Day: October 9, 2023

Why Now?

The world is asking this same question.

After years of raids, protests, arrests and killings what happen to make these people snap?

What made a people decide to jump when they will be taking on a modern navy, and air force and a massive uncaring army?

An Israeli lawmaker summed it pretty well….

An Israeli lawmaker told Al Jazeera on Saturday that his party had been warning that Israeli policies toward Palestinians would “erupt” into the violence that Israel is experiencing in the wake of Hamas’ assault.

The comments were made by Ofer Cassif, a member of the Knesset and the leftist Hadash party, which holds four seats in the 120-seat Knesset.

“We condemn and oppose any assault on innocent civilians. But in contrast to the Israeli government that means that we oppose any assault on Palestinian civilians as well. We must analyze those terrible incidents [the attacks] in the right context – and that is the ongoing occupation,” said Cassif, who is Jewish.

“We have been warning time and time again… everything is going to erupt and everybody is going to pay a price – mainly innocent civilians on both sides. And unfortunately, that is exactly what happened,” he added.

Is there more to this situation?

What’s happening right now in Israel almost defies imagination.

Overnight, Hamas fighters launched an unprecedented invasion across Israel’s southern border with Gaza, storming Israeli towns and killing Israeli soldiers and civilians alike. Thousands of rockets were fired into Israeli territory, and at least 100 Israelis are dead — a senior Knesset official said the attacks led to the most civilian deaths on a single day in the country’s entire history. The fighting in southern Israel is ongoing, with reports that Hamas is bringing Israeli hostages back to Gaza. Israel’s retaliatory airstrikes have already killed nearly 200 Palestinians, a figure that will likely only grow, as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Saturday that “our enemy will pay a price the type of which it has never known.”

Nothing like this has happened in the modern history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; even the bloody Second Intifada in the early 2000s never saw this kind of mass incursion into Israeli territory. Now an outright war between Israel and Hamas has begun, one whose consequences for the conflict and the broader Middle East we can only dimly anticipate. The only thing we can be certain about the future is that many, many people are about to die.

How can we begin to think about such a nightmare?

We can start by examining the conditions that made it possible. Though we can’t be sure why Hamas chose to launch this attack now, we do know that there are a number of background conditions — including not just the ongoing occupation but also recent surges of conflict in Jerusalem and the West Bank, a far-right Israeli government, and Israeli-Saudi negotiations about normalizing relations — that made the situation especially combustible.

https://www.vox.com/2023/10/7/23907323/israel-war-hamas-attack-explained-southern-israel-gaza

This situation did not occur overnight when someone said…hey let’s take on the IDF.

It comes after nearly two decades of the US and world leaders overlooking the more than 2 million people living in Gaza who endure a humanitarian nightmare, with its airspace and borders and sea under Israeli control. The attack comes amid an ongoing failure to grapple with the dangerous situation for Palestinians in the West Bank where Israel’s extreme-right government over the past year has escalated the already brutal daily pain of occupation.

Instances of Israeli security forces and Israeli settlers antagonizing Palestinians through violence are on the rise, from the pogrom on the city of Huwara to a new tempo of lethal raids on Jenin. Israeli government ministers have been pursuing annexationist policies and sharing raging rhetoric; both incite further violent response from Palestinians and appear at a time when new militant groups have emerged that claim the mantle of the Palestinian cause. The now-regular presence of Israeli Jews praying at the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, one of Islam’s holiest sites, have further pressurized the situation. A Hamas commander cited many of these factors in his statement.

https://www.vox.com/2023/10/7/23907912/israel-palestine-conflict-history-explained-gaza-hamas

The US is sending help.

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin announced on Sunday that he’s ordered the deployment of an aircraft carrier strike group to the Eastern Mediterranean to show US support for Israel amid fighting in Gaza and southern Israel.

Why?

Is Israel incapable of defending itself from a ragtag army that has no air force or navy…..

Not to worry we will throw more cash at Israel because we have so much laying around unused (that is sarcasm in case you missed it)

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

 

WTF Happened?

By now everyone has heard about the invasion of Southern Israel by Hamas….(if not then return to your lair under that rock)

How did the world’s best intel group miss the signals?

I have heard that said about the intel capabilities of the Israeli groups….so the question needs to be asked….how did these great intel groups miss this invasion?

As war unfolds in the Middle East following the unprecedented surprise attack on Israel by Hamas militants, one question is being asked repeatedly: How did Israeli intelligence—and that of its Western allies—have no idea this was coming? Some takes, which in many cases assume the form of further unanswered questions:

  • At CNN, Joshua Berlinger gives historical context: “It has been more than 17 years since an Israeli soldier was taken as a prisoner of war in an assault on Israeli territory. And Israel has not seen this kind of infiltration of military bases, towns and kibbutzim since town-by-town fighting in the 1948 war of independence. How could a terror group from one of the world’s poorest enclaves manage to launch such a devastating attack?”
  • At Politico, Jamie Dettmer cites reports that more than 2,200 rockets were fired into Israel from Gaza during the initial hours of the attack; planning is thought to have taken months or even years. “Hamas would have used its vast network of tunnels that link the enclave to Egypt, but how did it smuggle in the materials needed for such a huge attack without Israel catching wind of the traffic? And how did Israeli intelligence fail to notice Hamas was making and assembling thousands of home-grown Qassam rockets?”
  • Writing for the Times of Israel, Jacob Dallal suspects “the disunity in Israel created by the legislative overhaul weakened Israel’s deterrence and likely played a role in Hamas’ calculation to attack. Separately, talks of peace with Saudi Arabia may also have put pressure on Hamas and the axis of evil led by Iran to launch war in an effort to torpedo normalization that would have left them isolated in the Arab and Muslim world.” (A rep for Hamas told the BBC Iran provided support for the attack.)
  • At the Wall Street Journal, Dion Nissenbaum writes that “recent Israeli intelligence assessments of Hamas” got it wrong, believing “the militant group had shifted its focus to trying to stoke violence in the West Bank and that it was looking to avoid launching major attacks from Gaza in an effort to avoid the kinds of punishing Israeli military responses that have devastated the isolated area in the past.”
  • Nissenbaum spoke with retired Rear Adm. Mark Montgomery, who said, “I’m confident we [the US] had no intel.” At the Atlantic, Gal Beckerman digs into that line of thinking, pointing out that just 9 days ago, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said, “The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades. … Iran’s nuclear-weapons program, the tensions between Israelis and Palestinians. But the amount of time I have to spend on crisis and conflict in the Middle East today, compared to any of my predecessors going back to 9/11, is significantly reduced.”

Somebody has got some explaining to do.   Boy would I love to be a fly on the wall at that meeting.

Stay Tuned!

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”