Hamas's misreading of Israel resulted in its defeat

Though it seems absurd in retrospect, there were many in Hamas who believed the group's massacre of Oct 7, 2023, would succeed not just in wounding Israel but in destroying it.

- Bret Stephens

People gather at Hostages Square in Tel Aviv on Tuesday when bodies of some deceased hostages kidnapped during the Hamas attacks of Oct 7, 2023, were returned to Israel. REUTERS

(REUTERS)

They believed this out of religious fervour. They believed it because they hoped to inspire Hezbollah and Iran to join the battle with their own full-scale attacks. And they believed that Israel, for all its high-tech wizardry, was weak.

The belief turned out to be wrong — and fatal. But it wasn’t unfounded. “After 20 years, you will become weak, and I will attack you,” Yahya Sinwar, the mastermind of Oct 7, told his Israeli prison dentist about 20 years ago, according to reporting by The New Yorker's David Remnick.

What Sinwar and others in Hamas saw in Israel was a country prepared to release more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners, including Sinwar himself, for the sake of a single hostage. A country whose leaders talked tough but tended to be risk-averse for fear of upsetting the Israeli public's thirst for prosperity and calm. A country with deep internal fissures — religious versus secular, Jews versus non-Jews, supporters of judicial reform versus opponents. A country anxious about what the rest of the world thought of it.

All this Sinwar gleaned from closely reading Hebrew-language newspapers, a habit he picked up from his many years in Israeli prisons. That may have been his biggest mistake. Journalism in a democracy, particularly Israel’s, tends to neglect what's healthy in a society while obsessing over everything that’s not. (In autocracies, it’s the opposite.) The result is that Sinwar was better acquainted with Israel’s many self-advertised faults than with its underlying strengths.