As noted, Israel was already getting crap for the chain link fence with comparatively lightly manned open crossing points and lots of crossing traffic daily. If they had built a concrete wall like the one around the West Bank the crap thrown their way would have been worse.
Now the obvious question in hindsight is “worse than this?” to which the answer is no. But if they knew then what they know now...
It wasn't just settlements, they apparently overran the IDF's Gaza division HQ. And guess what most soldiers didn't have when the terrorists stormed in?
Arms rooms only work if you have at least minutes of warning. Trying to find the guy who has the combination and lives a quarter mile down the road while you are under attack is likely to end poorly. You need the weapons distributed in the houses of the people who are assigned to them. Military units on the border need them available immediately in the barracks when your troops might awaken to someone blowing in the gate. Trust your people.
Relearning the lesson that everyone is their own first responder. It doesn't matter what country you live in or the nature of the event. Speaking on the issue of police officers that have been taken hostage when their station was captured. Spokesman Dean Elsdunne -
"I think that anybody who's not wearing combat boots and was not there should not rush to make judgments. It's very easy to make decisions and opinions retrospectively under fluorescent lights. But what I can tell you is that there's a lot of questions that need to be answered and they will be answered..."
While it was going down I was wondering why every household did not have at least a handgun. I guess that kibbutz or all are pacifists. In most us states many citizens would be running to the sound of the guns.
There are tight gun control laws in Israel, almost to the point of making NYC or LA look permissive in comparison.
Even after the excrement hit the ventilation impeller, the internal ministry (whatever it's called, I forget offhand) only temporarily relaxed the licensing requirements, and upped the per-day ammo purchase amount from 50 to 100 rounds. I imagine more than a few here could burn through that in less than an hour at their local shooting range. I know I could, and I usually only bring a few weapons to the range, where I'm shooting at one paper target at a fixed distance that isn't interested in shooting back at me.
[edit] The 50/100 is owning or possessing, not buying. This doesn't make it any better, mind you.
Funny, they made their own citizens sitting ducks, even while screaming fearfully about all the unfriendly neighbors who wanted to drive them into the sea. I do not find it coincidental that many of their dual citizenship denizens of our own capitol building perpetually vote to take away OUR Second Amendment rights. Make it make sense.
The 50 rounds isn't the purchase limit. It's the possession limit. You cannot legally posses or have in your control more 50 rounds of ammo. (now 100).
~2% of Israeli citizens have a permit to OWN a gun. Not carry it, to own one at all. And these are only good for pistols with no more than 50 rounds of ammo.
yeah, safe rooms without guns are just a place to be burned to death when dealing with Hamas.
But Israel is hard core anti- personal gun ownership. Stricter than most European countries.
Hopefully now they will reconsider that. the moves so far have been half-measures - handing out a few tens of thousands of weapons, but not actually changing policy to allow more widespread ownership and general possession.
Literally every adult in Israel should be packing at all times
Thoughtful synopsis of the things that have plagued all successful societies, and you can bet Rudyard Kipling would have agreed. Too bad it will never be read by the people who need to read it the most.
One more lesson - don't hoist yourself on your own petard: “WHAT DO YOU know about Hamas?
That it’s sworn to destroy Israel? That it’s a terrorist group, proscribed both by the United States and the European Union? That it rules Gaza with an iron fist? That it’s killed hundreds of innocent Israelis with rocket, mortar, and suicide attacks?
But did you also know that Hamas — which is an Arabic acronym for “Islamic Resistance Movement” — would probably not exist today were it not for the Jewish state? That the Israelis helped turn a bunch of fringe Palestinian Islamists in the late 1970s into one of the world’s most notorious militant groups? That Hamas is blowback?
This isn’t a conspiracy theory. Listen to former Israeli officials such as Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Segev, who was the Israeli military governor in Gaza in the early 1980s. Segev later told a New York Times reporter that he had helped finance the Palestinian Islamist movement as a “counterweight” to the secularists and leftists of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Fatah party, led by Yasser Arafat (who himself referred to Hamas as “a creature of Israel.”)
“The Israeli government gave me a budget,” the retired brigadier general confessed, “and the military government gives to the mosques.”
“Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation,” Avner Cohen, a former Israeli religious affairs official who worked in Gaza for more than two decades, told the Wall Street Journal in 2009. Back in the mid-1980s, Cohen even wrote an official report to his superiors warning them not to play divide-and-rule in the Occupied Territories, by backing Palestinian Islamists against Palestinian secularists. “I … suggest focusing our efforts on finding ways to break up this monster before this reality jumps in our face,” he wrote.
They didn’t listen to him. And Hamas, as I explain in the fifth installment of my short film series for The Intercept on blowback, was the result. To be clear: First, the Israelis helped build up a militant strain of Palestinian political Islam, in the form of Hamas and its Muslim Brotherhood precursors; then, the Israelis switched tack and tried to bomb, besiege, and blockade it out of existence.
In the past decade alone, Israel has gone to war with Hamas three times — in 2009, 2012, and 2014 — killing around 2,500 Palestinian civilians in Gaza in the process. Meanwhile, Hamas has killed far more Israeli civilians than any secular Palestinian militant group. This is the human cost of blowback.
