Wall Street Journal – October 13, 2023
Israeli Air Force says it has dropped 6,000 bombs on Gaza
By Omar Abdel-Baqui
The Israeli Air Force said it has dropped about 6,000 bombs targeted at Hamas in Gaza since the war began, adding that it will continue the campaign as long as necessary. The airstrikes killed hundreds of Hamas militants and damaged the group’s military infrastructure, the Israeli Air Force said in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter.
The Israeli airstrikes caused extensive damage in several neighborhoods in Gaza, killing more than 1,500 Palestinians, nearly half of whom were women and children, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza. More than 1,300 Israelis have died since the Hamas assault began.
Information Clearing House – October 13, 2023
The Nakba that Israel has started will backfire
By David Hearst
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the mayors of southern border towns that Israel’s response would “change the Middle East”. He said the same thing in his address to the stunned nation: “What we will do to our enemies in the coming days will reverberate with them for generations.”
What is in his mind? We know he has long wanted to attack Iran’s nuclear installations. Three years after he was first thwarted in 2010, he told CBS: “I won’t wait until it is too late.”
We know, too, that he wants to eradicate Hezbollah and Hamas, which he once described to me (when he was in opposition) as aircraft carriers for Iran.
Since the Palestinian fighters’ attack on Saturday, he has used words that mirror former US President George W Bush’s response to the 9/11 attacks. In going after al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, former Vice President Dick Cheney, the power behind the throne, was already thinking about a bigger attack on Iraq.
Is Netanyahu thinking of harnessing the unparalleled support he is currently getting from the international community for his campaign against Gaza for something much bigger, as Bush did in 2001?
The head of the Israeli opposition, Benny Gantz, has also hinted at a bigger project: “We will win, and change the security and strategic reality in the region.
Second Nakba
Reoccupying Gaza and finishing off just one Palestinian armed group would not change the strategic reality of the region, and you don’t need an army of 360,000 troops to reoccupy Gaza. This is the greatest number of reserves called up in the history of the country.
Hamas has a maximum of 60,000 armed men, according to my sources, which alongside other factions, would struggle to make a force a third of that size.
Of course, this could be bluster – the sort of bellicose rhetoric that is Netanyahu’s stock in trade. Vows to change the Middle East have been made frequently by previous Israeli and US officials and have proved to be hollow.
Former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres wrote a book about how Oslo would reshape the Middle East. Former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice pointed to “a different Middle East” when she urged Israel to ignore calls for a ceasefire after 11 days of bombing Hezbollah in southern Lebanon in 2006.
But what if a bigger venture is being planned? What would it entail, and what risks would it pose for the region as a whole?
The first and most obvious answer is a second Nakba, or mass expulsion of a sizeable proportion of Gaza’s 2.3-million-strong population – a figure big enough to alter the demographic time bomb that is in the back of every Israeli’s mind.
On Tuesday, Israeli Lieutenant-Colonel Richard Hecht told foreign reporters that he would advise Palestinian refugees to “get out” through the Rafah crossing on Gaza’s southern border with Egypt. His office then had to “clarify” what Hecht had said by admitting the crossing was closed.
The possibility that Egypt might be forced to allow an influx of refugees from Gaza – which happened after both the Arab-Israeli war of 1948 and the 1967 war – was also raised by Al-Azhar Al-Sharif, the largest religious institution in Egypt, which called on Palestinians to remain steadfast and stay put. Why would it put this statement out if the possibility of another mass exodus were not being discussed behind closed doors?
The arrival of one million Palestinians from Gaza in the Sinai could, without exaggeration, have the potential to tip Egypt over the edge after a decade of economic decline under the leadership of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. Already, record numbersﾠof Egyptians are taking to the boats. Sisi himself realises this danger and repeated Al-Azhar’s call.
‘Human animals’
There is also little doubt about what effect a mass expulsion of Palestinians would have on the hair-trigger balance between Palestinians and East Bankers in Jordan, which has Israel’s longest – and up until now, quietest – border.
A second Nakba would present the first two Arab countries to recognise Israel with an existential crisis, which could threaten each regime’s ability to control their own state.
And yet, to judge by the words of Israel’s leadership and the actions of its pilots, a mass exodus is exactly what Israel might be trying to force in Gaza right now.
On Monday, Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant described Palestinians as “human animals” on the back of claims that Hamas had beheaded children – claims that cannot be independently verified, and which were not made when Israeli reporters were initially allowed in to see the carnage at Kfar Aza.
The same day, Knesset member Revital Gotliv called on Israel to consider using a nuclear bomb on Gaza, posting on social media: “Only an explosion that shakes the Middle East will restore this country’s dignity, strength, and security! It’s time to kiss doomsday.”
Then, Giora Eiland, a former general, said Israel must “create an unprecedented humanitarian disaster” in Gaza, and threatened another Nakba: “Only the mobilisation of tens of thousands and the cry of the international community will create the leverage for Gaza to be either without Hamas or without people. We are in an existential war.”
On Friday, little doubt remained of Israel’s intentions. The Israeli Army told Palestinians of north Gaza to leave, saying they would not be allowed to return “until we say so”. Hamas has told Palestinians in north Gaza to “remain steadfast” and to “stay in your homes”.
The second Nakba has started.
On Wednesday, an Israeli army official told Channel 13 that Gaza would be razed to the ground and reduced to a “city of tents” – which is, to be fair, exactly what has happened every night since the Hamas incursion.
Nightly slaughter
There is a massacre taking place almost every night in Gaza. Whole families have been wiped out by precision bombs. Palestinians in Gaza have been told to evacuate their whole district, only to run into the path of bombs. Districts are not just being bombed once; they are being systemically levelled.
In previous campaigns, Palestinians in Gaza fled to Rimal, a relatively wealthy middle-class area by the sea. It was regarded as a safe haven because in previous campaigns, Israel had no reason to bomb it. Now, Rimal is being levelled.
This nightly slaughter is not taking place accidentally by indisciplined pilots taking revenge for alleged war crimes committed by Hamas in southern Israel. It is taking place by design. The aim of cutting off electricity, water and food to more than two million people, and subjecting them to this nightly bombardment, is to get them to flee.
