First thoughts on the ongoing Hamas attack against Israel:
1. Massive Israeli intelligence failure. The last time Israel was blind sided this badly was the '73 war. Though we should note Israel came out on top in that conflict 50 years ago.
2. The scope of this infiltration attack indicates a huge level of planning and preparation spanning months or years. Which underscores point #1.
3. The level of brutality already involved; confirmed executions of Israeli soldiers and civilians, parading the bodies of slain IDF personnel (including 1 female soldier), indiscriminate killing of Israeli civilians, etc will help set the tone for what follows.
4. Israeli declaration of war by the PM gives some indication of what we can expect from Israel by way of response. Also indicates the seriousness with which the government regards this attack/invasion. As does the IDF moving to a war footing and immediately recalling reserves.
5. Expect a significant degree of rally around the flag following this. Internal disputes will be put on the back burner for the time being. This is good news for Bibi.
6. The Israeli left's political influence will likely take a serious beating given their long standing conciliatory (by comparison) stance towards the Palestinians. Again, good news for the current center-right governing coalition.
7. Given the widespread support for the Palestinians being voiced by various Arab governments in the region - the progress of the Abraham Accords has suffered significant damage. How much remains to be seen.
8. I expect a significant Israeli response. Whatever it looks like, it will open with the air campaign we're already seeing the beginnings of. I currently regard future ground operations into Gaza by the IDF as highly likely.
9. While Iran supports numerous proxies & militias in the region, including Hamas & Hezbollah, and has openly praised this attack, it's not yet clear how involved Tehran is prepared to be. Some of their official rhetoric has been bellicose. What Hezbollah chooses to do in over the next few days or weeks may provide insight.
10. Which way Hezbollah jumps will have a major impact. Their involvement would create a two front problem for Israel and bring a significant number of additional enemy forces into the fight.
11. Several Arab nations, including Egypt, have made what could be construed as threats against Israel if the IDF were to launch punitive operations against Gaza in ways they deem disproportionate. Whether this is merely rhetoric or a genuine warning remains to be seen. From some nations, like Egypt, it's a threat Israel must take seriously.
A 50th Anniversary War?
Why did Hamas stage a long-planned, carefully executed and multifaceted attack on Israeli towns, soldiers, and civilians—one designed to instill terror by executing noncombatants, taking hostages, and desecrating the bodies of the dead?
And how were the killers able to enter Israeli proper in enough numbers to kill what could be hundreds and perhaps eventually wound what could be thousands?
a) Ostensibly, radical Palestinians wanted to stop any rumored rapprochement between the Gulf monarchies—the traditional source of much of their cash—and Israel, by forcing the issue of Arab solidarity in times of “war”, especially through waging a gruesome attack aimed at civilians and encompassing executions and hostage taking. Iran likely was the driving force to prompt the war—given its greatest fear is a Sunni Arab-Israeli rapprochement.
b) Arab forces have had only success against Israel through surprise attacks during Israeli holidays, as in the Yom Kippur War (i.e., was it any accident that the present attack began 50-years almost to the day after the October 6, 1973 beginning of the Yom Kippur War?). And so they struck again this Saturday during Simchat Torah, coming at the end of a weeklong Jewish celebration of Sukkot—in hopes that others will join in as happened in 1973. (So much for the Arab warnings not for Westerners to conduct war during Ramadan).
c) Hamas may have reckoned that recent Israeli turmoil and mass leftist street protests over proposed reforms of the Israeli Supreme Court had led to permanent internal divisions and thus a climate of domestic distraction if not an erosion of deterrence.
But, more importantly, in a larger sense the Biden administration has contributed both to the notion that Hamas was a legitimate Middle East player, and to the perception that the U.S. was backing away from its traditional support for Israel—to the delight of Hamas—based on the following inexplicable policies:
1) In February Secretary of State Blinken had bragged that not only had the Biden administration resumed massive aid to the PLA cancelled by Trump, but cumulatively had transferred $1 billion—even as Palestinian authorities bragged that they would continue to pay bounties to the families of “martyrs” (i.e., those killed while conducting terrorists attacks against Israel).
And millions of American dollars also went into Gaza, run by Hamas—despite the Biden administration’s efforts to keep mostly quiet the resumption of such inexplicable support. In this regard, note the current shameful State-Department (“U.S. Office of Palestinian Affairs”) website news release that was posted after today’s attack. It ended with this quite embarrassing, morally equivalent admonition:
“We urged all sides to refrain from violence and retaliatory attacks. Terror and violence solve nothing.”
