"The 21st century has fully begun"

The attack on Israel and the precipice of chaos

Oct 08, 2023

∙ Paid

21:52 Paris time

Netanyahu has asked Lapid and Gantz to join him in an emergency unity government:

He made the offer during a meeting with Yesh Atid leader Yair Lapid and National Unity party leader Benny Gantz held earlier today, saying such a government would be the same in format as the Levi Eshkol government then-opposition leader Menachem Begin joined before the Six Day War in 1967.
Gantz said he was considering entering such a government for the duration of the war but insisted that government would “deal with security challenges alone” and in a manner that would allow “substantive partnership and influence over decision-making in relevant forums” for his party.
The National Unity party leader told Netanyahu that regardless, the current government would receive full backing “for any responsible and determined security action.” Lapid said earlier this evening that he would join “a reduced, professional, emergency government” and said it would be impossible to manage a war with “the extreme and dysfunctional composition of the current cabinet,” essentially calling on the prime minister to remove the far-right Religious Zionism and Otzma Yehudit parties from the government in order for him to bring his Yesh Atid party into the coalition.

The death toll has passed 700.
Among those abducted and taken to Gaza are 11 Thai nationals. Two Thai citizens were killed. (Many Thais work on Israeli farms.) Ten citizens of Nepal were killed, as was a Cambodian student.
Several days ago, a reporter for the Kan public broadcaster tweeted: “The Islamic Jihad organization has started a noisy exercise very close to the border, in which they practiced launching missiles, breaking into Israel and kidnapping soldiers.” It seems they prepared for this in public.
As I write this, fighting continues in at least three communities near the Gaza border, and Hamas continues to shoot rockets.
An Israeli man mistaken for a terrorist was shot dead by police near Ashkelon. A resident of Sderot was shot and wounded after refusing to stop for police.
Airlines have cancelled flights to Israel, leaving Israelis and tourists stranded.
Hamas claimed that its al-Qassam Brigades had sent additional forces into Israeli territory. This is unconfirmed.
Heavy armed clashes were reported in Magen, Kfar Aza, Kissufim, and Kibbutz Be’eri. Hamas claimed it had recaptured the IDF base in Kissufim. Also unconfirmed.
Residents of Sderot have been told to stay indoors, as have residents in the West Bank settlement and kibbutz, Migdal Oz, due to a suspected terrorist infiltration.
The head of Palestinian Islamic Jihad says the group has 30 Israeli captives, and they will only be released if Palestinian prisoners are freed.
The US will move a carrier strike group and fighter jets closer to Israel, including the USS Ford and the ships that support it.
Washington will announce new assistance for Israel: Blinken says the details will be made public later.
Lloyd Austin said the US will provide munitions to Israel, beginning today. (While I’m extremely relieved to know that yes, we do have munitions to spare, and yes, we are capable of moving them rapidly when we put our minds to it, here’s the evidence that we’ve been deliberately slow-walking our support for Ukraine.)
The IDF hit more than 800 targets in Gaza and 120 targets in the Beit Hanoun area which was used for staging invasions into Israel. It struck 150 targets in the Shejaiya neighborhood in Gaza, leveling it. The speed and volume of airstrikes are escalating rapidly.

Slightly more than a month ago, MEMRI published a report titled, “Signs of Possible War in September-October,” by Yigal Carmon, the president of MEMRI. It was based on open sources. It was eerily prescient. He pointed to the following as “some of the factors pointing to the possibility of a war breaking out in the coming months.”

Growing provocations by Hizbullah on Israel’s Northern Border.
Adoption of Gaza fighting methods by Islamist terrorist organizations in the West Bank, such as the firing of rockets and excavation of command-and-control tunnels.
Possibility of clashes in Al-Aqsa during the Jewish holidays in September, potentially sparking violence outside Jerusalem as well.
Increased threats of comprehensive regional war.
Possibility of unprecedented rise in number of Israeli fatalities following use of deadly new weapons, compelling Israel to respond even at cost of comprehensive war.

Hamas leader Saleh ‘Arouri actually said, on television, “We are preparing for a comprehensive war and are discussing this in closed chambers with all the elements and components [of the resistance axis] that are connected to this war.” He added that the resistance axis has “the presence, the motivation and the desire for a regional war to occur, and has an interest in this.” Perhaps statements like this were discounted (except by Carmon) on the grounds that no one would say so publicly if he really meant it?

