When Yahya Sinwar sat in an Israeli prison, he consumed the Hebrew press with obsession. It became his window into Israeli society — and ultimately, his fatal miscalculation.
What Sinwar and his fellow Hamas leaders thought they saw was a country that would trade 1,000 prisoners, including himself, for one soldier. A nation divided between secular and religious, Jewish and Arab, right and left. A state so concerned about global opinion that it restrained itself in war and avoided risk.
Sinwar mistook the noise of democracy for weakness. He read endless columns of criticism, protest, and self-doubt — and assumed they reflected a nation too fractured to fight back. What he missed is that Israeli journalism, by its nature, focuses on flaws, not strengths.
Journalism in a democracy, and particularly in Israel, tends to neglect what is strong and healthy in society, and to obsessively engage with everything that is flawed. (In authoritarian regimes, it is just the opposite.) The result was that Sinwar was well aware of Israel’s stated weaknesses—but not its fundamental strengths.