World Socialist Web Site – December 2, 2023
Israel resumes its genocidal assault on Gaza, targeting the southern strip
by Thomas Scripps
Israel resumed its genocidal assault on Gaza Friday morning within minutes of the seven-day “operational pause” expiring. By the end of the day, at least 178 more Palestinians had been reported killed, and 589 injured. A woman and her son were killed in Lebanon by Israeli artillery fire, after shooting restarted across the border.
The Netanyahu government blamed Hamas for ending the truce—the latest in a long list of lies. Rocket fire into Israel, still unattributed, came only after Israel claimed that Hamas had failed to honour commitments to free all the women and children it was holding when it released eight hostages yesterday.
Hamas responded that there were no more such hostages to return. They had offered to hand over the bodies of a mother, Shiri Bibas, her 10-month-old son, Kfir, and his four-year-old brother, Ariel, who were killed by an Israeli bomb. “Hamas also offered to transfer the Bibas family’s bodies and release their father [Yarden] for their burial, along with two Zionist detainees,” it said in a statement, but Israeli authorities “remained unresponsive.”
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) had already determined to resume military action, come what may, after repeated complaints that it was “losing momentum”. Citing Hamas’s supposed failure to uphold its side of the bargain was a transparent justification for doing so.
Only a day before, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich had raved that Israel would “chase and destroy” its enemies “everywhere with the help of God.” The pretext for this outburst was an attack in Jerusalem in which two alleged Hamas members killed four people at a bus stop before they were fired on by an armed civilian and then killed by the IDF.
National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir boasted that this proved he was correct to arm civilians with assault rifles. The “hero gunman” died Friday from multiple gunshot wounds inflicted by the IDF, who mistook him for an enemy combatant.
Netanyahu’s response made clear that what is planned in the name of eliminating Hamas is the ethnic cleansing not only of Gaza, but of the West Bank and Israel itself. “All Hamas terrorists will die—in Jerusalem, in Gaza, in the West Bank, and everywhere,” he thundered.
No secret is made of the brutal, criminal character of the second phase of the IDF’s assault now underway. Government spokesperson Eylon Levy told reporters thuggishly, “Having chosen to hold onto our women, Hamas will now take the mother of all thumpings.”
Reviewing the day’s slaughter, Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said, “The results are impressive. Hamas only understands force and therefore we will continue to act until we achieve the goals of the war.”
The destruction wrought in the north of the Gaza strip is now planned for the south, focussing on the city of Khan Yunis, where Israel claims Hamas is headquartered. Leaflets have been dropped on the city, which has already come under repeated and deadly attack, telling residents to evacuate and describing the area as a “dangerous battle zone”.
Given that the vast bulk of northern Gaza’s population is already crowded into the south—with 1.8 million of a 2.3 million total population displaced—there is nowhere to go. The IDF has told civilians to move towards the border with Egypt at Rafah, confirming fears that Israel is seeking to drive the Palestinians out of the strip entirely and into the Sinai desert.
Al Jazeera journalist Zoran Kusovac commented, “the south is now so overcrowded that there is a danger that an all-out ground assault from Israel might leave the people of Gaza with no option but to try to force their way across the border fence into Egypt.
“From the beginning of the conflict, Egypt has been warning that it would not accept any refugees, fearful of political destabilisation and security risks. If it is confronted with that reality, it might find itself in the worst-case scenario of having to use force.”
The humanitarian situation in Gaza was described by the World Health Organization as a “horror movie”. During the truce, roughly 150 trucks of aid entered the strip each day, less than a third of the 500 a day on average before October 7, and less even than the 200 a day believed necessary to meet the most basic needs of the population. Supplies have ground to a halt again with the resumption of the bombing.
International agencies have issued dire warnings. Speaking from the strip’s largest still-functioning hospital, shortly after an airstrike landed barely 50 metres away, UNICEF chief of communications James Elder asked, “Has humanity given up on the children of Gaza?
“I cannot overstate how the capacity has been reduced in hospitals over the last seven weeks. We cannot see more children with the wounds of war, with the burns, the shrapnel littering their body, with their broken bones. Inaction from those with influence is allowing the killing of children. This is a war on children.”
At al-Nasr hospital, International Red Cross surgeon Paul Ley warned, “We are already overwhelmed. There are something like 2,000 patients in a hospital built for 300, and over half need surgery. But we don’t have enough drugs, and insufficient anaesthetics. There is very little pain control and we have to use techniques that have been abandoned for many years because they are seen as dangerous.”
