Brainless in Gaza

Slapped awake by God, we want to roll over and go back to our dreams

Last Saturday, on the Holy Day of Shmini Atzeret, Hamas attacked Jews in the Gaza envelope and massacred thousands. I’ve been running around between there and Samaria, trying to make myself useful. In the few hours before Shabbat, I wanted to write down my thoughts and impressions. This may be a multipart series.

The attack

Hamas prepared and executed an outstanding operation. Using speed, surprise and violence of action, it employed air support (drones with shaped charges,) artillery cover (rocket barrages,) electronic warfare, combat engineering, vertical envelopment (ultralight planes,) mechanized troops on motorcycles and pickups and swarm tactics to breach the fence in 15 places simultaneously and send approximately 2000 commandos into Israel proper. These commandos, operating in small autonomous groups, headed to their targets, which included IDF bases, small villages and larger cities up to 10 kilometers away, and attacked them with great success. Most of the villages and bases were overrun and the commandos operated freely in the larger cities (Ofakim and Sderot,) capturing police stations, killing passerby and taking captives. They massacred thousands of soldiers and civilians, and took hundreds of hostages back into Gaza.

Operational preparation of the battlefield had been performed by Hamas operatives who were part of the many thousands of Gazan Arabs with entry permits to Israel. They had been working on the overrun kibbutzim as laborers, and were personally recognized by some of the Jews who survived the attack.

Strategically, Hamas had played along with the IDF’s “quiet begets quiet” policy, refraining from major attacks in preceding years and pretending it was occupied with internal rule.

The IDF was caught completely unprepared and did not mount a response for approximately six hours. The female soldiers whose job was to observe the border via technical means were captured, raped, tortured and executed. Many of the soldiers in the area were killed piecemeal. Some units of the IDF fought effectively, including Shayetet 13 which sent in a small response force and maneuvered through the Gaza envelope engaging terrorists. Several local civil defense teams, kitot konenut, successfully defended their kibbutzim. One notable success was in Kerem Shalom, a kibbutz which had invited religious Zionist settlers to repopulate it as the numbers of its secular residents dwindled in previous years. The local kita konenut fought off the Hamas teams, losing two members but saving the residents.

Following the initial attack, follow on forces flowed out of Gaza to rape, pillage and kidnap. Scenes of brutalized Israeli civilians being dragged back across the fence flooded Twitter, shared by Hamas. Small children, women bleeding from their genitals being dragged by the hair, senior citizens incapable of walking, etcetera. The Arabs called some of the victims’ families and livestreamed executions to them on Facebook. Families were burned alive. Dozens of small children were slaughtered in Kfar Aza.

A mass casualty event took place outside Kibbutz Beeri, a mile outside the fence with Gaze, where a rave was taking place in a large field. The theme of the rave involved peace, and it prominently featured a large Buddha idol. The Hamas commandos used ultralights to attack it from above and murdered hundreds of the attendees, hunting them as they fled into the draws of the Gerar river to the immediate north. Those who made it to their cars and attempted to flee north on route 232 were killed by Hamas ambushes. Many dozens of their burned cars lined the roads.

After noon, the IDF finally launched a coordinated counterattack. Over the course of the next day, most of the Hamas commandos who had not crossed back into Gaza were killed or captured. Some continued to fight over the following week. I was in the area on Tuesday and Wednesday, and there were ongoing firefights with individual terrorists. Footage of enslaved Jewish women and children in cages was proudly streamed by Arabs from Gaza over the next several days.

Overall, this was an example of a classic form of Islamic warfare, the razzia. This is a slave raid into enemy territory, involving massacre, despoliation and the taking of captives. Razzias, or ghazawat, were employed everywhere Muslims encountered non-Muslims whom they were not capable of conquering immediately-Spain, the Balkans, Anatolia, the Ukraine, Russia, Central Asia. The immediate aim was the weakening of the enemy and the enrichment of the participants via slavetrading. The longterm aim was the extortion of tribute.

