Technical Predictions

Towards indigenous Middle Eastern ways of community defense

“We got tired of waiting for the IDF to show up, and grabbed the stick welder”

Among many other watershed aspects of the Simchat Torah massacre, the most significant one may be this: it represents the moment that the main social contract between the (secular) Israeli public and the Government of Israel (the GOI) collapsed. The unwritten contract went like this: “we, the GOI, will take 80% of your earnings, three years of your time and then another month a year, provide an East European quality of life at Swiss prices…BUT! In exchange, we will keep you safe. There will not be another Auschwitz here.” And, lo and behold, there is another Auschwitz here.

The natural response, on behalf of a normal secular Israeli who doesn’t see much of a religious significance to living here, is to fish out his foreign passport and start looking for cheap flights to California. The people who stay here will be the losers and crazies and fanatics, myself included. With this, we must win, and so with this, we will win. Fortunately, I think this segment includes most of our Jewish population.

But don’t you see the people uniting for the war?

Of course! 300K Israelis have returned from overseas since the war began, most to help with the war effort. I see an unprecedented wave of unity and even religious revival, soldiers wearing tzitzit, etc. Hopefully, this will last the duration of the war.

Why, what happens after the war?

Here’s how the war is going: the IDF’s offensive is so far successful and not taking too many casualties, thank God. I pray that this will continue. Hamas is not capable of large-scale fire and maneuver. The performance of its elite Al Nukhba force, which was fought off by some lightly armed community security teams in the Gaza envelope, suggests that its main force units in Gaza will not be able to stop the IDF or inflict crippling losses. Having lost face, the IDF’s leadership is doing its best to reclaim it, and doing the best it can in the operation, working methodically and employing plenty of fire support. Unless foreign political pressure causes the IDF to stop, it will conquer Gaza over the next several months. At which point…what?

The GOI still has not stated a concrete political goal or desired end state for the war. It’s been pretty clear, however, that it is not planning to expel the population of Gaza. Egypt and Jordan have announced that they will not take any refugees, even threatening war over the issue. The US has made it clear that it will not permit expulsion, and if there’s one thing the IDF is, it’s dependent on America.

The IDF is also not cut out for an indefinite occupation of Gaza. The best special operations and conventional units of the IDF have spent the last two decades conducting counterterrorism missions in the West Bank. What did this get us? Jenin and Tulkarem, small towns within the 1967 boundaries, are now less safe for the IDF than Fallujah and An Najaf were for US forces in 2008, to the point that the IDF requires battalion and brigade-sized forces with close air support to maneuver there, and that they are now producing rockets and IEDs in quantity and quality. Almost every mission brings accusations of civilian casualties. Administering and controlling the 2 million hostile Arabs of Gaza in a dense urban area full of weapons, is a recipe for a constant flow of casualties and atrocity stories, real or not.

Our Quislingsteins have not gone anywhere. Some are doubling down on the appeasement rhetoric, others already demanding a ceasefire, ostensibly to free Israeli hostages. Imagine how they will behave after the war: every terrorist attack or dead civilian in occupied Gaza will serve as the starting point for a national conversation. These conversations only ever end with withdrawal.

Therefore, at the end of the war, we will be more or less back where we began: Gaza, full of millions of Arabs, ruled by one flavor of Jew-hating terrorist or another (since that’s all our Arab political scene has to offer.) About the best they could do would be to bring in Mohammed Dahlan and give Gaza to him, allowing him to pacify the people as best he knows (death squads and disappearances, a Saddam-like rule of terror, in short, the normal political language of the multiethnic Middle East, maybe with modern Chinese surveillance technology.)

Now THAT’S what you call a “security subcontractor”!

All other options are even worse, involving rule by “moderate” Hamas survivors, the Islamic Jihad and so on. For extra 1980s Lebanon-style hideousness, they could slap a congress of sorts on top and sprinkle the whole thing with an international peacekeeping force! Just like old Gaza, new Gaza will be the perfect breeding ground for terrorists, some of whom will inevitably slip through the best security measures, and commit atrocities. Over time the atrocities will take on a log-normal distribution: many with a few victims, a few with many victims, some Black Swans. The security state will, of course use all of this to successfully demand increased budgets, driving taxation higher.

