This week, Bridget welcomes journalist Yaakov Katz for an in-depth conversation about his book While Israel Slept: How Hamas Surprised the Most Powerful Military in the Middle East. He and Bridget tackle the intelligence and strategic failures that enabled Hamas’s surprise attack on October 7th, 2023. They cover a brief history of the conflict in the region, Israel’s misguided policy of containment, the misunderstandings caused by the application of a Western mindset to a completely different ideology, becoming complacent in their reliance on technology, misunderstanding the motives of terrorist organizations, why no one wondered what Hamas had done with the billions of dollars in aid money it had received, whether or not Israel knew about the tunnel system being built in Gaza, how key warnings were missed, and the global rise of antisemitism that has followed.