The background: Hamas

Hamas is our local branch of the international Muslim Brotherhood. It was originally set up and armed under the protection of the Israeli Shin Bet secret police on the theory that it would make a good counterweight to the socialist secular terrorists of the Fatah (PLO.) The Fatah was later returned from Tunisia by the GOI (Government of Israel) under the Oslo Accords, turned into the Palestinian Authority, given money, weapons and military training, and set up as an Israeli client state in Gaza, Judea and Samaria. It then engaged in a multipronged strategy involving milking Israel and the US for money and military aid, engaging in terrorism and attempting to take more land by one means or another. The Fatah is famously corrupt and serves the interests of some Palestinian clans against others.

The Hamas continued to operate in opposition to the Fatah. Given the moral integrity of its leaders, its refusal to compromise on its goals (its original charter quoted the hadith involving a global massacre of Jews by Muslims) and its strong and brutal rule, it commands much more respect among Palestinian Arabs as a whole than Fatah does. Hamas ran a campaign of suicide bombings during the Second Intifada, causing massive civilian casualties in Israel.

In 2005, the GOI under Ariel Sharon ethnically cleansed the Jews of the Gush Katif settlement block in Gaza. This was done primarily for domestic reasons, as a means of class warfare. From this point onwards, the IDF could no longer maneuver in Gaza except in the context of full on conventional warfare. In 2007, Hamas launched a preemptive strike against the Fatah in Gaza and took control. It immediately engaged in full spectrum warfare against Israel. Over the years, this has ranged from taking hostages to sniping and antitank warfare against IDF troops outside Gaza to rocket barrages against Israeli cities to riots on the border fence. Hamas has armed itself through weapons smuggling (many of the small arms used in Saturday’s attack came from the US military by way of Afghanistan and Iran,) local manufacture (the rockets being used against Israeli cities come from salvaged water infrastructure left behind by Israel in 2005,) and dual use technology (the drones and ultralights discussed above.) Hamas has used periodic escalations to secure concessions from Israel in exchange for ceasefires.

The leadership of Hamas consists of men who spent decades of their youth imprisoned by Israel, brutally interrogated and humiliated, survived assassination attempts and in general are dedicated and committed to their cause. For example, unlike the Fatah, they have never offered Israel more than a temporary ceasefire, the Islamically permitted hudna, despite the political advantages of offering the prospect of a peace agreement; peace agreements are forbidden by sharia. From the religious perspective, Hamas are neither innovators nor extremists, following standard Islamic rulings.

Based on recent statements by Hamas leadership, they did not anticipate the scale on which the operation would succeed, and are now in the position of the dog who caught the car. They are now disavowing the kidnappings and claim that Palestinian civilians committed them without Hamas involvement.

https://twitter.com/AJA_Palestine/status/1712469453253030133

The background: Israel

Israel is a fairly run of the mill managerial state, with a nominal multiparty democracy and a huge state apparatus which is minimally responsive to elected leaders much of the time. Ideologically, it is led by heavily Westernized Jews whose worldview largely corresponds with whatever the New York Times thought last year.

Our political system is based on every party having a specific constituency in our highly fragmented society, promising it whatever it needs to hear before elections. If the party makes it into the ruling coalition after the elections, its actions focus on securing budgets and institutional power, then distributing them to key party supporters. Pre-election promises are ignored, and coalition partners are blamed. If the party fails to get into the coalition and remains in the opposition, it attacks coalition policies and failed promises from the outside, blaming the coalition members for all ills, even if the party itself directly caused them during its earlier time in power. Rinse, repeat. Due to the low educational and intellectual level of the Israeli electorate and the high level of internal fragmentation, this strategy works equally well for all parties and has never yet failed.