"All sides?" "Refrain from retaliatory attacks?”
So Israel is the moral equivalent of terrorists executing civilians and brutalizing their corpses? And the IDF then is not supposed to retaliate against these killers?
This Biden State Department insanity cannot stand. So expect some apparatchik to take down this Munich-like posting as soon as possible.
2) The Biden administration had recently released some $6 billion to Iran through a prison swap deal that saw South Korea hand over embargoed Iranian money to Qatar—despite Tehran’s increased anti-Israeli rhetoric and its loud brag about the escalation. We should assume money for rockets (Hamas claims they have launched 5,000, and have received 100,000 of them via the Damascus airport) and weapons in general for Hamas were supplied by Iran, which again is likely the chief catalyst for this surprise attack.
3) Almost immediately, after his inauguration Biden mobilized to resume the bankrupt Iran deal. And in unhinged fashion he appointed the anti-Israeli bigot, pro-Iranian journalist Robert Malley as America’s chief negotiator. Note that Malley is now under FBI investigation for security breaches, involving disclosing classified U.S. documents and also for allegedly helping pro-Iranian activists and propagandists land influential billets inside the U.S. government.
In short, there was a general Hamas and Iranian perception that the Biden administration had resumed the discredited Obama madness of empowering Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas. This discredited agenda was to “balance” the power of Israel and the moderate Arab Gulf governments to achieve “creative tension”, exacerbated by Biden’s loathing of the government of Benjamín Netanyahu (who has been snubbed by Biden and never invited for an official visit).
Note as well that the Biden administration has siphoned off key weapons and munitions from stockpiles inside Israel to transfer them to Ukraine. The so-called “War Reserve Ammunition—Israel" is all but depleted of just the sorts of weapons needed in the present crisis.
In this regard is there not a pattern here?
Upon the ascension of Biden and his woke military agendas, we saw the following: the complete humiliation of the U.S. in Kabul in its most shameful flight in 50 years and greatest abandonment of equipment in its history; followed by Vladimir Putin’s opportunistic invasion of Ukraine; followed by China’s new belligerence and escalating threats to Taiwan; followed by Turkey’s new de facto alliance with Russia and recent drone encounter with the U.S. air force in Syria; followed by the Hamas/Iranian inspired attack on Israel—with more to come unfortunately.
And will Biden finally get the message from the attacks on the Ukraine and Israeli borders, that borders matter and we too are being invaded, with the encouragement of the Mexican government and to the advantage of the cartels whose fentanyl exports kills 100,000 Americans a year?
What to expect in Israel?
Expect the following: the usual Hamas/terrorist selling and/or execution of Israeli hostages, the use of Israeli hostages as “human shields” in Gaza, the bargaining/sale of the remains of Israeli dead, occasional killings of Jews inside Israel by Arabs who falsely believe there will be a winning Middle East-wide existential war against Israel. And finally, a devastating Israeli counter-response that will eventually earn a U.S. rebuke.
What should the U.S. instead do?
It should quit talking to Iran and restore full sanctions against it. It should cut off all aid immediately to all the Palestinians. It should undertake a 1973-like massive arms lift of key munitions to Israel and warn Iran, Syria, Hezbollah and others in the Middle East not to intervene or else, given that Israel will need several weeks to deal with Hamas and Gaza. And if it shows any hesitation or weakness, other terrorist groups will opportunistically jump in.
The Late, Great Hamas Finally Got Its Wish–And . . . ?
Ever since Hamas was “elected” to run Gaza, and then followed the usual “one election/one time” Middle-East formula, it has bragged nonstop that its agenda was to erase Israel off the face of the earth (cf. the wall map in the office of our Representative Tlaib).
Its unabashed nihilist boasts resonated throughout the Palestinian “movement.” Its fiery threats delighted the Arab street.
Indeed, Hamas was soon celebrated as the most “authentic” of the radical Palestinian terrorist movements.
Which cadre of thugs could top its end-of-days rhetoric, its assured and steady supply of money and weapons from Iran, its satanic eagerness to mutilate and dismember, and the sanctuary and financial wherewithal offered to it by our “ally” Qatar?
None.
