Ever since the horrifying Hamas terror attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, Western reporting on the roots of that attack and the Israeli government’s response to it has suffered from serious misunderstandings. In While Israel Slept—borrowing from John F. Kennedy’s first book, Why England Slept, and, more directly, from Winston Churchill’s 1938 collection of speeches, While England Slept—two prominent Israeli journalists, Yaakov Katz and Amir Bohbot, set out to correct those misunderstandings. While their opening chapters focus on the immediate context of Hamas’s surprise attack, later chapters explore the deeper roots of that unpreparedness, going back over two decades before. Katz and Bohbot provide the closest thing to a definitive account of the events of 2023 and its causes—even if some prescriptions in their conclusion are debatable.
The biggest error in much of the reporting on Israeli policies over the years leading up to the attack portrays the Israeli government, usually under the leadership of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as excessively warlike and unsympathetic to the needs of Gaza residents. To the contrary, the authors demonstrate, Netanyahu and his fellow ministers erred by turning a blind eye to the preparations Hamas leaders had been making for war against Israel for at least a decade, accumulating billions of dollars in cash and shipments of materials to construct an elaborate network of tunnels along with an ample supply of drones, rockets, and other weaponry.
Desperate to avoid major conflict, Israeli leaders, including Netanyahu (and for less than two years the ostensibly “right-wing” Naftali Bennett and his “centrist-liberal” successor Yair Lapid), engaged in what political analysts during the Cold War called “mirror imaging.” That is, just as Cold War “doves” like Jimmy Carter’s secretary of state, Cyrus Vance, allowed themselves to believe that Soviet leaders, just like their American counterparts, aimed above all at peace and prosperity, successive Israeli political and military leaders supposed that Hamas leaders, too, wanted prosperity and stability. Accordingly, Israeli leaders believed major financial aid and even “dual-use” tunnel-building equipment would divert Hamas from any aggressive intentions, allowing them to focus instead (as the Israelis did) on advancing their people’s economic well-being.
In addition, both Netanyahu, who had previously called for the complete “dismantling” of the Hamas regime, along with his far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, came to regard the regime as an “asset” in that its existence would prevent any moves towards a “two-state solution” to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. That is, given Hamas’s widely recognized status as a terrorist group, in contrast with the Palestinian Authority (which governed the West Bank and engaged in negotiations with the outside world), no responsible parties would press for a unified Palestinian state.
In effect, the authors observe, for years Israeli authorities paid “terrorist blackmail” by facilitating the transfer of funds to Hamas from assorted Western “charities” and especially the Gulf States in an attempt to delicately “balance” weakening Hamas and elevating the prosperity of “the average Palestinian.” “Consecutive governments … believed that improved conditions in Gaza would lessen Hamas’s incentive to go to war,” ignoring “the fact that Hamas was a genocidal terrorist organization” that fired nearly 5,000 rockets into Israel in 2014 alone, while infiltrating killers through its attack tunnels.
When Israel did experience major military attacks from Gaza and elsewhere during those years, the government sought to respond in the most limited manner possible. Even the two terrifying Intifadas of 1987–93 and 2000—terrorist attacks massacring hundreds of Israeli civilians—were met with Israel launching rockets into the adjacent territories, but without any major ground incursion. (The main response was the construction of a defensive wall around Israeli territory.) And subsequently, in response to the 2006 kidnapping by Hamas of a single young Israeli soldier, Gilead Shalit, Israel (under Netanyahu) agreed in 2011 to release 1,027 prisoners, including the future leader of the October 7 attack, Yayah Sinwar. Shortly after the 2014 attack, when presented by a special intelligence unit with a plan to “deal a devastating blow to Iran and its proxies,” Hezbollah and Hamas, Netanyahu “hinted that he did not want wars to continue endlessly” and preferred to assist Qatar’s plan for financing Hamas operations.
Meanwhile, as the authors note, Hamas leaders, above all Sinwar, spent years carefully studying Israelis’ mentality. During his twenty-two-year prison stint for murdering four (actually, he boasted, twelve) alleged “collaborators,” Sinwar learned to speak Hebrew fluently and read books by former Israeli prime ministers Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Rabin as well as the “revisionist” Zionist Vladimir Jabotinsky. At the tactical level, meanwhile, many Gazans acquired detailed knowledge of the Israeli territory they would invade in 2023 thanks to the authorization by the tough-talking Bennett for up to 14,000 Gaza residents to obtain permits to work in Israel. Sinwar himself, having learned of Israelis’ reluctance both to incur casualties themselves (as in Shalit’s case) and to inflict them on civilians, took care to surround himself during his travels around Gaza “with children on his lap or holding them in his arms,” making them his “personal human shields.”
The demonstrations against the judicial reform bill may have helped encourage Hamas to strike when it did, though the long-planned attack would have occurred eventually.
But Israeli leaders themselves do not bear sole responsibility for their lack of preparedness against a major terrorist attack. As Katz and Bohbot observe, Ariel Sharon’s withdrawal of forces from Gaza in 2005 was made under pressure from the George W. Bush administration, so as to refute “claims that the Jewish state was still occupying” the territory. Subsequently, when Israel responded to the construction of tunnels into its territory and its rocket launchings by undertaking Operation Cast Lead, its “first large-scale ground offensive into Gaza since” the 2005 pullout, the government, against the advice of defense minister Yoav Gallant, halted the operation only two weeks later “to start building a relationship” with newly elected US President Obama. Although Americans then “promised to create a mechanism” to “curb the smuggling of weapons” into Gaza, “nothing was done.” Had Cast Lead been allowed to continue into the heart of Gaza City, former Israeli political and military officials later maintained, “the Hamas regime might have been toppled,” and replaced by “the more pragmatic Fatah,” which governs the West Bank under Israeli supervision and had signed the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords.