Over the last several decades, Israel has been mostly headed by Bibi Netanyahu as Prime Minister. With a few breaks, he’s been the Prime Minister for 16 years. In general, Bibi uses rhetoric designed to appease his secular lumpen base, allies himself with parties to his right, and follows very milquetoast policies, preferring to appease our nearest enemies rather than crushing them. All problems are swept under the rug. Externally, Bibi’s focus is on securing continued American patronage and signing treaties with various Arab and African states. Internally, he has presided over the Israeli economic boom, which takes a barbell shape. On one side is the I-Tek economy running on the smartest 5% of Israelis producing various advanced technology, ad-tech, malwaretising, weapons and spyware. On the other is the low-tech sector powered by cheap and poor quality Arab labor from within Israel, Yehuda and the Shomron, and Gaza. These are tied together by low interest rates, inflationary policies and skyrocketing costs of living, primarily driven by housing prices comparable to those of Switzerland.

With regards to internal politics, Bibi has followed a standard playbook. His enemies on the left are despised by an Israeli public which remembers the second intifada well and uses “leftist” as a curse word. His enemies to the center are easy to associate with those on the left. With regards to his enemies on the right, he has in turn brought them into his coalition and set them up to fail. One example is Lieberman, who in his previous incarnation was a rightist hawk, promising that if he were made defense minister, Ismail Haniyeh, the head of Hamas, would be decapitated within 48 hours. Bibi made him defense minister. Haniyeh is alive and well. Lieberman was forced to pivot, and announce to his constituents (non-Hebrew speaking Soviet retirees) that the real enemy was Haredim and Bibi, in whose coalition they sat. He later neutralized Moshe Feiglin, who posed a threat from the libertarian right, with similar tactics. Before Saturday, Bibi was well on his way to neutralizing Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich using the same playbook, bringing them into the coalition and setting them up to fail spectacularly.

One area in which Israel differs from its Western managerial state peers is the role which the military plays. The IDF has been coasting on its victories in 1967 and 1973 for the last half century. Since then, it has neither won a war nor attempted to win a war, and its generals could not even formulate a cohesive statement describing what victory would look like in any given conflict. This has not resulted in existential disasters to date because our neighbors are mostly also American satrapies, with the exception of Syria which is too weak to present an existential threat. The military role of the IDF in periodic unconventional conflicts with Hezbollah, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the IS in the Sinai has been to beat them back enough that the conflict could be swept under the carpet and life could continue as before.

With regards to Israeli society, the IDF largely functions as a forced educational institution, where Israeli youths can be inducted, tested, classified and indoctrinated. Politically, it is very leftist, proudly presenting to the world its gay and transgender officers, female soldiers in tight uniforms dancing on TikTok and so forth. Shortly before the attack, it announced that females would be allowed to serve in its special operations and combat units, in accordance with the philosophy of all progressive states. Even in the aftermath of the attack, it has chosen to focus on the alleged combat heroics of one of its female soldiers and to downplay the rape, torture, murder and kidnapping which most of them were subjected to after being faced with an armed enemy. The steady decline of the prestige of the IDF and its combat units over the last two decades is linked to this, as well as the perceived muzzling of soldiers in their response to Arab terror attacks by their officers.

From the perspective of its leaders, the IDF represents a paycheck, authority and prestige. Retiring at a high rank and with good standing in the good old boys’ club promises access to sinecures funded by Western NGOs like the New Israel Fund, lucrative arms deals, consulting gigs in the US and Europe, in short, the opportunity to make millions. A political career is also on the table. In order to access all of these, a senior officer must not step on the toes of any of the people who matter over his decades in the service. Many senior officers hold extreme leftist views, as evidenced by the participation of their wives in leftist organizations dedicated to Palestinian rights, the statements of those officers once they retire, and the semi-open participation of officers in the IDF’s elite units in the massive leftist demonstrations against the government over the last half year. Examples of the sort of officer who rises to the top in this environment include extreme leftists Yair Golan and Mossi Raz, and moderate leftist Benny Gantz, who was Bibi’s defense minister, then his competitor for the Prime Minister seat and has just joined the emergency government coalition.

