Yaakov Katz
Subject: Israel’s 10/7 Failure
Bio: Former Editor in Chief for The Jerusalem Post, Author of While Israel Slept: How Hamas Surprised the Most Powerful Military in the Middle East
Larry Bernstein:
Welcome to What Happens Next. My name is Larry Bernstein. What Happens Next is a podcast which covers economics, politics, and culture.
Today’s topic is Israel’s 10/7 Failure.
Our speaker is Yaakov Katz who is the former editor in chief for the Jerusalem Post and the author of the new book entitled While Israel Slept: How Hamas Surprised the Most Powerful Military in the Middle East.
I want to hear how the Israelis screwed up, and what Hamas was thinking making a surprise attack.
Yaakov Katz:
We wrote this book because we were shocked by the success of the October 7th Hamas attack. It seemed on the surface that this was a tactical failure, that the intelligence failed, the Israeli Defense Forces troops along the border failed, that the defenses that Israel built along that border failed. They’re always going to be surprises.
My co-author Amir and I both have served for a long time as military reporters. We drew on our experience over two decades and felt that there was something much deeper here. This wasn’t just any other strategic surprise and it wasn’t just any other tactical mistake. It spoke to a policy of containment that Israel put into place vis-a-vis the Gaza Strip that transcended politics and who was in the Prime Minister’s office. They all believed the fairytale, which is that a jihadist or genocidal terrorist organization could live alongside your southern border and that you could deter it or pay it off.
What they wanted was to draw Israel into this protracted war. They wanted to kill as many Israelis, abduct people, and isolate Israel. Israel is more isolated today than it has been since inception. It is a success for Hamas.
Larry Bernstein:
What was Hamas’ big strategic objective with October 7th?
Yaakov Katz:
We don’t know what it is that they wanted to achieve. This is a group that has a charter that calls for the elimination of Israel. Back in October of 2023, the country ripping itself apart over judicial reform, after five elections in the span of just three and a half years, the country was divided. And they saw an opportunity of weakness. We know that there were conversations with Iran, with Hezbollah at the same time.
In October before the attack, there was a lot of talk that to reach normalization agreement between Israel and Saudi Arabia that would’ve sidelined the whole Palestinian issue. Two years later every place in the world, you’ll see graffiti and people marching, Free Palestine, Free Gaza. There is not a single person around the world today who is indifferent to this conflict. Australia, Canada, France, and the United Kingdom have recognized a Palestinian state.
Larry Bernstein:
There was an expectation that Hezbollah, Syria and Iran would come to Hamas’ support. It didn’t happen. The senior leadership has been killed. And from a military perspective, it is a complete and utter loss. I hear your point that it’s great that Australia has recognized Palestine as an independent state, but there may be easier ways to get that result. I think it was a strategic error.
Yaakov Katz:
Hamas was surprised by the success of its attack on October 7th. It thought it would succeed in kidnapping some people and killing.
They were surprised at how quickly the military and its defenses collapsed that morning and how long they had free reign of the border kibbutzim.
Keep in mind, every operation starts with a lot of sympathy for Israel, but very quickly that passes. Hamas felt the world was going to stop Israel and the world tried to stop Israel.
I agree with you from a military perspective, Hamas has been decimated. It’s a shadow of its former self, but for Hamas, the success is not going to be in defeating Israel in the battlefield. The success was going to be surviving the war and maintaining control over the Gaza Strip. They thought the world would come to the rescue, they thought they could outlive this. They failed, and hopefully with the Trump plan being implemented that will ensure the removal of Hamas as the governing entity over the Gaza Strip.
Larry Bernstein:
Your title of your book resembles At Dawn We Slept, which is an analysis of Pearl Harbor. Maybe we could compare it with October 7th. It wasn’t completely unexpected. The headline in the Hawaii newspaper the previous day was War Expected with Japan. What they didn’t expect was a bombing of Pearl Harbor because it was too far away. Admiral Husband Kimmel decided not to drop torpedo nets in front of the battleships. He thought that was inconceivable that they would send aircraft carriers.
The Japanese had sent convoys at an unusual northern route to Hawaii, which was untraveled and not covered by American defenses. And the Americans were most worried about Japanese-Americans causing internal strife, and were fighting the wrong battle.
What you said in your book where the Israelis were expecting the attack to come through tunnels, and they didn’t. They came through the fences. They were surprised by the number of people and the ferocity of the attacks.
Surprise is just that. You can’t protect against everything. You have to anticipate what your opponent’s going to do and then find their weakness. Hamas was particularly good at observing Israel’s weaknesses and taking advantage of it.