Since it was viewed as the most “volatile” and creepy of the Palestinian factions, and the most useful to Iran, the Obama and Biden Administrations appeased its murderers. Was it not part of their hare-brained grand strategy of empowering theocratic Iran, and its Syrian, Hezbollah, and Hamas hirelings?
Their campaign (remember the “they literally know nothing” media and the Obama “echo chamber” created by a boastful Ben Rhodes?) was to forge these disparate Islamists into a crescent of resistance to Israel and any “moderate” Arab regime (recall the Obama-Biden transitory hatred of the Gulf sheikdoms).
The result would be “creative tension” —as well as payback for the Israeli election of Netanyahu.
Through this formula, Obama believed he could always pressure Israel to grant concessions to radical Palestinians, thanks to the looming threat of an ever menacing (and soon to be nuclear) Iran, with help from Obama’s other friends—the then Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt and his pal, the neo-Ottomanist and anti-Semite Erdogan of Turkey, Obama’s self-described personal liaison to the Islamic world.
Yes, of course, this was sheer madness—if perhaps characteristic of Obama’s well-known orneriness.
Perhaps someday soon, a few disinterested historians might even record that the current nightmare in Israel is the logical end-result of what Barack Obama, John Kerry (remember his Trump-era Paris reconnaissance with the Iranians?), Ben Rhodes, Valerie Jarrett, Robert Malley, Joe Biden, Antony Blinken, and a host of other incompetent but otherwise haughty and dangerous people once conjured up.
A defiant, and empowered murderous Hamas was one of the many dividends of their appeasement and grand Middle-East schemes—given the eagerness of the Obama and Biden administrations to send hundreds of millions of dollars into Gaza, despite warnings from their own experts that such cash would enhance terrorism and abet the evil work of Hamas with an American financial stamp of legitimacy.
Hence, a soon to be nuclear Iran, freed from sanctions, had enough money (remember the nocturnal cash pallets on the Tehran tarmac?) to fund its surrogate global death squads.
Hamas has killed Jewish civilians for nearly two decades, always escaping the full wrath of Israel retaliation by appealing to the amoral consciousness of leftwing European and American governments. It counted on ample help from both Iran and Arab regimes, along with Turkey, which always screams “instability” at the first sign of Israeli retaliation.
The blustering Hamas has now murdered 1,000 Jews in their homes, preferring especially to gun down children, reportedly behead babies, torture the doomed, rape the helpless, execute the elderly, and brutalize women—and topping the killing off in good SS fashion by gleeful dismemberment and desecration of Jewish corpses.
So, they finally got their wish for their own version of the Holocaust, for what they had always bragged would be the “final” Israel-ending war—as their cowardly elders announced last Saturday from their protected enclaves.
Yes, Hamas promised their mass killing of innocents would ignite the Muslim world, incite simultaneous attacks on Israel from Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and perhaps Egypt—all as their planned anniversary replay of the Yom Kippur War’s first 48 hours.
And it may—or may not.
The ebullient people of Gaza seemed initially enthralled at videos of mutilated Jews, and showed their zeal by spitting on hostages carried back home for supposed Roman-like triumphs before their public sacrifices. Videos of the gruesome killings of Jews were hot downloads on Gaza mobile phones.
Now mutilating dead Israelis, now boasting how brave their sons were in slaying unarmed jews inside Israel, Gazans assumed a shocked Israel would capitulate.
Would not its megaphones in the West characteristically protect them and restrain Israel?
Could not they themselves always ensure a few thousand of their own civilians be sacrificed as expendable human shields of their missiles pads, and thus become necessary fuel for their boilerplate accusations of “war crimes” that usually curtailed Israeli retribution?
But now the Israeli retaliation seems oblivious to all that.
It may not be like the past incursions into Gaza that were manipulated by a cowardly Hamas to gain media sympathy for “collateral damage” that they themselves had engineered.
Predictably, as Israel ramps up the air attacks and prepares for the ground assault, the global media is showing a concern for civilian collateral damage in a way it never quite did for murdered Jewish innocents and beheaded infants.
Western governments are terrified of Middle East killers who may return to their previous attacks on their European citizens. After all, Western leftwing suicidal immigration policies have ensured large unassimilated Muslim populations. Millions have fled the self-created violence and tyranny of the Middle East only to cheer it on from a safe distance in their adopted Western homelands, whose welcoming of these “refugees” is now so often reciprocated with sheer contempt for the apologetic hosts.
