In November 2025, Taiwan’s foreign minister commented that the island aims to deepen cooperation with Israel. Both Israel and Taiwan have called for Taipei to learn from the Middle Eastern country’s security apparatus, particularly regarding the ways in which Israel’s large reserve force and intense military training have protected the small democracy in a threatening security landscape. As Israel reckons with the tragic events of October 7th and assesses how it failed to predict and deter Hamas’ deadly attacks, Taiwan can draw from the lessons learned. Hopefully, knowledge from Israel’s failure can galvanize Taiwanese society into action and paint a more realistic early warning picture of the threat Taiwan faces from the People’s Republic of China (PRC).
No Information Gap
When a surprise attack happens, a common assumption is that the incident occurred because the government in question lacked information about the threat. Indeed, after the October 7th attacks, both Israeli and US intelligence analysts were surprised at the relative ease through which Hamas was able to build up its assault force, construct an elaborate underground tunnel network, and breach Israeli territory.
Yet, Israel’s internal security and counterintelligence service, Shin Bet, has since conducted its own investigation into the various failures that led to the attacks. Most notably, the report records policymakers’ lack of urgency towards the threat, a misunderstanding of Hamas’ intent, and overconfidence in Israel’s own border security as the main reasons for the surprise. Importantly, none of these issues relate to a lack of information. Instead, the conclusions point to a failure to take at face-value the information available regarding Hamas’ war preparations.
A Failure of Assumptions
Prior to 2023, much of Israel’s security establishment operated under an assumption that now reads as catastrophic: Hamas was a fragmented resistance force that was bogged down in its own governance issues in Gaza and lacked an appetite for all-out war.
October 7th shattered that illusion. What Israel encountered that morning was not a disorganized militia but a fully-formed army—one with an adaptable leadership structure, covert communications systems, pre-positioned weapons, and a vast underground infrastructure designed for sustained conflict. The scale of planning and preparation was incompatible with the image Israel had allowed itself to accept.
Yet this was not incongruent with the intelligence Israel had collected about Hamas, or even the publicly-available information about Hamas’ planning. Israeli military intelligence officials have told me that Israel had the names and phone numbers of every Hamas operative who crossed into Israel that day. Others have corroborated public reporting by telling me that Israeli authorities have tracked millions of US dollars flowing into Gaza. They had monitored Hamas’ growing arsenal, its training exercises on mock Israeli settlements, and even public statements by Hamas officials calling for confrontation and lauding the group’s tunnel network.
It is thus evident that the surprise of October 7th was not the result of a lack of information about Hamas’ preparations and intent, but rather Israel’s inability to shift its own assumptions about Hamas. Prior to 2023, Israeli commanders and policymakers insisted that Hamas did not want a full-blown war. Israeli policymakers and intelligence officials followed a logic that felt intuitive: Hamas was a resistance force that wanted a better life for those in Gaza, and war does not make Gazans’ lives better. Moreover, Israeli military leadership appeared to believe that their armed forces were strong enough that Hamas would never dare trigger an open confrontation.
But, Israel’s military and political leadership overlooked Hamas’ deep belief that a life under the thumb of Israel is no life at all, and Hamas’ extremist ideology that death through war brings rewards in the afterlife. Israel’s overconfidence left little possibility to imagine a scenario in which Hamas’s will to fight outweighed its desire to live, or its fear of Israel’s strength.
In other words, Israel assumed Hamas would make the same risk calculation that the Israelis would have. They were wrong, and paid dearly by belatedly understanding that deterrence is only as strong as the enemy’s assumptions—not yours.
Lessons for Taiwan
If there is a global audience that should study the failures of Israel’s defense planning, it is Taiwan and those that are invested in the island’s security. Israel’s faulty assumptions prior to October 2023 included the belief that Hamas did not want a full-blown war, that Hamas prioritized life in Gaza, and that Hamas’ military build-up and arsenal were not indicators of a true intent to attack. Taiwan’s policymakers would do well to rid themselves of their own faulty assumptions about the PRC and heed the lessons below.
- When an adversary shows you who they are, believe them.
Like Israel, many Taiwanese people and certain international observers are still reluctant to assume that China will truly go to war with Taiwan. However, the PRC’s rhetoric, military build-up and exercises, and societal planning signal the very opposite.
PRC officials have been explicit—sometimes blunt—about their intentions toward Taiwan. These officials have clearly stated they “absolutely will not rule out use of force” on Taiwan and Xi himself has said he is willing to use “all means necessary” to annex Taiwan. Additionally, China’s military buildup, increasingly sophisticated exercises around the island, and exercises targeting mock-ups of the Taiwanese presidential palace and the city of Taipei all demonstrate the PLA’s preparations to attack Taiwan specifically.