Yaakov Katz:
The attack on October 7th more resembled Pearl Harbor than it did 9/11, because there was a lot of intelligence indicating that Al-Qaeda might be planning something. America knew there was a World War raging in Europe as well as in the Pacific. I was not familiar with that book. Where we drew the title from John F. Kennedy’s book called While England Slept.
Throughout that night of October 6th to October 7th, while the country was sleeping, people were awake and were aware that things were happening, but they completely misunderstood.
I borrowed a line that’s long been attributed to Donald Rumsfeld that it was a lack of imagination. It wasn’t that we’d lacked the information because no one can accuse Israel of not knowing that there was an enemy in Gaza. We had been fighting with them on average every two years. No one could say we didn’t see that they were training and amassing rockets. They were firing those rockets at us.
They were amassing on the border and flying kites with fire and dropping them onto our fields. They dug tunnels. We knew it, but we completely lacked the ability to see what was happening at its face value.
Can this happen again? Can Israel once again fall into complacency, vis-a-vis its enemies? We’re still going to have people who seek our destruction and want to kill us.
Larry Bernstein:
You gave some examples in the book about things that Israeli should have been aware of. One example a surge in phone communication activity by Hamas in the 24 hours before the invasion.
What I think is misleading about that is I’m sure that there were many times when phone traffic goes up and if I had to make a regression model to estimate likelihood of surprise attacks, you may have 40 variables and there might be a lot of noise.
Yaakov Katz:
Netanyahu wasn’t woken up in the middle of the night. Maybe if they woke up the Prime Minister, he would’ve made a different decision. Turn on the floodlights, put the tanks into frontline position, send a couple Apache helicopters, make Hamas aware that we know that they’re planning something, and maybe that way spoil their surprise. But it’s easy to sit here to judge. You’re a hundred percent right that even with all these warnings that were going on, the traffic and communications, the SIM cards that had been replaced from Palestinian to Israeli ones maybe signifying that somebody’s planning to cross the border, the uncovering of rocket launchers, the preparing of underground bunkers, this was something that happens multiple times a year.
As we say on the night of Passover, why is this night different than all the other nights? It wasn’t to some extent, these things often happen on an active military front like Gaza.
Larry Bernstein:
Ariel Sharon’s decision to abandon Gaza, at the time, I thought it was a brilliant strategic decision. It doesn’t do Israel any good to have troops there. Let’s just separate. Good fences make good neighbors, good luck. That caused internal strife when they removed settlers. But it seemed like a very good strategic decision vis-a-vis the Palestinians in Gaza. But it undermined Israel’s ability to maintain intelligence there, to allow Hamas to make tunnels to embed themselves in the hospital and run their military headquarters out of there. How should we rethink Sharon’s decision to disengage with Gaza?
Yaakov Katz:
I also at the time supported it. I was the lead reporter for the Jerusalem Post, spent that whole period in Gaza covering it. It was very difficult to watch people uprooted from their homes and evicted with force by the Israeli military. But I felt that it didn’t make sense to have 10,000 Israeli settlers living in a sea of 2 million Palestinians.
Sharon argued at the time, pulling back to the pre-1967 border was meant to prevent the condemnations of Israel, the claims of an occupation of Gaza, and to save lives and prevent terrorist attacks.
Where the mistakes were made was doing this in a unilateral way just handing this off and creating a vacuum. Hamas was already there had rockets had back then. One of the mistakes I think that Israel did was walking away in the Philadelphi Corridor this strip of land along the border between Gaza and Egypt.
Back then, that strip of land was used by Hamas for tunnels, some of them big enough for trucks that were smuggling in weapons. Hamas, after 2005 jumped in its military capabilities in the span of a few years and this had to do with the fact that Israel walked away, threw away the key, and basically said, smuggle in all the weapons you want. That was a tragic mistake.
Now, I understand his argument against it. If we had stayed in the Philadelphi Corridor, the whole world would’ve said, you’re continuing to occupy Gaza. So, it would’ve undermined the argument of we’re leaving for Palestinians to build something on their own. But on the other hand, from a security perspective, it was foolish.
Larry Bernstein:
Egypt shares a border with Gaza. Gaza was part of Egypt in my lifetime.
Yaakov Katz:
How come there was no expectation at any point during this war that Egypt should do more? I’ve seen no protests around the world. None. Egypt, open your border. Egyptian authorities are charging throughout this war, $5,000 from a Palestinian who wants to leave the Gaza Strip to get out. What Palestinian has $5,000 in the Gaza Strip? So why would they make it so difficult?