“When I look back at the chain of events, I think we made a mistake,” David Hacham, a former Arab affairs expert in the Israeli military who was based in Gaza in the 1980s, later remarked. “But at the time, nobody thought about the possible results.” https://theintercept.com/2018/02/19/hamas-israel-palestine-conflict/
Note the date - this was published 19 February 2018... Also note that this Intercept article from 2018 appears to have been plagiarized from this 2009 Wall Street Journal article - https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB123275572295011847
Yep - "Hamas traces its roots back to the Muslim Brotherhood, a group set up in Egypt in 1928. The Brotherhood believed that the woes of the Arab world spring from a lack of Islamic devotion. Its slogan: "Islam is the solution. The Quran is our constitution." Its philosophy today underpins modern, and often militantly intolerant, political Islam from Algeria to Indonesia.
After the 1948 establishment of Israel, the Brotherhood recruited a few followers in Palestinian refugee camps in Gaza and elsewhere, but secular activists came to dominate the Palestinian nationalist movement.
At the time, Gaza was ruled by Egypt. The country's then-president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, was a secular nationalist who brutally repressed the Brotherhood. In 1967, Nasser suffered a crushing defeat when Israel triumphed in the six-day war. Israel took control of Gaza and also the West Bank.
"We were all stunned," says Palestinian writer and Hamas supporter Azzam Tamimi. He was at school at the time in Kuwait and says he became close to a classmate named Khaled Mashaal, now Hamas's Damascus-based political chief. "The Arab defeat provided the Brotherhood with a big opportunity," says Mr. Tamimi.
In Gaza, Israel hunted down members of Fatah and other secular PLO factions, but it dropped harsh restrictions imposed on Islamic activists by the territory's previous Egyptian rulers. Fatah, set up in 1964, was the backbone of the PLO, which was responsible for hijackings, bombings and other violence against Israel. Arab states in 1974 declared the PLO the "sole legitimate representative" of the Palestinian people world-wide." https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB123275572295011847
If you look at the precepts of Islam, a religous fantatic should be conservative and dedicated to the same concepts at the basis of the Old Testament and the Torah and Talmud. They concentrated on the peaceful side and forgot about the violent, virulent strain of jihad that has gotten out of control. But Islam vs the Marxist terrorists that Russia was training in the 70s seemed something they could use and control better.
In the end, it is always a choice to believe and take the path of jihad - of war - and become a terrorist to achieve your aims. It is THEIR agency, their choice.
As has been said, if the Arabs stopped fighting there would be peace in the Middle East. If Israel lays down its arms (or become complacent) the Islamic Radicals will kill all the Israelis, as so recently demonstrated.
Nope - "Washington, D.C. has suddenly become very interested in the Muslim Brotherhood. American policymakers are debating whether to engage non-violent elements of the Muslim Brotherhood network, both inside and outside the United States, in the hope that such engagement will empower these “moderates” against violent Wahhabi and Salafi groups such as al-Qaeda. Unfortunately, this strategy is based on a false assumption: that “moderate” Islamist groups will confront and weaken their violent co-religionists, robbing them of their support base.
This lesser-of-two-evils strategy is reminiscent of the rationale behind the Cold War-era decision to support the Afghan mujahideen against the Soviet army. In the short term, the U.S. alliance with the mujahideen did indeed aid America in its struggle against the Soviet Union. In the long term, however, U.S. support led to the empowerment of a dangerous and potent adversary. In choosing its allies, the U.S. cannot afford to elevate short-term tactical considerations above longer-term strategic ones. Most importantly, the U.S. must consider the ideology of any potential partners. Although various Islamist groups do quarrel over tactics and often bear considerable animosity towards one another, they all agree on the endgame: a world dictated by political Islam. A “divide and conquer” strategy by the United States will only push them closer together." https://www.hudson.org/national-security-defense/the-muslim-brotherhood-s-u-s-network
OT: Our SPR has half the oil it had under Trump. We're in an undeclared war against US energy independence, and we have less ability to defend ourselves and our interests abroad.
I broadly agree with your criticism. But, just focusing on the SPR, how do you integrate the substantial increase in 🇺🇸 domestic production capacity that's occurred over the last 10 years?
As constantly noted by The Other Sal, we still need to import foreign oil while exporting our domestic oil because our refineries are constructed to refine only certain grades. There has not been a major refinery built since the 1970's. Expansion of existing refineries maintains the same grade limitations. A year ago, TOS put out a video on the Administration's plans to sell from the SPR and, per the signed EO, was expected to drop to 550 million barrels. Here we site at a record low of 350 million barrels with no replenishment in sight. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbZ8SD6vgEg
Well, those countries along with OPEC and our own green oligarchs. The US citizens will pay the foreign oil barons at the pump and the green oligarchs through their income taxes and utility bills.
Our SPR has not been this low since it passed this level being filled the first time.....
Even full, the SPR is inadequate for our needs - it should be 3x the current size at least. And the releases did nothing to stabilize prices in the US, it has just made the US weaker.
we demonstrate our unresolve and unseriousness to the world when we both limit domestic production, and beg despots to increase their production at the same time.
