While Israel Slept: How Hamas Surprised the Most Powerful Military in the Middle East by Yaakov Katz and Amir Bohbot, St Martin’s Press, 336 pages, $29.00

Why did Israel fail to prevent October 7? 

A new book takes a crack at that question and should inform all serious discussions on the difficult matter going forward. While Israel Slept: How Hamas Surprised the Most Powerful Military in the Middle East is damning of Israel’s strategic culture and intelligence apparatus but mostly avoids pinning blame on particular officials or agents. The Palestinian militant group Hamas’s barbaric attacks on October 7, 2023 traumatized Israelis, and the book’s authors—the veteran Israeli journalists Yaakov Katz and Amir Bohbot—don’t seem eager to transform the trauma into fuel for a scapegoating frenzy.

There are minor exceptions to this gracious structural critique: For example, one Aviv Kohavi, a former Israel Defense Forces chief of staff, gets a bruising he seems to deserve. After Naftali Bennett, the prime minister from 2021 to 2022, ordered the IDF and Shin Bet intelligence agency to draw up plans for assassinating Hamas’s leaders, Kohavi resisted. “Hamas is deterred, and there is no need to risk an all-out war with such an operation,” he said in one meeting. Fixated on the threat from Iran, Kohavi continued to oppose Bennett’s proposal and to challenge the politically weak prime minister. The episode exemplifies the book’s captivating, fly-on-the-wall narration of elite decision-making in Jerusalem.

Katz and Bohbot also find myriad opportunities to criticize “Mr. Security” himself, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. They fault Netanyahu for pushing controversial judicial reforms in 2023 that divided Israeli society and, they say, made the country more vulnerable to attack. They also propound a general view that Netanyahu, over the course of a remarkably long political career, hasn’t been hawkish enough; for example, he tolerated and indeed facilitated Hamas’s rise for reasons both hubristic and cynical.

While Israel Slept reflects a longstanding siege mentality in Israel that October 7 understandably heightened and which the Gaza war and its related conflicts further intensified. In the last two years, the Israeli government has set out not only to exterminate Hamas—which would be difficult enough—but to neutralize all regional enemies and construct a Greater Israel whose territory exceeds even the current extralegal borders. Except for the few remaining leftists in Tel Aviv and in the pages of Haaretz, Israeli society, by and large, seems to approve of this endeavor.

To be sure, we’ve seen significant Israeli protests against the Gaza war, but even the demonstrators didn’t wholly oppose the belligerence of their government in Gaza and beyond. Rather, they just wanted to get back the hostages held by Hamas, and a ceasefire was the only reliable way, in their view, that this could be accomplished. Katz and Bohbot too, though severely critical of the Netanyahu government and saddened by the human tragedy in Gaza, believe that Israelis face constant Islamist threats and must remain poised to inflict violence abroad. Indeed, this forward-looking vigilance motivated them to look backwards at the miscalculations that led to October 7. Early in the book, they write: 

The war in Gaza is unlikely to be Israel’s last war, and as Iran continues to pursue a nuclear capability and stoke mayhem and chaos throughout the region with impunity, the question of the next battle is one of “when” and not “if.” Future governments in Israel will need to be reminded constantly of what went wrong in the lead-up to October 7 and how it cannot be allowed to happen again.

Though framed here in defensive terms, Israel’s escalating militarism amounts to a bid for regional hegemony, a bid that is both unusual and potentially counterproductive. Unusual because Israel, a geographically diminutive country with a population of only 9.5 million, greatly depends on its superpower ally, the United States, for its military needs. And potentially counterproductive because Israel has been freaking out its Mideast neighbors while alienating most of the world, including America and the West. A decade or two hence, Israel may find itself a global pariah surrounded by hostile Muslim nations and without the backing of its erstwhile patron. 

Katz and Bohbot don’t seem to appreciate this long-term risk of a hypermilitarized foreign policy, though they are certainly aware of the danger for Israel of losing America. Many right-wing Israelis, believing their government is unduly shackled by Washington, argue that Israel should “detox” from U.S. security assistance to gain true autonomy. And some left-wing Israelis and American Jews have argued the U.S. should slash support for Israel to rein in its military ambitions. 

