Thursday

May 9th, 2024

Insight

'We Are at War'

Mark Steyn

By Mark Steyn

Published October 09, 2023

'We Are at War'

SIGN UP FOR THE DAILY JWR UPDATE. IT'S FREE. Just click here.

On the fiftieth anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, Israelis woke up to a sustained attack on multiple southern towns near the border with the Gaza Strip (half of the so-called "Palestinian Authority" territory). This isn't the usual vicious but random spasm of slaughter in which Hamas likes to engage. It appears to have been very well planned and executed, with thousands upon thousands of rockets barraging Israeli residential areas from the southern border to north of Tel Aviv. It is also an invasion: Hamas used bulldozers to demolish Israeli border barriers, enabling an unknown number of its assets to enter the country - followed by reinforcements:

That's different - as the locals quickly noticed:

We woke up at 6:30 a.m. to alarms, we thought it was the usual rocket attacks but we started hearing gunshots on the street, sounded like it came from the parking of our building. Then we realized something was unusual. We then started seeing Hamas people in pickup trucks. They knocked on the homes of residents, who thought they were Israeli soldiers. They took them hostage.

The twin prongs of the invasion were in evidence at an all-night "nature party": first the revellers came under rocket attack; then, as they fled, they came under gunfire. Dozens of the partygoers were massacred.

There are reports that the Israelis have lost control of parts of their territory, and that Hamas is now in charge of certain communities: Their men patrol the streets in captured Israeli military vehicles - not something most of the world would have thought possible. The first part of this Telegraph montage gives you an idea of the infiltration:

As I write, over 100 150 200 250 300 Israelis are dead, and well over a thousand 1,500 are injured. Dozens of others have been kidnapped, and taken across the border into Gaza. Among the hostages are seventeen Nepalese citizens. The border community of Netiv HaAsara, a town of nine hundred people, has released the names of fifteen civilians killed by terrorists. Just one hospital in Beersheeba has in its emergency ward sixty 114 civilians critically wounded. In the southern city of Ofakim, a family has been seized in its home by terrorists armed with live grenades. Also in Ofakim, a paramedic was shot dead in his ambulance en route to treat the injured. In Sderot, the fire chief has been killed in a battle with Hamas. This is the biggest and most brutal Palestinian assault on the Jewish state ever, and is looking, proportionately and psychologically, like an Israeli 9/11, or Pearl Harbor. For several Mark Steyn Club members, it's hit pretty close to home:

House next to us took a direct hit. Fortunately they were not at home. Our building has much broken glass.

It would seem to me improbable that Hamas could pull off anything as strategically calculated as this on their own. The unprecedented scenes are also a catastrophic Israeli humiliation of even greater improbability: it represents a total failure of intelligence and perhaps something worse, if critical Israeli agencies have fallen to the same enervation and loss of purpose as their American equivalents. The fiftieth anniversary of the Yom Kippur War was surely a date to which one would have expected the Israeli authorities to have been alert.

Even to type that merely underlines its unlikelihood: you don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to regard the intelligence failure as the most striking aspect of the day's events. A central premise of the tiny Jewish state surrounded by merciless enemies is that it's not as other nations - it's sharp enough to know what's coming its way before it arrives. That reputation has just taken a profound hit. If you're one of those mullahs itching to nuke the Jews, today was a very good day.

That said, we know very little at the moment, so one must be cautious about the facts on the ground. My old shingle in the Holy Land, The Jerusalem Post, has a live feed, but one notices it has very little of the cellphone video and Tweets that readers have come to expect in a breaking news story - which suggests not only a fairly major breakdown of communications, but also that a lot of the footage is too graphic and disturbing to publish. Here is one video that has made it out - a Hamas kidnapper cheering "Allahu akbar!" as he arrives back in Gaza with his prize:

And another:

If you can stomach it, here are streetfuls of Palestinians doing their usual happy dance as their heroes arrive back in town with dead Israeli bodies. The fitter ones climb up on the flatbed and start thwacking the corpse with sticks:

So these guys are doing all the things - targeting civilians, especially women and children - that the US and EU argue justifies the toppling of Vladimir Putin. Fortunately for them, the Palestinians enjoy a much better press. The Government of the United States reacted to the unprovoked invasion from a neighboring state by immediately urging Israel "to refrain from violence and retaliatory attacks. Terror and violence solve nothing" - which is in striking contrast to its general approach in Ukraine:

When whoever does the weekend shift at the White House woke up, he/she/zhe evidently felt that was going a bit far even for the Biden Administration and ordered the advice deleted.

