Hamas’ attack on Oct. 7, 2023, was not Israel’s first intelligence failure. In the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, Israel was surprised by Egypt and Syria’s two-front armored attack. It is the mission of national intelligence services to avoid such surprises. Nothing is perfect; some levels of imperfection are to be expected, and the public never sees the after-action report. In fact, most intelligence failures register far below the level of intolerability. But Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack was an intolerable failure.

Israel has since completed a review of its intelligence failures that day, even going so far, apparently, as to give the media complete access to its operations. The Times of Israel recently published an article about the findings, which are fairly damning. The first two paragraphs tell the tale:

“The Israel Defense Forces Military Intelligence Directorate received information and plans outlining Hamas’s intent to launch a wide-scale attack against Israel over a period of several years, but dismissed the plan as unrealistic and unfeasible, according to a probe of the intelligence failures leading up to the October 7 attack.

“Instead, the Military Intelligence Directorate falsely assumed that Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was a pragmatist who was not seeking a major escalation with Israel, and that the terror group viewed its 2021 war as a failure and was focusing its capabilities on rocket fire and not a ground invasion.”

The first point is based on human reality. No one can be sure of what another human is thinking, and therefore no one can be sure of their intent. This is particularly true of public figures, especially public leaders. Their thoughts are shaped by reality. They present one face to the public and keep their own thoughts to themselves. We all do that. Thoughts can be shaped by fantasy, but a successful person’s thoughts are shaped by reality. Their public face is a tactic that hides intent and a weapon that pursues intent.

The Israelis tried to read Sinwar’s mind, correlating it with what they saw as an insufficient force. This validated a (faulty) model, whereby Sinwar could not intend to attack because he didn’t have a sufficient force.

What the Israelis missed is that reality had forced a very different thinking on Sinwar. He had a force already, one that could serve as the core of a major force or could over time decline into a demoralized impotence. Sinwar would not be able to continue to lead Hamas if he continued to do nothing. Israeli intelligence also overlooked something more important: that Israel had conquered Palestinian land, and that the Palestinian desire to recover that land was as strong as the Jewish urge to reclaim it. In other words, it missed an empathetic – not sympathetic – element necessary to intelligence, one that imagines real thoughts in another’s mind, the pressures it is under and the opportunities it sees.

This constitutes the geopolitical imperative I often speak of. The imperative is the combination of the moral and geopolitical forces driving a nation or group. The dispossession of the Palestinians created a moral imperative, not unlike the one created among Israelis, to retrieve what was lost. The geopolitical imperative was that time was passing and nothing was happening. The Arab nations were reaching accommodation with Israel, as evidenced by the Abraham Accords. For Hamas, if an accommodation was reached, it would create a geopolitical reality that negated the moral reality.

Hamas saw the Palestinians running out of time, and empathetic analysis would have shown that Hamas had to act as quickly as possible to undermine Arab-Israeli accommodation. Had Israeli intelligence considered the imperative, it would have seen what Sinwar had to be thinking, having lived his life with this on his mind. But their thoughts were shielded. The documents Israeli intelligence received might have been real at the time, and their spies honest, but they also all could have been planted to mislead the Israelis.

If Hamas had remained passive, it would wither away or be destroyed. Thus its strategic imperative, driven by moral and geopolitical imperatives, was to preempt an Israeli attack with an attack of its own. The attack would not destroy Israel but would divide it. It was intended for an Arab audience, the message being that Israel is not invincible. A small force that had no business surviving could stun Israel, even if it couldn’t defeat it. Imagine what a large force could do. Accommodation with Israel, then, would be unnecessary.

This imperative led to a strategy that did not in any way threaten the survival of the Israeli state, although it did threaten the survival of Israeli citizens. It was a miniature demonstration of what was possible. Similar attempts had been tried, but Hamas intended for this one to work.