Israel’s policies with regards to Hamas were one thing agreed upon by Netanyahu’s coalition, the opposition and the IDF leadership. “Quiet begets quiet.” “They don’t really want to kill us, that’s just rhetoric.” “All people want the same thing-a decent life for their family.”

Specifically, this has manifested in the issuing of entry permits to many thousands of Arab laborers from Gaza, the disarmament of civilian security teams in the Gaza envelope under Bibi while Gantz was the minister of defense, extreme reluctance to use overwhelming force in response to Hamas probes, the transfer of billions of dollars and huge volumes of imported goods to Hamas over the last decade and a half, free water and electricity provided to Gaza by Israel (to the extent of sending repair teams to fix infrastructure providing power to Gaza when it was knocked out by Hamas missiles, as other missiles continued to fall in the area!)

The response to date

In response to the attack, the GOI has issued many bombastic statements and been assured of support from various foreign states which had spent the last several decades pressuring it on behalf of the Palestinian population and its welfare. A total mobilization has been declared, with hundreds of thousands of reservists mobilized. These have mostly been staged outside Gaza but have not yet invaded. The Israeli Air Force, Navy and artillery have been firing into Gaza. The previous practice of warning the inhabitants of target buildings to evacuate, then destroying them and claiming that this represents a degradation of Hamas “infrastructure” may have been abandoned-Palestinian Twitter has contradictory reports. Water and electricity, which Israel hasMost recently, the IDF has advised the million Arabs living in the North half of Gaza to move to the South half within the next 24 hours, drawing condemnation from various Western politicians.

Aside from some cross-border indirect fire, Hezbollah has not joined the battle. Arabs in pre-1967 Israel and Judea and Samaria have not responded to Hamas’ call for pogroms and murders against Jews, except for a few attempts at riots which were met with a very aggressive response by Jewish civilians and, to some extent, IDF soldiers. The Arabs have been staying off the roads and largely quiet. The estimated 400K illegal assault weapons in Arab hands have not come into play.

Strategic aspects

The war can continue in one of four ways:

1. An isolated Gaza operation, allowing the IDF to largely focus on Gaza. Right now, this seems to be most likely.

2. Hezbollah joins the war, forcing Israel to pause the Gaza operation and flex North.

3. Hezbollah, Palestinian and Israeli Arabs join the war, resulting in a civil war situation similar to that faced by Syria last decade.

4. Number 3, combined with an invasion by Syria and Iranian conventional and unconventional forces. It seems that the recent dispatching of a carrier group to the Eastern Mediterranean by the US Navy is aimed at preventing this scenario.

Indecisiveness, weakness and high losses combined with slow progress in a Gaza invasion all increase the likelihood of moving down the list.

Additionally, it is not clear what the formal goal of the GOI is for the Gaza operation. What is the desired end state? I can think of four possibilities, one worse than the next:

1. Expulsion of the Arabs. This would be condemned as a crime against humanity and result in sanctions hurting our I-Tek economy, crippling the essential ability of Israeli politicians to go shopping in Europe and retired Israeli generals to make millions off consulting contracts and arms deals.

2. Reinstating direct rule over Gaza, as was the case before Oslo. This would be condemned as colonialism, resulting in the same sanctions as above. It would also require a continued high level of mobilization, and fighting an open ended counterinsurgency as Hamas cells would attack IDF troops in Gaza, resulting in continued Israeli casualties and Arab ones. The latter would be leveraged as propaganda, motivating more sanctions.

3. Replace Hamas with another Arab proxy ruling structure, as Hamas was originally intended to be a counter to Fatah. Maybe moderate Palestinian Islamic Jihad is interested in the job. When it turns out they are more interested in killing Jews than stability and money, we can invade again, overthrow them and give the job to the moderate terrorists of the Lions’ Den jihad group.