There is no place in Gaza safe from this form of genocide. Fourteen medical facilities have been bombed. Since Saturday, 500 children have been killed.
Ergo, if Israel is not stopped, the course on which it is embarked is to kill not 2,251 men, women and children in Gaza – as was the case in the ground incursion of 2014 – but tens of thousands, a casualty rate high enough to induce another Nakba.
Before that, this policy could have two effects: to start a civil war inside Israel between the Palestinians of 1948 and Israeli Jews, and to trigger a regional war with Hezbollah and ultimately Iran itself.
This could also be in Netanyahu’s head. Crushing Hamas would not change the Middle East, but defanging Hezbollah and Iran as forces that would be willing to try anything against Israel for the next decade, almost certainly would.
Palestinian fighters shattered in one dawn raid the myth of invincibility Israel had enjoyed since defeating three Arab armies in six days in 1967. Even the 1973 Middle East war did not produce the shock that Hamas did.
Israel is now saying this war is existential. On the streets, Israel feels like a country where there is no authority; where Israelis can take justice into their own hands; where normal citizens, unconnected with settlers or the extreme right, are going around on the streets armed. Such is the general level of hatred and fear, that it could be only a matter of time before Palestinians inside Israel are attacked.
Domestically, those on the extreme national religious right, such as Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, have been saying for years now: “Bring it on.”
This past February, Gantz accused Smotrich of supporting settler violence in the occupied West Bank because he “wants to cause another Palestinian Nakba”. Now, Gantz and Smotrich are sitting side by side in the same cabinet.
In the view of the national religious right, the sooner the Palestinian national cause is crushed, the better. The national trauma induced by Hamas’s successful incursion is manna from heaven for them. It has produced exactly the conditions they have been waiting for.
Regional war
On Israel’s borders, the possibility of Gaza triggering a regional war has never been greater. Emotions are running high in all Arab capitals.
Hezbollah, the best-equipped and trained armed group Israel faces, has its finger on the trigger. There are credible reports that it has started a general mobilisation.
There have already been several days of attacks launched from the Lebanese border, including a confrontation involving fighters claimed by Islamic Jihad, in which three Israeli soldiers were killed. Three of Hezbollah’s fighters were also killed after Israel attacked sites in Lebanon in retaliation.
If a ground offensive gets going, which could be very soon, the choice for Hezbollah may be either to wait for Israel to finish off Hamas and then come for them – knowing they would effectively be on their own – or join Hamas and the other armed factions in Gaza, while each group retains its effectiveness as a fighting force.
Hezbollah might have very good reasons for wanting to keep the status quo on the Lebanese border, but this is no longer a conflict that any group facing Israel, or any part of the Palestinian movement, can afford to sit out without handing Israel a free pass.
On Thursday, Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian said that the crimes against the Palestinians would receive a response from “the rest of the [resistance] axis”.
Hezbollah would be right to think that the longer this goes on, the more vulnerable each front becomes if they do not act in unison. That could be the one way to force Israel to come to a negotiated ceasefire in Gaza.
The second lever of constraint is the US. Does President Joe Biden really want to be dragged into a regional war, which would involve every armed group linked to Iran, such as the Houthis – a war for which it is not remotely prepared – at the very time that Ukraine’s counter-offensive has become bogged down, winter is coming, and Russian President Vladimir Putin can taste victory and European battle fatigue?
Does an unplanned regional war in the Middle East, created entirely by an unhinged ally, make any sense for the US? I don’t think it does. Biden has given Netanyahu the brightest of green lights in offering Israel its unequivocal backing, but I do not think the US has war-gamed the possible devastating outcomes of what is taking place in Gaza right now.
Dangers ahead
Off the Lebanese coast, a western battle fleet is assembling as a deterrent to Hezbollah.
Before acting, they should remember what happened just 40 years ago in Beirut, when a truck full of explosives drove into a barracks housing US marines, and minutes later, a similar attack occurred against a French company of paratroopers. Around 300 military personnel died.
Then-US President Ronald Reagan and then-French President Francois Mitterrand intended to mount joint air strikes. In the end, no retaliatory attack took place beyond naval bombardment, because the US defence secretary, Caspar Weinberger, and the secretary of state, George Shultz, could not agree on who was responsible for the bombings.
This time around, the warnings that Biden as vice president gave former President Barack Obama, about starting wars you cannot finish, will be ringing in his ears.
Both the US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and the Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin are in the region trying to calm things down, but theirs is mission impossible. Having allowed Israel to light the fuse, they are now trying to contain the explosion.
The Middle East is incomparably weaker today than it was when Bush and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair blithely planned their invasion of Iraq in 2003. Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Sudan and Libya lie in ruins; and Egypt, Jordan and Tunisia are bankrupt. Instability has created huge flows of refugees across the Mediterranean, which even the most hospitable of hosts, Turkey, is now trying to reverse.
If only a third of what I have written comes to fruition, Israel could end up with open borders, inviting constant incursions by armed groups from Lebanon to Jordan to Egypt. At the very least, Israel would lose the quiet it has enjoyed on its longest border with Jordan.
No one can afford what one man, Netanyahu, has got in his head. No one can afford the blank cheque he has been given by the West to start this operation in Gaza.
A Gaza campaign that develops into a plan that could change the Middle East could backfire dangerously – and it should be stopped before it is too late.
David Hearst is co-founder and editor-in-chief of Middle East Eye. He is a commentator and speaker on the region and analyst on Saudi Arabia. He was the Guardian’s foreign leader writer, and was correspondent in Russia, Europe, and Belfast. He joined the Guardian from The Scotsman, where he was education correspondent.