China is also preparing its society to tolerate a conflict over Taiwan, and planning for the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP, 中國共產黨) administrative control over the island of Taiwan. Take, for example, state- and province-level planning for conflict scenarios, legal changes criminalizing those that identify as Taiwanese, and state-affiliated media and public universities proposing plans for Taiwan’s governance. Dismissing these datapoints because they conflict with what Taiwanese society wants to believe means repeating Israel’s mistake.
- Never project your own intent onto an adversary.
Taiwanese and US analysts and pundits commonly reference the cost of war on China’s economy as an indicator that Beijing does not really intend to invade. This analysis may be driven by the emphasis that both Taiwan and the United States place on maintaining their own economic strength.
Yet, we have witnessed time and time again that Beijing is willing to shoulder economic costs in pursuit of its political aims. This includes its own damaging economic policy to maintain political control over industry; domestic policies cracking down on foreign influence that drive out overseas investors; and economic coercion that ultimately scares businesses away from China and hurts Chinese firms.
China’s strategic decoupling from parts of the global economy is not an ad hoc policy—rather, it is a plan illustrated by PRC economic strategy documents, investment in its own supply chains, and CCP rhetoric that Chinese companies are an “important force to carry out the major decisions and deployments of the Party Central Committee.” This demonstrates PRC intent to isolate its economy from external shocks such as sanctions or retaliation, or disruptions to global trade routes, both of which it might face if it were to move on Taiwan. All of this points to Beijing’s willingness to shoulder economic costs if it sees the political outcomes as necessary.
While the threat of being cut off from the global economy may factor strongly into a theoretical calculus by Taiwan as to whether the PRC would conduct a military intervention, Beijing may not share the same priorities. Ultimately, Beijing will weigh whether the political necessity of annexing Taiwan is worth the economic cost. Like Israel, Taiwan should not assume the enemy will make the same calculus that it would. To project Taiwan’s desire for peace and global economic stability onto Beijing’s decision-making risks clouding the evidence already in plain view: that the PRC is building the military capability and preparing for the economic consequences of war.
- A bottom-up, decentralized response can save a nation.
Lastly, Taiwan can learn not just from how the Oct 7th attacks happened, but how Israel responded in the early hours. Hamas sent thousands of fighters into Israel, wave after wave. Israel’s initial responders often numbered in merely the tens or hundreds. Yet, by the end of the day, Israel had deployed a formidable defense that drove back the attackers and declared war.
No doubt this response was facilitated by Israel’s longstanding conscription policies and military training. But training and mobilization are two different undertakings. Israeli citizens mobilized quickly without a central command or central communication. Reserve soldiers and Israeli citizens shared stories about how they first learned about the attacks through WhatsApp groups and local community message boards, and sprang into action. Israeli citizens shared information about Hamas fighters’ whereabouts online, identified local first response groups, and drove to their reserve command units without being officially called up for duty.
In certain places, such as the Nova music festival grounds, first responders arrived within hours with little or no knowledge about Hamas’ coordinated attack or the horrific massacre that was occurring, hearing only that “something was happening.” Army intelligence officers told me that it took the country’s military around three days to map the full scope of Hamas’s penetration and military coordination. Even so, it took only six hours for Israeli society to mount a formidable, improvised first line of civilian defense.
For Taiwan, which faces a numerically-superior adversary with the capacity to overwhelm early defense lines, this lesson matters profoundly. A fast, decentralized, self-directed response can blunt even a large, well-coordinated surprise attack.
The Warning Is There—If It Is Heeded
Incorporating these lessons does not guarantee that Taiwan will prevail in a conflict scenario with the PRC, nor will it necessarily deter an attack from the PRC. Indeed, Taiwan faces a very different kind of adversary than Israel does, and Taiwan has unique geographic challenges that Beijing must overcome if it were to use force against the island. But ignoring these lessons guarantees Taiwan’s vulnerability.
Israel learned, at enormous human cost, that an enemy can broadcast its intentions in plain sight and still not be believed. Taiwan cannot afford that luxury. Preparedness starts with accepting that an adversary’s declarations, capabilities, and preparations are not rhetorical theater—they are data. And when a threat tells you who they are, the most dangerous mistake is to think they are speaking figuratively, or to project your own intent onto the adversary. What happened to Israel on October 7th should be a clear warning sign for Taiwanese society. China is planning to annex Taiwan, and without taking PRC preparations at face-value or building a bottom-up defense, Taiwan is vulnerable to a surprise attack.
The main point: While Taiwan faces a very different challenge than Israel does, it can still learn from Israel’s failed assumptions about Hamas. It is a grave mistake to assume China would make the same risk calculation that Taiwan or the United States would, and ignore China’s capability, rhetoric, and actions.