There was a belief among Israeli policy-makers that Hamas was just a bunch of crooks who could be mollified by trade. 17,000-20,000 work permits would have gone a long way to alleviate poverty in Gaza but would also have weakened the reliance on Hamas for resources among the local population.
Even if Hamas were a bunch of crooks only seeking extortion, it was foolish to think trade would have been beneficial to Hamas' business model.
Turns out that the declarations of hate were sincere and the temporary reduction in attack attempts was to lull the Israelis into a false sense of security.
The West generally has a higher status for merchants and trade than most of the world. That means that prestige-seeking behaviors are going to be very different.
"In hindsight it is easy to second guess the border around Gaza..." It sure is. If that single picture of the Gaza barrier wall in the CDR's article is representative of the whole structure around Gaza it seems to be very inferior to the West Bank barrier wall. That'd be a starting point in a critique. Compare the Gaza barrier to this:
You would think that the Israelis ...more than anyone...would be skeptical of a wall holding back a surprise breach given what happened to them at the Bar Lav Line...
Israeli politics is infamous for wild emotional swings.
Natan Scharansky was surprised at that when he moved there and saw the wild swings in reception to Russian Jews and the unfounded optimism about the "Peace" process.
Israeli's have constructed fairly impenetrable walls elsewhere. Just a guess--Israeli intelligence didn't foresee attacks by ultralight to breach the fence for a rapid infantry attack by ATV and foot. Further, it doesn't appear there was any close by military support to protect a very attractive, easily accessible and basically undefended target. Huge intelligence failure, total lack of imagination, essentially inviting attack. None should have been a surprise although hindsight is always 20-20.. In the long run and judging from worldwide response, Israel has lost big time. They will destroy Gaza, capture/kill a few terrorists, worldwide opinion will turn against their "overreaction," creating a "mass humanitarian crisis" among largely "innocent civilians" and the world, basically the US will pay to rebuild Gaza.
As always, CDR Sal us gives more to chew on, ponder and hopefully digest. Israel is falling into the same trap as the rest of the west. The over dependence on newer technologies and less on old well worn principles and disciplines. When I write of Israel, I'm also speaking of the west including CONUS. Do we LISTEN-LISTEN? Do we listen to what is actually being said? But also, do we listen to what is not being said? The difference is much like the words, see, watch and observe, they all enter through the eyes. The main difference is brain involvement. Brain involvement brings an old discipline into play, "Discernment". The Egyptians were warning Israel of odd behavior patterns beginning to happen on the southern tip of Gaza. Here's the importance of how we deal with a "data packet of intel from Egypt", we have two options, we can just throw it on the ground at his feet OR we can actually take it back with us to the planners, then we thank him, for his contribution. Why should we through this trouble? This is all about understanding the most valuable commodity in the Middle East, rich or poor, the saving of face. He is risking his life. Your actions just might be an opening for more intel, just think about it. Many times a solution is not a big thing, just one intel data packet that HQ needs. Solutions are more like a mosaic with many pieces of different size and color.
It's also been said that what Egypt provided was not sufficiently specific as to be actionable. It was (supposedly) more 'the Palestinians are planning something big in the next few months' then 'Hamas plans a massive artillery, ground, air and sea terror attack in the first half of October'.
Kevin, actually, no. This depends on how you define "actionable". Egypt gave a warning about changes in patterns of behavior among the locals of Gaza. We are back to the "actionable" definition or standard. Kevin, do you look at the word "actionable" and immediately attach the word kinetic? Here's the importance of this question, let's use a fictional story for example. Of course, you are the subject in the role of clandestine services officer, you have a tight cover story and know it well, everything is in order. "In the course of your day, you meet with a trusted contact and he gives you exactly one data point, "You're being watched". You ask the natural questions, who, what, when, where and why? To all of the questions, the answer is the same, 'I don't know.' " Kevin, was the data point actionable? The fact you asked questions proved it was actionable and changed your thought processor model.
The Palestinians are always planning something. Just like the Mexican cartels are always 'planning something violent'. Does that mean Cartel X will attack Cartel Y or are they planning on invading Laredo this weekend? So without details, don't know.
Regarding the "border wall" and technology. From this NYT article - https://archive.li/CvYkC - it looks like your point about technology was aided by basic failure to implement redundant networking:
> Hamas took advantage of that weakness by sending aerial drones to attack the cellular towers that transmitted signals to and from the surveillance system, according to the officials and also drone footage circulated by Hamas on Saturday and analyzed by The New York Times.
> Without cellular signals, the system was useless. Soldiers stationed in control rooms behind the front lines did not receive alarms that the fence separating Gaza and Israel had been breached, and could not watch video showing them where the Hamas attackers were bulldozing the barricades. In addition, the barrier turned out to be easier to break through than Israeli officials had expected.
end quote.
This is a mind-blowing failure to think things through. Not physically wiring these things up was insanely stupid. The people who made that decision have the blood of their fellow citizens on their hands because (as Hamass noticed) it introduced clear single points of failure into the system. Running wire (fiber) back to local POPs connected to the same internet as connected all the kibbutzim AND having a cellular backup would have removed this. Not saying Hamass couldn't have worked around it but it would have been a lot harder and they probably couldn't have taken almost the entire network offline in one go so there would have been warnings.