Faced with that, knowing that the GOI can’t be trusted to keep enemies from swarming across its borders and committing mass atrocities, as it becomes obvious that October 7th was not some aberration but represents a permanent decay in the ability of the Westernized secular IDF to provide security within the 1948 borders. what will Israelis do? Many will just leave, disproportionately the well-to-do, secular and professional.

It’s not this poor family’s reaction that’s significant, but that our Quislingstein media runs this story in the middle of a war

Those who are not willing to leave will resort to a classic measure in times of insecurity and governmental failure: form militias.

What?!

You know, militias. Like they have in Syria, Iraq, Pakistan, the Ukraine, Latin America, Africa…

But that’s for…

Dysfunctional non-Western countries whose corrupt armed forces can’t or won’t maintain a monopoly on violence? Yes, exactly.

The typical arrangement the state has with militias in those places where it’s still functional is this: the armed forces keep the borders from being overrun and the skies from being overflown by conventional enemy forces. The militias do what needs to be done but would be too inconvenient and politically expensive for the state. Many times, it turns out that necessary measures which the state absolutely could not allow itself are very easily achieved by militias. For instance, the expulsion of hostile populations, reprisals (including rocket strikes against enemy civilians,) and all the other accoutrements of 20-21st century civil wars.

How did it come to this? I thought we were a normal, modern country!

We are a paradoxical country.

Israel’s independence was won by altruistic right wing insurgents dedicated to waging war on the global empire occupying the Land, then claimed by socialist bureaucrats. They believed that war was a temporary phenomenon, soon to be made obsolete by the new society and new man which they would develop. Despite its basically atheistic and unwarlike nature, the bureaucracy won one war after another, eventually conquering the Biblical heartland and creating something that had not existed since the Bar Kochba revolt: communities of deeply religious Jews living all over the Land of Israel and ready to fight for it. Despite its earlier commitment to creating an independent, socialist country, the bureaucracy sold its sovereignty to the largest capitalist empire on the planet. And in spite of its commitment to peace, the bureaucracy built a giant military, armed to the teeth and hoovering up a huge budget every year.

That military eventually did what all government agencies not under immediate external threat do: it rotted and became a patronage scheme. First it lost the ability to fight offensive ground wars against peers. Then it lost the ability to fight offensive ground wars against near-state actors. All of this culminated with October 7th, where the IDF demonstrated that it was no longer even capable of defending the territory and citizens of the State of Israel from attacks by raggedy militias with a rudimentary combined arms ability. In short, the IDF had degenerated to almost complete dysfunction.

Well, what had it been doing all of these years? Basically, except for special operations, aerial warfare against Syria and air/counter-artillery defense, the IDF has been cutting back on its ground warfare capabilities under the premise that it needed to become a smaller, smarter army. This was half-achieved: it has certainly become smaller. Instead of troops, its steadily growing budget went towards pensions, various mentally ill progressive experiments and iTek boondoggles that turned out not to work.

These Idiocracy-style turrets proved absolutely useless at containing 80 IQ savages, but provided much needed career boosts and budget payouts for thousands

In parallel with these processes, the IDF lost all strategic depth, with the result that it had no more room to maneuver. All wars would now start inside Israel’s territory, inside its towns and villages. Of course, taking initiative, getting inside the enemy’s OODA Loop, destroying his ability to react and then himself-all of these things were not even on the table. Victory in conventional warfare and counterinsurgency was not even held to be theoretically possible, let alone desirable.

The result is that, mobilized for its first operational-scale ground offensive in 40 years, the IDF was instantly reduced to acting like a Haredi schnorrer begging for money to marry off his daughter. Body armor, weapons and other fundamentals turned out to be in scarce supply. Logistics were lacking, with the mobilized troops living off the charity of the population in the South. Our small, professional, effective force turned into a large, disheveled, poorly equipped mob.