Also from MEMRI:

Saudi media figure Tariq Al-Homayed wrote that the new war in Gaza in the wake of Hamas’ deadly terror attack on Israel will bring the Palestinians no benefit since it has no plan or strategic goal, as far as the Palestinians are concerned, and it will not cause Israel to withdraw from territory. This war, he says, serves only Iran and brings the Palestinians more suffering; moreover, it is bound to strengthen the Muslim Brotherhood in the region. Accusing Hamas and the other Gaza factions of “trading” in the Palestinian cause, he adds that the timing of the war is not incidental, and is aimed at torpedoing the emerging American-Saudi deal, which could have benefited the Palestinians, strengthened the chances of regional peace and brought the Palestinian Authority back to the center of the stage, thus weakening Hamas and the factions.
Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) Spokesman: The Palestinian resistance factions have succeeded in “exposing the lie of the ‘invincible [Israeli] army.’”
Abu ‘Abdallah Al-Shami, head of the Al-Qaeda aligned Ansar Al-Din Front: “The Al-Aqsa Flood has brought healing—by Allah’s grace and generosity—to the hearts of the believers, demonstrated the weakness of the occupiers, laid bare the traitorous normalizers, and exposed the exploitative Rafidites [a pejorative term for Shi’ites]. All of this has increased the believers’ conviction in the approach of the promise of the Lord of the Former and Latter [prophets, i.e., Muhammad], who said: “The Last Hour will come when the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them, until the Jews hide themselves behind a rock or a tree, and the rock or tree will say: ‘O Muslim, o servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.’ Only the gharqad tree will not speak out, for it is the tree of the Jews.”
‘Amer Al-Sheikh, head of Syrian jihadi group Ahrar Al-Sham: “In a time when the ranks are intertwined and the cards shuffled, we experience conflicting feelings.” On the one hand, “We rejoice over our brothers in Palestine’s victory over the criminal Zionists and pray for their steadfastness and empowerment.” At the same time, “We are saddened that the mullahs of Iran will strive to claim it for the benefit of their sectarian project and to drag it into their negotiations with [other] counties, when they do not care about the fate of our heroic mujahideen.”

Opinions:

For years, Netanyahu propped up Hamas. Now it’s blown up in our faces:

For years, the various governments led by Benjamin Netanyahu took an approach that divided power between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank — bringing Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to his knees while making moves that propped up the Hamas terror group. The idea was to prevent Abbas—or anyone else in the Palestinian Authority’s West Bank government—from advancing toward the establishment of a Palestinian state. Thus, amid this bid to impair Abbas, Hamas was upgraded from a mere terror group to an organization with which Israel held indirect negotiations via Egypt, and one that was allowed to receive infusions of cash from abroad. …
Additionally, since 2014, Netanyahu-led governments have practically turned a blind eye to the incendiary balloons and rocket fire from Gaza. Meanwhile, Israel has allowed suitcases holding millions in Qatari cash to enter Gaza through its crossings since 2018, in order to maintain its fragile ceasefire with the Hamas rulers of the Strip.
Most of the time, Israeli policy was to treat the Palestinian Authority as a burden and Hamas as an asset. Far-right MK Bezalel Smotrich, now the finance minister in the hardline government and leader of the Religious Zionism party, said so himself in 2015. According to various reports, Netanyahu made a similar point at a Likud faction meeting in early 2018, when he was quoted as saying that those who oppose a Palestinian state should support the transfer of funds to Gaza, because maintaining the separation between the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza would prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.

How could this happen?

… The IDF was used to rocket fire without border riots or border riots without rocket fire. It was used to one small group of sea commandos trying to invade Zikim beach or one or two drones or other flying contraptions being sent over the border which could be easily isolated and handled. Instead, Hamas launched 2,000 rockets as a cover.
At the same time that it launched rockets diverting IDF attention, it also launched an entire fleet of motorized hang-gliders (something which has barely ever been discussed by the IDF) which manually dropped bombs on Israeli lookout positions. These motorized hang gliders were a brilliant tactical use of homemade retro technology with a tiny “footprint” (in terms of being able to detect them in advance) customized to pinpoint holes in the IDF’s highly advanced technological apparatus. With the lookout positions taken out, immediately after Hamas sent its forces into different crossing locations.
As the IDF started to notice that its crossing locations were under attack along with the rocket fire, its attention was diverted from the 20 or so entry points, which already lacked lookout positions, where Hamas was ready with additional large volumes of soldiers. At the same time, Hamas did not come into Israel on land with dozens, but with hundreds of soldiers, a volume the IDF never expected. Also, at the same time, Hamas did not penetrate Israel by sea with one group of Hamas naval commandos, but with many groups, something the navy was not ready for.
Let’s also not forget that despite Israel declaring complete victory over all Hamas attack tunnels, it turns out that the terror group figured out a way to dig around a dozen new attack tunnels which the IDF’s fancy billion-dollar technologies failed to detect.
All of this happened virtually simultaneously, but in a specific order to allow each next step to move forward smoothly and further confuse and overwhelm Israeli decision-makers about where and what was going on.

