Analysts, journalists and strategists are all required to ignore the near-impossibility of truly understanding a war as it unfolds.

Failing to do so would send us into a morass of self-doubt, and our work would become a useless succession of Zen-like shrugs. A pose of certainty is therefore necessary, even as recent history serves as a caution.

When Rwanda’s Tutsis were being slaughtered 30 years ago this month, it was anything but obvious that, just two years later, they’d be leading a semi-successful multinational campaign of conquest in neighbouring Zaire, then the second-largest country in Africa.

The Syrian Civil War looked far different in July 2012, when a suicide bomber assassinated the country’s defence minister and Bashar al-Assad’s brother-in-law, than it did in September 2015, when Russian forces arrived to rescue Assad’s crumbling regime.

And when the most recent Israeli campaign in Gaza concluded in May 2021, the country’s leading strategists, along with many in the US, believed Hamas wanted nothing more than a long stretch of quiet in order to consolidate its rule over the coastal strip.

Operation Guardian of the Walls was the Israeli success that would finally allow the country to address bigger and more dangerous threats than those irritating Islamist militants in the south.

For both the Israelis and Palestinians, this proved to be a grave misunderstanding of reality. The Israelis believed they had reduced Hamas to strategic insignificance.

Meanwhile, the people who turned out to be the most meaningful Palestinian decision-makers, namely Gaza-based Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar and his inner circle, were caught in the climax of what the political scientist Shany Mor has described as the “ecstasy-amnesia cycle”, convinced against all prior experience that the violent destruction of the Zionist entity was close at hand.