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Netanyahu is Finished
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INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, ISRAEL / PALESTINE, POLITICS, RELIGION AND FAITH
‘Netanyahu is finished’
The Bibi doctrine—his belief that he could control Hamas—compromised Israeli security and has now begat a bloody war.
Decades ago I spent three years writing The Samson Option (1991), an exposé of the unstated policy of American presidents going back to Dwight Eisenhower to look the other way as Israel began the process of building an atomic bomb. The right or wrong for Israel, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, was not the point of the book. My point was that what America was doing was known throughout the Third World, as it was then called, and our duplicity made our worries about the spread of nuclear weapons another example of American hypocrisy. Since then others have undertaken far more comprehensive studies, as some of the most highly classified Israeli and US documents have become public.
I chose not to go to Israel to do my research in fear of running afoul of Israeli national security law. But I found Israelis living abroad who had worked on the secret project and were willing to talk to me once I indicated I had information from American intelligence files. Those who worked on such highly classified materials have remained loyal to Israel, and a few of them became lifelong friends of mine. They have also remained in close touch with former colleagues who stayed in Israel.
This is an account of the past week’s horrific events in Israel, as seen by a veteran of Israel’s national security apparatus with inside knowledge of recent happenings.
The most important thing I needed to understand, the Israeli insider told me, is that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “is finished. He is a walking dead man. He will stay in office only until the shooting stops . . . maybe another month or two.” He served as prime minister from 1996 until 1999 and again, as leader of the right-wing Likud Party, from 2009 to 2021, returning for a third stint in late 2022. “Bibi was always opposed to the 1993 Oslo Accords,” the insider said, which initially gave the Palestinian Authority nominal control over both the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. When he returned to office in 2009, the insider said, “Bibi chose to support Hamas” as an alternative to the Palestinian Authority, “and gave them money and established them in Gaza.”
An arrangement was made with Qatar, which began sending hundreds of millions of dollars to the Hamas leadership with Israeli approval. The insider told me that “Bibi was convinced that he would have more control over Hamas with the Qatari money—let them occasionally fire rockets into southern Israel and have access to jobs inside Israel—than he would with the Palestinian Authority. He took that risk.
“What happened this week,” the insider said, “was a result of the Bibi doctrine that you could create a Frankenstein and have control over it.” The attack by Hamas was a direct result of a decision Bibi made, over the protest of local military commanders, “to allow a group of Orthodox settlers to celebrate Sukkot in the West Bank.” Sukkot is an annual fall holiday that commemorates the ancestral journey of Jews into the depths of the desert. It is a weeklong festival that is observed by building an outdoor temporary structure known as a sukkah in which all could share the food that their predecessors ate and viscerally connect to the harvest season.
The request came at a time of extreme tension over another West Bank incident in which Jewish settlers, according to the Associated Press, “rampaged through a flashpoint town” on October 6 and killed a 19-year-old Arab male. The youth’s death, the AP report added, “marked the latest in a surge in Israeli-Palestinian fighting that so far has killed nearly 200 Palestinians this year—the highest yearly death toll in about two decades.”
The Sukkot celebration, held near a Palestinian village known in Hebrew as Haware, would need extraordinary protection, given the tension over the latest violence, and the local Israeli military authorities, with the approval of Netanyahu, ordered two of the three Army battalions, each with about 800 soldiers, that protected the border with Gaza to shift their focus to the Sukkot festival.
“That left only eight hundred soldiers,” the insider told me, “to be responsible for guarding the 51-kilometre border between the Gaza Strip and southern Israel. That meant the Israeli citizens in the south were left without an Israeli military presence for ten to twelve hours. They were left to fend for themselves. And that is why Bibi is finished. May take a few months, but he is over.”
The insider called the attack in southern Israel “the great military failure in Israeli history” and pointed out that “only soldiers were killed in the ’73 war”—the surprise attack on Yom Kippur in which Israel was briefly overrun by Egyptian and Syrian troops. “Last Saturday twenty-two settlements in the south were under control of Hamas for hours, and they went house to house slaughtering women and children.”
There will be a military response, the insider said, noting that 360,000 reservists have been called up. “There is a big debate going on about strategy. The Israeli Air Force and Navy special forces are ready to go, but Bibi and the military leadership have always favored the high-tech services. The regular army has been used primarily as security guards in the West Bank. . . . The reality is that the ground forces are not trained for combat. Don’t misunderstand—there is confidence in the spirit of the troops but not in their ability to succeed in the ‘special situation’ that the soldiers would be facing in a ground assault” in the ruins of heavily bombed Gaza City.
