For nearly 10 months, Israel has been living under a heavy shadow and in deep anxiety. “How?” Israelis ask themselves, “How did the worst intelligence failure in Israel’s history occur? How, despite the bitter lesson we learned in 1973, did this happen to us again?”
Faced with the burning failure of October 7, Israelis must admit with great sorrow: “We were up against a sophisticated leader who planned his murderous attack on us with meticulous attention to the smallest details. Yahya Sinwar knew us intimately. He understood us.”
Sinwar was 20 years old when he served his first (short) term in an Israeli jail, and he was almost 50 upon his final release. Those years shaped him into a cruel and ruthless leader. He learned Hebrew and read all the newspapers daily. He even gave interviews in Hebrew. Meanwhile, Israel saved his life from a cancerous brain tumor and treated his teeth – a twisted blood pact between enemies.
Most Israelis don’t speak Arabic. They know nothing about Palestinian society or have any idea of its mood. Unlike the Israelis, who roll the dice of chance while playing backgammon, Sinwar is a cold-blooded and calculated chess player who knows all the openings and gambits on the way to a checkmate of terror.
Yet that supposition is inaccurate.
Sinwar, almost like us, his close enemies, experienced a colossal intelligence failure. He, too, was captive within a misconception. He fell because of it.
In a profile published in The Wall Street Journal after the war began, Dr. Yuval Bitton – former head of intelligence at the Israel Prisons Service, who spent hundreds of hours with Sinwar – explained that the Hamas leader believed that mandatory IDF service and reserve duty comprised a weakness that he could exploit. According to Sinwar, the special place the military holds in Israeli hearts turns every capture of a soldier into a strategic asset.
Israel, according to that perception, will do everything in its power and pay any price for its prisoners. This theory was proven for Sinwar in the most personal way: In 2011, he was among the 1,000 Palestinian prisoners exchanged for the release of IDF soldier Gilad Schalit, captured by Hamas in 2006.
But Sinwar, perhaps because of his long stay in the tunnels, did not update his intelligence. His assumptions about Israel, which may have been correct for 2011 when the Schalit deal was signed, were no longer relevant in and after October 2023.
That was his strategic mistake: The Israeli “cohesion,” which had impressed the Hamas people, did not exist.
“One people?” “We’re all brothers?” “United We’ll Win?” You were naive, Sinwar: Today, there are several nations here.
False vision of unity
There are people who demonstrate for the hostages and prisoners; there are those among them who, week after week, suffer violence from the police and from passersby; and there are those who are sure that the events since October 7 were an open miracle, the first steps towards messianic redemption.
There are people whose lives stopped on October 7; there are reservists in endless service; families who were uprooted and are homeless; small business owners on the verge of collapse; and still others who are convinced that the attack was an inside job and mock the military that is stretched thin for its failures.
Netanyahu appears to be delaying the hostage deal endlessly; his supporters seem oblivious to the tortuous videos of the hostages.
After Gaza has suffered tens of thousands of casualties and is immersed in ruins, it’s worth returning to the interview given by Saleh al-Arouri after the Schalit deal.
In it, al-Arouri, the head of Hamas’s military wing, who was eliminated in Beirut in January this year, explained in Hebrew why Israeli sensitivity to the lives of soldiers and civilians, that famous “cohesion,” was “a point of strength for Israeli society. I wish you didn’t have it,” he said.
Sinwar continued: “For me, as your enemy, it’s better, and I would be happy if Israelis reach a state where they don’t care about the soldier or the citizen. This will harm the military and the entire Israeli society.”
Sinwar didn’t understand that the scenario al-Arouri was describing had already manifested, perhaps faster than expected. He had hoped to strike Israel hard, followed by a quick deal that would release all Palestinian prisoners and present him as the victor and the great liberator – but he was mistaken.
Sinwar didn’t understand that “United We’ll Win” is nothing but an empty slogan, a deception of solidarity, intended to blind the public and normalize the immeasurable abandonment. The desertion of the hostages is the rendering asunder of the most basic value that brought together the people who built their homes in Zion. It is the indication that we have become a diaspora in our land: From a people without a land to a land without a people.
The writer is owner of the Unik Media Group.