The personal belongings of festival-goers are seen at the site of an attack on the Nova Festival by Hamas terrorists from Gaza, near Israel’s border with the Gaza Strip, in southern Israel, Oct. 12, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun

October 7. And October 6. Two dates burned into Israel’s memory.

The first was October 6, 1973, Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year, when Syria and Egypt launched a surprise attack. The second, exactly 50 years later, was October 7, 2023.

Are these two separate events that history, with cruel irony, decided to link together? Is this a coincidence with some deeper, almost theological meaning? Or is it the very same lesson, one we refused to learn the first time, coming back to knock on our door, only much harder this time?

The Concept. That’s the word that was coined in 1973, and it came back in 2023.

As the historian Uri Bar-Yosef showed, “The Concept” was not a one-time intelligence mistake. It was a whole way of thinking, one that turns an assumption into an unquestionable fact, so completely that any evidence to the contrary gets dismissed as a rare “exception” rather than proof the rule is wrong.

In 1973, the assumption was that Egypt would not attack without enough air power to strike deep into Israel. Fifty years later, the assumption was that Hamas was “restrained” — that it preferred keeping civilian control of Gaza rather than risking a war it couldn’t win. Both assumptions turned out to be wrong with the exact same cruel precision. Sadly, the only difference between the two failures is the number of victims, and how public and theatrical the second massacre was.

In my view, the people who never learned this lesson are exactly the ones chanting “from the river to the sea” day and night, on campuses across the United States and in the public squares of European main cities.

Any Middle East scholar knows perfectly well, or should know, which sea is actually meant. Not a sea marking a country’s border, but the sea that millions of Jews are supposed to be pushed into. Why bother with the delicate distinction between “the right to self-determination” and “denying someone’s existence,” when you can just chant a four-word slogan and feel enlightened?

This contradiction — a slogan presented as a call for freedom, peace, and equality, while in practice it denies the existence of one of the two peoples involved — is not some accidental rhetorical slip. For anyone still chanting the slogan in 2026, that is the whole point of it, not a side effect. But this Western blindness doesn’t stop at protest signs on campus; it seeps straight into the highest halls of power, turning a failure to understand tribal reality into official policy.

On one hand, Washington keeps building solutions from the top down: ceasefire deals, technocratic governments, sovereign entities whose borders were originally drawn on colonial negotiating tables. On the other hand, the real power on the ground runs on clan, tribal, religious, and ethnic loyalties that existed hundreds of years before those borders did.

To be fair, the United States does understand that a problem exists here; it just hasn’t managed to get to the bottom of it, or turn that understanding into a policy that doesn’t repeat the same mistake every generation. Europe is beginning to understand too, but largely too late. In the suburbs of major cities, local and national authorities are discovering, usually only after severe terror attacks, that entire neighborhoods actually run on a system of loyalties that has nothing to do with the state itself.

And this is exactly the gap that American Jews, in particular, should pay attention to. In Israel, the lesson is learned in blood, in reality, in every house of mourning, in every bomb shelter. In America, by contrast, the conversation mostly happens at a safe distance, on campus, online, in an opinion piece. And so, it can afford a luxury that history denies Israelis.

There’s just one problem: As elections approach, in Israel, in the United States, anywhere with a ballot box, leaders make promises designed to win one more vote at the last minute, leaving behind the scholars who studied this dynamic for years before it ever made headlines. A promise of a quick, final, ceremonially signed solution sounds great at a campaign rally. It sounds a lot less convincing when measured against 50 years of agreements that were signed with ceremony and broken on the ground.

So, are the Oct. 7 attacks and the Yom Kippur War two separate events, or the same lesson returning in an upgraded version, on a strangely matching date? The answer seems all too clear to me: a policy built on shaky foundations and “Concept”-style thinking won’t be rescued by one more agreement, one more conference, and one more handshake at the White House. The second lesson of the Concept teaches exactly what my professor used to say: “What we always learn from history is that nobody learns from history.” And history, when its lessons go unlearned, simply waits. Patiently.

Itamar Tzur is an Israeli scholar of Middle Eastern history and the author of The Invention of the Palestinian Narrative. He holds a B.A. in Jewish History and an M.A. in Middle Eastern Studies, both with honors. As a senior member of the Kedem Forum for Middle Eastern Studies and Public Diplomacy, Tzur leverages his extensive academic research to provide deep, contextual insights into regional dynamics.