Head of the UN relief agency for Palestinian refugee UNRWA Philippe Lazzarini referred to a “staggering human tragedy” and a “race against time… already disease is becoming as much a threat as the bombardment.”
He described the south of Gaza as “completely overloaded… It simply cannot cater to so many people. Remember people from Gaza City and the north have been asked to go to the south because they were told the south would be safer. Yet a large proportion have been killed in the south.”
Condemning the “siege on an entire population” as “collective punishment”, he referred to the “one million people in UN installations, including 100,000 in the north… Their locations are known, and despite that, nearly 100 installations have been hit directly or indirectly.”
A joint investigation by Israeli outlets 972+ Mag and Local Call, published Thursday, confirmed the deliberate process used to carry out strikes on civilians in unprecedented numbers.
A source told the journalists, “The numbers increased from dozens of civilian deaths [permitted] as collateral damage as part of an attack on a senior official in previous operations, to hundreds of civilian deaths as collateral damage.”
An artificial intelligence programme called “The Gospel” has been used to select targets, powering what one source called a “mass assassination factory,” with the “emphasis… on quantity and not on quality.” Reporting the story, the Guardian explained that the programme “was created to address a chronic problem for the IDF: in earlier operations in Gaza, the air force repeatedly ran out of targets to strike.”
At the start of the war, the head of the Israeli air force made a point of emphasising that in carrying out “around the clock airstrikes… We are not being surgical.”
The massacre in Gaza resumes with the continuing support of US and world imperialism. Speaking in Dubai, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken backed Israel’s lie that the pause “came to an end because of Hamas, Hamas reneged on the commitments it made.” He reiterated Washington’s “strong solidarity with Israel defending itself” while cynically insisting that it was doing “everything possible to protect civilians.”
Chris Hedges Report – December 2, 2023
Israel Reopens the Gaza Slaughterhouse
by Chris Hedges
Phase One of Israel’s genocidal campaign on Gaza has ended. Phase Two has begun. It will result in even higher levels of death and destruction.
The skies over Gaza are filled — after a seven-day truce — with projectiles of death. Warplanes. Attack helicopters. Drones. Artillery shells. Tank shells. Mortars. Bombs. Missiles. Gaza is a cacophony of explosions and forlorn screams and cries for help beneath collapsed buildings. Fear, once again, is coiling itself around every heart in the Gazan concentration camp.
By Friday evening, 184 Palestinians — including three journalists and two doctors — had been killed by Israeli air strikes in the north, south and central Gaza, and at least 589 injured, according to the Ministry of Health in Gaza. Most of them are women and children. Israel will not be deterred. It plans to finish the job, to obliterate what is left in the north of Gaza and decimate what remains in the south, to render Gaza uninhabitable, to see its 2.3 million people driven out in a massive campaign of ethnic cleansing via starvation, terror, slaughter and infectious diseases.
The aid convoys, which brought in token amounts of food and medicine — the first batch was shrouds and coronavirus tests according to the director of al-Najjar hospital — have been halted. No one, least of all President Joe Biden, plans to intervene to stop the genocide. Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Israel this week, and while calling for Israel to protect civilians, refused to set conditions that would disrupt the $3.8 billion Israel receives in annual military assistance or the $14.3 billion supplemental aid package. The world will watch passively, muttering useless bromides about more surgical strikes, while Israel spins its roulette wheel of death. By the time Israel is done, the 1948 Nakba, where Palestinians were massacred in dozens of villages and 750,000 were ethnically cleansed by Zionist militias, will look like a quaint relic of a more civilized era.
Nothing is off limits. Hospitals. Mosques. Churches. Homes. Apartment blocks. Refugee camps. Schools. Universities. Media offices. Banks. Sewer systems. Telecommunications infrastructure. Water treatment plants. Libraries. Wheat mills. Bakeries. Markets. Entire neighborhoods. Israel’s intent is to destroy Gaza’s infrastructure and daily kill or wound hundreds of Palestinians. Gaza is to become a wasteland, a dead zone that will be incapable of sustaining life.