Brett Wilkins is a staff writer for Common Dreams.
https://informationclearinghouse.blog/2023/10/13/the-nakba-that-israel-has-started-will-backfire/
Information Clearing House – October 13, 2023
Israel’s Massive Intelligence Failure
Scott Ritter and George Galloway
The origins of Israel’s intelligence failure on the Hamas attacks can be traced to the decision to rely on AI instead of the contrarian analysis born of the earlier intelligence failure of the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
As the scope and scale of the Hamas surprise attack on Israel becomes clearer, one question emerges more than any other from the detritus of the battlefield: How did such a massive, complex undertaking escape the notice of Israel’s vaunted intelligence service?
An equally important question is why wasn’t this attack detected by the U.S. intelligence community as well, given the massive expenditures made in countering terrorism since the terrorist attacks on the U.S. homeland of September 11, 2001?
The answers lie in the history of success Israel has enjoyed in identifying and responding to Hamas operations in the past, success which manifested itself into a culture of complacency, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of Israeli citizens — the very people the intelligence services were dedicated to protect.
The fact that this attack took place 50 years and a day from when Israel suffered what had been — up until this moment — Israel’s greatest intelligence failure, the 1973 Yom Kippur War, only reinforces the depth of the failure that transpired.
Findings of the Agranat Commission
In the weeks following the end of the Yom Kippur War, the government of Prime Minister Golda Meir formed a commission of inquiry headed by Shimon Agranat, the chief justice of the Israeli Supreme Court. The Agranat Commission, as it was subsequently called, focused on the flawed analysis conducted by Israeli military intelligence directorate (AMAN), with particular attention being placed on Eli Zeira, the head of AMAN’s Research and Analysis Department, or RAD.
Zeira was the principal architect of what became known as “the concept”, a dogmatic adherence to an analytical paradigm which had, until October 1973, proven itself reliable in the years that followed Israel’s victory in the six-day war of 1967.
The “concept” held that the Arab armies, while possessing a limited ability to initiate a war with Israel, were not ready for an all-out war, and as such would avoid engaging in actions which logically would lead to such an all-out war with Israel.
The analysts of RAD were criticized for an over reliance on inductive reasoning and intuition and failing to use structured deductive methodology. One of the conclusions reached by the Agranat Commission was the need for so-called structured analytical techniques, in particular what is known as “Analysis of Competing Hypotheses.”
This manifested itself in the development within AMAN of a culture of contrarian thinking, built around critical thinking designed to challenge unitary assessments and groupthink.
The United States also examined the root causes of its intelligence failures regarding the Yom Kippur War. A multi-agency assessment of the October 1973 intelligence failure published by the U.S. in December of that year concluded that the issue at that time wasn’t the inability to collect or even accurately assess intelligence data — in fact, the report stated, evidence of an a surprise attack by the armies of Egypt and Syria had been “plentiful, ominous, and often accurate” and that U.S. intelligence analysts debated and wrote about this evidence.
In the end, the December 1979 report said however, that the U.S. analysts — like their Israeli counterparts — had concluded there would be no attack, conclusions which, as the post-mortem noted, “were—quite simply, obviously, and starkly—wrong.”
Some of the critical issues which emerged from this assessment included the over-reliance by U.S. analysts on Israel to know its own security posture; analysts being married to preconceived notions about Arab military capabilities; a tendency for plausible interpretation of the same evidence; and a failure by analysts to challenge the “rational actor” fallacy.
March 1, 1973: U.S. President Richard Nixon, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir and U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in the Oval Office. (Oliver Atkins, Nixon’s photographer, via Wikimedia Commons, CC by SA 4.0)
In the years that followed the Yom Kippur War, the intelligence communities of Israel and the U.S. established their own gravitational “pull,” with Israel employing a methodology of threat predictions and assessments that underpinned decisions to intervene militarily in Lebanon, often putting it at odds with U.S. policy makers.
Policy in Washington was made based on briefings by U.S. intelligence analysts who had developed a culture of downplaying Israeli intelligence in favor of their own. The resulting gap in analytical approaches and conclusions led to the intelligence crisis of 1990-1991 surrounding the threat posed by Iraqi SCUD missiles.
This crisis was predicated on the differences of priorities placed on the SCUD threat, both in the lead up to, and execution (regardless of the military objectives) of Operation Desert Storm, the U.S.-led campaign to evict Iraqi forces from Kuwait conducted in January-February 1991.
These differences only became exacerbated in the years that followed the end of that conflict, when both the U.S. and Israel struggled with how best to respond to the threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, including its SCUD missiles.
I was at the center of the U.S.-Israeli intelligence controversy during this time, having been brought into the United Nations to create an independent intelligence capability to support the inspection-based effort to disarm Iraq.
From 1991 until 1998, I conducted sensitive liaison with both the C.I.A. and AMAN, and often found myself caught in the middle of the clash of cultures that had developed between the two.
This clash sometimes took the form of vaudeville comedy, such as the time I had to be ushered out the back door of an AMAN building to avoid being seen by the C.I.A.’s chief of station, who had arrived for the purpose of finding out what intelligence the Israelis were sharing with me.
On another occasion, I had run into a team of C.I.A. analysts on the streets of Tel Aviv who had been advising me on a particular inspection that was being planned. They were critical of the Israeli intelligence I was using to support this mission.
The purpose of their visit was to put pressure on Israel to stop the flow of information to the U.N. through me, arguing that, as a U.S. citizen, I should be getting my information from U.S. sources, and therefore Israel should flow all intelligence to me through them. Our meeting, it turned out, was no “chance” encounter, but rather set up by the Israelis, without my knowledge, so that I would be aware of the duplicity of my U.S. counterparts.
Such duplicity led to interactions of a more ominous character, with the C.I.A. green-lighting an F.B.I. investigation into allegations that I was spying on behalf of Israel. The U.S. actions had nothing to do with genuine concerns of espionage on my part, but rather were part of a larger campaign designed to minimize the influence of Israeli intelligence upon a U.N. inspection effort that the U.S. believed should instead be marching to the beat of a drum dictated by U.S. intelligence.
CIA vs. Israeli Intelligence
The animus that existed within the C.I.A. regarding Israeli intelligence was real and was grounded in the differing policy approaches taken by the two nations regarding the role of weapons inspectors and Iraqi WMD.