The reservists are now undergoing crash training and a decision of what to do may come by the end of this week, the insider said. Meanwhile, the current bombing of civilian targets—apartment buildings, hospitals, and mosques—no longer includes a token civilian safeguard. In prior attacks in Gaza City, he said, the Israeli Air Force often would drop a small bomb on the roof of a civilian facility to be targeted—it was called “a knock on the roof”—that would theoretically alert noncombatants to flee the building. That is not happening in the current round-the-clock bombing raids.
As for a ground attack, the insider told me that there is a brutal alternative under consideration that could be described as the Leningrad approach, referring to the famed German effort to starve out the city now known as St. Petersburg during World War II. The Nazi siege lasted nearly 900 days and the death toll was at least 800,000 and possibly many more. It is known that the Hamas leadership and much of its manpower “live underground,” and Israel’s goal is to destroy as much of that manpower “without attempting a traditional house-to-house attack.”
The insider added that some Israelis were “made anxious” by the initial statements from world leaders in Germany, France, and England who avowed, in one case through an aide, their total support for an immediate response but added that it should be guided by the rule of law. President Biden reinforced that point in an unscheduled appearance at a White House conference of Jewish leaders Wednesday by pointedly saying that he had recently told Netanyahu: “it is really important that Israel, with all the anger and frustration and just—I don’t know how to explain it—that exists is that they operate by the rules of war—the rules of war. And there are rules of war.”
The option now under consideration, the Israeli insider told me, is to continue the isolation of Gaza City in terms of power supply and the delivery of food and other vital goods. “Hamas now only has a two- or three-day supply of purified water and that, along with a lack of food,” I was told, “may be enough to flush all the Hamas out.” At some point, he said, Israel may be able to negotiate the release of some prisoners—women and children—in return for food and water.
“The big debate today,” he said, “is whether to starve Hamas out or kill as many as 100,000 people in Gaza. One Israeli assumption is that Hamas, which has received as much as $1.6 billion from Qatar since 2014, wants to be seen as a sovereign that takes care of its people. He went on: “Now that President Biden says they are a terrorist state, Hamas may have reason to want to be seen as less hostile and there might be a chance for calm and rational discussion about prisoners—and a release of some of its Israeli hostages, beginning with women and children.” The other prisoners will be treated like prisoners of war, he said, and their release could be negotiated, as has happened in the past.
But, the insider added, “the more we all see” of Hamas brutality on TV and “the more Hamas is seen as another ISIS, time gets short.”
The reality, he said, is that Hamas is not rational and is incapable of any negotiations, and Qatar will not intervene. And, barring some international or third-party intervention, there may be a general ground invasion with untold deaths to all sides and to all prisoners.
The decision to invade in full force is Israel’s, and it has not yet been made.
First published by SEYMOUR HERSH October 12, 2023
SEYMOUR HERSH
Seymour Hersh is an American investigative journalist and political writer. He gained recognition in 1969 for exposing the My Lai massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War, for which he received the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting.
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Open Mind and Closed Mind
[There is a] dangerous little catch phrase which advises you to keep an “open mind.” This is a very ambiguous term—as demonstrated by a man who once accused a famous politician of having “a wide open mind.” That term is an anti-concept: it is usually taken to mean an objective, unbiased approach to ideas, but it is used as a call for perpetual skepticism, for holding no firm convictions and granting plausibility to anything. A “closed mind” is usually taken to mean the attitude of a man impervious to ideas, arguments, facts and logic, who clings stubbornly to some mixture of unwarranted assumptions, fashionable catch phrases, tribal prejudices—and emotions. But this is not a “closed” mind, it is a passive one. It is a mind that has dispensed with (or never acquired) the practice of thinking or judging, and feels threatened by any request to consider anything.
What objectivity and the study of philosophy require is not an “open mind,” but an active mind—a mind able and eagerly willing to examine ideas, but to examine them critically. An active mind does not grant equal status to truth and falsehood; it does not remain floating forever in a stagnant vacuum of neutrality and uncertainty; by assuming the responsibility of judgment, it reaches firm convictions and holds to them. Since it is able to prove its convictions, an active mind achieves an unassailable certainty in confrontations with assailants—a certainty untainted by spots of blind faith, approximation, evasion and fear.
Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand in Her Own Words
Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swamps of the not-quite, the not-yet, and the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration for the life you deserved and have never been able to reach. The world you desire can be won. It exists.. it is real.. it is possible.. it’s yours.”
— AYN RAND
Ever since reading “The Fountainhead” 32 years ago, I have been a huge fan of Ayn Rand’s ideas.
If you haven’t read any of her works, then you definitely don’t understand her. That’s ironic, because she is the clearest, most articulate writer in the English language I have ever read … and I have read a few. If you read everything she wrote, like I did, you will know exactly where she stands, what her most primary assumptions and premises are, and how she reaches her conclusions. Agree or disagree; you will know. I never, in 10 years of schooling with a major in psychology and a minor in philosophy, ever encountered anyone close to that.
