Shin Bet director David Zini delivered a sharp warning to Israel's security establishment today at a memorial ceremony for the October 7 massacre held at the agency's headquarters, calling on personnel not to slip back into the complacency and fixed assumptions that preceded the attack.
Zini opened his remarks by urging Shin Bet staff to watch the security reality with open eyes and track every shift with discipline: "We in the service must remember that our responsibility does not end with correcting the past. It requires looking forward and changing at the right pace and in the right direction. The security reality is changing before our eyes. The enemy is studying us, adapting, developing new capabilities and methods of operation. And so we too must change, and quickly."
The Shin Bet chief then issued a stark warning against sliding back into the conceptzia, the fixed mindset that left Israel blind to the threat building in Gaza: "We must not fall in love with what we already know. We must not lean on concepts just because they served us in the past, and we must not wait for the next threat to understand that reality has changed. Each of us, and all of us together, are required to ask, to challenge, to innovate, to initiate, to identify the change before it becomes a threat, and to be one step ahead of those who seek to harm us."
"We will continue to defend the State of Israel. We will do so with open eyes, with humility, with determination and with deep faith in our mission. We will carry with us the memory of the fallen and the courage of the fighters and the people, not as a weight that stops us, but as a command that requires us to be better. This is our responsibility, this is our mission, and this is our promise to the State of Israel."