The U.S. was engaged in a policy of regime change in Iraq and was using weapons inspections as a vehicle to continue economic sanctions designed to contain the government of Saddam Hussein, and as a source of unique intelligence that could enable the U.S. to carry out operations designed to remove Saddam Hussein from power.
The Israelis were singularly focused on the security of Israel. While the Israelis had entertained a regime change option in the first two years following the end of Desert Storm, by 1994 they had determined that the best way forward was to work with the U.N. inspectors to achieve the verifiable elimination of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, including the SCUD missiles.
One of the starker manifestations of the difference in approaches taken by the C.I.A. and Israel dealt with the effort I had led in accounting for Iraq’s SCUD missile arsenal.
In November 1993, I was summoned to the White House to brief a C.I.A. team, headed by Martin Indyk and Bruce Reidel, on my investigation, which had concluded that all of Iraq’s missiles had been accounted for.
The C.I.A. rejected my findings, declaring that their assessment of Iraqi SCUD missile capability was that Iraq maintained a force of 12-20 missiles along with several launchers, and this assessment would never change, irrespective of my work as an inspector.
By contrast, when I visited Israel for the first time, in October 1994, I had been approached by the head of AMAN, Uri Saguy, about my assessment regarding the accounting of Iraq’s SCUD missiles. I gave the AMAN director the same briefing as I gave the C.I.A.
Saguy, accompanied by the head of RAD at that time, Yaakov Amidror, accepted my conclusions in their entirety, and used them to brief the Israeli prime minister.
My experience with Israeli intelligence is far more revealing than my contemporaneous experience with the C.I.A., if for no other reason than the Israelis were trying to solve an intelligence problem (what was the real status of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction), while the U.S. was trying to implement a political decision regarding regime change in Iraq.
Between 1994 and 1998, I conducted 14 trips to Israel where I worked closely with AMAN, personally briefing two directors (Saguy and, from 1995, Moshe Ya’alon), two chiefs of RAD (Yaakov Amidror and Amos Gilad), and developed a close working relationship with intelligence analysts and operators from several Israeli intelligence organizations, including the legendary Unit 8200 — Israel’s signals intelligence unit.
The Israelis briefed me extensively on their post-Yom Kippur War methodology, especially their new contrarian approach to analysis. One of the more interesting aspects of this approach was the creation of a post, known within AMAN as “the doubting Thomas” (derived from the New Testament of the Bible, when Thomas — one of the 12 apostles of Jesus— would not believe that Jesus had come back from the dead until he saw him.)
I was introduced to the colonel who had this thankless task, explaining to me how he would receive every briefing before it was given to the director and proceeded to question conclusions and assertions. His queries had to be answered to his satisfaction before the briefing could be sent forward.
It was this colonel who helped formulate the Israeli conclusion that Saddam Hussein was a rational actor who would not seek a larger conflict with Israel that could result in the destruction of his nation — ironically embracing the same “rational actor” conclusions that had been erroneously reached in the lead up to the Yom Kippur War. On this occasion, the analysis was correct.
The analysis produced by “the doubting Thomas” allowed the Israelis to consider the possibility of a change in approach regarding Saddam Hussein. It did not, however, reduce the vigilance of Israeli intelligence in making sure that this assessment was, and remained, accurate.
I worked closely with AMAN and Unit 8200 to put together an intelligence collection plan which used imagery, technical, human, and signals intelligence to ascertain Iraqi capabilities and intent. I personally witnessed the diligence with which the Israeli analysts and collectors pursued their mission. Literally no stone was left unturned, no thesis left unexplored.
In the end, the Israelis were able to back up Uri Saguy’s embrace of my 1994 conclusion regarding the accounting of Iraqi SCUD missiles with their own detailed analysis derived from intelligence collected through their own means, as well as that collected through collaboration with myself and other U.N. inspectors.
This success proved to be fatal to Israel and contributed to the failure of both U.S. and Israeli intelligence to predict the 2023 Yom Kippur-like attacks by Hamas.
In 1998 Yaakov Amidror was replaced as the head of RAD by Amos Gilad. Where Amidror fully embraced the contrarian approach taken by RAD and AMAN when it came to producing intelligence analysis, Gilad was of a different mind, believing that the Agranat Commission report had constrained Israeli intelligence from adapting to new challenges.
He believed that the trauma of Yom Kippur had resulted in AMAN adopting a conservative and minimalist, analytical approach, focusing on analyzing capabilities while neglecting intentions, resulting in over-cautious conclusions.
Not a Rational Actor
Gilad was more inclined to embrace the C.I.A. assessments of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein and worked with the C.I.A. to dismantle the collaboration between the U.N. inspectors and AMAN.
In the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States, Gilad had thrown out the previous conclusion that Saddam was a rational actor and, as such, had posed no threat to Israel (an assessment backed up by the conclusion reached through the extensive cooperation between the U.N. inspectors and AMAN that Iraq did not possess viable quantities of weapons of mass destruction, and that there was no effort by Iraq to meaningfully reconstitute the industrial capability to manufacture weapons of mass destruction.)
Instead, Gilad painted a fact-free picture that postulated Saddam as a threat worthy of military intervention, thereby helping underpin the U.S. intelligence that justified a U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.
The fact that the intelligence regarding Iraqi weapons of mass destruction capabilities that was used to justify the U.S. invasion of Iraq was subsequently proven to be wrong did not undermine the newfound ardor between U.S. and Israeli intelligence.
The political goal of regime change had been accomplished, and as such it did not matter that the analytical product that had been relied upon for the flawed assessments was wrong.
In the lead-up to the 1973 Yom Kippur War, AMAN had disregarded a plethora of intelligence reporting predicting the Arab attacks. Because the consequences of this failure had resulted in an Israeli political embarrassment, it was called out and remediation undertaken.
No Embarrassment, Unlike Yom Kippur
The lead-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq was different. AMAN had disregarded its own considerable body of evidence, accumulated through years of close cooperation with U.N. weapons inspectors that showed Iraq did not possess meaningful quantities of weapons of mass destruction, nor the desire to reconstitute the production capabilities necessary for their reacquisition.
