The attack by Hamas against Israel appears to have caught both Israel and the United States by surprise. At The Atlantic, Gal Beckerman reports that just a week ago, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan was touting increasing stability in the Middle East. “The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades,” he said.
In the coming days, Sullivan’s Pollyannaish view will undoubtedly be subjected to great scrutiny. Hamas, and its Iranian and Hezbollah allies, has not made a secret of its ultimate aims. Beyond wishful thinking, the cause of the hopefulness articulated by Sullivan might be this: the developing deal to establish formal relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia—a developing deal that is most likely developing no more.
The Biden administration and Netanyahu have been deeply invested in such an agreement, and the desire for it might have created a blindness among Israelis and Americans alike about what was happening just over the border in Gaza. “We wanted to try and pretend that this conflict was isolated and contained and didn’t need our attention,” Yaakov Katz, the former editor in chief of The Jerusalem Post, told me today hours after the invasion.
The only predictable thing about this is that Republicans blame Joe Biden for the attack.
Note that there seems to be a lot of assuming that Iran is behind the attack, but that’s not something we actually know at this time. So let’s not assume.
One big mystery about today’s events in Israel, which I alluded to in the previous post, is how exactly Israel was caught quite this unprepared. An attack of this scale required very large numbers of people to be read into the preparations if not the operational planning for the attack. Israel has long had a dense network of informants and collaborators in the territories. That’s layered over with signals intelligence and various forms of surveillance. And yet Israel appears to have been caught totally unawares and unprepared. It’s not just that they didn’t know something like this was happened today. They don’t seem to have known that an operation of this scale and audacity was even being considered.
That’s an intelligence fairly that’s hard to overstate.
Why Hamas did this also requires some explanation. A friend rightly described this as an organization-scale suicide operation. For the why you have the unsettled business of 1948 and 1967. You have the fact that Mahmoud Abbas won’t live forever. You have Israel’s looming normalization with the Gulf Arab states. Particularly the last factor provides a decent explanation of the ‘why now?’ Indeed, I’m seeing a lot of foreign policy and security analysts confidently declaring that Hamas planned this attack with Iran to break the momentum for normalization with the Gulf states.
But then Josh goes on to remind us that we don’t know if Iran was in on this or not.
The Washington Post is reporting that this shouldn’t have been such a surprise.
Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip and carried out Saturday’s attacks, said the operation was in response to the blockade, as well as recent Israeli military raids in the West Bank and violence at al-Aqsa Mosque, a disputed religious site in Jerusalem known to Jews as the Temple Mount.
“Enough is enough,” the leader of Hamas’s military wing, Mohammed Deif, said in a recorded message Saturday, the Associated Press reported. “Today the people are regaining their revolution.”
As of Sept. 19, before Saturday’s outbreak of violence, 227 Palestinians had been killed by Israeli troops or settlers this year, according to U.N. figures, with most of those deaths — 189 — occurring in the West Bank. At least 29 Israelis, mostly in the West Bank, were also killed this year as of the end of August, according to the same U.N. database.
I don’t pay enough attention to the Middle East to know how this might impact Netanyahu politically.