4. Kill a bunch of Hamas cadre and Arab civilians, declare the remaining ones to be moderate and chastened, withdraw, funnel Western aid money into Gaza for rebuilding everything we destroyed. Do it all over again in a decade, maybe with a peace rave festival with 10,000 attendees, and a Pride Parade outside the border fence this time.

Since the policy of the establishment for decades has been to sweep the issue under the rug and to cuck, I am sure that it fervently desires the last option. The only problem is the optics. There have been far too many Jews murdered and kidnapped all at once. What is worse is that many were the wrong kind of Jews: not arsim, Haredim or settlers, but upper middle class secular Jews, related to tycoons, journalists, security officials. All of these people will not accept a face saving cuckold maneuver so easily. Their former leftist positions, their advocacy on behalf of Palestinians, will force them to be aggressive and uncompromising in their demand for meaningful vengeance.

Political aspects, internal and external

This happened on Bibi’s watch. Accounts must be settled. To prevent this, Bibi has formed an emergency government, which Benny Gantz joined. Lapid wisely declined. Bibi’s move if the war ends ingloriously will be to pin the blame on Gantz, whom he is positioning as the strategic architect. Bibi’s opposition has been trying to get him removed and hopefully convicted of something, and now they finally have a case. The only problem is their own complicity. Assuming Israel does not descend into a regional or civil war, there will be a huge judicial and political struggle.

Our leftists have been shocked and injured to the point that many are issuing calls for ethnic cleansing and vengeance which would be extreme even coming from Rabbi Kahane. Simultaneously, they are looking for a coping strategy which will allow them to project blame externally. Already, we are hearing explanations that the IDF failed because it was forced to protect Judea and Samaria. If these areas, 20 times larger than Gaza, had been given to the Palestinians as Gaza was, the resulting economy of force would have allowed the IDF to protect the Gaza envelope, the Judea envelope and the Samaria envelope effectively. So it is the settlers’ fault. Soon, they will explain that if only the Haredim served, the IDF would have had enough troops to keep the massacre from occurring.

Externally, the initial outpouring of support is already starting to die down. Various Muslims and other antisemites are franticallyexplaining that reports of Hamas atrocities were faked or exaggerated. The Palestinians have switched gears from bragging about their rapes, kidnappings and murders, posting evidence on social media, to crying about the casualties they are taking in Gaza. Soon, pictures of dead and mutilated Gazan Arab women and children, real or not, will flood social media. Those whose thoughts and emotions are dictated by images on a screen change their minds when the images change.

Economic aspects

Our I-Tek professionals are mobilized. The low-tech economy’s Arab workers are locked down and potentially will riot. This is not a sustainable situation in the long term. The economy will have to downgrade and restructure to a more sane shape if it continues, which our upper and middle classes view as anathema-their assets are all based off inflationary debt and the bubble can not pop spectacularly. American loans and other aid might be used to keep the party going for a little while.

The future

Most of the people whose voice matters in Israel either currently want to punt or will soon want to punt. Their dearest wish, which they currently feel ashamed to voice, is to return to the pleasant dream in which they were living last Friday. Soon they will realize that many other people who matter share this wish, and they will unite to achieve it.

As a Torah Jew, I can not but view this as a painful punishment from God, His attempt to slap us awake since gentler rebukes have failed. If we are determined to roll over and go back to sleep, the next slap will be more painful. In the end, He always gets what he wants. As Eim Habanim Smeicha, the great and tragic Holocaust book by the holy Rabbi Issachar Teichtal, puts it, in halacha there are two legal ways a man can take possession a piece of livestock-by leading it behind him or by driving it before him. It is more pleasant to be led than driven.

May we all merit complete repentance and a return to God’s ways, vengeance upon the wicked to their complete annihilation, and to dwell peacefully in our Land, each man under his own vine and fig tree, speedily, in our days.

PS I am sure there are typos and spelling errors. Please forgive me, I rushed to write this before Shabbat. Shabbat shalom to everyone.