But because the consequences of this failure did not manifest in political embarrassment in Israel, unlike with Yom Kippur, this failure was ignored.
Indeed, the principal culprit for this failure, Amos Gilad, was elevated in 2003 to head the powerful Political-Military Affairs Bureau, a position he held until 2017. During his tenure, Gilad was said to enjoy more influence over policy than anyone else. He helped strengthen ties between the U.S. and Israeli intelligence communities and returned Israel to the pre-Yom Kippur War practice of over reliance on inductive reasoning and intuition void of structured deductive methodology.
One of the major consequences of Gilad’s long tenure as head of the Political Military Affairs Bureau was the re-subordination of the U.S. intelligence community to Israeli analytical judgements on the grounds that Israel knew best the threats it faced.
This reality was manifest in the words of U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, speaking atﾠThe AtlanticﾠFestival a week before the Hamas attacks, when he optimistically concluded that, “The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades,” adding that “the amount of time I have to spend on crisis and conflict in the Middle East today, compared to any of my predecessors going back to 9/11, is significantly reduced.”
The foundation of Sullivan’s errant optimism seemed to be a joint U.S.-Israeli policy that sought the normalization of relations between Israel and the Arab world, first and foremost with Saudi Arabia.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who for more than three decades has been the poster child for Israeli security, had bought into the idea of normalization with the Saudis as the key component of a strategic realignment of power in the Middle East away from Iran, and toward Israel.
This faith in the imperative of normalization was a vivid demonstration of how Israel’s new emphasis on intention over capabilities blinded it to the reality of the threats emanating out of Gaza.
Likewise, the fact that the U.S. had once again subordinated its threat analysis to Israeli conclusions —especially in circumstances where Israel saw no immediate danger — meant the U.S. did not spend too much time looking for indications that might contradict the Israeli conclusions.
Outsmarting AI
But perhaps the largest source of the Israeli intelligence failure regarding Hamas was the over reliance Israel put on intelligence collection and analysis itself. Gaza and Hamas have been a thorn in the side of Israel for years, and as such have attracted the overwhelming attention of the Israeli intelligence and security services.
Israel has perfected the art of human intelligence against the Hamas target, with a proven track record of placing agents deep inside the Hamas decision-making hierarchy.
Unit 8200 likewise has spent billions of dollars creating intelligence collection capabilities which vacuum up every piece of digital data coming out of Gaza — cell phone calls, e-mails, and SMS texting. Gaza is the most photographed place on the planet, and between satellite imagery, drones, and CCTV, every square meter of Gaza is estimated to be imaged every 10 minutes.
This amount of data is overwhelming for standard analysis techniques relying on the human mind. To compensate for this, Israel developed a huge artificial intelligence (AI) capability which it then weaponized against Hamas in the short but deadly 11-day conflict with Hamas in 2021, named Guardian of the Walls.
Unit 8200 developed several unique algorithms which used immense databases derived from years of raw intelligence data collected from every possible source of information.
Building upon concepts of machine learning and algorithm-driven warfare that have been at the forefront of Israeli military research and development for decades, Israeli intelligence was able to use AI to not only select targets, but also to anticipate Hamas actions.
This ability to predict the future, so to speak, helped shape Israeli assessments about Hamas’s intent in the lead up to the 2023 Yom Kippur attacks.
Israel’s fatal mistake was to openly brag about the role AI played in Operation Guardian of the Walls. Hamas was apparently able to take control of the flow of information being collected by Israel.
There has been much speculation about Hamas “going dark” regarding cell phone and computer usage to deny Israel the data that is contained in those means of communication. But “going dark” would have, by itself, been an intelligence indicator, one that AI would have certainly picked up.
Instead, it’s highly probable that Hamas maintained an elaborate communications deception plan, maintaining a level of communications sufficient in quantity and quality to avoid being singled out by AI — and by Israeli analysts deviating from the norm.
In the same way, Hamas would likely have maintained its physical profile of movement and activity to keep the Israeli AI algorithms satisfied that nothing strange was afoot.
This also meant any activity — such as training related to paragliding or amphibious operations — that might be detected and flagged by Israeli AI was done to avoid detection.
The Israelis had become prisoners of their own successes in intelligence collection.
By producing more data than standard human-based analytical methodologies could handle, the Israelis turned to AI for assistance and, because of the success of AI during the 2021 operations against Gaza, developed an over reliance upon the computer-based algorithms for operational and analytical purposes.
Turning from the Contrarian
The origins of Israel’s massive intelligence failure regarding the 2023 Hamas Yom Kippur attacks can be traced to the decision by Amod Gilad to divorce Israel from the legacy of contrarian analysis born of the intelligence failure of the 1973 Yom Kippur War that produced the same over-reliance on inductive reasoning and intuition, which led to the failure to begin with.
AI is only as good as the data and algorithms used to produce the reports. If the human component of AI — those who program the algorithms —are corrupted by flawed analytical methodologies, then so, too, will the AI product, which replicates these methodologies on a larger scale.
In Volume 1 of The Gathering Storm, Winston Churchill’s comprehensive history of the Second World, the British World War II leader quips, “It is a joke in Britain to say that the War Office is always preparing for the last war.”
Human nature being what it is, the same quip can be tragically applied to the Israeli military and intelligence services in the lead up to the 2023 Yom Kippur attacks by Hamas. It appears that the Israelis were singularly focused on the successes they enjoyed in the 2021 Operation Guardian Walls, and the role played by AI in bringing about that success.
Denied the benefit of the contrarian approach to analysis put in place in the aftermath of the Agranat Commission, Israel set itself up for failure by not imagining a scenario where Hamas would capitalize upon the Israeli over-reliance on AI, corrupting the algorithms in a way that blinded the computers, and their human programmers, to Hamas’ true intention and capability.
Hamas was able to generate a veritable Ghost in the Machine, corrupting Israeli AI and setting up the Israeli people and military for one of the most tragic chapters in the history of the Israeli nation.
