The following study was written by Prof. Efraim Karsh, former Director of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies and Professor Emeritus of Middle East and Mediterranean Studies at King's College London. Prof. Karsh is the former Director of the Middle East Forum in Philadelphia, where he edited the journal Middle East Quarterly from 2010 through 2023. He is the founding editor of the journal Israel Affairs and founding general editor of the Routledge book series Israeli History, Politics and Society. He is the author of sixteen books and over 100 scholarly articles.  The failure to prevent Hamas’s slaughter of some 1,300 Israelis on 7 October 2023 – the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust – is a direct result of an emergency phone consultation three hours before the terror group’s invasion of Israel with the participation of the IDF’s and Shin Bet’s top leaders, who decided to do nothing despite acute warning signals and failed to alert the Gaza division commander and the political echelon to the imminent attack. Had they taken the minimal precautionary measures, the catastrophe would have been averted altogether. To fully understand the mindset underlying this monumental blunder requires tracing its evolution within the context of the 30-years-long Oslo peace delusion in general, and during the turbulent year preceding the 7 October massacres in particular. That is: the substitution of a grand strategic deception aimed at Israel’s destruction for a true peace process and the attendant emasculation of the IDF’s military capabilities and combative/offensive ethos, on the one hand, and the unravelling of Israel’s sociopolitical fabric that culminated in the 2023 mass civil disobedience that enticed Hamas into action, on the other. Even Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who opposed the Oslo process from the outset and managed to neutralise its most catastrophic potential calamity – the establishment of a Palestinian state committed to Israel’s destruction in the West Bank and Gaza – failed to extricate Israel from this disastrous course and was ironically forced to bear its full brunt on 7 October 2023.