(Note it is entirely possible that the NYT is wrong about this and I'm doing the planners a disservice, but IF the article is correct in general thrust, even if it is wrong on some details, this is just astounding )
Well, I'm sure it saved tens of thousands of dollars per tower and was considered best practice for leading commercial firms by the MBAs they consulted. Win Win!
Assuming that the NYT isn't wrong (which is generally not good odds, but let's roll with it for now), the attacks on the cell towers alone should have been enough to tell someone in the chain that something very WRONG was going down.
Either there was no monitoring of the towers, or the people watching the monitors went stupid to the level of cartoon villain henchmen and didn't notice.
As I understand the operation, the cell towers were disabled just prior to the first attack across the border which was to the bases where the monitoring troops were. Which leads to a whole second question of why they had the monitors close to the border (or at least why they didn't have a back up location somewhere)
It appears the monitoring center was rapidly overrun. Also overrun, in possibly the same base, was the division and brigade command structures while most of their subordinate units were dealing with attacks themselves.
I'm not certain it was an operator error issue, I think it was a massive design failure resulting from a failure of imagination or an absence of effective red-teaming and/or the designer ignoring issues people raised. This combined with the whole 'we must tightly control all weapons' philosophy of Israel (And the US military too) resulted in the troops who, not being able to line up at the arms room for the interminable process of issuing their weapons, got involved in gunfights while unarmed.
I want to say that is too stupid to be credible but, as governments are want to do, it is entirely plausible someone saw the criterion of "have communications on redundant systems" and assumed commercial systems counted.
This is why you need a decent class of middle managers, not just idiot optimists.
Perhaps Millenium Challenger 2002 redux??? Complacency is like the inertia of a heavy object in motion. It's really a bear to alter the object's trajectory. An attitude of complacency is really convenient when circumstances have all appearance of being in a predictable, steady state condition. And it just seems to to take for granted that conventional wisdom and underlying assumptions still hold true... up till the point tragedy strikes.
Cdr Sal…. Thank You!! Superb series. Brilliant summary w #4 here. Excellent commentary by so many other usual suspects. We are all in your debt. Bravo Zulu.
The lesson here is when (not if) we will having the same discussions on the lax US border security and how it led to a similar massacre of US civilians in one form of terrorism or another.
I'm not talking about a horde of terrorists attacking Brownsville Texas. I'm talking about sleeper agents infiltrating the US through the open southern border and meeting at some predetermined time and place and given weapons by one of these domestic terrorist groups. Hardly far fetched IMO.
Thank you Sal! This series has been excellent and some challenging food for thought.
Hope for the best, prepare for the worst. All of those settlements should have been hardened:
- anti-vehicle ditch around a perimeter
- blockhouse at entry roads
- arms room with more than 16 rifles. e.g. rifles, gpmg, grenades, m203, LAWS, mortar with he and flares
- better drills
- mortar pit
- redundant commo
learn from the way the Romans recruited retired legionnaires to border settlements
btw: "If you can run a bulldozer through a wall, it isn’t a wall" it wasn't a dozer, it was a bucket loader.
Better than a bulldozer for taking down walls. You can dump debris out of your way easier for expanding the hole.
better for a chain link fence, not as good for a concrete wall fronted by an anti-tank ditch. I expected more from the Israelis
As noted, Israel was already getting crap for the chain link fence with comparatively lightly manned open crossing points and lots of crossing traffic daily. If they had built a concrete wall like the one around the West Bank the crap thrown their way would have been worse.
Now the obvious question in hindsight is “worse than this?” to which the answer is no. But if they knew then what they know now...
It wasn't just settlements, they apparently overran the IDF's Gaza division HQ. And guess what most soldiers didn't have when the terrorists stormed in?
Arms rooms only work if you have at least minutes of warning. Trying to find the guy who has the combination and lives a quarter mile down the road while you are under attack is likely to end poorly. You need the weapons distributed in the houses of the people who are assigned to them. Military units on the border need them available immediately in the barracks when your troops might awaken to someone blowing in the gate. Trust your people.
Relearning the lesson that everyone is their own first responder. It doesn't matter what country you live in or the nature of the event. Speaking on the issue of police officers that have been taken hostage when their station was captured. Spokesman Dean Elsdunne -
"I think that anybody who's not wearing combat boots and was not there should not rush to make judgments. It's very easy to make decisions and opinions retrospectively under fluorescent lights. But what I can tell you is that there's a lot of questions that need to be answered and they will be answered..."
https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/israeli-police-reject-allegations-of-sluggish-response-to-hamas-attack/3016265
While it was going down I was wondering why every household did not have at least a handgun. I guess that kibbutz or all are pacifists. In most us states many citizens would be running to the sound of the guns.
Israel's government went anti gun ownership a long time ago.
Too late they are handing out arms.
If they survive don't be surprised if they ban guns again.
There are tight gun control laws in Israel, almost to the point of making NYC or LA look permissive in comparison.
