I entered basic training in the IDF as a 38-year-old father of four.
Sinwar couldn’t begin to understand why I would do that, and that’s why he massively miscalculated his attack on Israel.
Much has been made of Sinwar’s fluency in Hebrew and close following of Israeli news.
Sinwar made one correct judgment of Israelis:
We want to live safely and peacefully and create a good life for our children.
We assumed our neighbors wished the same.
In that, we were wrong, and he was right.
He leveraged that understanding to lull us into complacency and then he struck.
The attack on October 7 was a success, but his monumentally poor judgment about what would happen the day after that will go down in history.
In the same way that Israel had false conceptions on Oct 6, Sinwar and his fellow Axis of Resistance members suffer from false conceptions of Israel that will ultimately lead to their own destruction.
Namely:
1) The state of Israel is fragile and Israeli society is divided. A bit of pressure and the entire Zionist enterprise will collapse
2) Israeli soldiers are cowards, and Israelis aren’t ready to die for their country
3) Israeli society loves life too much and isn’t ready to make major sacrifices
4) Jews aren’t rooted in the land of Israel and will flee as colonizers would
5) Israel’s humanity and morality are its weaknesses and will prevent it from responding as needed to destroy Hamas
6) Israel will ultimately succumb to International pressure and halt the war prematurely
Everything that’s happened in the past 100+ days has proven Sinwar wrong.
Instead of fleeing, tens of thousands of Israelis rushed back home from around the globe to join their reserve units.
Every single soldier and reservist fighting Hamas or Hezbollah is there because they want to be there.
If they didn’t, they would be home.
That is a fact.
We fight because we have no other land.
We’ve dreamt for too long and given too much to build the beautiful country we have now.
We’re not putting our fate back into the hands of others.
Never again.
Our soldiers don’t celebrate death, but they are ready to sacrifice everything for this country, which we love and are so deeply rooted in.
You can see that in every interview given by soldiers entering or leaving the battlefield, and you can read it in the last wills left by soldiers who fell in battle.
Nearly 200 of our soldiers have been killed in the counter-attack of Gaza. Thousands more have been injured. Every single death is a stab in the heart of the entire country. But don’t mistake our humanity and empathy for weakness.
Don’t confuse our love of life with a lack of willingness to sacrifice it all for our fellow citizens and country.
That’s why I jumped at the opportunity to join the IDF. And that’s why my wife supported me.
I will now be a reserves soldier in a non-combat unit, but at my swearing-in ceremony when I held a gun in my right hand, a bible in my left and vowed to “obey all orders… and even sacrifice my life, for the protection of the homeland and the liberty of Israel” I meant it with every fiber of my being.
Sinwar might have learned Hebrew but - blinded by hate and having never lived in a liberal democracy - he could never truly understand Israel
As he cowers in a tunnel under Gaza, he’s beginning to understand just how wrong he was.