This documentary is really the closest thing I’ve yet seen to a reliable autobiography (or biography) of her.
Nearly everything you read about Ayn Rand is wrong. Before I read her, I mistakenly thought she was a “conservative.” That’s not true. She was certainly no leftist, but she wasn’t primarily political; she was primarily philosophical. Her ideas have guided me more as a student and practitioner of psychology and psychotherapy than as a lover of liberty.
The things you read about Ayn Rand are usually the opinions of people who haven’t read a word of her ideas or novels. When challenged with this fact, the more candid ones will say, “Of course I haven’t read her. Why would I?”
Then why have an opinion about someone you haven’t read or tried to understand?
If you’re going to have an opinion about someone or something, you owe it to yourself, most of all, to make sure that opinion is based on the facts.
I cannot believe this movie was made in 2010. I don’t know how I missed it. It’s beautifully done. It draws on some amazing interviews Rand did in her very final years (late 1970s) with people like Mike Wallace (a real journalist, unlike his son), Phil Donahue and Tom Snyder. These were the leftists of her day. Yet they were Jeffersonian compared to the depraved nihilism we find everywhere around us today, a nihilism Rand foresaw and predicted as the inevitable decline of a culture that totally abandons reason (and freedom along with it).
I believe the title is: “Ayn Rand, in Her Own Words.”
The movie absolutely delivers. It’s the best I’ve seen on her. If you are at all interested in her (or anything I post), please do not miss it
Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason
The World is Falling Apart
The esteemed Victor Davis Hanson posted an excellent analysis of what’s really happening in the Middle East and how the Biden-Harris regime are complicit. The Israel War is Joe Biden’s albatross. They say foreign relations don’t affect elections but such rules don’t apply when Islam and Israel are the subjects.
Whatever the White House projects publicly, behind the scenes they will be playing both sides. They will declare support for Israel as they’ve already started doing, but they will quickly reverse that support when they have a smidgen of “evidence” that Israel is engaged in asymmetrical retribution. But here’s the thing. Asymmetrical retribution is the only option for Israel at this point. They’ve pandered, compromised, and restrained themselves for decades. It doesn’t work. They know this now.
Behind the scenes, the Biden-Harris regime will be working with Iran as they’ve done from the start. They’ll be supportive of Hamas as they’ve been from the start. And they will alert their Pro-Hamas base in the United States that they will hold ISRAEL accountable.
But let’s call it what it is. This is not a Biden-Harris operation. This is 100% being driven by the unholy alliance of Barack Obama, the Deep State, the Military Industrial Complex, and the emerging Multipolar World Order. Biden is the scapegoat. Obama is calling the shots. With that said, here’s Victor Davis Hanson…
Israel, Our White-House Absurdities, and the Left’s Empire of Lies
The Biden administration is furiously trying to contextualize its past, unsupportable policies that have sown global chaos, especially in the Middle East. But the more it spins, the clearer its culpability.
Does it really believe that the long-agreed-upon U.S. green-lighting of $6 billion in sanctions relief to Iran has had no role in Iran’s terrorist support of Hamas, whether psychological or material or both? Do they think we are that stupid?
Even a first-grader might surmise that if a terrorist state knows that an impending $6-billion bonanza will shortly arrive in its coffers, then it will more readily in the here and now send arms to Hamas—on the logical assumption that those costs soon will be more than covered, while making the additional assumption that the United States is complicit in its own fungible use of sanctions relief cash, and thus not innately hostile to Tehran’s self-professed agenda. In short, Tony Blinken is either a naif, a fool, or to use his words “misinforming”.
These administration’s megaphones who deny such fungibility always end up mouthing the same arguments as the lying and murderous theocracy in Tehran.
But then why not—given the Biden-appointed Robert Malley, previously known as Obama’s ISIS advisor (and we remember how that worked out in Iraq), and a self-declared expert on Hamas rapprochement, eagerly accepted the offer to restart the disastrous Iran deal and normalize Iranian-American relations?
And Malley was indeed eagerly at work—until he was stripped of his security clearance for his alleged unlawful dissemination of classified documents, and in addition fell under further scrutiny allegedly for treasonous efforts to insert pro-Iranian activists into the State Department.
What also was behind the initial, natural instincts of the State Department’s “U.S. Office of Palestinian Affairs”? On news of the attacks, our State department in Pavlovian fashion immediately posted: “We urged all sides to refrain from violence and retaliatory attacks. Terror and violence solve nothing.”
Yes, as lots of us predicted, that insane virtue signal would eventually be taken down—but only in response to Americans outraged at its amoral inanity.
