In late September, after watching the fall of the Sahel region in Africa to military coups from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea, I wrote a column analyzing the factors that encouraged the militants there to act, to act when they did, and to believe that they could get away with it.
Weeks later, Hamas terrorists attacked Israel, killing about 1,200 people — most of them Israeli citizens — taking 240 hostages, and triggering an Israeli military response that has led to the death of thousands of Palestinian civilians and unleashed a widespread outbreak of antisemitism in America and other Western Democracies.
As a student of Africa, but also a first-generation Jewish American whose six-year-old mother arrived at Ellis Island in 1934 as a refugee from Hitler's Germany, I felt duty-bound to apply my analytical framework to the war in Gaza, hoping to see what others might have missed, disregarded, or undervalued.
I do so with a belief that America's greatest export to the world is its democratic values. I write with confidence that the Israeli citizens will ultimately hold their leaders accountable for failures that led to 10/7 and all that has transpired since, and with a certainty, that in Gaza, the Palestinian people cannot.
In my analysis of the collapse of constitutional democracies in Africa, I cited several triggers including failed leadership, compromised institutions, and the malicious role of Russia. I turned to independent survey datawhich showed a decline in support for democracy for the first time in 25 years, and a flatline in governance, leaving a continent less safe, secure and democratic.
The Middle East is not Africa. Gaza is not Niger. The Islamic State is not Hamas. However, all bad actors make rational decisions based upon a complex calculus of ambition, threat, tactical advantage, weaknesses of their adversaries, opportunity, and the demands of their paymasters.
Here is where my African analytical framework led me; it was all there in the publicly available data.
According to the latest report of Arab Barometer (AB), the longest-running public opinion project in the region, Hamas was a spent force heading into their terrorist attack. The AB survey, which was in the field two weeks prior to the Hamas attack, found that 67% of respondents had little (or no) trust in Hamas, and 70% saw significant corruption in Hamas-led institutions which 75% associated directly with their declining quality of life.
On basic freedoms, 60% of those polled said they could not express their opinions freely, and 72% said that they could not protest peacefully against the Hamas-led government. When asked who was to blame for their hardships, a plurality cited Hamas corruption more so than they did the Israeli blockade on Gaza.
In short, on the eve of the attack, the data reveals that the citizens of Gaza saw Hamas as rotted by corruption, uninterested in their well-being, diverting money to terrorist fighters and to their cohorts and co-conspirators. And the Palestinian people feared speaking out. Hamas leaders knew they had lost their popular legitimacy, that the civilian population was dissatisfied, if not hostile.
Within this context, we can better appreciate the design of Hamas' operational plan, which premeditated barbaric acts of violence against women and children. It was their goal to traumatize. They didn't intend hide their crimes; indeed, they live-streamed them. They counted on an unprecedented response from the Israeli Defense Force (IDF).
Hamas also knew — and accepted — that it would be the Palestinian noncombatants who would feel the brunt of the Israeli counterassault as the Hamas leaders hid in their network of protective tunnels. The deployment of human shields — both the Palestinians civilians and the 240 hostages — was likewise baked into the plan to limit the expected IDF tactical reprisals and to use as bargaining chips, on the propaganda side, to provoke global outrage of the civilian suffering that would distance Israel from its traditional allies and separate the Israeli people from its own government. It was a success of historic and sadistic proportion.
Like the juntas in West Africa, Hamas had its accomplices. In our review of intelligence to find a "smoking gun" of complicity, we seem to have missed the obvious: This is a regional war. Iran told us so.
Iran is the preeminent financial backers Hamas, along with the Islamic Palestinian Jihad. It also funds the Houthis in Yemen, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and terror networks in Bahrain, Iraq and Syria. These groups exist solely to destabilize nation-states. They build loyalist insurgencies riven with hate and historical grievances. Their goals are to destroy — and they do so at the behest of Iran. There is no free agency.
Iran dreads peace. It fears normalization. It had hoped that the Trump administration's Abraham Accords was an anomaly, a policy to be overturned when he left office. But when the Biden team embraced it, doubled down, and sought to broker Israel's reproachment with Saudi Arabia, the threat for Iran became mortal.
In April 2023, the Iranian regime broadcasted its pledge to use "all military and political levers" to harm nascent ties between Jerusalem and Arab capitals. It called for the "unity of Muslim nations in solidarity with the plight of the Palestinian people."
We should have taken them at their word.
The 10/7 attacks were plotted to halt the momentum of this realignment. It had to be bold. Diabolical. Spectacular. Only such a move could return the region to the old status-quo, rallying rage at Israel.
October 7 was an act of self-preservation for the Iranian regime and for its proxy, Hamas, whose authority is derived from their self-declared struggle, not from the consent of their people. It was promised. The data were predicative. We were forewarned.
K. Riva Levinson is president and CEO of KRL International LLC, a D.C.-based consultancy that works in the world's emerging markets, award-winning author of "Choosing the Hero: My Improbable Journey and the Rise of Africa's First Woman President. You can follow her on X @rivalevinson