The authors offer a very different view, highlighting their nation’s continued dependence on America, which equips its military and bolsters its air defenses in ways Israel cannot soon replace by boosting domestic weapons manufacturing. The book’s concluding chapter, on how to prevent another October 7, offers several recommendations, perhaps most importantly: “Bolster the US–Israel Alliance.” No one, they write, 

should be fooled into thinking that Israel can become fully independent anytime soon. With the general assessment predicting additional conflicts in the years to come, Israel needs to do more to shore up support in the United States before opening even a single production line.

There’s the rub. Israel needs America to support its wars, and Americans increasingly believe that arrangement doesn’t serve their own interests. The geriatric U.S. political establishment remains fond of Israel, or at least frightened of the Israel lobby, but the American left has turned en masse against the Jewish state, and younger generations on the American right are turning as well.

Alarmed by this development, the Israeli government and American Zionists have ramped up their propaganda efforts, but the ship of U.S. public opinion may already have sailed. American liberals cannot abide the horrifying images from the Gaza war, which was not so much a war as a brutal, unrelenting assault by the region’s most powerful military on its most vulnerable population. And American conservatives increasingly cannot reconcile the contradiction between America First ideology and unconditional U.S. support for a small, non-Western country in the Middle East.

Unfortunately, many anti-Israel conservatives have become unmoored from reality, and also from anything resembling actual conservatism. Some are spreading and apparently believing a host of bizarre conspiracy theories about the Jewish state, including the idea that Netanyahu had foreknowledge of October 7 and permitted Hamas’s atrocities for political gain. The conspiracists’ latest fever dream pertains to the assassination in September of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, who many internet personalities speculate was killed by Israel—despite being a passionately pro-Israel Christian Zionist.

While Israel Slept lays out the actual, somewhat boring sources of the failure to prevent Hamas’s attacks: deficiencies of HUMINT, i.e., human intelligence, including a dearth of Gazan informants; over-confidence in border fortification technologies; and the strategic miscalculation of assuming that Hamas hoped to avoid a big war. A kind of willful blindness—and wishful thinking—infected the minds of Israel’s strategic planners in the years leading up to October 7. Whenever an intel report warned of a looming attack, some higher-up or other would perceive a disjuncture between the evidence of Hamas’s activities and the government-approved concept of Hamas’s intentions—and disregard the evidence to save the concept.

“We have strong criticisms of Israel and do not hesitate to convey them out of deep concern for our country and its future,” Katz and Bohbot write. I do not doubt them. The authors manifestly love their country, and they hate its enemies, and they have written their book to help ensure Israel wins and its enemies lose. Such sentiments of local attachment and national solidarity unite virtually all Israelis and motivate a critical mass of them to serve the common good. 

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In that respect, Israel stands as a counterpoint to America and the entire West, which has lost not merely its confidence but its very recognition of itself as a distinct people whose rapid demographic replacement portends civilizational doom. One reason for older conservatives’ continued affection for Israel may be the perception that it retains the kind of grounding ethnic and spiritual kinship that the West, in the era of mass migration, has lost. And one reason for liberals’ hostility to Israel may be their pathological resentment of exclusionary, ethnic forms of political togetherness, at least among people who look white.

Intriguingly, the exhaustion and ethno-amnesia of Westerners are contrasted with the unapologetically Jewish state of Israel in Submission, a 2015 novel by the semi-nihilistic French writer Michel Houellebecq. In the book, an Islamist party wins the presidential elections and passes sweeping reforms affecting everything from gender relations to foreign policy to control of the Sorbonne, where the protagonist-cum-narrator, François, teaches literature. As the political crisis intensifies, François’s Jewish girlfriend Myriam and her parents decide to flee Islamic France and emigrate to Israel. Kissing Myriam goodbye, François whispers the novel’s most memorable line: “There’s no Israel for me.”

Westerners enjoy key material advantages over Israelis, not least of which are significantly larger populations, territories, and economies. But spiritually, the 21st century Westerner is homeless and solitary, a deracinated hairless ape, an “individual.” Israelis fear another October 7, another Holocaust, a nuclear Iran. But only Westerners truly stare into the abyss.