Even after the excrement hit the ventilation impeller, the internal ministry (whatever it's called, I forget offhand) only temporarily relaxed the licensing requirements, and upped the per-day ammo purchase amount from 50 to 100 rounds. I imagine more than a few here could burn through that in less than an hour at their local shooting range. I know I could, and I usually only bring a few weapons to the range, where I'm shooting at one paper target at a fixed distance that isn't interested in shooting back at me.
[edit] The 50/100 is owning or possessing, not buying. This doesn't make it any better, mind you.
Funny, they made their own citizens sitting ducks, even while screaming fearfully about all the unfriendly neighbors who wanted to drive them into the sea. I do not find it coincidental that many of their dual citizenship denizens of our own capitol building perpetually vote to take away OUR Second Amendment rights. Make it make sense.
Not being the Almighty, "make it make sense" is well beyond my capabilities.
(It's probably a good thing I'm not, either. My hypothetical godhood would be along the Old Testament model.)
The 50 rounds isn't the purchase limit. It's the possession limit. You cannot legally posses or have in your control more 50 rounds of ammo. (now 100).
My mistake, I misremembered the article I read on the issue.
That only makes it even MORE stupid, however.
50 rounds is a minimum monthly expenditure for carry guns in my world. Minimum. Monthly.
YMMV.
~2% of Israeli citizens have a permit to OWN a gun. Not carry it, to own one at all. And these are only good for pistols with no more than 50 rounds of ammo.
yeah, safe rooms without guns are just a place to be burned to death when dealing with Hamas.
But Israel is hard core anti- personal gun ownership. Stricter than most European countries.
Hopefully now they will reconsider that. the moves so far have been half-measures - handing out a few tens of thousands of weapons, but not actually changing policy to allow more widespread ownership and general possession.
Literally every adult in Israel should be packing at all times
the 'safe rooms' were not what the rich build here. they were anti-rocket shelters, often with no lockable door
They got what they voted for.
It started with powered kites.
Thoughtful synopsis of the things that have plagued all successful societies, and you can bet Rudyard Kipling would have agreed. Too bad it will never be read by the people who need to read it the most.
Kilping was canceled. He was an imperilaist who has nothing to say to our woke generation. Ship me somwheres east of Suez....
I prefer Sommerset. It all comes down to blowing their heads off.
One more lesson - don't hoist yourself on your own petard: “WHAT DO YOU know about Hamas?
That it’s sworn to destroy Israel? That it’s a terrorist group, proscribed both by the United States and the European Union? That it rules Gaza with an iron fist? That it’s killed hundreds of innocent Israelis with rocket, mortar, and suicide attacks?
But did you also know that Hamas — which is an Arabic acronym for “Islamic Resistance Movement” — would probably not exist today were it not for the Jewish state? That the Israelis helped turn a bunch of fringe Palestinian Islamists in the late 1970s into one of the world’s most notorious militant groups? That Hamas is blowback?
This isn’t a conspiracy theory. Listen to former Israeli officials such as Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Segev, who was the Israeli military governor in Gaza in the early 1980s. Segev later told a New York Times reporter that he had helped finance the Palestinian Islamist movement as a “counterweight” to the secularists and leftists of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Fatah party, led by Yasser Arafat (who himself referred to Hamas as “a creature of Israel.”)
“The Israeli government gave me a budget,” the retired brigadier general confessed, “and the military government gives to the mosques.”
“Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation,” Avner Cohen, a former Israeli religious affairs official who worked in Gaza for more than two decades, told the Wall Street Journal in 2009. Back in the mid-1980s, Cohen even wrote an official report to his superiors warning them not to play divide-and-rule in the Occupied Territories, by backing Palestinian Islamists against Palestinian secularists. “I … suggest focusing our efforts on finding ways to break up this monster before this reality jumps in our face,” he wrote.
They didn’t listen to him. And Hamas, as I explain in the fifth installment of my short film series for The Intercept on blowback, was the result. To be clear: First, the Israelis helped build up a militant strain of Palestinian political Islam, in the form of Hamas and its Muslim Brotherhood precursors; then, the Israelis switched tack and tried to bomb, besiege, and blockade it out of existence.
In the past decade alone, Israel has gone to war with Hamas three times — in 2009, 2012, and 2014 — killing around 2,500 Palestinian civilians in Gaza in the process. Meanwhile, Hamas has killed far more Israeli civilians than any secular Palestinian militant group. This is the human cost of blowback.
“When I look back at the chain of events, I think we made a mistake,” David Hacham, a former Arab affairs expert in the Israeli military who was based in Gaza in the 1980s, later remarked. “But at the time, nobody thought about the possible results.” https://theintercept.com/2018/02/19/hamas-israel-palestine-conflict/
Note the date - this was published 19 February 2018... Also note that this Intercept article from 2018 appears to have been plagiarized from this 2009 Wall Street Journal article - https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB123275572295011847
Hamas is a spin-off of the Muslim Brotherhood, a transnational Islamic revolutionary movement.
Yep - "Hamas traces its roots back to the Muslim Brotherhood, a group set up in Egypt in 1928. The Brotherhood believed that the woes of the Arab world spring from a lack of Islamic devotion. Its slogan: "Islam is the solution. The Quran is our constitution." Its philosophy today underpins modern, and often militantly intolerant, political Islam from Algeria to Indonesia.