Now, in the awful quiet

For most of us, today is oddly quiet. The cafes are mostly closed, because who’d want to sit in them? The stores are mostly closed, because who’d want to shop? School is cancelled, because who’d want to be far away from their kids? And meetings are mostly canceled, because who can pay attention?
Most of us are scrolling through our social feeds while listening to the radio, and trying to take in the stories we’re reading and hearing: the guy being interviewed on the news, Yoni Asher, describing how he learned from his wife’s “Find My iPhone” app that she and their two girls, 4 and 2, were kidnapped to Gaza; the woman, Adva Adar, who posted to Facebook a picture she found in the news, of an old woman in a jeep, surrounded by young men with guns, and wrote, “This is my grandmother, Yafe Adar, 85 years old, kidnapped with no resistance to Gaza”; the people describing phone conversations with sons, sisters, daughters, mothers, moments before they were murdered; people posting pictures of people with instructions of who to call if you know their whereabouts or what became of them. …

Bret Stephens has a few suggestions:

Israel has a clear interest not just in punishing Hamas but also in ending its rule for good. But how can it do so without either allowing it to descend into anarchy or reoccupying the territory, which Israel doesn’t want?
The answer is to turn Gaza into a zone of shared interests. Despite its anti-Israel public rhetoric, Saudi Arabia has long distrusted Hamas because of its close military ties to Iran. Egypt sees Hamas as the Palestinian arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, which it ruthlessly suppresses at home. The ailing Palestinian Authority views Hamas as its principal rival for power. And the United States long ago designated Hamas as a terrorist group.
Could Israel finally dislodge Hamas from power and invite Saudi Arabia, Egypt and maybe the United Arab Emirates to deploy a substantial peacekeeping force to the strip? That would serve Israel’s interests in toppling an enemy and the Arab states’ interests in diminishing a rival.
Could the Palestinian Authority resume civil control over the strip, with security furnished by Arab states and economic aid from the Gulf states, Washington and Brussels? That would give Ramallah the control over Gaza it has lacked for 16 years, strengthen secular forces in Palestinian politics and free Gazans from extremist tyranny.
Could Israel and Egypt ease their restrictions on Gaza’s economy and the movement of its people in exchange for guarantees that the strip won’t again turn into a haven for havoc? That would give the Saudis the opportunity to show that any agreement they make with Israel would help ordinary Palestinians.

I don’t know how plausible these ideas are.

Michael Weiss spoke to “Karl,” his generally very reliable Estonian intelligence source:

On Ukraine

It is clear that there will not be a big breakthrough this year. Smaller tactical breakthroughs are still possible. The maximum that I see is that Ukraine can still advance towards Tokmak. Capturing Tokmak inside this year would mark a significant achievement. Ukraine is moderately calm about it. There is just so much of Russian defense facilities, lines, and equipment that it wasn’t possible to destroy all of it during the summer. Kyiv has been systemic in destroying it. They can continue with it during the winter to prepare ground for continued offensive push in spring.
Elsewhere on the frontline Ukraine has been mildly successful at Bakhmut. Russia is desperate to hold ground there but they’ve had large losses. Russia tries to push an offensive in the north at the Oskil river. They’ve had minimal success. Maybe a couple of hundred meters. In general there is little news from the frontlines. In mid-September Ukraine was advancing faster. They broke through one line and are now working on widening the area primarily near Verbove and Robotyne. They can’t advance deeper before they widen the flanks.
Russia has started to use more air forces in close proximity to the frontline in the south. This is an indication that the situation is hard for them. Otherwise they wouldn’t bring fighter jets so close. They’ve downed 2-3 of their own planes. Ukraine breached the second defense line near Robotyne, which was the most heavily fortified. But Russia is trying to build an additional line on the go. It is much difficult for them than it was a year ago because now Russia is under strong pressure by Ukrainian forces. Ukraine will need to continue destroying Russia’s artillery systems, air defense, rear support, communication and logistics lines with Crimea to the south and Russia to the east. Russia has been losing some tanks near Kupyansk where they’ve tried to go on offensive themselves.
Senior Ukrainian military officials are very calm about Kupyansk. They don’t think Russia has enough forces there. They do have a high number of troops but many are still going through training and units are frequently redirected to stretches on the frontline where Russia has gaps. They are also estimating that Russia is losing more weapons and equipment than they can produce in all categories but two. The exceptions are ammunition and drones. The number of drones that they are using has gone significantly up since September.
Ukraine must keep Russia under pressure in other parts of the frontline. If Russia has units that are free to operate, of course they will try to take them on to Kupyansk. Neither Ukraine nor Russia is satisfied with the current situation. Russia’s minimum target is still to fully capture Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts and then Zaporizhzhia and Kherson. It is hard to imagine they could in any way attempt to cross the Dnipro river anymore.
Russia is storing missiles for the winter. Here are two important factors.
Ukraine has a much better air defense than a year ago. '
Ukraine’s energy infrastructure is not as strong as it was last autumn. It is more vulnerable to attacks. It is certain that Russia will attempt to destroy energy facilities this winter as well.
A critical loss for Russia is that their navy has been pushed out of half of the Black Sea. They have very limited operating capabilities west of Sevastopol. This means it is difficult to block grain shipments there. A Turkish cargo ship hit a mine this week and in theory Russia could try to mine the trade corridor, but I think this would be going too far because it would affect not only Ukraine but also Turkey-Romania and Turkey-Bulgaria trade routes. Moving the navy more to the east will also affect missile strikes. The Kalibr range will still be enough but Ukrainian air defense will have more time to detect and prepare.
In a larger scope, so much will depend on US elections and what the US policy will be after that. If the US stays on board supporting Ukraine, I can’t see Europe backing away. If the US support falls, the danger of discontinued Western support is great. We can’t 100 percent conclude that Trump winning would equal a catastrophe to Ukraine, but it would mean a lot of unpredictability and uncertainty. It was during Trump’s first term that the US started delivering lethal aid to Ukraine. Obama refused to do it.

On Europe

Polish-Ukrainian relations will calm down after elections in Poland next week. The fight is due to the PiS party needing to compete with the [far-right] Confederation party and paint themselves as extreme nationalists. Slovakian elections don’t play a role in a wider frame. The extent of delivering aid to Ukraine through Slovakia has been much smaller than through Poland and Romania. Fico wouldn’t kill the commercial deals under which Slovakian factories are working for Ukraine.

On Israel and Hamas

Hamas and Russia share the same supporter—Iran. But I would be careful when assessing the degree of Russia’s support for Hamas. Russia has been trying to keep good relations with Israel. Putin and Netanyahu have got along even too well. I’m hesitant to say that Russia would have a significant role in the current conflict. But Russia sees it as beneficial because this will take US attention away from Europe.
The tone of Russian propagandists has not been uniform: Some are publicly pro-Hamas, but ones closer to power are more careful and neutral. They’re not criticizing Israel directly, but they say the US hasn’t done anything to find a solution in the Middle East. But they also show no condemnation of Hamas. Hopefully, Israel will notice this and will be more supportive of Ukraine and critical about Russia in the future.
Israel’s support to Ukraine is like China’s support to Russia. It hasn’t sent any meaningful weapons aid, at least not until mid-summer this year. Israel made a too-easy decision in 2015 when Russia entered Syria. They deemed that Russia would be better than other potential neighbors and it would make sense to get along well. Israel hasn’t grasped that Russia’s influence in Syria has decreased and Iran’s has grown.
How much these events will affect the war in Ukraine depends how long and how serious the war in Israel will be. If it passes in a matter of weeks, there won’t be much impact. If it lasts longer, the US will have two choices. Either it will decide to support both countries as much as it possibly can, or it will say it can’t deal with both of them and start to distance itself from one. It will depend on the next US administration.
I’m not of the opinion the war will be very long. Israel has all the capabilities to destroy Hamas structures in Gaza. Especially so when they use their ground forces, as it now looks like they will. It also seems that Hezbollah will not go into complete war. They would be militarily a much more serious opponent than Hamas. Today’s firing across the border was more a display of solidarity.
It also wouldn’t make sense for Hezbollah to wait with a decision to join the war. Israel has been at its weakest during the first days of the attacks, but from here on out they will only be stronger.
What happened was a total failure of Israeli military intelligence and that of internal service Shin Bet. Mossad can breathe a little easier because Palestine is not under their area of responsibilities.
Such an operation was prepared for months, hundreds of people were aware of it. It wasn’t only a military operation. Propagandists were included. They had professional and forceful videos.
It was surprising that Israel totally lacked defense on the borders.

(Northern European understatement of the year, that last sentence.)

17:06 pm, Paris time

The European Parliament, flying the Israeli flag in solidarity, astonishingly.