Israel began to bomb Khan Younis on Friday after dropping leaflets warning civilians to evacuate further south to Rafah, located on the border crossing with Egypt. Hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians had sought refuge in Khan Younis. Once Palestinians are pushed to Rafah, there is only one place left to flee — Egypt. The Israeli Ministry of Intelligence, in a leaked report, calls for the forcible transfer of Gaza’s population to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. A detailed plan to intentionally displace the Palestinians in Gaza and push them into Egypt has been embedded in Israeli doctrine for five decades. Already, 1.8 million Palestinians in Gaza have been driven from their homes. Once Palestinians cross the border into Egypt — which the Egyptian government and Arab leaders are seeking to prevent despite pressure from the U.S. — Palestinians will never return.
This is not a war against Hamas. It is a war against Palestinians.
Israeli strikes are generated at a dizzying rate, many of them from a system called “Habsora” — The Gospel — which is built on artificial intelligence that selects 100 targets a day. The AI-system is described by seven current and former Israeli intelligence officials in an article by Yuval Abraham on the Israeli sites +972 Magazine and Local Call, as facilitating a “mass assassination factory.” Israel, once it locates what it assumes to be a Hamas operative from a cell phone, for example, bombs and shells a wide area around the target, killing and wounding tens, and at times hundreds of Palestinians, the article states.
“According to intelligence sources,” the story reads, “Habsora generates, among other things, automatic recommendations for attacking private residences where people suspected of being Hamas or Islamic Jihad operatives live. Israel then carries out large-scale assassination operations through the heavy shelling of these residential homes.”
Some 15,000 Palestinians, including 6,000 children and 4,000 women, have been killed since Oct. 7. Some 30,000 have been wounded. Over six thousand are missing, many buried under the rubble. More than 300 families have lost 10 or more members of their families. More than 250 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank since Oct. 7, and more than 3,000 injured, although the area is not controlled by Hamas. The Israeli military claims to have killed between 1,000 and 3,000 of some 30,000 Hamas fighters, a relatively small number given the scale of the assault. Most resistance fighters shelter in their vast tunnel system.
Israel’s playbook is the “Dahiya Doctrine.” The doctrine was formulated by former Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Chief of Staff Gadi Eizenkot, who is a member of the war cabinet, following the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Dahiya is a southern Beirut suburb and a Hezbollah stronghold. It was pounded by Israeli jets after two Israeli soldiers were taken prisoner. The doctrine posits that Israel should employ massive, disproportionate force, destroying infrastructure and civilian residences, to ensure deterrence.
Daniel Hagari, spokesman of the IDF, conceded at the start of Israel’s most recent attack on Gaza that the “emphasis” would be “on damage and not on accuracy.”
Israel has abandoned its tactic of “roof knocking” where a rocket without a warhead would land on a roof to warn those inside to evacuate. Israel has also ended its phone calls warning of an impending attack. Now dozens of families in an apartment block or a neighborhood are killed without notice.
The images of mass destruction feed the thirst for revenge within Israel following the humiliating incursion by Hamas fighters on Oct. 7 and the killing of 1,200 Israelis, including 395 soldiers and 59 police officers. There is a sadistic pleasure voiced by many Israelis over the genocide and a groundswell of calls for the murder or expulsion of Palestinians, including those in the occupied West Bank and those with Israeli citizenship.
The savagery of the air strikes and indiscriminate attacks, the cutting off of food, water and medicine, the genocidal rhetoric of the Israeli government, make this a war whose sole objective is revenge. This will not be good for Israel or the Palestinians. It will fuel a conflagration throughout the Middle East.
Israel’s attack is the last desperate measure of a settler colonial project that foolishly thinks, as many settler colonial projects have in the past, that it can crush the resistance of an indigenous population with genocide. But even Israel will not get away with killing on this scale. A generation of Palestinians, many of whom have seen most, if not all, of their families killed and their homes and neighborhoods destroyed, will carry within them a lifelong thirst for justice and retribution.
This war is not over. It has not even begun.
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper. He is the host of the Emmy Award-nominated RT America show On Contact. His most recent book is “America: The Farewell Tour” (2019).
https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/israel-reopens-the-gaza-slaughterhouse
Rima Najjar – December 2, 2023
Who are you betting on to win, Hamas or the US and Israel?
by Rima Najjar
I am betting on Hamas and the resistance of the Palestinian people to win, if not immediately in the next few weeks, then definitely in the near future. I think so, not just because of the demonstrated strength and sustainability of the Palestinian armed resistance that surprised us all on October 7th, not only because the smokescreen of an Israeli ethical, invincible military power has dissipated forever revealing its barbaric reality, not only because regional dynamics have been shifted by the earthquake, but because, as Einstein put it, “no problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.”
