Hamas’s barbaric raid on southern Israel represents the worst failure in Israeli intelligence since the Yom Kippur War of 1973. As in 1973, an Egyptian gave advance warning that “something big” was about to happen. In 1973, it was Ashraf Marwan, son-in-law of the deceased Egyptian dictator Gamal Abdel Nasser and aide to Nasser’s successor, Anwar Sadat. In 2023, it was Abbas Kamel, the head of Egyptian intelligence. The footage of Hamas surging through Israel’s Gaza fence proves that tech is no substitute for HUMINT: human intelligence.
Intelligence means more than sounding clever or dreaming big. In Latin, intelligere means “to understand”: to absorb information and turn it into knowledge. This war is also a failure of American intelligence. The Hamas attack was a large and complex operation. Ali Baraka, a senior Hamas official, said it took two years of planning. U.S. intelligence agencies also seem to have missed the signs or failed to understand what they meant.
ISRAEL WAR: HAMAS SURPRISED AND 'WORRIED' BY HOW SUCCESSFUL ATTACK TWO YEARS IN THE MAKING WAS
After the 1973 war, Israel’s public recriminations and inquiries concluded that its military and political leadership had fallen victim to a conceptzia, the “concept” that Sadat wouldn’t launch a war that would end in yet another Egyptian defeat. Israel’s leaders forgot to know their enemy. Sadat lost on the battlefield, but he reasserted Egypt’s honor, broke Israel’s image of invincibility, and forced the United States into negotiations.
Israel’s latest war is not the second time that a false conceptzia has led Israel to the brink of destruction. It is the third. In 2000, the dream of peaceful coexistence with a Palestinian state exploded in Israel’s face in a war of suicide bombings. Ariel Sharon, whose tank counterattack had split the Egyptian assault in 1973, returned as prime minister and split the Palestinians of the West Bank from the Palestinians in Gaza. After the Gazans elected Hamas in 2006, Israel’s policy has been to contain Hamas and “shrink the conflict.”
Shrinking the conflict has taken three forms. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has outflanked the Palestinians by diplomatic engagement with the Gulf Arabs. When Hamas resisted shrinkage by launching rockets, Israel fought limited wars and used its Iron Dome defense system to nullify the attacks. Third, billions of dollars in international aid, including from the U.S., have poured into Gaza.
The idea was that Hamas and its Gazan supporters could be weaned off genocide by welfare payments and work permits. The reality is that the aid, though earmarked for civilian use, is diverted to war and preparations for war with the Jews. Hamas has boasted openly about this for years, just as it has boasted of its alliance with Iran, and Iran has boasted of its intention to destroy Israel. Western governments have pretended not to notice any of this; they, too, are caught in their concepts. The Europeans, in particular, fear that mass immigration is importing the communal conflicts of the Middle East.
The exception to the West’s willed delusion was the Trump administration. Those in the Obama administration liked to think of themselves as the “smartest guys in the room.” They tried to install Iran, the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism, as their regional policeman. Then-President Donald Trump severed aid to the Palestinians and took the U.S. out of the Iran deal. In 2021, President Joe Biden resumed sending cash to Gaza as soon as he entered the White House. In a failed attempt to buy Iran’s return to the nuclear deal, his administration has allowed sanctions on Iran to lapse. In 2020, Iran’s oil revenues were worth $7.9 billion. In 2022, they reached $42.6 billion.
This administration has pretended not to notice as Russia uses Iranian-supplied drones in Ukraine. It has pretended not to notice as Iran raised its uranium enrichment levels to the cusp of weapons’ grade. It has pretended not to notice as Iran sends cash and weapons to Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza and the West Bank, and the Houthi militias in Yemen — the imperial strategy that Iran calls “unity of the arenas.” Only days before Hamas launched its assault on Israel, the administration surrendered to Iranian hostage-taking by sending another $6 billion Iran’s way.
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Biden may be slow on his feet, but he retains the political intelligence to turn on a dime. He responded to the Hamas atrocities with a clear statement of support for Israel’s right to defend itself. The Pentagon is sending military supplies. The USS Gerald R. Ford, the world’s biggest aircraft carrier, is off the coast of Israel. Yet the effort to save a broken conceptzia sails on.
Hamas terrorists were still holding hostages in Israeli homes when Secretary of State Antony Blinken tweeted that he “encouraged” Turkish “advocacy for a ceasefire.” Hamas’s key backers are Iran, the administration’s regional favorite; Turkey, a NATO ally; and Qatar, which Biden designated a non-NATO ally in 2022. The administration, facing the results of its flawed policies, is even doing its best to minimize Iran’s role in the Hamas attack. The national interest would be served better if the smart people applied their intelligence to understanding how U.S. strategy went so far off track and how it might still be diverted from a march of folly.