For his part, Netanyahu has said simply: "We are at war." And, when you're at war, listening to Joe Biden is a luxury you can't afford. The alleged President supposedly telephoned the Israeli Prime Minister. That's not a call I would have bothered to take. One assumes that Joe has been given a notecard instructing him to remind the PM of the need for "restraint". In our comments section, Chris Hall writes:

I'm afraid that the gloves will have to come off this time. Israel never gets any credit for being nice, so they might as well end this endless war, permanently.

Indeed. How "restrained" is Israel? So restrained that it supplies the invaders' electricity. From the BBC:

Israel's energy and infrastructure minister Israel Katz said that Israel will cut off its electricity supply to Gaza Strip.

"I have signed an order instructing Israel's electric company to stop the electricity supply to Gaza," Katz said in a statement.

So Israel provides the electricity for the Hamas war-room - and now that they've turned it off, the self-same BBC's commentators will be denouncing its lack of "restraint". Have they had Layla Moran on yet? Or Toronto mayor Olivia Chow? Or the Irish foreign minister Micheal Martin? Or the Archbishop of York, who has already issued a "Statement on the Violence in Israel and Gaza"? There'll be enough moral equivalence to choke on in another hour or two.

Meanwhile, the Taliban have apparently asked Iran, Iraq and Jordan for safe passage through their territory so they can join the fight and "conquer Jerusalem":

If they bring even a tenth of the weaponry Thoroughly Modern Milley and the US military gifted them, that could be a significant escalation.

Given all that, underneath the kidnappings and murder of civilians, what's going on? As I said, it's not credible that Hamas could have pulled off anything this coherent unaided. For what it's worth, Obama and Biden's indulgence of Iran's nuclear ambitions destabilised the balance of power in the Middle East. That helped spur the Abraham Accords, under which Israel and the Sunni Arabs became new best friends. The Jerusalem-Riyadh axis is regarded as a threat by Tehran to its own hegemony. Did they decide to act on that threat and try to prise the besties apart? At least one western government thinks so:

The British government believes that Iran is linked to the Hamas attack on Israel and that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is likely to have played a role in training and the supply of weapons (Dipesh Gadher writes).

A Whitehall source said: "The Revolutionary Guards have their fingerprints all over this multifaceted attack. Hamas is just another tool in Iran's campaign against the West."

Those thousands of rockets don't come cheap, but, thanks to Obama and Biden's pallets of cash, that's no problem - they got another six bil from Biden just last month.

UPDATE! From Hamas and Iran:

A Hamas spokesperson earlier told the BBC that the militant group had backing from its ally, Iran, for its surprise attacks on Israel, saying it was a source of pride.

Ghazi Hamad told the World Service's Newshour programme that other countries had also helped Hamas, but he did not name them.

Earlier, a senior adviser to Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, confirmed the Islamic Republic supported the attacks, but did not go into any details.

Hmm...

So what happens next? When the Israelis are retaliating against Gaza, how many of those Gulf regimes will stick with the Abraham deal? And, aside from those newfound chums in Saudi, Israel has far fewer friends around the world than it did fifty years ago. Just contrast the coverage of this unprovoked invasion with that of Ukraine - same time-zone, different rules.

It will be interesting to see whose fingerprints are on this as the facts emerge.

Mark's international bestseller America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It. If you haven't read the book during its first seventeen years, well, you're missing a treat. It's still in print in hardback and paperback. (Buy it at a 77% discount by clicking here or order in KINDLE edition at a 47% discount by clicking here. Sales help fund JWR)

(COMMENT, BELOW)

Mark Steyn is an international bestselling author, a Top 41 recording artist, and a leading Canadian human rights activist. Among his books is "The Undocumented Mark Steyn: Don't Say You Weren't Warned". (Buy it at a 49% discount by clicking here or order in KINDLE edition at a 67% discount by clicking here. Sales help fund JWR)

Columnists

Toons

© 2024 Mark Steyn Enterprises (US) Inc.