None of this background, however, can excuse the multitude of Israeli errors that allowed the October 7 attack to succeed. Back in 2016, as the authors recount, the country’s “hardline” defense minister, Avigdor Lieberman, distributed a “top secret” assessment of the situation in Gaza to Netanyahu and the heads of the Israeli armed forces and of military intelligence, which urged launching a pre-emptive strike against Hamas before the group could capture an Israeli town along with numerous hostages. The document also revealed Hamas’s “long-term strategy,” including a buildup of its military force by 2020 (as occurred) and plans for a “multifront campaign” by numerous terrorist groups (along with “attacks on Jewish targets worldwide”), aimed at destroying the Jewish state by 2022. But Lieberman’s assessment was ignored.
I shall not review here the egregious tactical mistakes that military leaders made in response to the utterly unexpected October 7 attack—exemplified by their disregard of the warnings issued by (young, female) military border watchers who conveyed warnings of unexpected, suspicious events transpiring in Gaza in previous days. (The young women were all killed.) However, once the invasion was recognized as such, Israeli military members and even civilians displayed numerous examples of heroism and tactical cleverness that enabled Hamas’s defeat. The authors single out some nine “meticulously executed operations,” including the elimination of several Hamas military and political leaders and “the remarkable pager and walkie-talkie attack” of 2024 that killed dozens and wounded thousands of Hezbollah operatives, signaling “Israel’s resurgence.” Perhaps most importantly, the authors—in agreement with John Spencer, chair of urban warfare studies at West Point’s Modern War Institute—refute the libelous charges of “genocide” hurled at Israel by emphasizing that it achieved victory, against an enemy that hid underneath schools and hospitals, “in a way not seen before in the history of war, taking unprecedented steps to minimize the loss of civilian life.”
Among the authors’ concluding recommendations, some seem more meritorious than others. The wisdom of their call to reform Israel’s intelligence system to promote the exchange of diverse opinions and the sharing of information among the government and military leadership is unarguable. Similarly desirable for Israel is the adoption of “a preemptive strike policy” to prevent its enemies “from reconstituting their capabilities once the high-intensity stage of war is completed” (a timely lesson for the immediate present). On the other hand, their blaming “the Netanyahu government” for introducing in January 2023, a “controversial judicial overhaul” that divided the Israeli public, thereby offering Israel’s enemy an opportunity “to accelerate and deepen Israel’s distress” (this per a private letter from intelligence officials to the cabinet and prime minister) is unfair. Although the Israeli public was stirred by the media to protest the proposed overhaul as undemocratic, a look at the proposal demonstrates that it was more, not less, democratic than the system it would have replaced.
What is not widely understood in the US is that since Israel, unlike this country, lacks a written constitution, Israel’s highest court has claimed the right to strike down whatever legislation it pleases if it fails to meet the standard of what a court majority deems “reasonable.” Moreover, whereas all federal judges are chosen by elected officials, a majority of Israel’s supreme court are selected through a process of co-optation. That is, they are chosen by a nine-member Judicial Selection Committee consisting of three sitting Supreme Court Judges, two cabinet ministers, two Knesset members, and two representatives of the Israel Bar Association. In sum, of the selection committee, only four members are elected legislators, while five belong to the legal establishment. It is this system that Netanyahu sought to democratize. And as the authors acknowledge, “the opposition often refused to entertain [even] middle-ground solutions.” The demonstrations against the judicial reform bill may have helped encourage Hamas to strike when it did, though the long-planned attack would have occurred eventually.
Netanyahu’s conduct of his nation’s foreign and defense policies, as Katz and Bohbot demonstrate, was sometimes deeply flawed (albeit in a manner shared by his rivals, Bennett and Lapid, when they were in office). Nonetheless, before one blames Netanyahu for “dividing” his country at a time of grave danger, one should consider the following recollection by Lapid in September 2024—almost a year after the Hamas attack—of his coalition’s aims before and after the war’s onset:
Whenever it has been necessary so far, we knew how to march the 56 Knesset members of the opposition into the Knesset plenum and vote the right way or work together in committees to do what needs to be done. I’m telling you, for the sacred cause of overthrowing this horrible government of ours, we will be very functional.
Calling the defeat of one’s country’s “horrible” government a “sacred” quest hardly sounds like the language one would expect from a loyal opposition amidst a country’s war for survival. (Fortunately, Lapid adopted a more conciliatory tone at the Knesset session where the recent peace settlement was formally announced.) But that Israel will continue to stand in need of a spirit of unity, regardless of which party governs, is indicated by the following statement issued by Hamas on the day that President Trump announced the ceasefire agreement: “We emphasize our determination to continue with the resistance in all its forms until our rights are achieved—first and foremost the removal of the occupation, [Palestinian] self-determination, and the establishment of an independent [Palestinian] state with full sovereignty with Jerusalem as its capital” (emphasis added).