In 1938 Winston Churchill published a collection of his speeches given between 1932-1938 in Britain about Germany rearming and publicly proclaiming it would conquer Europe called Arms and the Covenant. When that book was published in the U.S. soon afterward it was retitled While England Slept.
Yaakov Katz, experienced Israeli reporter and formerly editor-in-chief of the Jerusalem Post and Amir Bohbot, also an Israeli reporter especially familiar with defense and military issues, pay homage to Churchill by the title of their new book about what went wrong on October 7, While Israel Slept: How Hamas Surprised the Most Powerful Military In the Middle East: , St. Martin’s Press, 2025.
A central point they make in this well-researched book, which could not have been written without the co-operation of many people in the upper echelons of the Israeli intelligence and military establishments, is that the failures of October 7 were not just due to immediate problems that arose in the days and weeks before October 7, although there were those as well. Instead, the failures of October 7 were due to a long history of mistaken judgments, missed opportunities, political compromises and misplaced assumptions, some of which stretched back years, if not decades.
The authors show, perhaps somewhat indirectly, that there is an asymmetry of identities and goals at the heart of the conflict between Israel and Hamas.
Israel, a small nation-state, wants to live in peace with its neighbors, obtain prosperity for its people, and enjoy trade and cultural relations with the rest of the world. Hamas, however, is a fundamentalist Islamist group dedicated to wiping Israel off the map and doing that by any means that will advance their cause including using teenagers as suicide bombers and assassins, blowing up and shooting women and children, bombing restaurants, wedding halls, synagogues, kidnapping children and acting with especial brutality to frighten Jews and Israelis.
That asymmetry is reflected in the way they wage war, with Hamas unconstrained by any rules at all and Israel ruled by the laws of war.
The authors begin with the lead up to October 7 and the sense among the intelligence and military leadership that the Gaza front was quiet. Israel had installed a high-tech border fence and had also built structures to block Hamas’ specialty, tunneling into Israel. That fence was watched on cameras and video screens by young female recruits whose main job was to report any unusual activity. These observers had reported unusual activity, what appeared to be training for an operation against Israel shortly before October 7, but their supervising officers had not paid attention nor passed the information up the chain of command to the highest echelons of the army.
There had been a surge in Hamas phone traffic right before October 7, Hamas was seen removing the protective fabric from its rocket launchers, Moreover, an experienced female intelligence analyst in military intelligence had predicted that something like this would happen, although she could not say when. The idea that Hamas might attack above ground, instead of by tunnels, had been suggested by MK Avigdor Liberman. He had also warned the rest of the cabinet that such an attack might occur but at that time there was quiet on the Gaza border. It was a time between wars with Hamas.
There were signs on the night of October 6th that something was wrong to the point that some of the higher-ups in the defense and intelligence establishment went to their offices late on the night of the 6th or early on the morning of the 7th. Yet those officials were cautious about stirring up the country that wanted peace and quiet for something that might have only been a Hamas drill. They also did not activate the IAF to bomb the border once Nukhbas and Gazans began crossing into Israel en masse.
Unlike Iran, Lebanon, Syria and elsewhere, for reasons that remain opaque, (but have much to do with Israel's leaving Gaza in 2005 as well as the populace's loyalty/fearof Hamas, borne out by the fact that no Gazans have supplied information about the hostages, ed.) the Israeli intelligence services did not have a single human asset, a spy or agent, on the ground in Gaza who could alert them that something was about to happen.
In short, there was a feeling of unease among many in the intelligence and military establishment on the night of October 6 and the early morning of October 7 but fatally, they did not believe they had the information they needed to issue an alert or send troops South over the Simchat Torah holiday. None of the higher ups, not the CoS nor the head of the Shabak, nor the head of Intelligence who was on vacation in Eilat, alerted the Prime Minister.
The authors also give a detailed history of Hamas with its origins in the 1970s as a supposedly charitable and educational organization in Gaza. The charities and schools then recruited young men from its educational institutions, including the University in Gaza, to its newly formed military wing which, by 1987 was conducting the ‘First Intifada’ against Israel, a campaign of kidnapping, bombing and shooting civilians at crowded places like buses, restaurants and hotels.
The unilateral Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's idea, only increased Hamas’ standing with the Gazans since Hamas had gotten rid of the Israelis without making any concessions. In the 2006 election Hamas won a large majority of the seats in the Palestinian Authority parliament and the next year, Hamas consolidated its power by murdering and ‘kneecapping’ most of their Fatah (PLO) political opponents in Gaza. Hamas then took complete control of Gaza, making it an independent Palestinian Arab statelet.