The key was to build a suitable force without alerting Israel. Israeli intelligence saw the slow growth of Hamas’ force but could not escape from its geopolitical model. Israel is powerful enough to destroy any Hamas force of any conceivable size, so Israel saw no need for a preemptive strike that would potentially rupture its Arab accommodation process or strain relations with the United States, which would support its defense but could balk at a larger offensive operation. What the Israelis didn’t understand was that the point of the attack was not to defeat Israel but to demonstrate Israel’s inherent vulnerability, reveal Israel’s potential capabilities, and trigger a larger and longer process that could destroy Israel. So Israeli intelligence, having misread the intent and dismissed the imperative as fantasy, also misread the buildup. Even as the men and equipment were readied, and as engineers were preparing the invasion routes, Israel could not abandon its model.

It was right in thinking Sinwar was a pragmatist but wrong about where pragmatism would lead him. How could they know whether Sinwar’s pragmatism would lead him to aggressive action or to inaction? The misreading of the intent created an associated misunderstanding of military reality. As a fighting force, Hamas was small. But size didn’t matter if the intent was to create a crisis of confidence in Israel that would make it more paranoid and defeat the process of accommodation. In time, Israel’s fear of surprise would lead to preemptive attacks on imagined threats and rekindle the Arab world’s fear of Israel, or at least maintain Arab-Israeli hostility.

Arab hostility toward Israel would, notably, also affect the United States. The U.S. countermove was to inch toward an understanding with Saudi Arabia, using the nonsense of taking over Gaza as an indicator of how unpredictable the U.S. is and forcing the Saudis to offer a different strategy in which it takes responsibility for Palestinian behavior.

So the question now is whether Hamas has succeeded in its strategy to end Arab accommodation with Israel, or if it has created its own worst nightmare: accelerating Riyadh’s accommodation under U.S. cover and forcing other Arab nations to follow suit.

The Oct. 7 attack, then, was a Hail Mary. It may end in success or failure. But Hamas made the only move it could, and where Israeli intelligence analysts should have sensed there was an imperative behind it, they chose to comfort themselves by pretending to read the enemy’s mind.

Now Israel must reexamine its own imperatives. Can it endure a Palestinian strategy with periodic attacks that wound it and undermine its people’s confidence, which is so essential to its geopolitical needs? This will surely be discussed in Riyadh.

For now, though, this example is a lesson for all who work in intelligence. Intelligence is the art of ignoring intent and focusing on imperatives. Imperatives must be married to constraints – that is, what a leader cannot do. Imperatives and constraints create reality, and geopolitics generates both.

I draw from this a number of principles on intelligence. Do not imagine you know the intent of an enemy’s leader. What leaders want to do and what they must do are different things. Leaders don’t become leaders without crafting an image of themselves and hiding their deeper thoughts. They are leaders, whether democratic or dictatorial, because they have understood what it takes to become and stay a leader. They did that by having a public mind that is designed to maintain power in the mode appropriate to their nation. The reality of their thinking is hidden to thwart a view of their fears, hopes, ruthlessness and pleasures.

Do not trust sources because they may lie, may not know, or may have been sent to mislead you. We humans are deceptive, and having access to the general’s wife doesn’t get you much more than bribes or blackmail. Counterintelligence does not depend on truth. Counterintelligence is easier than intelligence.

Focus on the nation and what it must have as a nation. Leaders become leaders and survive by knowing this. They act on it but rarely reveal it.

Know what a nation can’t do. That is the most important thing. If you know what is impossible, you will know what is possible, and that limits surprises.

The personal is anything that is communicated personally or electronically to someone who you believe is not deliberately talking and hoping to be intercepted and believed.

Note that this does not apply to intelligence about the available military force. On this, intelligence is indispensable, for it helps define the impossible.

Analysis can get a glimpse of national imperatives and constraints not just between two nations but concerning all involved. The role of intelligence is to know what must and what can happen. This must first be known on the broadest level, and that must guide intelligence on a more detailed level. This is the Israeli lesson. They have learned and even published it. What conclusions they draw about improving intelligence will almost certainly not be mine. Depending on the Hamas leader’s personality type is a dicey proposition.

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