Nonetheless, the Gaza crowds of 48 hours ago who were boasting their sons murdering with impunity and spat on bound defenseless women, are now aggrieved. But they might as well be barking at the moon about the supposed “unfairness” of the Israeli air counterattack.
Among the rubble of once Hamas high-rises they are weeping for media cameras, calling on a corrupt and anti-Semitic UN for accustomed relief, threatening on spec the West with who knows what (is it now infant beheading or body dismemberment?), and in general suddenly quite unhappy about their “final” war they just recently boasted was all but won.
Will the heroic legions of Hamas who beheaded and raped now pour out in the streets to fight the IDF and push them into the sea as promised?
Perhaps not?
Some final thoughts: Why has Iran gone from bragging three days ago about its training and tutelage of the Hamas killers suddenly to pleading that while it is certainly delighted about the beheadings, rapes, executions, and mutilations, it technically had no actionable role in ensuring them?
The truth is that a Hamas right now is alternately threatening and begging Western governments, beseeching its suddenly mum Iranian suppliers, whining that Hezbollah and the PNA have not yet sufficiently shared the bloodletting of this war, and generally railing for more jihad from a few of its increasingly so-so, nonplused Middle-Eastern sponsors.
Hamas fears it may have boxed itself in, with two American aircraft carriers between it and Iran, with private satisfaction from many Arab states that their nuisance Hamas might at last have committed suicide through its mass homicide, with even fanatic supporters hard-pressed to make their “moral” case for the beheading of babies, and with a half-million IDF soldiers headed their way to deliver upon them divine justice, perhaps in the Lincolnesque Second Inaugural sense of “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”
Translated, that means for the first time in its existence an unholy Hamas may not get out of its self-created rendezvous with what it has so duly earned, given there is now no assurance of third-party relief and thus no restraint on Israel.
Even a shaken and shamed Biden administration—guilty of an open border and its de facto support for Hamas and Iran, but suddenly scared of a furious election-cycle American public—may for a while not call off Israel.
The arrogant but half-educated Harvard crowd, the European Islamists, the woke and pampered anti-Semites on Western campuses, the AOC socialists, the pro-Hamas Squad, the BLM chorus who cheered on the Hamas glider death attack, of course CAIR, and all the usual suspects for now are as furious as they are impotent—petulant that for once, just this once, and for a while longer at least, no one is listening to their oh so tired amoral defense of the indefensible.
This conflict weighs so heavily on me. I have Jewish friends and I have Muslim friends. I have a deep affinity for Israel and for Arab culture, and do a lot of work in the Middle East.
But let’s be clear about some things. Anti-Israel + Pro-Palestine demonstrations erupted around the world *before* Israel responded.
BEFORE.
Let's recap that sequence of events.
1. Palestinian militants wake up in the morning and decide to go and murder Israeli civilians, take hostages, and declare their intent to destroy Israel
2. Demonstrations erupt around the world supporting Palestine and condemning Israel
3. Israel responds to this threat
Go back over it again in case there is any ambiguity.
There is no moral grey area to inhabit here. No fog of war that one can hide behind.
Palestinian militants murdered civilians. In cold blood. They raped Israeli women. They set children on fire and beheaded them. Grandmothers were raped so brutally their pelvis was broken. A pregnant woman had her baby cut out of her stomach and beheaded, only to then suffer beheading herself. Palestinian militants murdered Jews, on a mass scale, in the most barbaric and heinous ways possible. And then vowed that they would keep going, to the thunderous applause of their sympathisers living in the West.
Members of our intelligentsia and elite students openly cheered Hamas, laying the blame *entirely* at the feet of Israeli policy. They justified the most barbaric atrocities under the banner of liberation and decolonization.
If you can't see the problem with that, I don't know what else to tell you.
It is easier of course to just keep quiet, to not talk about it. But I am compelled to.
Because 90 years ago, no one spoke up.
Yet.
It is important to recognize that this is war, and in this war, there are people are dying on both sides - children, women, civilians.
Many people have been trying to build bridges to bring about peace – and all their work crumbled just like that. The world before Oct 7 was a different world. Peace in the Middle East was achievable and now, we’re back to reliving ancient hatreds between the sons of Abraham.