Scott Ritter is a former U.S. Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD. His most recent book is Disarmament in the Time of Perestroika, published by Clarity Press. Via Consortium News
https://informationclearinghouse.blog/2023/10/13/scott-ritter-israel-is-reaping-the-whirlwind/
Coalition of War Criminals, Relentless War Crimes in Gaza
and Changing Geopolitics in the Middle East
By Dr. Firoz Mahboob Kamal
The green signal to Israel
The Gaza Strip now stands as a showcase of the Israeli war crimes. People can see that on the TV screen. Anybody with an iota of morality and humanity will condemn such barbaric acts of brutality. But the US leaders failed to do so. President Joe Biden proved totally blind to see those worst war crimes. The US Secretary of State Mr Antony Blinken left Tel Aviv on 12/10/2023. On 13/10/2023, the US Secretary of Defence General ( rtd) Lloyd Austin arrived. Like Blinken, Mr Austin too, at his first moments of the arrival, paid deep condolences for the Israeli deaths, but no mention of the Palestinian deaths. As if Palestinians are not human and their deaths do not deserve any mention and sympathy. These US leaders also proved blind to see the Israeli war crimes in Gaza. Such blindness doesn’t owe to their physical blindness but to moral death. Only proven war criminals can support and become complicit in such war crimes.
Like the Israeli Zionists, the USA and the European colonialists cum imperialists are well-known for their ugly war crimes like occupational wars, genocides, ethnic cleansings, forced displacement of people, enslavement of the weak and destruction of people’s homes in colonies in Asia, Africa and Latin America. The Red Indians in the USA, the Aborigines in Australia and the Maoris in New Zealand were almost cleansed by thes known war criminals. Israel is now committing all those heinous crimes in Palestine in its ugliest form -especially in Gaza. The US-led western leaders now stand united with their ideological cousins to give green signal to continue war crimes in Gaza. The USA and the UK are sending urgent military enforcement to Israel. They argue for Israel’s self-defence but stay silent on the survival rights and freedom of the Palestinians. They demand the release of Israeli captives held by Hamas, but look deaf and dumb on the release of thousands of Palestinians in Israeli jails. They also keep silent on relentless Israeli bombardment on Gaza’s defenceless people -let alone demanding the end of war crimes.
Israel claims that their action against Hamas is defensive. But when the residential homes of innocent civilians are destroyed and unarmed men, women and children are killed, then the war doesn’t remain defensive. Bombing homess, hospitals and mosques is not a feature of defensive war either. Relentless bombardment on lame-duck like people of Gaza from the air, from the land and from the sea is pure evil and the worst war crime. But the key stakeholders of the UN like the USA, the UK, France fail to show any sense and morality to condemn it. They are concerned only with Israel’s security. They condemn Hamas, but condone Israel’s war crimes. On 13/10/2023, the UN Secretary General Mr. Antonio Guterres in his press conference didn’t even ask Israel to stop the ongoing bombardment. It is very shameful that stopping the cleansing operation of Palestinians from Gaza didn’t appear in his speech either.
Israeli atrocities are not limited to Gaza. On 13/10/2023, 14 Palestinians were killed in the West Bank for protesting against the Israeli bombardment in Gaza. Human Rights organisations like Human Watch have reported that Israel is using toxic chemicals like white phosphorus against Palestinians. This is a gross violation of international law. But such a law has no place in the Israeli code of conduct. Since Israel doesn’t face any accountability anywhere in the world, it doesn't face any prohibition in its horrendous war crimes. The UN plays its role only as a silent watcher. And the US proves its complicity by supporting Israel.
The second nakba
The Palestinians now face another nakba (the great catastrophe). Nakba is the forceful extermination of Palestinians from their ancestral homes. The first nakba took place in 1948 to cleanse Palestinians from their land. In the first nakba, about 500 villages were destroyed and more than 600, 000 Palestinians were driven out of Palestine. Thus, empty spaces were created for the imported Jews from abroad. In this second phase of nakba, the Palestinians are now being driven out of Gaza. Most of the residents of Gaza are refugees from the main land of Palestine. Now they are going to be refugees again in the desert of Sinai to make an Egyptian problem.
Israel plans to accomplish the cleansing operation in Gaza in two phases. In its first phase, Israel asked 1.2 million people of Gaza city and northern part of the Gaza Strip to vacate their homes in 24 hours. It is a gross violation of human rights. A foreign country can’t ask people from another country to leave their homes. It is grotesque terrorism. It is indeed the core ideology of Israel since the days of its creation. When Israel takes control of northern Gaza, the second phase of cleansing will start to drive out the rest of the population from Gaza. When the cleansing is complete, the full annexation of Gaza will start. The same methodology was applied to annex Golan heights and East Jerusalem.
Israel: a textbook case of state-terrorism
It is not difficult to understand the meaning of terrorism. As per a standard dictionary, terrorism is the use of force for a political end. Such terrorism has been used by Israel since the day one of its creation in 1948. In fact, Israel is the textbook case of state-terrorism. Israel deployed ugly tactics of terrorism like bulldozing the homes of Palestinians to build residential blocks in the captured lands for the imported Jews from Europe, Russia, the USA and the Middle East. The terrorist gangs of the Zionists like Hagana killed innocent Palestians to terrorise the whole indigenous population. The peaceful stay in Palestine was made deliberately impossible for them. Thus, Israel is built on terrorism. Now, it survives by it and pursues to expand by it. Since imperialism is itself a form of worst international terrorism, Israeli terrorism is supported by the classical modern imperialists like the US, the UK, France and other former colonial powers.
The western leaders’ moral death
In all societies, most people are innocent. They are not involved in punishable crimes. Hence, collective punishment is the worst form of war crimes. It is against morality, humanity and basic human rights. No state has the right to punish innocent men, women, children, patients and disabled people. Every war has its own rule; it does not allow indiscriminate bombing. Such acts are war crimes. To punish common people, Israel has cut off the supply of electricity, water, food and drinks and medicine to Gaza. Israel is taking every step to starve people to death.
