Ever since the horrifying Hamas terror attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, Western reporting on the roots of that attack and the Israeli government’s response to it has suffered from serious misunderstandings. In While Israel Slept—borrowing from John F. Kennedy’s first book, Why England Slept, and, more directly, from Winston Churchill’s 1938 collection of speeches, While England Slept—two prominent Israeli journalists, Yaakov Katz and Amir Bohbot, set out to correct those misunderstandings. While their opening chapters focus on the immediate context of Hamas’s surprise attack, later chapters explore the deeper roots of that unpreparedness, going back over two decades before. Katz and Bohbot provide the closest thing to a definitive account of the events of 2023 and its causes—even if some prescriptions in their conclusion are debatable.
The biggest error in much of the reporting on Israeli policies over the years leading up to the attack portrays the Israeli government, usually under the leadership of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as excessively warlike and unsympathetic to the needs of Gaza residents. To the contrary, the authors demonstrate, Netanyahu and his fellow ministers erred by turning a blind eye to the preparations Hamas leaders had been making for war against Israel for at least a decade, accumulating billions of dollars in cash and shipments of materials to construct an elaborate network of tunnels along with an ample supply of drones, rockets, and other weaponry.
Desperate to avoid major conflict, Israeli leaders, including Netanyahu (and for less than two years the ostensibly “right-wing” Naftali Bennett and his “centrist-liberal” successor Yair Lapid), engaged in what political analysts during the Cold War called “mirror imaging.” That is, just as Cold War “doves” like Jimmy Carter’s secretary of state, Cyrus Vance, allowed themselves to believe that Soviet leaders, just like their American counterparts, aimed above all at peace and prosperity, successive Israeli political and military leaders supposed that Hamas leaders, too, wanted prosperity and stability. Accordingly, Israeli leaders believed major financial aid and even “dual-use” tunnel-building equipment would divert Hamas from any aggressive intentions, allowing them to focus instead (as the Israelis did) on advancing their people’s economic well-being.
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