Hamas turned that statelet into a place whose primary purpose was to be a platform for war against Israel. Towards that end Hamas purposely designed its tunnel systems to use hospitals, mosques, schools, and many private homes of the supportive Gazan population as entries, exits, storage facilities for weapons and other military purposes. The physical structure of Gaza under Hamas was arranged so that if Israel attacked those war-making locations it would be blamed for hitting schools, mosques, hospitals and private homes.
In the prior wars between Gaza and Israel, Israel had been reluctant to penetrate far into Gaza because it was aware that there was a system of tunnels and booby traps, although Israeli intelligence misjudged how large, elaborate and sophisticated that system was. The likelihood of substantial casualties to Israeli soldiers, most of whom are young draftees and older reservists, as well as the damage that is ordinarily done to civilian populations in urban warfare restrained Israel from the kind of war which would remove the genocidal Jihadis of Hamas from power even though after about 2006 Hamas fired hundreds of rockets and missiles into Israel every year and routinely attempted to kidnap Israelis.
Instead, Israel used a program of targeted air strikes, bombing Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Palestine (IJP) launch sites and targeting the officers of Hamas and IJP with bombs on their houses and missiles through their windows. The problem with targeted killings, of course, is that someone else always steps up to take the place of the dead Hamas leader.
While Israel Slept also points out some of the political maneuvers in Israel around and involving Hamas. For instance, the authors are quite sure that Prime Minister Netanyahu found a use for Hamas in that each time he was called upon to seriously look at creating a Palestinian Arab state he rightly could point to Hamas and indicate that it was impossible to create a Palestinian Arab state in which Hamas was in power. He used the existence of Hamas as a reason to deny the viability of a Palestinian Arab state (the Palestinian Authority was corrupt, incompetent and vicious enough to justify refusing to participate in creating such a state, but Jew-free Gaza's border was the scene of explosive balloons, tunnel digging etc.) because Israel could not participate in creating an openly Jew-hating and genocidal country within or on Israel’s current borders.
The sources of Hamas funding are also discussed. Until 2006 Saudi Arabia provided much of Hamas’ financing but stopped in that year. Hamas developed business interests all over the Middle East, particularly in Turkey, and for a while Israel tried to undermine Hamas’ financing. But then more recently as the Qataris became a bigger player in the Middle East, spreading their cash around to buy influence, PM Netanyahu thought he saw some signs that Hamas was calming down, and that the influx of Qatari cash along with the other massive infusions of money into Gaza could improve the lives of Gazans. (The Qataris mendaciously promised to keep things under control, ed.)
The Israelis allowed the monthly transfer of millions of dollars from Qatar to Hamas and to Gaza, because the Israeli political echelon believed that if the lives of the ordinary Gazans improved they would have a stake in peace and prosperity and be less likely to go to war with Israel. That thinking might have worked if Hamas and many other Gazans were not a religiously motivated murderous death cult who do no care at all for the lives of the average Gazan or anyone else. The money never got to the ordinary Gazans.
While Israel Slept concludes with five recommendations for not only preventing such a successful attack again but also for improving Israel’s status in the world. Those recommendations include
-reforming the Israeli intelligence system so that the different branches share information and analyze it together,
-bolstering the Israel-U.S. relationship, particularly with regard to avoiding having Israel become a partisan issue in American politics,
-improving public diplomacy-a matter at which Israel has been particularly inept,
-strengthening national resilience especially about divisive issues like the judicial reform demonstrations which signaled to the outside world, including Hamas, a particular weakness in Israeli society at the moment that Hamas attacked, and
-not conducting a war without a clear exit strategy, a problem that has occurred in some of Israel’s other wars and which is a problem in this one.
Katz and Bohbot’s While Israel Slept is clearly written, tells an important story, gives insight into a host of problems related to Israeli security, the military and Israeli politics that are rarely discussed in-depth in the news. Like Winston Churchill, whose memory the title evokes, the authors are patriots and want to see that in the future there is never again an intelligence and military failure like that of October 7, 2023.
Dr. Michael Krampner, a retired American trial lawyer, who also earned a Ph.D. In Jewish history, lives in Jerusalem where he is improving his Hebrew, learning traditional Jewish texts, reading widely on historical and political subjects and is engaged with family.