AP

Lisa Van Dusen

October 9, 2023

The hell that Hamas unleashed on Saturday when it thwarted Israel’s Iron Dome, blew its way through Gaza’s border fences, then rampaged across southern Israel, killing, as of press time, 73 IDF soldiers, hundreds of civilians at a music festival and elsewhere and taking dozens of hostages (including Canadian peace activist Vivian Silver) has already produced a wave of global outrage and the order of a “complete siege” of Gaza by Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant.

It will also produce a cascade of political, geopolitical, and peace-and-security consequences — some foreseeable, some not; some inevitable and some opportunistic.

While predictions at such times should always come with asterisks and caveats, there are some early implications emerging from the worst attack against Israel since the Yom Kippur War of 1973. That invasion was both slightly less surprising and much easier to fathom given the security symmetry among the belligerents at the time.

“Our enemies had hoped to surprise the citizens of Israel on the Day of Atonement, when so many of our people are fasting and worshipping in the synagogues,” Prime Minister Golda Meir told Israelis in a televised statement hours after the invasion by Egypt through the Sinai and by Syria through the Golan Heights on October 6, 1973. “The aggressors thought that on this day we would not be ready to fight back. We were not caught by surprise. For several days now our intelligence services have been aware that the armies of Egypt and Syria were preparing a joint offensive.” In reality — a reality compellingly dramatized in the recently released film Golda — Israel was not completely surprised, but it was unprepared. This time, it seems it was both surprised and unprepared.

In Saturday’s Hamas attack, staged 50 years and a day later, a group that has long been closely monitored by a neighbour so technologically sophisticated that it has exported its surveillance and hacking software to tyrannies around the world precisely to pre-empt and prevent incursions and uprisings long before they can happen, somehow managed to coordinate an elaborate cross-border invasion without any of the planning required to do so being detected. The element of surprise long presumed a dead letter in Israeli security threats based on the ubiquity of surveillance was suddenly, surprisingly back.

“We have no idea how this could have happened,” the BBC was reportedly told by Israeli intelligence and security officials on Saturday.

In a Council on Foreign Relations video briefing on Saturday, former US Ambassador to Israel and respected Middle East expert Martin Indyk called what many have described as an intelligence failure as “total system failure”, one that is “hard to believe, given the way that Israel has penetrated all forms of communication in Gaza — failure to prepare, failure to add troops along the border, failure of the fence along the border that they’ve paid billions of shekels for, failure once the Hamas infiltrators came across and grabbed Israeli civilians and soldiers, failure to get to them…”

Those failures have been variously attributed to: a sub-failure to “connect the dots” reminiscent of the 9/11 failures by The Washington Post‘s David Ignatius; the ruse of feigned passivity per Guardian reporting; that very element of surprise that surveillance is deployed to pre-empt by the IDF via CNN; and, ironically, to the dangers of too much surveillance by security experts via WIRED.

The association — for a whole new generation worldwide — of the Palestinian cause with the crazed mass slaughter of civilians will have an impact yet to be calculated on the balance of leverage in any future peace negotiation.

As with the intelligence failure of January 6^th, 2021 in Washington, the intelligence failure of 9/11, the intelligence failure of the case for WMDs in Iraq, and the litany of other apparent intelligence failures since 2001, what the soon-to-be-announced commission of inquiry into the Hamas invasion of October 7, 2023 will likely find is that the intelligence was available, and failures in processing, analysis and dissemination will be blamed. By that time, the fact that the Hamas operation was a success but hundreds of Israelis died will be the last war’s news.

In terms of the long-moribund Israel-Palestinian peace process, as Roger Cohen pointed out in The New York Times, Hamas’s barbaric rampage is a horribly disproportional reminder that the strategy of isolating and alienating the unresolved question of Palestinian statehood outside a skein of more transactional regional dynamics has failed. At the same time, the association — for a whole new generation worldwide — of the Palestinian cause with the crazed mass slaughter of civilians will have an impact yet to be calculated on the balance of leverage in any future peace negotiation.

In political terms, Benjamin Netanyahu — whose Faustian governing coalition with the country’s most radical right-wingers (see McCarthy, K., for cautionary tale) has been under a siege of its own by Israelis protesting its anti-democracy assault on the judiciary — has already predicted a “long and difficult war”. In any previous era of Israel’s history, the prime minister would have resigned within hours of such an apocalyptic abrogation of Israel’s political covenant with its citizens that certain sacrifices must be made — including at the price of democratic principles and sons and daughters mourned — in exchange for security. It was that article of faith that Golda Meir was recognizing on October 6th, 1973 when she opened her speech with the assurance that the country in the world most likely to be invaded had not been caught off-guard. But times have changed, and if the checks and balances of Israeli democracy that would normally produce job-security angst in the current, six-term prime minister were still fit for purpose, he wouldn’t be prime minister.

The most politically perilous aspect of this catastrophe for Netanyahu may be the fate of the 150 Israeli hostages now being held by Hamas as prisoner-swap pawns and human shields in Gaza. Pidyon shvuyim, or the sacred duty under Jewish law of “redemption of captives”, is not only a mitzvah rabbah in the case of soldiers such as Ron Arad and Gilad Shalit. It also applies to civilians.

In geopolitical terms, President Joe Biden’s planned peace deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia is already said to be on life support by some observers, still entirely viable by others. “It may throw some hiccups into the diplomatic efforts between Israel and the Saudis, but it won’t destroy a process that M.B.S. is convinced will best serve Saudi national interests,” security expert John Hannah told the New York Times. “As the saying goes, the dogs bark, but the caravan moves on.” Right now, the dogs are barking three months before the 2024 primary season kicks in, and the tactical value attached to anything that may rob Biden of a foreign or domestic policy victory by the assorted interests, foreign and domestic, invested in undermining his re-election campaign is considerable.

In historical terms, Hamas is once again playing the role of gruesomely asymmetrical narrative disruptor. The last global shock delivered by the group was the 2006 election of the Hamas government that gave democracy a bad name and divided the Palestinian leadership between Gaza and the West Bank, providing a whole new rationale for the failure of progress toward a two-state solution. This time, it has delivered a far more horrifying upset.

Policy Magazine Associate Editor and Deputy Publisher Lisa Van Dusen was a senior writer at Maclean’s, Washington columnist for the Ottawa Citizen and Sun Media, international writer for Peter Jennings at ABC News and an editor at AP National in New York and UPI in Washington. She also served as director of communications for the McGill Middle East Program in Civil Society and Peace Building.