Well, the Israelis will say, if we are to defend ourselves in the ranks of a poorly equipped mob, at least let it be our local poorly equipped mob. A Jewnjaweed, if you will.

You’re crazy!

All historical change is crazy, in the sense that it’s paradoxical and drastic. Like a truck engine, history converts reciprocating motion into linear progress. This is due to the basic orneriness and stupidity inherent in human nature: you can’t make a plan without either force majeure or other people coming along and screwing it up. Every development (thesis) creates its own nemesis (antithesis), and from their conflict, the next new development is born (synthesis). Snooty European academics call this Hegelian dialectics. The great Turkish philosopher Heraclitus described the result as “everything flows”.

This process, systems birthing their opposite, can be seen in recent history. The great empires of the 20th century morphed into their opposite, with the USSR moving from a revolutionary collection of councils to a tyrannical hierarchy, Nazi Germany transforming into something resembling Stalinist Russia in its last years, and the USA, a former beacon of freedom and middle class Christian values, grew a tumorous Cathedral whose metastases ensure that you’re never more than an hour’s drive away from a Drag Queen Story Hour, an abortion clinic and a BLM riot. Paradox is the cardiac pulse of historical progress.

The antithesis of Israel’s raggedy original people’s army which won wars is its modern day professionalized army which loses them. The synthesis of the two will be a professionalized army focusing on running the Iron Dome and David’s Sling as it promotes transgenderism and gender equality, combined with extremely politically incorrect, lightly armed and ruthless militias. If an external enemy invades, these militias will defend their homes or die trying, as the civil defense teams of the Gaza envelope did (despite having been previously disarmed by the GOI.) If an internal enemy raises its head, the militias can react in a unequivocal and clear way.

Most importantly, there is something the IDF no longer can do: take initiative and capture ground, creating strategic depth. This is the key ingredient in warfare. Lack of depth is the reason that within the first 30 minutes of the Simchat Torah war, the battles were taking place inside Jewish towns. The IDF attempted to compensate for lack of depth through technological means, spending massive amounts of money on electrooptical surveillance, obstacles and other sophisticated means, and failed. With depth, you can trade space for time and casualties, you can mobilize your forces, you can continue functioning and supply those forces as the war goes on. Depth is how the Ukraine has been able to fight off Russia for two years. The inability of the IDF to create and maintain depth means no security is possible for the population whose protection is the IDF’s raison d’etre.

Free from governmental oversight, militias can take initiative away from the enemy and create depth. The survival of Israel in its present form is precisely due to the irregular forces of Etzel and Lehi striking the terrorist stronghold of Deir Yassin and striking fear into the hearts of the Arabs, causing many to flee and many others to stop fighting from terror.

This is just blackpilling. The IDF will surely correct the failures that led to October 7th and things will return to normal. There is no need for such radical measures.

I doubt that. The IDF’s post-war inquiries have usually not led to reform but to finding scapegoats, with the Agranat Commission after the Yom Kippur war a prime example. The people in charge of the IDF after the war ends will come from the same senior ranks which were previously unanimous in promoting the policies that caused the Simchat Torah massacre. Their focus will be what it was after the Yom Kippur war: sweeping their friends’ and peers’ failures under the rug so that they can get back to what’s truly important (their own careers). The assurances of the senior military leadership that “what was is not what will be” ring hollow, as they can’t even bring themselves to verbalize “what was”, much less “what will be”.

In any case, I am not prescribing or advocating anything here. The militias will develop on their own, without being called such, and not as the result of a purposeful policy on the part of our establishment, which isn’t really capable of setting and enacting long term policies that don’t involve going with the flow.

But how will this actually happen? How will these militias form? Where will they get weapons? Can a militia even stand up to an invading army? What will the Americans say?

To find out, you’ll have to wait for the next Substack!