Was our government’s first inclination to stop Israel’s counter-responses to systematic Hamas murdering? Should Israelis accept another 800, 1,000, or 2,000 dead women and children in the interest of abiding by the instruction of the American “Office of Palestinian Affairs” to avoid “retaliatory attacks”?
For that matter, does the Biden administration admonish Ukraine to refrain from “retaliatory attacks”—since, in its logic, responding to Putin’s “terror” with Ukrainian counter “violence” would “solve nothing”?
Or is it just Israel, a democratic ally, that deserves these sermons?
Or do they not reflect the embarrassing reality that there is a core Democratic base—the toxic Squad, AOC’s Democratic Socialists, the fusion media, and some of the identity politics caucuses—who are Hamas apologists, even if that bankrupt ideology descends into ignoring or condoning the abject slaughter of civilians in their homes?
And are we really to believe, as told, that resumption of hundreds of millions dollars in aid to the Palestinians was also not fungible and used to aid the current murderous agendas of Hamas?
But do not just believe supporters of Israel about that reality.
Instead, read what dissidents in the State Department themselves warned at the time of the dangers of Biden’s resumption of aid to the radical Palestinians: “We assess there is a high risk Hamas could potentially derive indirect, unintentional benefit from U.S. assistance to Gaza. There is less but still some risk U.S. assistance would benefit other designated groups.”
The administration is, of course, back peddling furiously, given its prior appeasement of Iran and Hamas, if not an outright tilt against Israel—again policies that reflected the embarrassing core constituency of the Democratic Party.
Americans should not listen to what Biden’s team now conveniently says, but instead to what it actually does in the upcoming weeks when it is under fire by its base in the new woke Democratic Party, as the Israelis have to go into Gaza, end this toxic death machine, and confront the Hamas global propaganda machine.
A hard rain is soon going to fall abroad.
And the United States better get its house in order, whether defined as standing with its few dependable allies left, securing its own oil and gas supplies, protecting its borders, un-woking and rebooting its suspect military, recalibrating its all too often incompetent and politicized intelligence bureaus—and thus preparing for a world turned upside down.
J. D. Rucker
Kevin McCarthy: Good Riddance to Bad Rubbish
When a previously free country becomes occupied by an authoritarian government illegally installed, and openly committed to the destruction of all individual rights, the first obligation of any opposition is to destabilize that occupation government. Kevin McCarthy missed out on an important opportunity to destabilize the Biden regime by putting it on a constant defensive, through repeatedly impeaching Biden, his VP and every member of his Cabinet (over and over) so it would be impossible for them to govern. McCarthy didn’t do this, or anything close to it, but he did find time to ensure RINOs got their wish to keep paying billions to Ukraine so Hunter Biden can keep his coke and whore habits going indefinitely.
Nice work, McCarthy.
Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason
What Education is NOT
“The best teachers are those who show you where to look, but don’t tell you what to see.”
— Alexandra K. Trenfor
Yes, indeed. In other words: The precise opposite of what teachers do today.
More than ever, today’s universities and primary/secondary schools are indoctrination mills. They don’t merely spew propaganda; they present only one side of the story — implying that any other side is irrational.
It would be rational to teach: “1 plus 1 equals 2. No other answer is correct.”
Most subjects are not like this.
It’s not rational to teach economics solely from the Marxist perspective. It should be taught that capitalism is one point of view, and socialism is another point of view, and explain the differences. Leave the student to decide for himself.
Ditto for ethics. Self-sacrifice as the ideal is one point of view. Individualism is another point of view. Describe both, as well as any other approaches to ethics. Encourage questions. Answer the questions as the proponents of each point of view would answer them. If pressed, some teachers will tell you what they think is correct — but only after presenting all the options.
Ditto for “climate science,” which actually isn’t science (at least according to many scientists). Ditto for disease and vaccination theory. The pharmaceutical companies funded by the government are NOT the final and only authority on the subjects. Learning consists of getting other opinions and facts that contradict the dogma of a Fauci.
The purpose here isn’t merely “fairness,” although fairness and objectivity are important side benefits. The purpose here is to teach a child and young adult HOW TO THINK. Even when giving his opinion, a good teacher shares not just his conclusions; he shares the thinking process that led to his conclusions. Assuming he shares his conclusions at all.
The essence of propaganda is to teach only ONE conclusion and ONE thinking process leading to the conclusion. Call this what you want … it is NOT education.
Yet that’s what almost every child gets today — yes, from government schools. But also from the government. The corporate world. The sports and entertainment worlds. From celebrities. From even churches, if you count leftist churches and the Communist Pope. ONE point of view. That’s all anyone is getting.
Is it any wonder we’re in trouble?
Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason
