In the aftermath of Hamas’s attack on Israel three years ago, comparisons to the Japanese attack on the American fleet at Pearl Harbour abounded. This largely had to do with the scale of the attack, which left some 1 200 people dead, and the complete surprise of the assault, which represented Israel's largest intelligence failure since the Yom Kippur War almost exactly 50 years earlier.

But as time went on, it became apparent that there was perhaps something more to the comparison.

Historian Paul Johnson noted that Pearl Harbour was a tremendous tactical triumph but ultimately a strategic failure. It caught the Americans off guard and did considerable damage to American naval power in the Pacific, but Japan had no viable long-term plan to defeat the United States or permanently hold the vast empire it had acquired. The attack did nothing to destroy America’s enormous economic and industrial base or its broader military potential. Most importantly, it united American public opinion, which had previously been deeply divided over entering the war, and “awoke the sleeping giant” that would become a decisive factor in the conclusion of the Second World War.

Unlike the Japanese, Hamas and its patrons in Iran suffered from no such myopia about their broader strategic goals. For several decades, they had been building a “ring of fire” around Israel across multiple fronts: Gaza, the West Bank, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, among Arab Israelis, Iran itself and, perhaps most importantly, Lebanon, where Hezbollah had accumulated an enormous arsenal of rockets and missiles capable of raining down on the Israeli population and potentially overwhelming shelters and missile defences.

The ring served two purposes. The first was deterrence. Iran had for decades been working towards a nuclear capability while threatening Israel with destruction and describing it as a “one-bomb country”. Other states in the region, such as Iraq, had previously attempted to acquire nuclear weapons, only to see Israel’s air force make short work of their ambitions. The ring of fire was intended, in part, to deter Israel from attempting something similar against Iran.

Spider’s Web

But the ring served a second purpose. Should Israel ever find itself in a state of profound weakness or internal disunity, as it appeared to be on 6 October 2023, amid bitter arguments over judicial reform, the combined forces surrounding the country might be able to overwhelm its defences. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah had famously compared Israeli society to a “spider's web”: seemingly strong, but in reality fragile.

Hamas understood this very well, and it appears to have hoped that the October 7 attack would activate the combined arms of the ring of fire and that Israel’s destruction would begin.

For whatever reason, this did not happen. Quite why remains open to debate. Perhaps the other members of the axis were themselves surprised and unable to respond. Perhaps the Biden administration's forceful military posture in the immediate aftermath made Israel’s adversaries think twice. Or perhaps the old problems of rivalries, disunity, and poor coordination among Arab fighting forces simply reasserted themselves.

Whatever the reason, the breathing room given to Israel would prove fatal.

Israeli society united almost immediately. The Israeli military, based as it is on an extensive reserve system, began moving into action. Reservists arrived at bases and ultimately served hundreds of days away from their families, careers, and businesses.

From there, Israel began removing pieces from the board.

The brutality of the October 7 attack, including the killing of Israeli Arabs, helped convince the population that Hamas was not a cause that could be supported. This, along with a strong military deployed in the West Bank, kept any Hamas mobilisation in check. The army moved into Gaza and began demolishing a vast underground tunnel network built principally for Hamas’s military operations rather than the protection of Gaza’s civilian population.

Meanwhile, the other fronts failed to achieve their intended effect. Forces in Iraq became increasingly marginal. The Houthis in Yemen launched missiles and drones at Israel, but repeated Israeli strikes subsequently inflicted heavy damage on their infrastructure and leadership.

Most Important

Then came the most important play.

For roughly two decades, Israel had been building intelligence and operational capabilities against Hezbollah, which had steadily entrenched itself within the Lebanese state. As Hezbollah gradually began discovering elements of these capabilities, Israel faced pressure to use them before they were lost.

The result was the extraordinary pager and walkie-talkie attacks. This operation helped tip the scales. Soon afterwards, much of Hezbollah’s senior leadership, including Nasrallah, had been eliminated, as had further senior figures within Hamas.

Hezbollah's weakness then contributed to a dramatic change in Syria. Rebel forces rapidly reconstituted themselves, the civil war reignited, and the Assad regime, one of Iran’s most important regional allies, collapsed in remarkably short order. The fall of Assad further weakened Iran’s regional network and helped leave an exposed sky route through Syria towards Iran.

This set the stage for the next act. Israel, with the support of the Trump administration, was able to strike Iranian air defences and key nuclear and military sites. Further attacks followed in the wake of the regime’s murder of tens of thousands of its own citizens.

In the meantime, something else that had once seemed almost unthinkable happened. A year ago, Hamas still held both living and dead Israeli hostages. Those hostages have now all been returned. What had been an unbearable thorn in the body politic of Israel and the Jewish world had been removed.

In some ways, the war has still not ended. Hamas survives, weakened, and controlling only part of the Gaza Strip. Hezbollah continues to exist. The Iranian regime continues to repress its own population and to threaten regional and global stability. Yet, for the moment, none of these actors poses anything approaching the danger it did on 8 October 2023.

The ring of fire still smoulders, but much of its flames have been extinguished.

Public Opinion

There is, however, one front on which October 7 has been spectacularly successful for Hamas and the axis: the battle for Western public opinion.

Western opinion had already been softened by decades without an existential external threat comparable to the Soviet Union. This contributed to increasingly pacifistic societies, inadequate military investment, and self-destructive strains of postmodern thinking among its elites. At the same time, sophisticated anti-democratic influence operations, media networks such as Al Jazeera, and large-scale immigration without sufficient plans or capacity for integration helped create an environment and constituencies for parts of both the left and extreme right who were increasingly receptive to anti-Israel positions.

The Israeli government and its allies did themselves few favours. They failed to take the information war seriously enough, neglected steps to shape the international information environment, and frequently failed to discipline domestic political rhetoric with an eye to its international import.

Israel consequently finds itself in the rather bizarre position of enjoying greater sympathy among the Global South, including African, Indian, Arab, and South American populations, than in the universities, stadiums, and cinematheques of Europe and the Anglosphere. America may yet follow the same trajectory.

Scrutiny

Still, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has put it, better a bad editorial than a positive obituary. At the same time, elements of the genocide narrative, promoted expertly by governments including South Africa’s African National Congress-led administration, are coming under increasing scrutiny and is slowly starting to unravel.

There is no doubt that Gazans have suffered enormously by voting into Hamas power, which brought this war upon them. The question now is whether October 7 and everything that followed it might eventually mark the beginning of a longer political transformation, one in which the extremists who have dominated Palestinian politics give way to new leadership capable of pursuing a different path.

That would complete the Pearl Harbour idea in a way Yahya Sinwar could hardly have intended. October 7 was an extraordinary tactical success for Hamas. Three years later, however, much of the strategic architecture within which that attack was conceived has been dismantled. Like Pearl Harbour, the ultimate significance of October 7 may therefore lie not in what its perpetrators achieved on the day, but in everything their success unleashed against them afterwards.