An attack that no one saw coming.
There have been two kinds of conspiracy theories circulated by ‘truthers’ after the Hamas massacre of Israelis.
The first kind essentially denies there was an attack or nitpicks the details. Those arguments are made in obvious bad faith by people who simply hate Israel and side with the terrorists. Any evidence presented to them is dismissed as fake.
The second kind of conspiracy theory is of the “inside job” variety most often involving a “stand down” order that allowed Hamas to massacre over 1,000 people without any military intervention. Some of the people pushing this stuff are the usual suspects, alt-righters and anti-semites, some of it’s coming from anti-war leftists and libertarians who treat every war as a vast conspiracy, and some from fringe figures in Israel.
The idea that Prime Minister Netanyahu or top generals would have issued a “stand down” (apart from being horrifying) makes no sense. Before this attack, he was the longest-serving prime minister in Israeli history. Now he’s been forced to join a unity government and polls show that most Israelis want him to resign. His political career may be over. Likewise that of the top generals. In Israel, they transition into politics. That is a whole lot less likely to happen now.
The Yom Kippur War disaster tanked Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan despite their heroic stature. There’s no political gain to letting the enemy murder over a thousand of your people in a preventable attack.
Finally, Israel is a small country. A whole lot of people know each other and are related or friends with each other. This conspiracy theory requires you to believe that military personnel who had friends and family living in these communities decided to ignore calls for help and sit around playing cards while they were being butchered. Not to mention ignore attacks on their own bases and allow their fellow military personnel to be murdered, tortured, and taken hostage.
But since it is out there, let’s address it.
- Israel is a mighty fortress and its security is second to none, so how could this have happened?
Most forms of this ‘trutherism’ claim that Israel’s security is so great and its intelligence apparatus so solid that there’s no way that the Hamas attack could have happened without some sort of complicity.
Sorry, no.
Libertarians, of all people, should know that governments are incompetent. Israel’s security is pretty compared to the United States because it actually tries to secure things. But it’s a long way from being secure. The best evidence of that is how many times it has failed.
Israel’s intelligence has been hyped a lot, but it’s mostly offensive intelligence. That means it’s pretty good at doing what it does now, learning the locations of enemy targets and taking them out. Its defensive intelligence has been a mixed bag at best. Israel’s track record at preventing terrorist attacks using intelligence is only a little better than ours.
Ask where a particular terrorist is and they stand a good chance of being able to answer, ask where the next terrorist attack is coming from, and the answer is no more useful than our color-coded homeland security alerts. There’s usually ‘chatter’ and some ‘sources’ say something, but ‘other sources’ say something else. Analysts pore over it and then someone higher up settles the debate.
Without having boots on the ground, Israel was relying on passive intelligence collection and on sensors and cameras, rather than on human intelligence sources and people who were actually paying close attention to what was going on.
As I recently wrote, Israel was nearly destroyed 50 years ago during the Yom Kippur War because key intelligence figures refused to believe that an Egyptian attack was coming even though they had plenty of warning. That was a worse and more unjustified intelligence failure than this one.
Intelligence is not the same thing as ‘intelligence’. Information doesn’t come perfectly packaged and wrapped in a bow. Human beings have to look at it and draw conclusions. Sometimes they draw the right ones, often they draw the wrong ones. And for every piece of information they see, there’s a thousand pieces of information that they don’t see.
Does it make sense that Israel missed the Hamas preparations? As much as missing the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor or Israel losing the defense strategy that would have allowed it to hold the Suez Canal.
Israel knew that something was coming. It sent a small security team expecting to intercept maybe 5 or 7 attackers. Instead, it was overwhelmed by a massive assault that no one saw coming because it was unprecedented.
And that’s the real issue.
Yes, Israel had been distracted by months of leftist riots. And it was the last day of the High Holy Days which is usually a major celebration. But most of all no one had anticipated something on this scale taking place.
That takes us to the second point.
