Host Steven Shalowitz sits down with journalist and author Yaakov Katz to unpack While Israel Slept: How Hamas Surprised the Most Powerful Military in the Middle East. Katz argues that October 7 wasn’t a “mystery failure,” but the result of a long-running “policy of containment” (the concepcia): believing Hamas could be deterred, managed economically, and fenced in with tech like Iron Dome and border sensors. He walks us through the tense night of Oct. 6–7—alarms, contradictory intel, and warnings from female surveillance soldiers that were brushed aside—and explains why a visible show of force might have changed the next morning.
Katz traces Hamas’s roots from Sheikh Ahmed Yassin’s Mujama al-Islamiyah and the Islamic University of Gaza, and how Israel misread the movement while prioritizing Iran/Hezbollah. He describes the pre-war overreliance on signals intelligence (and what’s changed since), the debate over preemption, and the tradeoffs of targeted strikes—precision to spare civilians vs. missed kill opportunities. On allegations of “genocide,” Katz lays out why he believes they’re false—detailing Israel’s civilian warnings and Hamas’s use of human shields—then shares a personal moment from Oct. 7 that brings the stakes home. Yaakov Katz is an Israeli-American author and journalist, the co-founder of MEAD, the premier Middle East-America policy forum, and a senior fellow at the Jewish People Policy Institute in Jerusalem. Between 2016 and 2023, Yaakov was editor-in-chief of The Jerusalem Post where he continues to write a popular weekly column. Yaakov also writes a regular column for the Jewish Chronicle, is the host of the JPPI weekly podcast and appears regularly on CNN and BBC as an analyst on Israel affairs.
Yaakov’s newest book (co-authored with Amir Bohbot) “While Israel Slept – How Hamas Surprised the Most Powerful Military in the Middle East” comes out on September 2. His previous three books are “Shadow Strike – Inside Israel’s Secret Mission to Eliminate Syrian Nuclear Power”, “Weapon Wizards - How Israel Became a High-Tech Military Superpower” and “Israel vs. Iran: The Shadow War”.
Prior to taking up the role of editor-in-chief, Yaakov served for two years as a senior policy adviser to Naftali Bennett during his tenure as Israel’s Minister of Economy and Minister of Diaspora Affairs. Originally from Chicago, Yaakov has a law degree from Bar Ilan University and spent a year as a fellow at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. He lives in Jerusalem with his wife Chaya and their four children.