Is Israel Misreading the Middle East?

On October 7, the illusion of Israel’s technological invincibility was shattered. Hamas’s success that day was not merely a failure of border fences, automated gun towers, or high-tech sensors; it reflected a deeper, asymmetric cognitive imbalance. Hamas’s leadership, most notably Yahya Sinwar, spent over two decades in Israeli prisons mastering fluent Hebrew and meticulously studying Israeli political psychology, media ecosystems, and societal fractures. They learned how to operate within Israeli assumptions, using the enemy’s own linguistic and conceptual frameworks to project calculated ambiguity. Israeli intelligence, by contrast, did not lack access to Arabic language or intelligence data; it misread Hamas’s intentions by viewing them through rigid assumptions shaped by deterrence and military superiority.

This failure was not an anomaly. It was the culmination of a recurring pattern of “mirror-imaging”: the tendency to assume that adversaries operate according to the same utilitarian cost-benefit logic that has long shaped Israeli strategic thinking. For decades, Israel’s security establishment has built one of the world’s most sophisticated intelligence systems, from the technological capabilities of Unit 8200 to the global reach of the Mossad. Yet this extraordinary intelligence apparatus has repeatedly struggled with strategic misrecognition. The problem has not been a lack of information, but the difficulty of interpreting information through frameworks that account for the ideological, historical, and cultural logic of those confronting Israel.

This pattern of misreading is not new. Before the Six-Day War in 1967, Israeli planners misinterpreted the political constraints and motivations shaping Egyptian President Nasser’s escalation, reading military movements through assumptions of restraint rather than intent. That analytical framework hardened into the catastrophic intelligence paradigm of the “Conceptzia” before the 1973 Yom Kippur War, which held that Egypt and Syria would not go to war without air superiority. Israeli intelligence failed to anticipate that President Sadat was pursuing a limited-war strategy aimed not at battlefield victory but at breaking the diplomatic stalemate and reshaping regional calculations. Even after that trauma, the pattern persisted: Sadat’s 1977 visit to Jerusalem was initially met with deep skepticism and suspicion, reflecting Israel’s difficulty in recognizing a genuine strategic transformation by the Egyptian president.

The same cognitive pattern resurfaced during the First and Second Intifadas (1987 and 2000), when the security establishment initially interpreted mass uprisings as localized security disturbances, consistently underestimating their political depth and accumulated psychological weight.

The current Israeli strategy toward Tehran echoes earlier intelligence failures rooted in the belief that direct military action could precipitate the collapse of the Islamic Republic. By persuading Washington that war would produce rapid regime change, Israel misjudged both Iran’s internal resilience and its threshold for escalation. It also overestimated the likelihood that leadership decapitation would trigger a mass anti-regime uprising. In retrospect, both assumptions proved wrong.

The state-run Jewish education system plays a central role in producing and reproducing this cultural ignorance. Although Arabic is the mother tongue of more than one-fifth of Israel’s citizens, the Jewish education system largely treats it as a foreign language rather than a shared civic and regional medium. The consequences are stark: according to data from the Van Leer Institute, only 2.6% of Israeli Jews report being able to read a newspaper in Arabic, and just 1% can read a book in the language.

Even more significant is the generational erosion of Arabic among descendants of Jewish immigrants from Arab countries. Mizrahi Jews now comprise nearly half of Israel’s Jewish population. Although many first-generation immigrants arrived fluent in Arabic or Judeo-Arabic dialects, Hebrew’s dominance in schools and state institutions rapidly displaced it. Within two generations, Arabic ceased to function as a living language for most Jewish Israelis, surviving primarily in music, religious practice, and fragmented expressions of memory.