The Israeli Defence Minister called the people of Gaza as human animals. So, killing them is the state policy of Israel. So, they bomb indiscriminately. This is why they stopped supplies of everything that is necessary for physical survival. No person with an iota of morality and humanity can support such an ugly act of brutality. But the leaders of the USA, the EU and the UK failed to show such morality and humanity.They have openly sided with the war-criminals. They are not interested in stopping such collective punishment. They don’t want to stop the Israeli war on Gaza. They are not interested in stopping the Israeli occupation of Palestine either. Their only concern is to punish the Palestinians -especially the resistance movement like Hamas. Whoever criticises Israel are labelled as anti-Semitic and terrorist. These western supporters of the Israeli war crimes are indeed the textbook cases of people with moral death.
The narratives that are used by the western powers to condemn Russia for its war in Ukraine are not used to condemn the Israeli atrocities in Palestine. Whereas Russia never bombed so relentlessly on Ukrainian cities. In its more than one year war in Ukraine, Russia didn’t cause as much destruction of residential homes as Israel did in a small piece of Gaza. Nor did Russia kill so many innocent people as Israel killed in Gaza in only 7 days. Israel has already killed more than 2,215 civilians and destroyed more than 70 percent homes in Gaza. Among the deaths, 700 are children.
The ugliest treachery and the beginning of a new era
Israel wants to eliminate Hamas -the most powerful resistance movement of the Palestinians. The USA too, wanted to eliminate the Taliban in Afghanistan. Such US hubris met huge humiliation. The US forces no longer exist on the soil of Afghanistan, but the Taliban gracefully prevails. The USA met the same fate in Vietnam and Iraq. Its thousands of nuclear warheads and huge army couldn’t protect its pride. And Israel is not stronger than the USA. It's invincibility has gone with the wind.
Israel and its allies argue that the action of Hamas on 7 October, 2023 was unprovoked. But they forget the simple historical fact that the Israeli occupying war criminals were provoking the Paletinians for the last 75 years by their worst criminal acts. They ignore the fact that wherever there are injustices, resistance movement is inevitable. Israel is the state of most terrible injustices. It is an awful apartheid state on the earth. So, resistance movements like Hamas are a natural product of such a context.
Israel and its western allies think that terrorizing others should be their sole monopoly. As if, all rights belong to them; and others have the rights only to surrender to them. So, no protest or resistence to their occupation is acceptable to them. In such a conceptual premise, any protest against Israeli occupation is labelled terrorism. The USA and its allies buy and preach such imperialist arguments. So they consider the Russian occupation of Ukraine as a war-crime. But the Israeli occupation of Palestine is labelled as the Divine right of the Jews. This is why the Oslo Agreement -signed by both Israel and PLO stands dead.
The Oslo Agreement promised a state for the Palestians. But Israel and its allies do not have any appetite for such a state for the Palestinians. The Oslo Agreement was signed only to get PLO’s recognition for Israel. At that time PLO was described as the sole representative of Palestine. Since Israel achieved the recognition, the treaty had to die. And Yasir Arafat had to die, too. The treaty was used only as a tool to deceive the PLO leaders. And it was indeed the ugliest act of treachery against the people of Palestine. Now neither Israel nor the USA talk about the Oslo Agreement.
Because of the USA’s constant pressure, the autocratic Arab leaders also left Palestinians. They were busy making peace with Israel. Hamas bravely and cleverly stood on its own feet and showed its miraculous strength. This is why Hamas is identified as the arch enemy of Israel.
Hamas has successfully revived the Palestinian issue from the graveyard; it is indeed the greatest achievement of Hamas. Now it will be very difficult to bury the Palestinian issue in the near future. Even the secularist Arabs and the Palestinians admire Hamas. Even the worst Arab autocratic rulers can’t dare criticise Hamas. Muslims all over the world are showing their solidarity with Hamas and condemning Israel and its western allies through massive street protest. Huge protest rallies are also seen in the major cities of Europe and the USA.
It is now a new context. It is indeed the beginning of new geopolitics of the Middle East. Hamas may even influence the politics of the Muslim World significantly. The geopolitics of the Muslim Ummah is indeed on a distinctive move. The US and its allies with their ugly face will hardly be able to contain it. Israel and its allies can kill many Hamas fighters, but can’t kill its combative Islamic ideology. 14/10/2023
Countercurrent – October 14, 2023
Violence Against Human Animals: Images from the Israel-Hamas War
by Dr Binoy Kampmark
With the body count rising in this latest, and particularly bloody Israel-Hamas War, the narrative of Israel the wounded, Israel the desperate, has now been annexed to Israel the just warrior State, fighting darkness and primaeval stone age barbarism.
This has taken two forms. The first is the way the victims of the Hamas attacks inside Israeli territory have been elevated, ennobled, sanctified. The second is the manner with which the Hamas killings have been rendered exceptionally ghoulish, visceral, blood curdling.
Regarding the former, Israeli suffering has been personalised, individualised, and given the spit and polish of reverence. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, for instance, stated his shock at the “depravity of Hamas” while feeling a jolt of inspiration from the Israeli “grandfather, who drove over an hour to a kibbutz under siege, armed with only a pistol, and rescued his kids and grandkids; the mother who died shielding her teenage son with her body, giving her life to save his, giving him life for a second time; the volunteer security teams on the kibbutzes [sic], who swiftly rallied to defend their friends and neighbors, despite being heavily outnumbered.”
In contrast, the Palestinians die in sheer anonymity by the thousands, untroubling statistical notations. The names of whole families who perish in the aftermath of machine inflicted slaughter are not known, not published, and not sought. Reduced to mere numbers, the human element is leached out.
That absence of humanity brings us to the second point: reiterating, portraying, and marking the violence of the Hamas militants as singular and spectacular. While international debates rage on the issue of holding back media distribution of graphic content, notably showing massacres and atrocities, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has decided to throw all caution to the wind.