After the 1948 establishment of Israel, the Brotherhood recruited a few followers in Palestinian refugee camps in Gaza and elsewhere, but secular activists came to dominate the Palestinian nationalist movement.
At the time, Gaza was ruled by Egypt. The country's then-president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, was a secular nationalist who brutally repressed the Brotherhood. In 1967, Nasser suffered a crushing defeat when Israel triumphed in the six-day war. Israel took control of Gaza and also the West Bank.
"We were all stunned," says Palestinian writer and Hamas supporter Azzam Tamimi. He was at school at the time in Kuwait and says he became close to a classmate named Khaled Mashaal, now Hamas's Damascus-based political chief. "The Arab defeat provided the Brotherhood with a big opportunity," says Mr. Tamimi.
In Gaza, Israel hunted down members of Fatah and other secular PLO factions, but it dropped harsh restrictions imposed on Islamic activists by the territory's previous Egyptian rulers. Fatah, set up in 1964, was the backbone of the PLO, which was responsible for hijackings, bombings and other violence against Israel. Arab states in 1974 declared the PLO the "sole legitimate representative" of the Palestinian people world-wide." https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB123275572295011847
important in this context, the Brotherhood and Hamas are deadly enemies of the current Egyptian Gov.
And ISIS, Hamas and Al-Qaeda all come from the same source.
If you look at the precepts of Islam, a religous fantatic should be conservative and dedicated to the same concepts at the basis of the Old Testament and the Torah and Talmud. They concentrated on the peaceful side and forgot about the violent, virulent strain of jihad that has gotten out of control. But Islam vs the Marxist terrorists that Russia was training in the 70s seemed something they could use and control better.
In the end, it is always a choice to believe and take the path of jihad - of war - and become a terrorist to achieve your aims. It is THEIR agency, their choice.
As has been said, if the Arabs stopped fighting there would be peace in the Middle East. If Israel lays down its arms (or become complacent) the Islamic Radicals will kill all the Israelis, as so recently demonstrated.
Having "The Clevers" isn't restricted to Israel.
Nope - "Washington, D.C. has suddenly become very interested in the Muslim Brotherhood. American policymakers are debating whether to engage non-violent elements of the Muslim Brotherhood network, both inside and outside the United States, in the hope that such engagement will empower these “moderates” against violent Wahhabi and Salafi groups such as al-Qaeda. Unfortunately, this strategy is based on a false assumption: that “moderate” Islamist groups will confront and weaken their violent co-religionists, robbing them of their support base.
This lesser-of-two-evils strategy is reminiscent of the rationale behind the Cold War-era decision to support the Afghan mujahideen against the Soviet army. In the short term, the U.S. alliance with the mujahideen did indeed aid America in its struggle against the Soviet Union. In the long term, however, U.S. support led to the empowerment of a dangerous and potent adversary. In choosing its allies, the U.S. cannot afford to elevate short-term tactical considerations above longer-term strategic ones. Most importantly, the U.S. must consider the ideology of any potential partners. Although various Islamist groups do quarrel over tactics and often bear considerable animosity towards one another, they all agree on the endgame: a world dictated by political Islam. A “divide and conquer” strategy by the United States will only push them closer together." https://www.hudson.org/national-security-defense/the-muslim-brotherhood-s-u-s-network
Yep, and our government opened the borders for every crazy, raping, killer and rug mule in the world.
Governments are basically two things, 1.Geedy and 2. stupid.
Ours is also incompetent and dangerous.
See https://www.hudson.org/national-security-defense/the-muslim-brotherhood-s-u-s-network
OT: Our SPR has half the oil it had under Trump. We're in an undeclared war against US energy independence, and we have less ability to defend ourselves and our interests abroad.
It's like our energy policy is written in Tehran
I broadly agree with your criticism. But, just focusing on the SPR, how do you integrate the substantial increase in 🇺🇸 domestic production capacity that's occurred over the last 10 years?
As constantly noted by The Other Sal, we still need to import foreign oil while exporting our domestic oil because our refineries are constructed to refine only certain grades. There has not been a major refinery built since the 1970's. Expansion of existing refineries maintains the same grade limitations. A year ago, TOS put out a video on the Administration's plans to sell from the SPR and, per the signed EO, was expected to drop to 550 million barrels. Here we site at a record low of 350 million barrels with no replenishment in sight. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbZ8SD6vgEg
Yea, very apt counter-point. Total domestic refining capacity really does look to have flatlined over the last 40-50 yrs.
as in no new refineries. too hard to 'permit'
just volume upgrades to old ones
It's not the permit process, with the headlong charge to EVs, why spend untold millions to provide to a diminishing demand?
Green and EV are a dream. EV will take 50 to 100 years to replace more tha about ten percent of vehicles.
Green energy should be called Make Russian and Iran Rich Again.
Well, those countries along with OPEC and our own green oligarchs. The US citizens will pay the foreign oil barons at the pump and the green oligarchs through their income taxes and utility bills.
you forgot China
"Free Trade" i.e. deindustrialization of the America made China rich. Electric vehicles will only make them even richer.
concur
Our SPR has not been this low since it passed this level being filled the first time.....
