtained a 40-page Hamas battle plan codenamed "Jericho Wall." It detailed the exact strategy used on October 7: massive rocket barrages, drones disabling cameras, and breaching the fence to overrun bases and towns.
The real issue wasn't that the threat was invisible, but that top leadership was blinded by a rigid concept: they firmly believed Hamas was "deterred" and wouldn't risk a full-scale war. Because of this bias, high-ranking commanders dismissed the lookouts' specific reports as mere posturing. The IDF leadership has since explicitly apologized to the surviving lookouts for ignoring their warnings.

Listen, the Israeli government has the most sophisticated spy systems in the world so the idea that they had no idea is ludicrous.

Yes, those cunning Jews.