On October 12, his office released photos of slain infants, sharing them on the official Twitter (‘X’) account to roughly 1.2 million followers. A PMO spokesperson explained the rationale for doing so to The Times of Israel: “So that the world will see just a fraction of the horrors that Hamas carried out.” The Israeli Ministry for Foreign Affairs, in another post accompanied by a “graphic content warning,” featured a bloodied victim with a preamble on Hamas’s achievements: “More than 1,300 Israeli civilians slaughtered. Women and girls raped. People burned alive. Young kids kidnapped. Babies tortured and murdered. Parents executed in front of their young children.”
Such distributive efforts depicted Hamas, and it follows, Palestinians, as unalloyed in their savagery, untutored to the finer points of civilised life. Blinken affirmed the point by stating that such “difficult-to-see images of babies murdered and burned by the monsters of Hamas” served to show that these people were “not human. Hamas is ISIS.” As for US President Joe Biden: “I never really thought that I would see, have confirmed pictures of terrorists beheading children.”
In contrast, an Israeli fighter jet responsible for demolishing a building complex in Gaza resulting in the deaths of whole families is merely a hygienic, industrial consequence of war. In terms of an unstated moral calculus here, industrial-military murder proves less affronting. Throw in the justification of self-defence and such terms as “collateral damage” closes the matter. File it and forget it.
With humans reduced to paper jottings and innocuous markings, it becomes easy for a state, as Israel has done, to simply demand the removal of 1 million individuals from their already precarious dwellings in an imprisoned enclave should they wish to live. In his address to the nation on October 7, Netanyahu warned those living in Gaza to, “Leave now because we will operate forcefully everywhere.”
Such individuals are moveable stock. It matters not that they may have no choice in moving, nor the means, nor the inclination. Arrogating a power to itself, Israel had annulled the autonomy of an entire population, declaring that those who remain are no better than terrorists who deserve speedy liquidation.
The order to evacuate dovetails with sentiments from politicians who see this as a prelude for a more conclusive expulsion, inspired by the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians by the embryonic Israeli state in 1948 that came to be known as the Nakba. Forget the fact that the roots of the Hamas attacks, as with previous wars between Israelis and Palestinians, have been the bitter harvests of those forced, vicious expulsions.
Ariel Kallner, a Knesset member of Netanyahu’s Likud Party, could barely conceal his ecstasy at the retributive violence to follow in a social media post: “Right now, one goal: Nakba! A Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of 48. Nakba in Gaza and Nakba to anyone who dares to join!” It was “time,” affirmed Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, “to be cruel” begging the question when Israel’s policy towards Gaza and Palestinians more broadly had been anything other than cruel.
The corollary of such power and treatment is the imposition of a wholesale siege that is deemed that much easier because the targets are not seen as humans. In the words of the Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, “There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals, and we act accordingly.”
In the mild, though rebuking language of the International Committee of the Red Cross, “The instructions issued by the Israeli authorities for the population of Gaza City to immediately leave their homes, coupled with the complete siege explicitly denying them food, water, and electricity, are not compatible with international humanitarian law.”
To execute what will be an operation of sheer pulverisation, euphemised as a mission to “degrade” and “dismantle” terrorist infrastructure, the Israeli Defence Force has now massed on the border with Gaza and is already making what are stated as “incursions”. Journalists from a whole stable of Western news outlets are reporting such this state of affairs as cathartic. There is even a charging frisson, a sense of masochistic delight at the handiwork that awaits the fourth most powerful military in the world.
To that end, the coverage is almost cartoonish: the savage Indians circling the caravans have struck the innocent settlers, and now must be punished with the full modern might of the “settling” power that really wants peace, but whose hand was forced. But the facts remain that the “people’s army,” as the IDF is often called, was hoodwinked, its intelligence community caught unawares. The murderous rage now following is only informed by vengeance born from impotence. The diplomatic corps has gone into hibernation, but in time, political realities will have to be acknowledged, though this is likely to be done over a mountain range of corpses.
Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He currently lectures at RMIT University. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com
https://countercurrents.org/2023/10/violence-against-human-animals-images-from-the-israel-hamas-war/
Arab League condemns Israel's siege on Gaza, demands urgent aid access
Arab foreign ministers on Wednesday denounced Israel’s siege of Gaza following the shock attack by Palestinian militants on Israel, demanding that aid be “immediately” allowed to enter the blockaded enclave.
Israel has imposed a “complete siege” on the Gaza Strip, cutting off the water supply, food, electricity and other essential supplies, after Saturday’s massive assault by Hamas militants that has killed hundreds on both sides.
On Wednesday, as Israel kept up its bombardment of targets in the crowded and impoverished coastal enclave for a fifth day, the only power plant in Gaza shut down.
The Palestinian enclave’s electricity authority made the announcement saying the plant had run out of fuel.
Meeting at Arab League headquarters in Cairo, Arab foreign ministers discussed the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas and demanded Israel lift its siege of Gaza.
They also called for the “immediate” dispatch of food, fuel and humanitarian aid to the impoverished and densely populated coastal enclave.
The Arab foreign ministers also urged Israel to reconsider its “unjust decision to cut electricity supply and water to Gaza”.
They concluded their emergency their meeting by affirming the importance of Israel’s fulfillment of the international law obligations as an occupying power for the Palestinians.
Five days of relentless bombardment of Gaza by Israel in retaliation for the brutal assault on Israeli communities across the border have left the tiny territory in tatters.
Air strikes have struck residential buildings, mosques, factories and shops, said Salama Marouf of the Gaza government’s media office.
Medical supplies, including oxygen, were running low at Gaza’s overwhelmed Al-Shifa hospital, said emergency room physician Mohammed Ghonim.
Israel has reported a “staggering” 1,200 deaths since Saturday’s onslaught by the militants while Gaza officials speak of more than 1,000 people killed in Israel air and artillery strikes.
Gaza is one of the most densely populated places on the planet, with 2.3 million people living on a 362-square-kilometre (140-square-mile) strip of land.
It has been under Israeli blockade since 2007 when Hamas took control of the territory from the secular Fatah movement of Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas.
The only entrance to Gaza not controlled by Israel is Rafah on the Egyptian border.
Rafah has been bombarded by Israel three times this week.
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