---

A New Book Reveals Perhaps the Most Important Lesson of October 7

Nira Broner Worcman and Oswaldo Luiz Pepe

---

Palestinian Hamas terrorists stand guard on the day of the handover of hostages held in Gaza since the deadly Oct. 7, 2023, attack, as part of a ceasefire and a hostages-prisoners swap deal between Hamas and Israel, in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, Feb. 22, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Hatem Khaled

As tensions between Israel, the United States, and Iran continue to reshape the Middle East, democracies once again face an old and uncomfortable question: When does prevention become legitimate?

The dilemma extends far beyond Israel. Democratic societies have long struggled to determine when emerging threats justify action. Move too early, and you risk being condemned as an aggressor. Move too late, and you are accused of negligence. Respond only after an attack, and the response itself may become the focus of criticism.

The Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023, brought this dilemma into sharp focus. The assault on southern Israel killed about 1,200 people and took 251 hostages in the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. Since then, one question has echoed across Israel: Why wasn’t Hamas stopped before it struck?

That question lies at the heart of 06:29, the recently published Hebrew book by Amos Harel, the longtime military correspondent for Haaretz, whose English edition is expected later this year. His answer begins with a blunt admission: “Nobody wanted that war.”

The remark is striking precisely because of its source. Harel has spent decades scrutinizing Israel’s political and military leadership. Yet he argues that before Oct. 7, a major preventive operation against Hamas would likely have found little support across Israeli society. There was no broad political appetite, no military consensus, and little public support.

In hindsight, the danger appears obvious. At the time, it did not. The prevailing assumption was that Hamas could be contained. That assumption collapsed on Oct. 7.

Harel argues that this was not simply the failure of one government. Although often critical of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, he notes that successive governments led by Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid did not fundamentally alter Israel’s strategy toward Hamas. The belief that the threat could be managed rather than confronted had become deeply embedded across Israel’s security establishment.

The failures preceding Oct. 7 point to one danger. The Iraq War reminds us of another.

The 2003 invasion of Iraq, justified in part by claims about weapons of mass destruction that were never found, remains a cautionary example of the risks of acting on flawed intelligence. Democracies are right to be skeptical of preventive action. History offers too many examples of exaggerated threats and misread intelligence.

But the opposite error carries risks as well.

The aftermath of Oct. 7 exposed not only failures of intelligence and deterrence, but also a broader failure of perception — one that shaped governments, public opinion, and media coverage alike.

This paradox also shapes public understanding of war. While the Oct. 7 attack was widely recognized as initiated by Hamas, coverage of the conflict over time tends to shift toward discrete military events.

In Brazil and elsewhere, headlines often emphasize Israel’s military responses to terrorist attacks as standalone developments, while the cumulative context of repeated rocket fire, cross-border attacks, and long-term military build-ups by Hamas and other armed groups receives less sustained attention. Over time, this can weaken the perception of causality, making defensive actions appear less as part of an ongoing cycle of attack and response and more as isolated acts of escalation.

The paradox is that legitimacy often depends less on the nature of a threat than on timing. A successful preventive action can appear indistinguishable from unprovoked aggression because the catastrophe it prevented never occurred.

Consider the counterfactual. Had Israel launched a major operation against Hamas’s military infrastructure in 2022 or early 2023, international criticism would likely have centered on escalation and proportionality. There would have been no massacre, no hostages, and no devastated Israeli communities to shape public perception. Even Harel himself has suggested he likely would not have supported such an operation at the time.

Yet after Oct. 7, many of the same observers asked how Hamas had been allowed to become so powerful. Both positions are understandable. Reconciling them is more difficult.

What makes the Israeli case especially instructive is that the threat was neither hidden nor hypothetical. Hamas repeatedly declared its objectives. Over time, it expanded its military capabilities, built an extensive tunnel network, accumulated weapons, and trained forces for large-scale attacks. At the same time, Hezbollah evolved into an even more formidable Iranian-backed force along Israel’s northern border.

The threat developed gradually. And because it developed gradually, it became normalized. Warnings that might once have prompted urgency instead faded into background noise.

This dilemma extends beyond Hamas. Democracies increasingly confront adversaries whose intentions are openly declared while capabilities accumulate incrementally. The challenge lies not only in identifying threats, but in determining when they cross the threshold that justifies preventive action.

International law remains more developed in defining response than anticipation. Yet many contemporary threats evolve over time rather than presenting themselves as immediate, binary choices.

One of the most revealing moments in Harel’s account comes from an Israeli intelligence officer reflecting on Hamas’s mindset: “They imagined our defeat and occupation. We did not imagine that they were imagining it.”

The observation captures more than an intelligence failure. It reflects a failure of imagination. Hamas prepared for a scenario many considered implausible. Its adversaries treated those preparations as rhetoric rather than operational intent. On Oct. 7, that distinction disappeared.

None of this implies that preventive action is always justified. Democracies require restraint, rigorous intelligence and clear legal and political thresholds before resorting to force. The ability to distinguish between genuine dangers and imagined ones remains one of the defining responsibilities of democratic leadership.

But restraint without any threshold carries its own danger. If force becomes legitimate only after mass casualties occur, democracies may effectively be required to absorb the first blow before they can act.

The lesson of Oct. 7 is not that every threat demands military action, nor that Israel necessarily should have acted earlier. It is that democratic societies still lack a coherent framework for evaluating threats that are declared, visible and slow to materialize.

When does prevention become legitimate? Possible thresholds come to mind: when intentions are openly declared, when military capabilities are built, when intelligence identifies operational planning, or only after civilians are killed?

There are no simple answers. But the absence of clear criteria for prevention carries consequences that democratic societies can no longer afford to ignore.

---

Nira Broner Worcman is a Brazilian journalist, CEO of Art Presse Communications, and author of A Sisyphean Task (English title of the Brazilian hors commerce edition Enxugando Gelo), a study of media coverage of the war between Israel and terrorist organizations.

---

Oswaldo Luiz Pepe holds a law degree and is the founder of Art Presse Communications.

---

---