The Hamas-Israel War
by George Friedman
Hamas fighters launched a major attack on Israel on Saturday morning.
Hamas is an Islamic group with close ties to Iran, which is said to be its main source of funding.
This differentiates it from Fatah, which is supported by Egypt, is more secular in nature, and apparently was not involved in the attack.
The bulk of Arab countries are hostile to Iran and therefore won’t support Hamas, and negotiations between Saudi Arabia and Israel to normalize relations are underway.
Egypt is hostile to Hamas even though the latter dominates Gaza.
In 2008, when Hamas launched rockets into Israel from Gaza, Republicans claimed that American aid money had been released to Hamas just prior to the attack.
Similar claims have already been made against the Biden administration over funds it released to Iran as part of a prisoner swap.
This is a small fraction of the complexity of the Middle East and the politics involved in this weekend’s events.
This was not a spontaneous attack but a vastly complex operation, carefully coordinating air and rocket attacks, naval landings and large-scale infantry assaults.
Why was it carried out now?
I can only speculate that Iran was observing increasing cooperation with Israel among Arab countries like Saudi Arabia and was concerned that it would be excluded from the emerging system.
Tensions between Arab Sunnis and Iranian Shiites – a fundamental split in Islam –are substantial, and the morphing Arab relationship with Israel had to be disrupted.
Hence the attack, under the assumption that a brutal Israeli response was inevitable along with U.S. aid to Israel, which would shame the Arabs.
It is undoubtedly much more complex than this, and many Arab Sunnis want nothing to do with normalization with Israel, but this is a reasonable explanation of why the attack had to happen now.
The attack was designed to discourage a counterattack.
Its focus, other than capturing objectives, was capturing people, especially children.
The assumption is that the Israelis would not strike back and risk killing Israeli hostages.
The Israelis have claimed that Hamas chained Israeli children to stakes in areas where an attack would likely take place.
Capturing and planting children is unsavory but effective.
Before we discuss Israel’s response, we must consider Israeli intelligence, vaunted as world-class but having experienced its largest failure since almost exactly 50 years ago, when Israel was simultaneously and surprisingly attacked by the Egyptian army from the Suez Canal and the Syrian army from the Golan Heights.
Those attacks were designed to shock the Israelis and force them into completely unplanned action to split their forces and weaken their ability to resist the attacks.
The attacks were resisted and the counterattacks ultimately succeeded, but the outcome was touch and go.
Israel’s fighting forces recovered rapidly from the intelligence failure to see the threat.
In fact, Israeli intelligence saw much of the planning and preparation for the attack – which required many meetings and electronic communications that were intercepted.
The Israelis also captured photographs of massing tanks, and human intelligence picked up growing activity and excitement at airfields.
But the Israelis failed to understand what simultaneous activity in Egypt and Syria might mean.
The main breakdown was the analysts.
Analysts must absorb all the data to draw a conclusion.
In many cases, however, intelligence organizations develop an analysis originally based on fact but fail to update it as new, contradictory facts flow in.
The analysis becomes sacred, and the forecast goes unchanged.
In 1973, the Egyptians and Syrians were obviously preparing for something, but the Israelis’ existing concept – which said neither would launch a war with their current equipment and training – governed their understanding of events.
Every intelligence organization battles its concepts.
Few succeed.
In intelligence, humans’ love of stability is deadly.
It seems that the concept this time was that Hamas and especially its Iranian benefactors were caught up in negotiations with various powers and seeking to enter into profitable relations leveraged by the Iranian nuclear program.
Obviously, this analysis was wrong, and I wonder whether some shred of intelligence or the concept drove the analysts.
I suspect the latter but don’t know, as Israel’s official position is that it will examine the intelligence failure.
I doubt it will publish a full report.
In the meantime, the current team stays in place.
There is a lot of intelligence to process, and this may be a long war, but that’s their call.
Like all wars, this is an intelligence war – intelligence deploys the troops.
I will end with the obvious question: Did Russia trigger this to divert American attention from Ukraine?
My guess is no.
Russia is tangled with many countries, like Saudi Arabia, that did not want this war.
At any rate, starting a war on the assumption the U.S. will be diverted could blow up in Russia’s face, and its face is beat up enough.
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