The level of consciousness that allows Israel to exist as a Jewish state is violent domination. I am not referring here to the anti-Semitic trope or idea of a Jewish conspiracy to control the world, which has been around since the thirteenth century and has been used to justify discrimination and violence against Jews. I am referring to the domination of Palestine and the Arab region by Jews.
There may be no evidence to support the claim of an international Jewish conspiracy for world domination, but there certainly is plenty of evidence to support Jewish domination of Palestine and the Middle East region as a whole.
I refer you to the Dalet Plan that was requested by the Jewish Agency leader and later first prime minister of Israel David Ben-Gurion, and developed by the Haganah, the largest of the Jewish underground militias in Palestine, which was involved in several massacres of Palestinian civilians and unarmed soldiers.
When the Zionist Jewish leadership declared the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine in 1948 after the British gave the Jewish immigrants to Palestine the green light as long as doing so did not prejudice the civil and religious rights of the Arab non-Jewish majority, i.e., the indigenous Palestinians, they deliberately did not announce its borders. The borders of Israel are yet to be entirely settled, thus keeping the door open for a “greater Israel,” for more Jewish colonies, for more ethnic cleansing.
Plan Dalet called for the conquest of Palestinian towns and villages inside and along the borders of the area allocated to the proposed Jewish State in the UN Partition Plan, which was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on November 29, 1947. It laid out in detail a blueprint for the forcible depopulation and destruction of Palestinians. In case of resistance, the population of conquered villages was to be expelled.
Sounds familiar? That’s the “level of consciousnesses” that inhabits both Israel and the US. It is not a level that will ever “solve the problem” of Israel as a settler-colonial entity and it doesn’t take a mathematical genius to arrive at this conclusion.
Einstein believed that we cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them. In other words, we need to experience a jump in consciousness to find the answers we need. It’s a call to action for people to think outside the box and to approach problems from a new perspective. So far, the US’s “new perspective” is to kill more softly and to rejuvenate the lie of a “two-state solution” with a new and “revitalized” Palestinian Authority.
For both Israel and the US, the strategy continues to be Israel’s domination and subjugation of the Palestinian people and theft of their land and resources.
And there’s the rub. The Palestinian people refuse to succumb to this and have been refusing for decades. Because the only language Israel understands, as Senior Hamas Representative Osama Hamdan said, is that of violence, the miracle of the Palestinian armed power is what will ultimately win the game.
It’s a very costly game of blood and unspeakable suffering for Palestinians. Israel is betting that this high price it continues to inflict, if not its brutal and vengeful power (its “ring of fire”), is what will force the armed resistance to give in. But such logic is misplaced, and the opposite is true. This enormous cost in precious blood is a motivation for the resistance to continue to defend Palestine, even more ferociously. The resistance is defending both Palestine’s “living martyrs” and its prisoners.
Thinking outside the box for the US and Israel will begin only when Israel’s army is renamed from Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) to Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF).
Martin Luther King believed justice is indivisible; it is a unified concept and cannot be divided into separate parts. For that reason, Palestine cannot be partitioned.
Rima Najjar is a Palestinian whose father’s side of the family comes from the forcibly depopulated village of Lifta on the western outskirts of Jerusalem and whose mother’s side of the family is from Ijzim, south of Haifa. She is an activist, researcher and retired professor of English literature, Al-Quds University, occupied West Bank.
https://rimanajjar.medium.com/who-are-you-betting-on-to-win-hamas-or-the-us-and-israel-39acf721657d
https://countercurrents.org/2023/12/who-are-you-betting-on-to-win-hamas-or-the-us-and-israel/
World Socialist Web Site – December 2, 2023
Documents expose Israeli conspiracy to facilitate October 7 attack
By Andre Damon
On Friday, the New York Times published a report establishing conclusively that Israel was fully informed, in detail, of plans by Hamas to attack its border that were executed on October 7. These revelations make clear that Israeli officials, knowing full well where and how Hamas would strike, made a deliberate decision to stand down in order to facilitate the attack.
These revelations mean that the Israeli government allowed and abetted the killing of their own citizens and that the Israeli government is responsible for the deaths that took place that day. This criminal conspiracy was aimed at establishing a pretext for a long-planned genocide against the people of Gaza.