Why was there never any expectation that the Egyptians do more for the people of Gaza? And it’s not just them, how come all the Arab countries stood on the sidelines and refused to accept refugees, refused to take people out and give them medical care?
Some did. The United Arab Emirates did. Jordan eventually did under pressure from the United States, but barely anyone stood up. I think that they just don’t want the Palestinians in Gaza. They don’t care about them. That’s the tough reality.
Larry Bernstein:
Israel is frenemies with Egypt and Jordan. They want to get along. They don’t want to undermine that tenuous relationship. They know they’re not going to take them. So why humiliate them? They’re not going to do it. If, for example, if the Egyptian said, we want $5,000 a head, Israel could have said, fine, take a million Palestinians. Here’s $5 billion, you’re done. And they would’ve said, no, I’m sorry. We withdraw the offer. We don’t want a million Palestinians. So it wasn’t even sincere at $5,000 a head. That was nonsense.
Yaakov Katz:
We’re not in a black and white world. Israel from a public diplomacy perspective, should have immediately pointed the finger at Egypt. But from a strategic perspective, we have a border with Egypt. Egypt has a powerful Western military. The last thing we want is to be in a place that we go from a cold peace to a position where we have a tense border with a volatile and erupting front with Egypt.
Larry Bernstein:
Take me through your thoughts on more frequent mowing the lawn and the use of preemptive strikes in Gaza.
Yaakov Katz:
When we look at Israel since inception, the country has fought a war almost every single decade, and obviously tired of war and seeking an opportunity to avoid conflict. That was always the Israeli position. And for that reason, it never launched any wars because of conventional military buildup. The only exception is the 1967 6-day war, which Israel began with the Air Force operation that attacked Egypt and Syria.
Iin the aftermath of October 7th we can’t be in a position where the enemy is allowed to build capabilities that could be used against us.
The West Bank’s different because the Israeli military is present there all the time means that whenever they feel like they want to go into Jenin, they feel that the grass is getting too high, the terrorists are getting too jumpy. They round them up and break up whatever they find.
We didn’t do that in Gaza. We didn’t do that in Lebanon. And you’re already seeing now, it’s been a year almost since the ceasefire went into effect in Lebanon. Israel continues to attack there almost every single week. A truck carrying weapons, a house that has an arm’s cache. It’s all about preventing them from being able to rebuild. So, when we think to the future, Israel’s going to have to apply this to Gaza, and this means something that I think is going to be very difficult for the world to come to terms with. Israel is going to have to fight on multiple fronts all the time. It’s going to have to have a sword in its hand always.
Hamas is not going to disappear. If you see a Hamas guy carrying a rocket or digging a tunnel, you attack now. You can’t wait. That’s the reality. So this preemptive strike policy is a dramatic change for Israel, and the world won’t like it because what it means is that Israel’s going to be bombing Gaza. No one’s going to be a fan of Israel for doing this. But if we’re intellectually honest, it makes complete sense. This is a tough reality, and it’s going to be one that’s going to be with us for a long time. So, while I’m happy that this Trump’s 20-point Plan is going into effect, and hopefully the war is ending, I’m completely cognizant of the fact the war is not going away. Israel will have to fight for many years forward.
Larry Bernstein:
I’m a professional investor, and if I was shown an opportunity to build a new factory in Gaza, I would recognize that there’s a substantial risk of demolition. That will have an enormously negative impact on private sector investment within Gaza.
Yaakov Katz:
The prosperity of Gaza it’s in the interest of all of us because we want the people of Gaza to have a better life. We want them to be free of the reign of Hamas, and if they have a better life, there’s no question that their motivation to engage in terrorism against Israel would drop.
Now you still have a genocidal ideology, but it can help, right? But what investor in their right mind is going to want to put money into the Gaza Strip knowing that there’s a group there that could dig a tunnel underneath your factory and launch rockets from there.
And then one day Israel comes and says we’re destroying this factory. For the time being, it’s hard to imagine private investments in the Gaza Strip. What we’re going to see in the short-term is a massive international fund led by the Saudis, the Emiratis who are going to be pouring billions, into the Gaza Strip to rebuild. But that is going to depend on who’s going to govern the place, whether they can prevent Hamas from trying to rebuild and reconstitute. And let’s not forget the de-radicalization of the Gaza Strip has to take place.
In the aftermath of World War II, Germany and Japan suffered a decisive defeat, and they changed. There was the Marshall Plan, but there was a de-radicalization.
We recognize that the Gaza Strip is a place that generations have been educated to want to kill me and my kids. That’s the reality. It must change by schools with cultural institutions. It has to have a leadership that speaks of coexistence.
Look at Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. I’ve been to a Holocaust museum in Dubai, whoever thought that would be possible. Now the Palestinians if we make investment and reconstruction contingent on those changes as well, we have a chance to talk about getting back on the track to a two-state solution.
You create real partners, real coexistence. But that requires patience, investment and the ability to do the tough work. Israel wasn’t willing to do the tough work either. We all preferred to go to the White House, stand on the Rose Garden and sign on the dotted line and say, we have peace.
We now know that’s not the way you’re going to get peace. You got to build the infrastructure and the institutions that can change the culture.
Larry Bernstein:
Netanyahu offered carrots to Hamas, and one was that that the people living in Gaza could work in Israel. And as part of the 10/7 investigation, they found out that Palestinians who worked in Israel were taking very good notes and took advantage of that ended up killing many people in the kibbutz where they worked. That was a grave error. Tell us about whether there will be work between Gaza and Israel.
Yaakov Katz:
Not for the foreseeable future. Israelis are going to be very suspicious. There was some evidence that has led the military and the intelligence agencies to believe that some of these workers were helping Hamas, because we know that when Hamas came in they knew who lived in what home. They knew what home had a dog, and how many kids. That wasn’t information that they could get from surveying the border. They had to rely on the people who were working inside Israel.
If there was one last bastion of left-wing politics in Israel, it was those kibbitzes on the border. It was this crazy reality where you had people living on the border with a territory ruled by a genocidal jihadist terrorist group. These were the people who were voting for left-wing parties in Israel who were saying, we got to do a two-state solution. We need to do more for peace. These were people who were driving Palestinians for medical treatment in Israel. They were taking them to the hospital, they were supporting them when the workers couldn’t come in because there was a flare up of violence. They were sending money to Gaza for these people, and they were murdered, massacred, burned alive, abducted. Go convince them that they should go back to that reality. It’s impossible to imagine.
Larry Bernstein:
Interaction with the Palestinians, where is the Israeli public opinion now?
Yaakov Katz:
Israelis are disenchanted with any prospect of a political resolution with the Palestinians. After happens when we withdraw from , we got to give them the chance to rebuild, and we got to open up with the negotiations and give them an independent state, and they’ll look at you and they’ll say, what are you smoking? That makes no sense. The instinctive reaction to October 7th is hunker down and be prepared to fight.
You’re not going to find anybody who’s going to talk about peace negotiations with the Palestinians. That’s not in the cards right now. For that to happen, we must have that de-radicalization process start to bear fruit and show Israelis that there is an alternative.
Larry Bernstein:
The Europeans and Americans want a two-state solution as the end game. Others have talked about a confederation with Jordan. What is the talk in Israel?
Yaakov Katz:
Israel’s not there. There’s the pro-settler contingent that never wants to see any establishment of a Palestinian state, but they don’t talk about what they do want. Is it a one state solution, which means Israel would have to give citizenship to all the Palestinians. Is it a solution where Israel is in control of everything but does not give citizenship, which I would not want to see. I also wouldn’t want to see us giving citizenship to everyone because that would endanger the demographic majority of the Jews and the Israelis in this country.
We must get back on track towards a separation.
Larry Bernstein:
I end each podcast on a note of optimism.
Yaakov Katz:
October 7th and the book While Israel Slept is one side of the coin. The other side of the coin has been the re-engineering of the Middle East. In the two years that have passed since that invasion, Iran is on the defensive. Its nuclear infrastructure significantly degraded and destroyed.
Hezbollah beaten, the pager attack, the elimination of Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah. The Assad regime gone. Israel then went in and destroyed the Syrian military in just 36 hours. And now Syria’s ruled by a guy who was yesterday Al-Qaeda but today speaks openly about a potential security arrangement with Israel that one day could lead to a normalization agreement.
Hamas degraded, destroyed infrastructure, and to rebuild Gaza we have such an amazing opportunity. It was a painful price that we paid. The people of Gaza have suffered tremendously. True leadership will lead us to a new era of stability, normalization, and integration in the Middle East.
The true defeat to Hamas will be the normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia and that agreement is reached with the mediation of Donald Trump. That will send a message that will resonate in every home in Gaza and the West Bank and throughout the Arab world. There’s so much potential if we can only get there.
Larry Bernstein:
Thanks to Yaakov for joining us.
If you missed the last podcast, the topic was Betting on Sports. Our speaker was my buddy Steve Kuhn an entrepreneur who started Sportspredict.com that allows the public to predict sporting events for fun to give them a predictor ranking.
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