2. Why did Israel let Hamas rampage for so long without intervening?
Estimates are still preliminary, but reports are that Hamas sent in 2,500 terrorists into Israel. Israel had not been prepared for an invasion on that scale. It did not have the manpower in place to quickly and decisively respond to it.
It’s a disaster that emerged from poor planning and worse assumptions.
Here’s a sample of how disastrously this played out in Kibbutz Be’eri where some of the worst killings happened.
Lt.-Col. “B,” commander of the Shaldag elite special forces unit, was at the forefront of the fighting to retake the Gaza Strip periphery communities that were invaded by Hamas from the first moments on Saturday morning.
B said he was awoken at 7 a.m. on Shabbat while at his parents’ house for Simchat Torah and informed about the invasion some 30 minutes after it had started.
Soon after, he and some other units were in helicopters on their way to the Gaza Strip corridor, simultaneously reaching out to more units to head south.
The first Shaldag special forces units, with 12 fighters, arrived at Kibbutz Be’eri at 8:30 a.m., he said, and immediately started to fight to retake the kibbutz.
There was significant fire from Hamas terrorists at the special forces from the start. Some of the special forces personnel were killed or wounded immediately, and the forces realized that the kibbutz was full of terrorists.After reorganizing and five hours of fighting, they had killed 20 Hamas terrorists.
Other accounts suggest that Shaldag was quickly overwhelmed by superior numbers of terrorists, 90 or so, inside. Anyway, the numbers and the chaos speak for themselves.
By 2 a.m. on Sunday, many Shaldag reservists had also shown up, bringing the special forces numbers to 200 – along with much larger numbers of regular troops, paratroopers, and other special forces.
B said about five of his forces were killed and 15 were wounded, including his top deputy.
Many soldiers who were not at a specific spot that they were expected to be at were attacked on their way, B said, adding that some of the top commanders were killed or wounded because they were off duty and jumped right into the fray wherever it was, often without their full complement of forces.
B told a story about one off-duty commander who ran off toward where he thought the fighting was, happened to find a group of soldiers who were being trained to run basic-training sources, and commandeered them to successfully clean Urim of terrorists and save a group of female soldiers who were trapped and surrounded.
This draws as nice a picture as possible, but a really bad one. The IDF was unprepared and caught off guard by the scale of an attack that no one was expecting. It did not have the manpower or organization to quickly respond. (The question is would we do any better if a million armed terrorists showed up at the border?)
Miki Zohar, the Likud’s culture and sports minister, issues an apology on behalf of the government to the residents of the southern communities slaughtered by Hamas on Saturday and to those who paid the ultimate price.
“The preparations were not in place for an attack like this…. The government, the state, was not ready for an attack like this,” Zohar says on Army Radio.
“In the name of the government of Israel, and in the name of the whole State of Israel, we ask your forgiveness for what happened. Because the responsibility is on the government of Israel and the whole State of Israel.”
There’s nothing self-serving here to say that the preparations were not in place. Blame will be spread around. But hell, were we prepared for a bunch of Saudis to hijack planes with box cutters and fly them into buildings?
The errors here were catastrophic, there will be protests and heads will roll. But this wasn’t a conspiracy, it was government incompetence.
Should the attack have been seen coming, should there have been a faster response? Obviously yes.
It’s a catastrophic failure, not just of intelligence, but of strategic planning. It shows the cost of becoming complacent, of playing defense and letting the terrorists learn how you operate, while assuming that they wouldn’t shake up their strategy.
There are lessons here for all of us. In the wake of the attack, some people try to make sense of what doesn’t seem to make sense, by turning to conspiracy theories. And Israel, which spent decades projecting an image of superior competence, brilliant intelligence, and daring operations, was a victim of its own success. But Israel is also the country that operates best when going on the offensive and, like most militaries, becomes stale and unimaginative on the defensive.