One of the problems with discourse today isn’t just about the things we say; sometimes it’s about the things we don’t say.
Even when we think that “our side” may have not been totally right, we hold back from criticizing because we fear weakening the moral standing of “our side.”
So on one side, they cannot criticise Hamas, and on the other, they cannot criticise the Israeli government / IDF. But Hamas isn’t Palestine, and the Israeli government isn’t Israelis / Jews.
This distinction is important. And for those who say “but Palestinians support Hamas overwhelmingly,” please ask yourself exactly what choice you would have if you were born into the same cultural and social milieu?
You’ve heard the phrase the “bigotry of low expectations.” Sometimes it is compassionate to expect less.
Moral clarity is important, but so is being compassionate and not giving up on humanity.
When will we beat swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks? When will we no longer take up sword against each other, nor train for war anymore?
I recall the words of Rudyard Kipling:
“What profit to kill men?”
“Very little - as I know; but if evil men were not now slain; it would not be a good world for weaponless dreamers.”
I hesitated whether to write something about the topic. Let it be.
A. This is not the first time that masses of Muslims and supporters have taken to the streets in Britain. For example, before today's demonstration, there were protests against the invasion of Iraq (2003), and protests against the publication of 'The Satanic Verses'. That is, internal or external issues.
B. In both of the above cases, the damage to the Muslim communities was immense. The British public mostly refused to identify with the protests (except for the immediate suspects) and demanded an iron fist against the organizers. In the first case, the burning of a book that was broadcast on television changed the momentum, and in the second case, the organization that led the protests, which was a local Muslim, disintegrated.
C. Here we see a repetition of the pattern - mass protests, which are characterized by a green-red partnership (Islamism - radical left) and anger from the opinion of the local public.
D. What is different here is the focus - in both previous cases, Britain was involved (Rushdie, Iraq). Here the protests are about a war >>>
in which Britain 'officially' expresses support for one side, albeit, but does little beyond that. She (still) is not involved in the fighting. So why did the protests break out there?
There are several reasons for this -
1. First and foremost, they are multiculturalism. The curtain will be short to detail here what multiculturalism is, but suffice it to remind that one of its side effects >>>
is the creation of communities that operate in a kind of autonomous (partial) way. The policy received a lot of *very* fire after 9/11, but in practice very little was done to create a new policy. Thus we received huge segregated and sometimes distorted publics.
2. Despite the fact that most of the Muslims in Britain are not Arabs (but from the Indian subcontinent) -
there is evidence that Middle Eastern actors (Saudi Arabia and others) invested many resources and made alliances with local actors in order to export a very conservative and harsh type of Islam to Britain.
3. As I mentioned in a previous thread - there are 3 places prone to violence when it comes to extremism - the mosque, prison and university. The academy has become a breeding ground for extremists, who quickly connect with radical left-wing actors. They actually 'ride' on popular perceptions (social positions for example) and inject them >>>
with particularistic Islamist perceptions. The demand for the elimination of Israel, for example, is presented as an act of liberation, of breaking the yoke of Palestinian slavery. True, this exists in all the Western world, but Britain has a tradition of 'popular' protests, and even social riots - and it is easy for Islamists and pro-Palestinians to connect to this sentiment.
E. Should Britain 'be excited' by these protests? I think so. What we see today in Europe is a return to the days after 9/11. That is, there is now an event that constitutes a common denominator and a focal point for anti-Western forces to coalesce around. Hamas now becomes, in twisted logic, a liberator, while Gaza is a symbol for all the Muslim world.
It may be that from these protests will grow the next cells of terror stemming from my perception of the evolution of Islamist terror on the continent. So far, all the ideological infrastructure of terror in Europe has come from outside. But the direction was clear (maybe in a separate thread) - the time for the appearance of a European terror organization is approaching. But he needs a spark >>>
to ignite it. And Hamas may have provided him with that spark. From these protests and from supporters at home and across the continent will grow a generation of ideologues, activists, financiers, planners and more, on behalf of Europe's purity, who will spread a poisonous and destructive doctrine alongside terrorist acts from home. Of young brainwashed people who will perceive Hamas's fall >>>
and perhaps other forces as well, as a victory of colonialism over the Muslim mother.
So actually, it may be that these protests are not against Israel, but against the West.
All that remains is to hope that we will not return again to the years after 9/11, this time with greater intensity.