Moreover, it is impossible to believe that the United States was uninformed of Hamas’s plans, under conditions where not only Israeli intelligence but also Egypt, had advanced warnings of the attack. Everything points to a plot that involved Israel, the Biden administration and likely British and European intelligence agencies.
The Times published this report Monday as Israel launched a new wave of attacks on Gaza during a visit by Antony Blinken. The presence of the US Secretary of State was meant not only to express the United States’ support for the renewed onslaught but to manage the response to the exposure of this conspiracy.
The Times reported that
The approximately 40-page document, which the Israeli authorities code-named “Jericho Wall,” outlined, point by point, exactly the kind of devastating invasion that led to the deaths of about 1,200 people.
The document obtained by Israeli intelligence forces “meticulously described the attack method, mirroring the actual events,” the Times reported. “It outlined an intense assault aimed to breach Gaza Strip fortifications, seize Israeli cities, and target key military bases. This plan was implemented with alarming accuracy, involving a coordinated use of rockets, drones, and ground forces.”
The Times reports,
Hamas followed the blueprint with shocking precision. The document called for a barrage of rockets at the outset of the attack, drones to knock out the security cameras and automated machine guns along the border, and gunmen to pour into Israel en masse in paragliders, on motorcycles and on foot—all of which happened on Oct. 7.
Moreover, the Times reported, Israeli military and intelligence officials knew Hamas carried out an exhaustive, day-long training mission to practice the plan in detail just three months before the attack. The Times states,
The training included a dry run of shooting down Israeli aircraft and taking over a kibbutz and a military training base, killing all the cadets. During the exercise, Hamas fighters used the same phrase from the Quran that appeared at the top of the Jericho Wall attack plan.
Even while acknowledging that Israel was fully informed of Hamas’s plans, the Times seeks to package the revelations with an alibi, asserting, without any substantiation, that Israeli officials simply made a mistake. The Times writes,
Underpinning all these failures was a single, fatally inaccurate belief that Hamas lacked the capability to attack and would not dare to do so. That belief was so ingrained in the Israeli government, officials said, that they disregarded growing evidence to the contrary...
The failures to connect the dots echoed another analytical failure more than two decades ago, when the American authorities also had multiple indications that the terrorist group Al Qaeda was preparing an assault.
No, Israel’s stand-down on October 7 was not a failure to “connect the dots” because there were no dots to connect. The Israeli intelligence forces had obtained the entire operational plan of the October 7 attack, then witnessed Hamas carry out a major, high-level training exercise for that plan. They knew exactly what was planned and decided to let it go ahead.
The Times writes, “Israeli military and intelligence officials dismissed the plan as aspirational, considering it too difficult for Hamas to carry out.” It adds, “It is unclear whether Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or other top political leaders saw the document.”
This presentation is absurd. It is impossible to believe that information of this character could come into the possession of the intelligence agencies without provoking the most intense analysis. The idea that, after 9/11, such high-level plans would be kept from the prime minister is unbelievable.
Such a document would have come from a source at the highest levels of Hamas. Once this valuable information was obtained, it would have been vital to take action to protect the source, including countermeasures to make Hamas believe Israel did not possess the information. The stand-down could have been a means to send a signal that Hamas’s plan had not been exposed.
Ultimately, a choice was made to allow Hamas’s operation to go ahead, in order to provide Israel with a pretext for a massive, long-planned military assault on Gaza. Only Netanyahu could make such a decision. The United States, meanwhile, instantly sent a massive military force to the region, announcing the deployment of its largest aircraft carrier and escort ship to the region within 24 hours of the attack.
The Times’ claim that Israel’s stand-down was an “intelligence failure” makes no sense because it is a lie from beginning to end. No, the events of October 7 were not an intelligence failure: Israel was remarkably successful in exactly predicting Hamas’s military operation. Instead of acting on this intelligence, Israel orchestrated a stand-down of troops and intelligence-gathering at the precise moment when the attack took place.
Four days after the October 7 attack, veteran journalist Seymour Hersh reported that in the days ahead of the attack, “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” taking place near the West Bank.
Hersh quoted a source who told him, “That left only eight hundred soldiers … to be responsible for guarding the 51-kilometer 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.”
The stand-down not only left the border vulnerable to attack, it created the conditions where military forces had to be transferred to intercept Hamas attackers in civilian areas, creating conditions in which Israeli tank and helicopter forces shot indiscriminately into civilian areas, further swelling the Israeli death toll.
