Sinwar's March of Folly

The Atlantic

23-06-2025

On May 26, 1967, the Egyptian president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, issued the following statement about a war he planned to start: 'The battle will be a general one and our basic objective will be to destroy Israel.' Nasser and other Arab leaders believed that the annihilation of the Jewish state was both certain and imminent. Several days later, the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, Ahmed al-Shuqayri, said, 'We shall destroy Israel and its inhabitants and as for the survivors—if there are any—the boats are ready to deport them.' When he was asked about the fate of native-born Jews, he said, 'Whoever survives will stay in Palestine, but in my opinion no one will remain alive.'
A short while later, on June 5, the Israeli government, believing the sincerity of these threats, launched a preemptive attack on Egypt and Syria, destroying their air forces on the ground. Six days later, Israel had gained possession of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, the Gaza Strip, and the Sinai Peninsula.
One would think that Yahya Sinwar, until recently the leader of Hamas in Gaza, had absorbed the lessons of 1967. But he overestimated his own capabilities, and those of the Iranian-led 'Axis of Resistance.' Like the leaders of Iran, he spoke violently and with great confidence. He allowed his reasoning capabilities to be overwhelmed by conspiracism and supremacist Muslim Brotherhood theology. He also made the same analytical mistake Nasser had made: He underestimated the desire of Israelis to live in their ancestral homeland, basing his conclusion on an incorrect understanding of how Israel sees itself.
In the end, the October 7 massacre Sinwar ordered did not cause the destruction of Israel but instead led to the dismantling of its enemies. Hamas is largely destroyed, and most of its leaders, including Sinwar, are dead, assassinated by Israel. Hezbollah, in Lebanon, is comprehensively weakened. Syria's Bashar al-Assad, Iran's main Arab ally, is in exile in Moscow, his country now led by Sunni Muslims hostile to Iran's leaders. Iran's skies are under the control of the Israeli Air Force, and its $500 billion nuclear program appears to be, at least partially, rubble and dust.
Not since Nasser has anyone in the Middle East been proved so wrong so quickly.
It is not at all clear how the latest Middle East war ends. It is not clear whether Iran and its proxies still possess the ability to hurt the United States and Israel in meaningful ways. And it is not clear if Israel will take advantage of its dramatic new security reality. But for now, there is a reasonable chance that the existential threat posed to Israel by the Iranian regime—ideologically committed to its destruction and to developing a weapon to carry out its vision—has been neutralized, perhaps for several years.
In 2001, the former president of Iran, Hashemi Rafsanjani, said, 'The use of even one nuclear bomb inside Israel will destroy everything. However,' he added, 'it will only harm the Islamic world.' For three decades, Israel and its longest-serving prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, made the Iranian threat a singular preoccupation. But until the arrival of Donald Trump, no American president believed that the Iranian threat should be ended—to borrow from the language of the campus anti-Israel movement—by any means necessary.
Trump may yet be remembered as a hypocrite who promised a clean American exit from the Middle East but found his presidency—like those of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan before him—hopelessly trapped in Iranian quicksand. His radical intervention in the Middle East may turn out to be catastrophic, particularly if Iran manages to find a quick way to save its nuclear program. But he could also be remembered as the president who averted a second Holocaust.
What is certain is that the conventional components of the 'Axis of Resistance' are in dismal shape. The demolition of this axis happened because Israel, after the humiliation on October 7, reconstituted its fighting and intelligence capabilities in remarkably effective (and severely uncompromising) ways, and because Sinwar and his allies fundamentally misunderstood their enemy.
The American attack on Iran's nuclear facilities happened because the country's leaders misunderstood Trump. But to be fair to Iran's leaders, Trump's national-security and foreign-policy impulses have been confusing even to his own supporters. The closest I ever came to a clear understanding of his contradictory and sometimes incoherent policies was in 2018, at a lunch in the White House with one of his closest aides. We were discussing an article I had published a few years earlier in this magazine, about Obama's foreign policy, and I said that I thought it might be premature to discern a Trump equivalent. The official responded, 'There's definitely a Trump Doctrine.'
I asked him to describe it. He said, 'The Trump Doctrine is 'We're America, Bitch.' That's the Trump Doctrine.'
The official continued, 'Obama apologized to everyone for everything. He felt bad about everything.' Trump, he said, 'doesn't feel like he has to apologize for anything America does.' Another White House official explained it this way: 'The president believes that we're America, and people can take it or leave it.'
The Trump Doctrine, as articulated this way, doesn't leave much room for the contemplation of potential consequences. On the matter of Iran, in particular, Democratic presidents—Obama, most notably—spent a great deal of time studying second- and third-order consequences of theoretical American actions. It is not clear that Trump even understands the meaning of second-order consequences. This is one reason he struck Iran—because he was frustrated, and because he could—and one important reason the long-term outcome is uncertain.
Sinwar's misunderstanding of Israel was, if anything, deeper than Iran's misunderstanding of Trump. Hamas and other Palestinian groups believe that Israelis see themselves as foreign implants, and therefore can easily be brought to defeat. Sinwar's misplaced confidence in theories of settler colonialism and Jewish perfidy undermined his strategic effectiveness. Sinwar was so convinced of his beliefs that he even sponsored a conference in 2021 called 'The Promise of the Hereafter—Post-Liberation Palestine,' in which specific plans were discussed for the building of Palestine on the ruins of Israel. 'Educated Jews and experts in the areas of medicine, engineering, technology, and civilian and military industry should be retained in Palestine for some time and should not be allowed to leave and take with them the knowledge and experience that they acquired while living in our land and enjoying its bounty,' one presentation read.
The theme of this conference, which was held in Gaza, was an echo of a statement made by Hassan Nasrallah, then the leader of Hezbollah, who said in 2000, 'This Israel, with its nuclear weapons and most advanced warplanes in the region, I swear by Allah, is actually weaker than a spider's web … Israel may appear strong from the outside, but it's easily destroyed and defeated.' Nasrallah was assassinated by Israel nine months ago.
I asked Yossi Klein Halevi, a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute, in Jerusalem, to explain the root of this misapprehension. 'The only way you can believe that Israel is Nasrallah's spiderweb is if you believe that we don't have substance here, that we're not a rooted people,' he said. 'The problem with Sinwar is that he believed his own propaganda. He believed that we ourselves believe that we don't belong here. Our enemies in the Arab and Muslim worlds don't understand that their perception of Israel and of Jews is based on a lie.'
If nothing else, the wars of the past 20 months have proved that Israel's adversaries are not adept at analyzing political and social phenomena as they manifest in reality. Walter Russell Mead, the historian, once explained that a weakness of anti-Semites is that they have difficulty understanding the world as it actually works, and don't comprehend cause and effect in either politics or economics. Sinwar, Nasrallah, and Ayatollah Khamenei himself saw Israel as they wished it was, not as it actually is. And in part because of this, they placed their movements in mortal danger.