Underestimate Israel at Your Own Peril: What October 7 Revealed About Israeli Military Strength

Hussain Abdul-Hussain

Smoke rises as Palestinians run through the broken Gaza border fence, October 7, 2023

The devastating events of October 7 did not happen in a vacuum. They were the direct result of a decades-long erosion of Israeli deterrence, a period during which Iran and its primary proxies, Hamas and Hezbollah, became dangerously convinced that Israel had lost its military might and its will to fight. To their surprise, and to the dismay of the antisemites around the world, the Jewish state proved them wrong, after which Iran and its allies tried to use Israel’s reaction to vilify it in the hope of delegitimizing it and undermining its existence.

For years, Iran’s Axis of Resistance watched Israel through a lens of wishful thinking, mistake-ridden analysis, and historical misjudgment. They looked at Israel’s thriving high-tech economy, its Westernized culture, and its vibrant, often boisterous democracy, and they saw a society that had grown too soft, too comfortable, and too fractured to endure a prolonged, brutal existential struggle. They mistook the cautious restraint of a liberal democracy for the terminal cowardice of a dying nation.

In Gaza, Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar’s calculations were forged in the crucible of four inconclusive campaigns: 2008-2009, 2012, 2014, and 2021. From these conflicts, Hamas drew a fatal conclusion. They became convinced that Israel’s leadership was terrified of risking the safety of its ground troops, paralyzed by the fear of a densely populated Gazan quagmire. Sinwar believed that as long as his fighters could survive periodic Israeli aerial bombardments by burrowing deep into their multi-billion-dollar tunnel networks, they were essentially untouchable.

The underground fortress became a shield of impunity. In Sinwar’s mind, Israel would never possess the stomach for the brutal, door-to-door urban warfare required to dismantle Hamas rule in Gaza. This hubris directly paved the road to the October 7 massacre.

To the north, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah was operating under an identical delusion. Ever since he survived Israel’s ferocious 2006 war with Hezbollah and successfully spun a tactical stalemate into a divine victory, the Hezbollah leader felt he held the psychological upper hand.

In October 2022, Nasrallah threatened Israel with total war over Mediterranean gas fields, and Israel responded by signing a maritime border deal with Lebanon. Months later, between April and June 2023, Hezbollah audaciously erected military tents across the UN-demarcated Blue Line. When Israel opted for diplomatic pressure over an immediate military strike to remove the tents, Nasrallah saw his theory confirmed: the Zionist entity was too scared to act.

This miscalculation extends far beyond the bunkers of Gaza and Beirut. Across parts of the Arab and Muslim world, and even among some Muslim-American communities, there has been a persistent, historical impression that Israel is fundamentally weakening from within. They view Israelis as pampered citizens of a hyper-prosperous, First World democracy—a people living far too good a life to ever abandon their comforts for the mud, blood, and sacrifice of the battlefield.

It is true that Israelis enjoy the highest standard of living in the region, with a GDP per capita that surpasses even oil-rich Saudi Arabia. But the critical error of Israel's enemies is their failure to understand that wealth does not automatically equal weakness.

The Western world is currently full of democracies that have effectively stopped fighting on the ground, preferring remote-controlled warfare, economic sanctions, or endless diplomatic concessions. Israel stands as the sole exception. It is the only democracy on earth that still fields a citizens' army willing to engage in gritty, high-stakes ground combat.

Israelis do not do this because they harbor a cultural love for war or a theological infatuation with death. On the contrary, they do it because they are acutely aware of an unyielding geopolitical reality. Unlike any other democracy in the world, Israel is the only nation whose sheer physical existence is permanently at stake. If America loses a war, it retreats across an ocean; if Israel loses a war, it ceases to exist. israel military strength october 7.

This reality forces tech entrepreneurs, doctors, baristas, and students to instantly drop their luxurious lives, don olive-drab uniforms, and march into battle. They are sustained by a profound national motto that no other democratic nation is required to possess: Ein lanu eretz akheret—we have no other country.

October 7 was meant to break Israel; instead, it shattered the illusion of Israeli weakness, revealing a society that, when pushed to the brink, chooses survival over comfort every single time.

Hussain Abdul-Hussain is a research fellow at The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD) and the author of The Arab Case for Israel.