If you missed it, I updated yesterday’s newsletter several times here. I’ll do the same with this newsletter, so be sure to check back later in the day. (To do that, just click on the headline of this newsletter. It will take you to the updated web page.)

An email from Seth Frantzman

(Seth is an Israeli journalist.)

I spent the day on the Gaza border. I’ve been on the border for most of the conflicts from 2008 to today and it’s never been like this. The massive death toll, and the fact that Hamas was apparently able to enter Israel at numerous locations without being opposed, including a raid from the sea with rubber inflatables, is shocking. Israel boasts of a lot of hi-tech sensors and “AI” jammed into various systems it puts on tanks and along the border and in UAVs in the sky; that Hamas openly approached the border in daylight with nothing more than men running, motorcycles, and trucks, and was able to assault IDF facilities and take over communities and massacre hundreds, without much opposition to their attack, seems to speak to a massive systematic breakdown in Israel.

There have been many incidents in the past that were much smaller where an after-action report supposedly sought to learn lessons. For instance, there was an incident on the Egyptian border where one man infiltrated and killed several soldiers and it took a while to respond. However, the fact that dozens of men were able to do this and not be detected and immediately confronted is very concerning. It seems to imply that Israeli civilians are not safe or secure from ground attacks. While Iron Dome and lots of technology may work to stop rockets, this kind of failure speaks of a situation in which there was a lot of training for these scenarios but a lack of preparation to actually deal with a large scale assault. Clearly Hezbollah will be watching, since it has vowed to carry out an attack like this.
While it’s clear Israel is in shock, it’s not clear to me that it is being internalized how much of a catastrophe this is. The country got used to a script with Gaza that always involved a few days of fighting and precision air strikes, usually very few casualties and lists of “terror sites” that were struck. But Hamas continued to get stronger and stronger and become more institutionalized, with backing from Doha and other places.
That Hamas feels comfortable sharing ISIS-like videos of stomping on bodies or parading dead bodies through streets is because it has got the message over the years from Doha, Ankara (Western allies) and other countries (Iran, Russia etc.) that its crimes are acceptable. It has done this for years, whether it was terrorism, blowing up buses, or dragging dead bodies behind motorcycles, and it got rewarded with more funding. Even before it captured numerous Israelis today to hold as hostages or desecrated bodies, it had already been holding two Israelis and the bodies of two Israeli soldiers since 2014 and very little was done to get them back. The terror group feels it has impunity. And today it did have impunity.
Whether Israel can recover from the slumber of 15 years of “managing the conflict” with Hamas and publishing endless lists of “victories” in Gaza with “200 terror sites struck” without any meaningful change remains to be seen. Surely the international community is now rushing to “de-escalate” and make sure there is no “disproportionate” response and work on a ceasefire to cement Hamas in power. As far as I know there has been no repercussions for Hamas leadership since back in the early 2000s. They jet set around the Middle East, flying to Doha, Lebanon, or other countries. They aren’t treated as wanted criminals but more rather like the Taliban. They have become “koshered.”
The attacks on Israel today are worse in terms of a death toll than any attack since 1948. They are worse than the first day of 1973, probably, worse than incidents like the Shalit kidnapping, the 2006 attack by Hezbollah, the attacks on the border in the 1950s, or the Ma’alot massacre.
I doubt there will be repercussions for those in charge when this happened. Unlike 1973, I don’t think there is a culture of accountability. I’m sure a few officers in the IDF will be blamed, but the overall massive failure that led to this probably won’t be corrected.

Since last night:

The Israeli death toll is now 600. The toll jumped sharply when IDF forces clearing border areas found more bodies. The IDF has set up a situation room to establish out how many hostages Hamas has taken into Gaza: As of now, no one is sure.
The Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza said that at least 370 Palestinians have been killed since the assault on Israel began and 2,200 have been wounded. Whether this count includes the terrorists is unclear.
US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said there are reports of “several” Americans killed or missing. A British man has been killed and another is missing. The bodies of Germans, Canadians, and Norwegians were discovered at the site of a music festival—a music festival for peace—in southern Israel.
Israel declared war for the first time since 1973. Earlier today the National Security Council approved a state of war in accordance with Article 40 of the Basic Government Law.
As I write this, Israel is still trying to gain control of the areas in the south that were taken over by Hamas.
The head of Hezbollah’s Executive Council threatened to join the “deluge,” and Hezbollah launched mortar shells at Israeli military sites on the Lebanese border “in solidarity.” No injuries were reported. The IDF responded with artillery and drone strikes against Hezbollah infrastructure.

Keep reading with a 7-day free trial

Subscribe to The Cosmopolitan Globalist to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.