In addition to the military stand-down, Israel made a decision to put its vaunted 8200 signals intelligence unit off duty on weekends, meaning that the signals intelligence unit that detected the training exercise three months ago was not on duty at the time of Saturday’s attack.
The exposure of Israel’s advanced foreknowledge of the attack likewise exposes the US media and political establishment, which have fully embraced Israel’s claims to have been caught by surprise by the attack, and claimed that the events of October 7 justify the genocide now being unleashed in Gaza.
These revelations expose the Gaza genocide to be a criminal conspiracy by the Netanyahu regime and its imperialist backers, whose victims include not only 20,000 slaughtered Palestinians but the Israeli population itself.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/12/02/klox-d02.html?pk_campaign=newsletter&pk_kwd=wsws
Countercurrent – December 2, 2023
New York Times hides its own reporting on Israel-Gaza War; Emulates Fox “News”
by Kim Scipes
On December 1, 2023, the story on the upper right side of the front page of the physical copy of the New York Times is headlined “Israelis Saw Plan for Hamas Attack Over a Year Ago,” and is by-lined to Ronen Bergman and Adam Goldman.
The story begins, “Israeli officials obtained Hamas’s battle plan for the Oct. 7 terrorist attack more than a year before it happened, documents, emails and interviews show. But Israeli military and intelligence officials dismissed this plan as aspirational, considering it too difficult for Hamas to carry out.
It continues: “The approximately 40-page document, which the Israeli officials codenamed ‘Jericho Wall,’ outlined, point by point, exactly the kind of devastating invasion that led to the deaths of about 1,200 people.
“Hamas followed the blueprint with shocking precision. The document called for a barrage of rockets at the outset of the attack, drones to knock out the security cameras and automated machine guns along the border, and gunmen to pour into Israel en masse in paragliders, motorcycles and on foot—all of which happened on Oct. 7.
“The plan also included details about the location and size of Israel’s military forces, communications hubs and other sensitive information, raising questions about how Hamas gathered its intelligence and whether there were leaks inside the Israeli security establishment.”
Obviously, there is a terribly damaging and devastating report to the Israeli state, somehow getting through the Times’ efforts to downplay the death and destruction inflicted on Gaza by the Israeli military. It has been obvious to this observer that the Times’ recent coverage—and especially the lack of photographs of Gaza today—has been far below its own standards of covering most conflicts (at least other than Ukraine). “Important” stories such as covering elite Western US fire-fighting teams—in late November, far from fire season?—have been given front page coverage recently, along with extensive photographic evidence inside. No, the editors have chosen to downplay Israeli death and destruction in Gaza.
And yet, somehow, this report of the humongous Israeli intelligence failure made it to the front page of the physical copy of the paper.
In any case, that it appeared, nonetheless, it was a damaging rebuke to the Israeli intelligence system—so long overplayed as “all-but-perfect”—and the Israeli government under Benjamin Netanyahu.
Again, from the Times’ report: “Israeli security officials have already acknowledged that they failed to protect the country, and the government is expected to assemble a commission to study the events leading to the attacks. The Jericho Wall document lays bare a yearslong cascade of missteps that culminated in what officials now regard as the worst Israeli intelligence attack that led to the Arab-Israeli war of 1973.”
I personally think this is a stunning rebuke also to the US Government, which has slavishly protected Irael’s activities from the world community.
In any case, this article is stunning news, and is the type that makes journalists’ careers and often leads to Pulitzer Prizes. I was sure the Times would want to circulate this report—once they decided to cover it—all over social media, etc.
Yet, when I went to the Times’ web site, somehow, this story did not appear. It seems that the death of retired Supreme Court Justice, Sandra Day O’Connor, was much more important a news item than this incredible Israeli intelligence failure.
“All the News That’s Fit to Print” my ass! Soon, they’ll probably claim “Fair and Balanced” as their next slogan regarding the Middle East.
Kim Scipes, PhD, is a Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Purdue University Northwest in Westville, Indiana. A global labor scholar, he has published four books, and over 260 articles and book reviews in peer-reviewed and specialty journals, general interest magazines, and local newspapers in the US and 11 other countries. His publications are on-line at https://www.pnw.edu/faculty/kim-scipes-ph-d/publications/.
|
Published since July 2008 |
Your donation
is tax deductable.
The Journal of America Team:
Editor in chief:
Abdus Sattar Ghazali
Senior Editor:
Prof. Arthur Scott
Special Correspondent
Maryam Turab