Israel is very far from perfect. Its failures and failings are many. This was among the worst. I’ve written at length elsewhere about those failures, but some people need to believe that government is uber-competent and that its failures can only be explained by a conspiracy, not by the reality that governments are innately incompetent.
How many times have Israeli soldiers been thrown into battle, unready and unprepared against superior numbers and firepower, only to turn the tide with heroism and self-sacrifice? Far too often. This was another of those times.
Israelis deserve a military leadership as good as the men and women who serve on the front lines. And the victims deserved a military leadership that would have planned for this scenario. Sadly, they didn’t get it.
Hopefully, next time they will.
somehistory says
Ezekiel chapter 38, a few verses
“7 “‘Get ready; be prepared, you and all the hordes gathered about you, and take command of them. 8 After many days you will be called to arms. In future years you will invade a land that has recovered from war, whose people were gathered from many nations to the mountains of Israel, which had long been desolate. They had been brought out from the nations, and now all of them live in safety. 9 You and all your troops and the many nations with you will go up, advancing like a storm; you will be like a cloud covering the land.
10 “‘This is what the Sovereign Lord says: On that day thoughts will come into your mind and you will devise an evil scheme. 11 You will say, “I will invade a land of unwalled villages; I will attack a peaceful and unsuspecting people—all of them living without walls and without gates and bars.”
Whether this hamas attack, backed and funded by iran, supported by turkey and praised by mozlums in “many natios,” is what is described in those few verses., is just the first salvo of the war described by Ezekiel, is to be seen.
But, it shows that Israel can be the victim of a “sruprise attack.”
And with a corrupt cia, iranian spies in the state department and mozlums everywhere, it’s possible Israel didn’t get the inttel due to sabotage.
BTeboe says
The World Trade Centers imploded as they were rigged along with WTC7, which was not hit by anything. Aluminum body airplanes do not cut through steel reinforced concrete and jet fuel doesn’t burn hot enough to melt steel, if it did planes would not fly. To believe that 9/11 was pulled off by terrorists requires suspending belief in physics. I drank the kool-aid in the beginning, but no more. Govt’s do, what govt’s do even it means sacrificing their own people. Before I make a judgement I will wait for some more facts.
Wellington says
Have you ever bothered reading Popular Mechanics’ 2006 publication that destroys the idea that what happened on 9/11 was not due to 19 Islamic monsters?
You insult the some 3,000 dead with rubbish such as you have written. Implicitly, if not explicitly, you exculpate Islamic barbarians. Yes, I have no love for the American federal government of late, but this does not equate to my buying into nonsense such as you have put forth.
Provide your proof. I say you can’t.
marc says
BTeboe, what a vile insult to the memory of the victims and to their families.
Westman says
Let us know if Elvis is sighted during that wait.
bill says
The domolition charges notion ( i will not dignify with ‘theory’) is completely wrong and stupid. As countless videos show, when demolishing a building you put the charges in the foundation structure not the top. Rigging those charges takes weeks of preparation by experts in their field. I think somebody would have noticed..
The rebar did not melt as anyone who has worked with metals can tell you heated metal becomes pliable, gravity did the rest.
Go and clown at a children’s party.
JimJFox says
Delusional ranting adds. nothing to rational discussion. Bugger off.
gravenimage says
Apologia for Jihad terrorists from BTeboe. Just appalling.
marc says
Some of the youth there have become infected with the leftist mind virus and did not believe how savage the poor Palestinians were on the other side of the wall, now they know.
David M says
Exactly. They were partying at a concert just miles from the border with Muslims who hate them & want to kill them, because that is how the Muslims were raised. But according to the leftists, all people are the same & all cultures are equal. Well, they aren’t.
Islam, the worst thing to ever happen in the history of mankind.
LeftisruiningCanada says
“They were partying at a concert just miles from the border with Muslims who hate them & want to kill them,”
The proximity of that location to the border with gaza surprised me too. Can’t think of too many other kinds of activity which would be more provocative to a serious muslims. The fantasy worldview of young lefties costs lives all the time, even israelies who should know better.
gravenimage says
Sadly true, Marc.