Compounding this linguistic decline is a profound ideological shift within Israel’s political culture. The rise of religious nationalism and right-wing fundamentalism has introduced a theological hostility into public discourse, rendering Arabic and Islam objects of suspicion and disdain. Within this framework, Arabic is no longer merely neglected; it is symbolically associated with existential enmity. This ideological transformation has removed any practical or human incentive for the Jewish majority to engage with Arabic or the societies it represents. By recasting Judaism and Islam as locked in an existential civilizational conflict, Israel’s fundamentalist currents have transformed ignorance of Arabic from a deficiency into a political virtue.

A stark manifestation of this racist barrier, which treats national identity as an automatic ground for disqualification, is seen in the Jewish opposition parties. Except for the Democrats, a left-leaning party, these parties have sweepingly refused to include Mansour Abbas, the most moderate Arab member of the Knesset, in any future government. This disqualification stems not from political or ideological considerations, but solely from the fact that he is an Arab.

Even academic institutions, whose mission is to deepen understanding across cultures, often reproduce the same structural limitations. Middle Eastern Studies programs at Israel’s leading universities have largely developed as disciplines that study the region from a distance rather than through sustained intellectual and human engagement with Israel’s neighbors. This is not simply the result of individual scholarly choices. It reflects a regional reality in which even states that maintain diplomatic relations with Israel rarely permit Israeli scholars to conduct extended field research or sabbaticals.

The problem is compounded by the underrepresentation of Israel’s Arab citizens in senior academic positions, despite their linguistic fluency, cultural familiarity, and lived experience. At the same time, many faculty members serve in the military reserves, particularly in intelligence units, reinforcing an institutional environment in which expertise on the Arab world is often shaped as much by security imperatives as by scholarly inquiry.

This broader structural marginalization was codified in law by the 2018 Nation-State Law. By downgrading Arabic’s status after nearly a century as an official language under the British Mandate and Israeli statehood, the Knesset conveyed the implicit message that Arabic is now an ‘enemy of the Hebrew state.’

The consequences extend beyond education and academia into the interpretation of daily news and public discourse. In a society where the vast majority of Jewish citizens do not speak Arabic, interpretation of regional news is monopolized by a narrow elite of official spokespersons, military analysts, and media commentators. This dependency limits direct engagement with primary sources and filters public understanding through highly mediated narratives that often reproduce state frameworks. Language thus functions as an invisible barrier shaping what can be seen, questioned, and understood in the public sphere.

This epistemic distance is not simply the result of the absence of contact, but of its structure. Even where formal peace exists with Egypt and Jordan, relations remain largely confined to diplomatic, military, and bureaucratic channels, without the dense social, touristic, and cultural interweaving that produces everyday mutual understanding. Newer forms of regional normalization have not fundamentally altered this logic; Israeli engagement with the Gulf, including travel to the United Arab Emirates, often takes the form of short-term commercial and tourist mobility, with cities such as Dubai functioning more as fancy shopping malls than as spaces of sustained social encounter. Morocco represents a partial exception: for many Israelis, particularly those of Moroccan Jewish descent, visits involve a form of heritage tourism—cultural immersion through ancestral sites, synagogues, cuisine, and local traditions. Relations with Palestinians present a different but related dynamic: here, contact is extensive, but it is shaped by the political realities of the occupation, security, labor, and territorial control rather than through ordinary reciprocal social exchange.

A fundamental paradigm shift is necessary: a genuine recognition that Israel is part of the Middle East rather than an external actor operating within it. This is easy to say but extraordinarily difficult to achieve. The State of Israel continues to pay a heavy price, often in blood, for its chronic failure to fully understand its neighborhood. As long as strategic analysis relies primarily on technological superiority and a security doctrine built around interception and control rather than cultural fluency and grounded regional knowledge, Israel will continue to misread its environment in ways that technology alone cannot compensate for. Until Israel moves beyond the “villa in the jungle” mindset and learns the region’s linguistic, historical, and political codes, it will remain a technologically brilliant but culturally blind power in the Middle East.

Please check out my book: Op-Ed, Musings on War & Peace in the Middle East and Beyond.