Even full, the SPR is inadequate for our needs - it should be 3x the current size at least. And the releases did nothing to stabilize prices in the US, it has just made the US weaker.
we demonstrate our unresolve and unseriousness to the world when we both limit domestic production, and beg despots to increase their production at the same time.
Or Beijing (with Davos acting as a cutout/intermediary).
"...look at those nations Israel relies on that also host cells of hatred for Jews and Israel."
Hell, the US has one of those "cells of hatred" in the Congress.
and our colleges
On our streets.
Crossing our southern border
There was a belief among Israeli policy-makers that Hamas was just a bunch of crooks who could be mollified by trade. 17,000-20,000 work permits would have gone a long way to alleviate poverty in Gaza but would also have weakened the reliance on Hamas for resources among the local population.
Even if Hamas were a bunch of crooks only seeking extortion, it was foolish to think trade would have been beneficial to Hamas' business model.
Turns out that the declarations of hate were sincere and the temporary reduction in attack attempts was to lull the Israelis into a false sense of security.
It's hard for us in the west to believe that some people would be content to kill and live in poverty than work and trade and be prosperous.
The West generally has a higher status for merchants and trade than most of the world. That means that prestige-seeking behaviors are going to be very different.
they reopened the border on Sep 28 to 20000 workers a day
"In hindsight it is easy to second guess the border around Gaza..." It sure is. If that single picture of the Gaza barrier wall in the CDR's article is representative of the whole structure around Gaza it seems to be very inferior to the West Bank barrier wall. That'd be a starting point in a critique. Compare the Gaza barrier to this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_West_Bank_barrier
https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fosu-wams-blogs-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fblogs.dir%2F126%2Ffiles%2F2009%2F03%2Fimg_2800.jpg&f=1&nofb=1&ipt=8ea59438ab896b60095a175b1cada5592a3553b9647349bdac3a01be4d00ea7c&ipo=images
My understanding is a lot of effort was to use the wall to prevent tunneling.
You would think that the Israelis ...more than anyone...would be skeptical of a wall holding back a surprise breach given what happened to them at the Bar Lav Line...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRqGovKp278
Israeli politics is infamous for wild emotional swings.
Natan Scharansky was surprised at that when he moved there and saw the wild swings in reception to Russian Jews and the unfounded optimism about the "Peace" process.
I understand that the guy who designed "the iron wall' just joined the national unity government, so how much introspection is it going to get?
can't cite the FM number, but the one that describes building field obstacles and minefields, leads with a sentence like:
Any field obstacle not covered by both observation and fires is a waste of effort...
Israeli's have constructed fairly impenetrable walls elsewhere. Just a guess--Israeli intelligence didn't foresee attacks by ultralight to breach the fence for a rapid infantry attack by ATV and foot. Further, it doesn't appear there was any close by military support to protect a very attractive, easily accessible and basically undefended target. Huge intelligence failure, total lack of imagination, essentially inviting attack. None should have been a surprise although hindsight is always 20-20.. In the long run and judging from worldwide response, Israel has lost big time. They will destroy Gaza, capture/kill a few terrorists, worldwide opinion will turn against their "overreaction," creating a "mass humanitarian crisis" among largely "innocent civilians" and the world, basically the US will pay to rebuild Gaza.
Israeli police was present at the music festival but was insufficient to stop the attack.
They were there ot take care of drunken teenagers not terrorists.
As always, CDR Sal us gives more to chew on, ponder and hopefully digest. Israel is falling into the same trap as the rest of the west. The over dependence on newer technologies and less on old well worn principles and disciplines. When I write of Israel, I'm also speaking of the west including CONUS. Do we LISTEN-LISTEN? Do we listen to what is actually being said? But also, do we listen to what is not being said? The difference is much like the words, see, watch and observe, they all enter through the eyes. The main difference is brain involvement. Brain involvement brings an old discipline into play, "Discernment". The Egyptians were warning Israel of odd behavior patterns beginning to happen on the southern tip of Gaza. Here's the importance of how we deal with a "data packet of intel from Egypt", we have two options, we can just throw it on the ground at his feet OR we can actually take it back with us to the planners, then we thank him, for his contribution. Why should we through this trouble? This is all about understanding the most valuable commodity in the Middle East, rich or poor, the saving of face. He is risking his life. Your actions just might be an opening for more intel, just think about it. Many times a solution is not a big thing, just one intel data packet that HQ needs. Solutions are more like a mosaic with many pieces of different size and color.
It's also been said that what Egypt provided was not sufficiently specific as to be actionable. It was (supposedly) more 'the Palestinians are planning something big in the next few months' then 'Hamas plans a massive artillery, ground, air and sea terror attack in the first half of October'.
