The Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7 reflects a long line of strategic errors on the part of the Arabs.
This conclusion comes from a Dec. 5 Geopolitical Futures article written by Hilal Khashan entitled “Arab Strategic Miscalculations”.
All nations make strategic (meaning big picture) miscalculations: Take Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S. involvement in Vietnam, President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, and in President Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, to name a few examples.
Hamas’ decision to attack, kill, rape, and kidnap Israelis was based upon major assumptions that turned out to be incorrect:
• Hamas believed that neither Israel, the U.S., nor Arab governments considered a two-state solution as a viable option for the Israeli/Palestinian problem.
• Hamas expected Israel to make prisoner swaps to get Hamas’ hostages returned for large numbers of Palestinian prisoners held by the Israelis. (In 2011, Israel traded 1,000 Palestinian prisoners for one Israeli soldier, Galid Shalit. He had been held hostage for five years.)
• Hamas failed to consider that the Israeli government would launch a massive and unprecedented air and ground campaign even though the massacre of over 1,200 Israeli citizens would invoke painful memories of the Holocaust of World War II.
• Hamas did not notify its regional allies of its surprise attack. They assumed that Hezbollah would massively and immediately attack Israel from Syria to the north, thus taking pressure off Hamas to Israel’s west.
• Hamas believed the attack would bring about a massive change in the balance of power in the Middle East, causing the creation of a Palestinian state.
• Hamas failed to understand that while Arab leaders give lip service to the Palestinian cause, they really don’t care about them.
Arabs have made a series of strategic errors in their history since the end of World War II:
The Arabs made miscalculations in the 1948 war against the newly created state of Israel. In 1946, Egyptian and Syrian Arab leaders rejected a recommendation of the Anglo-American Commission to create two states: Israel and Palestine.
In 1948, Egypt’s King Farouk made the decision to attack Jewish-controlled Palestine despite the objections of the Prime Minister, his cabinet, and the army. The Egyptian army’s chief of staff didn’t believe Egypt was ready to go to war, let alone win. The army believed that “80% of military-age men to be unfit for military service due to rampant hepatitis, schistosomiasis [infection by parasitic flatworms in the intestines or urinary tract], malnutrition and illiteracy.”
The Egyptians and Iraqis and Jordanians (who had the best trained army) did not coordinate their actions against Israel. They did not have a coherent war strategy, and troop morale was low. Farouk wanted to keep Jordan’s king from becoming the predominant Arab monarch. He wanted to resurrect the Islamic caliphate with Egypt as its center and Cairo as its capital. The previous caliphate had been destroyed by Turkey’s Kemal Ataturk after World War I.
King Farouk was overthrown by a group of Egyptian army officers from which Gamal Abdel Nasser emerged as the leader. Nasser made the error of nationalizing the Suez Canal in 1956, even though there were only twelve years remaining of the 99-year lease with the French and the British. France, Britain, and Israel retook the canal through a coordinated military attack, but President Eisenhower told them to give it back, weakening France and Britain’s status, while strengthening the power of the United States on the world scene.
Egypt lost thousands of soldiers and civilians. Their Czechoslovakian-made weapons were destroyed. Egyptian assets held in European banks, were expropriated to pay off investors, and the European-built cities built along the canal, such as Port Said, Port Fouad, and Ismailia were destroyed. Israel also got back its right to travel through the Straits of Tiran into the Red Sea, which Farouk had closed to Israelis in 1950. The reclosing of the straits in 1967 led to the Arab-Israeli War, also known as the Six-Day War—another disaster for the Arabs.
There isn’t space to describe Arab leader Saddam Hussein’s mistakes over its costly 1980-1988 war with Iran, or Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, which decimated the Iraqi army, or President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 when Saddam was toppled from power.
It seems that the writer of Genesis understood the genetic tendency of the Arab progenitor, Ishmael, when he wrote “He (Ishmael) will be a wild donkey of a man; His hand will be against every man [continually fighting] and every man’s hand against him” (Genesis 6:12). That seems to be an apt summary of the history of the Arabs, especially in the 20th and 21st centuries.
