Ian Bremmer on the emotional response of the Israeli people to the October 7 Hamas attack

It is very hard to say that Hamas actually expected the kind of success that they experienced on October 7th.  There were some 2,000 Hamas fighers, terrorists, that managed to get across one of the most well-defended borders with some of the best intelligence out there - human intelligence, signals intelligence - managed to get across the border, kill Israelis with reckless abandon and capture some 250 hostages and bring them back into Gaza.  I have a hard time believing that Hamas expected that they would have that kind of success, that they would be able to kill more Jews in one day than had happened anywhere in the world since the Holocaust.  I have a hard time with that.  

I think it turned out that Netanyahu and the Israeli government was dramatically weaker and less focused on defense than Hamas could have anticipated because the level of success that Hamas has had is a death sentence for those leaders and for those fighters.  There really is no choice.  There is no one in the Israeli political leadership - the entire spectrum from left to right that would say, "Oh, we can now leave Hamas intact.  We've hit 'em for a few weeks and that's enough."  The idea that Israel, after what they experienced on October 7th, would have a few weeks of attacks, but then could still live neighboring to Gaza, which is being run and controlled by Hamas, no country in the world would live with that.

And let's also remember that the people that were killed by Hamas, the people that are hostages, those that are Israeli, by the way, this is not a settler population, this is not a hard-right population, this was a progressive population!  These were the people in Israel that were most interested in making peace with the Palestinians.  And so you now have a situation where people that I know, friends of mine in Israel that I would consider to be very thoughtful, moderate politically, that are saying, "I wanna level this place.  I wanna make it a parking lot."  Not differentiating between Hamas fighters and Palestinian civilians and Palestinian women and children.  To you and I, that sounds insane, but on the back of what the Israelis have just experienced, that is the emotion that is coming out.

~ Ian Bremmer, 20:00 mark