Kevin, actually, no. This depends on how you define "actionable". Egypt gave a warning about changes in patterns of behavior among the locals of Gaza. We are back to the "actionable" definition or standard. Kevin, do you look at the word "actionable" and immediately attach the word kinetic? Here's the importance of this question, let's use a fictional story for example. Of course, you are the subject in the role of clandestine services officer, you have a tight cover story and know it well, everything is in order. "In the course of your day, you meet with a trusted contact and he gives you exactly one data point, "You're being watched". You ask the natural questions, who, what, when, where and why? To all of the questions, the answer is the same, 'I don't know.' " Kevin, was the data point actionable? The fact you asked questions proved it was actionable and changed your thought processor model.
The Palestinians are always planning something. Just like the Mexican cartels are always 'planning something violent'. Does that mean Cartel X will attack Cartel Y or are they planning on invading Laredo this weekend? So without details, don't know.
Regarding the "border wall" and technology. From this NYT article - https://archive.li/CvYkC - it looks like your point about technology was aided by basic failure to implement redundant networking:
> Hamas took advantage of that weakness by sending aerial drones to attack the cellular towers that transmitted signals to and from the surveillance system, according to the officials and also drone footage circulated by Hamas on Saturday and analyzed by The New York Times.
> Without cellular signals, the system was useless. Soldiers stationed in control rooms behind the front lines did not receive alarms that the fence separating Gaza and Israel had been breached, and could not watch video showing them where the Hamas attackers were bulldozing the barricades. In addition, the barrier turned out to be easier to break through than Israeli officials had expected.
end quote.
This is a mind-blowing failure to think things through. Not physically wiring these things up was insanely stupid. The people who made that decision have the blood of their fellow citizens on their hands because (as Hamass noticed) it introduced clear single points of failure into the system. Running wire (fiber) back to local POPs connected to the same internet as connected all the kibbutzim AND having a cellular backup would have removed this. Not saying Hamass couldn't have worked around it but it would have been a lot harder and they probably couldn't have taken almost the entire network offline in one go so there would have been warnings.
(Note it is entirely possible that the NYT is wrong about this and I'm doing the planners a disservice, but IF the article is correct in general thrust, even if it is wrong on some details, this is just astounding )
Well, I'm sure it saved tens of thousands of dollars per tower and was considered best practice for leading commercial firms by the MBAs they consulted. Win Win!
Assuming that the NYT isn't wrong (which is generally not good odds, but let's roll with it for now), the attacks on the cell towers alone should have been enough to tell someone in the chain that something very WRONG was going down.
Either there was no monitoring of the towers, or the people watching the monitors went stupid to the level of cartoon villain henchmen and didn't notice.
As I understand the operation, the cell towers were disabled just prior to the first attack across the border which was to the bases where the monitoring troops were. Which leads to a whole second question of why they had the monitors close to the border (or at least why they didn't have a back up location somewhere)
Leading to make me think the second option, in my second paragraph. Not a good sign.
It appears the monitoring center was rapidly overrun. Also overrun, in possibly the same base, was the division and brigade command structures while most of their subordinate units were dealing with attacks themselves.
I'm not certain it was an operator error issue, I think it was a massive design failure resulting from a failure of imagination or an absence of effective red-teaming and/or the designer ignoring issues people raised. This combined with the whole 'we must tightly control all weapons' philosophy of Israel (And the US military too) resulted in the troops who, not being able to line up at the arms room for the interminable process of issuing their weapons, got involved in gunfights while unarmed.
All in all it sounds like heads should roll.
Or at least any that didn't roll literally, when beheaded.
The Fort Hood massacre on a larger scale
I want to say that is too stupid to be credible but, as governments are want to do, it is entirely plausible someone saw the criterion of "have communications on redundant systems" and assumed commercial systems counted.
This is why you need a decent class of middle managers, not just idiot optimists.
We're just going to have to add this one to the Cdr Sal hall-of-fame edition.
Perhaps Millenium Challenger 2002 redux??? Complacency is like the inertia of a heavy object in motion. It's really a bear to alter the object's trajectory. An attitude of complacency is really convenient when circumstances have all appearance of being in a predictable, steady state condition. And it just seems to to take for granted that conventional wisdom and underlying assumptions still hold true... up till the point tragedy strikes.
Cdr Sal…. Thank You!! Superb series. Brilliant summary w #4 here. Excellent commentary by so many other usual suspects. We are all in your debt. Bravo Zulu.
Excellent conclusion to an excellent series.
> Israel is one of the richest, most educated and advanced societies on the planet.
>Doomsday Cults Sometimes Take Over Entire Cultures
"Trust me, there is an inferior culture of one ethnicity which must be destroyed in order to save the superior culture of another ethnicity"
LOL
The lesson here is when (not if) we will having the same discussions on the lax US border security and how it led to a similar massacre of US civilians in one form of terrorism or another.
Sorry, I dont get the connection between the two issues here
The Israel-Palestine conflict does not resemble the US border security problem at all, how do you even make an analogy here
It's again pretty interesting again how Americans again keep referring any problem to themselves, through
I'm not talking about a horde of terrorists attacking Brownsville Texas. I'm talking about sleeper agents infiltrating the US through the open southern border and meeting at some predetermined time and place and given weapons by one of these domestic terrorist groups. Hardly far fetched IMO.
Not at all farfetched. More like factual.
Detroit, Minneapolis, and Brooklyn are pretty far from the southern border, and closer to the Gaza problem