John says
The problem with the conspiracy theories is that it’s not a conspiracy. It is however a theory.
Israel and the US both should have heard something from somewhere at some point that Hamas and/or Iran is planning an attack. The problem being is that just like the US , Israel is complacent and let there guard down.
This is all on Biden for releasing money to Iran and showing weakness.
LeftisruiningCanada says
Apparently the Egyptians had alerted them them to something brewing but stuff sometimes just gets ignored due to the sheer amount of information moving around. Sometimes things just happen because people screw up.
Don’t see any reason to give the ‘stand down’ idea much credence so far.
Huapakechi says
Will the Israeli government adopt a Second Amendment (such as we in the United States are fighting against the socialists to retain) to allow the people of that nation the right of self defense?
LeftisruiningCanada says
When they dont have a leadership which considers it acceptable to use the population as subjects in medical experiments.
Unknown guy says
If Israel adopts second amendment like the usa, then all the arab citizens of israel will also be eligible for weapons. I don’t think you should give weapons to a group of people who question your existence want to wipe you out from this world.
marc says
According to the ministry’s updated conditions, any Israeli citizen interested in obtaining a permit, either for self-defense or because they are serving in the IDF, will be entitled to a gun license, provided that they have medical approval, police approval, and passed the exams for carrying private firearms.
https://www.nraila.org/articles/20231016/following-terrorist-attack-israel-relaxes-gun-laws-and-arms-civilians
It was always fairly easy for someone who served in the IDF to get a license
James Lincoln says
Unknown guy,
If the Arab citizens of Israel cannot be trusted with a weapon, they should not be in Israel.
Unknown guy says
Agreed. They cannot be trusted and should not be in Israel.
OLD GUY says
The game is called Let’s Not Blame the Muslims/Islamic sponsored attack/invasion of Israel on the those who actually did it.
This attack on Israel and its citizens was an act of WAR, funded and sponsored by Islamic leaders from the many Muslim anti-Israel organizations and countries. Make no mistake it was NOT some little offshoot group that did this, they had thousands of rocket and up to date military weapons and ammunitions. That cost MILLIONS of dollars and takes a major effort to train, put together and transport with out being noticed.
There are a lot of DIRTY hands around the Middle East involved in this attack on Israel.
They need to PAY for what they did.
garry pollack says
Israel Ordered Military to ‘Stand Down’ during Hamas Attacks
https://evol.news/news/israel-ordered-military-to-stand-down-during-hamas-attacks/
…Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave the order and told the military to hold back for 7 hours, according to Jewish Pro-Life Foundation leader Cecily Routman.
JEWISH BLOOD ON HIS HANDS!!!—okay Rob’t!
marc says
Gerry, what a garbage source you have there, I removed the duplicate posts and removed the other crap you are spreading.
LeftisruiningCanada says
yeah, ‘heard it from my rabbi’ isn’t really enough.
gravenimage says
Thank you, Marc.
Bob McCall says
Old Guy ^^^ has it right. What he posted.
Shalom says
Another excellent article by Daniel.
gravenimage says
The Hamas ‘Inside Job’ Truthers Don’t Understand Israel or War
……………………………………….
Oh, I think they understand, at least broadly. But Hamas supporters would never let a chance to falsely accuse Israel pass.
The idea that Israel doesn’t just have generally excellent security, but some has some sort of ‘Jewish omniscience’ is especially absurd. Israel *is* very good–but they are not superhuman, nor should any sane person expect them to be.
Then, it is Jihadists who regularly sacrifice their own people if it furthers the Jihad–Israelis do not act like this. The idea that they either allowed Hamas to murder Israelis or even murdered them themselves is grotesque.
Thanks to Daniel Greenfield for covering this story.