Via Washington Post:
“Security experts say the war is the result of severe intelligence and military failures. Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants had been training for weeks near the Israeli border — drilling in rocket launches, kidnapping soldiers and ‘storming settlements’…
Aharon Zeevi Farkash, former head of the Israel Defense Forces’ military intelligence branch, told Israeli radio station Reshet Bet that ‘after we are able to probe this, we will see that we knew almost everything. There were intelligence assessments hours before. The question is, did we understand what we knew?’’
Egyptian intelligence – which would be in a position to know something, given that Egypt controls part of Gaza’s borders – reportedly warned Israeli intelligence “repeatedly” that Hamas was planning “something big.”
Via Insider:
“Before the Palestinian militant organization Hamas launched its unprecedented, large-scale attacks on Israel over the weekend, the Israeli government was repeatedly warned that ‘something big’ was brewing from the group that controls the Gaza Strip, an Egyptian intelligence official told The Associated Press.
Yet Israeli officials downplayed the threat from Gaza and instead focused on the occupied West Bank, the anonymous Egyptian intelligence official claimed, the news outlet reported on Monday.
‘We have warned them an explosion of the situation is coming, and very soon, and it would be big. But they underestimated such warnings,’ the Egyptian official told the AP.
The Egyptian official said that Egypt, which has historically acted as a mediator between Israel and Hamas, told Israel repeatedly that ‘something big’ was being planned.”
Of course, one should not need confirmation from Egyptian intelligence or any other source to understand that an attack emanating from the most surveilled region on Earth roughly the size of two Washington D.C.s involving tens of thousands of operatives, months if not years of planning, tons of equipment including tens of thousands of rockets imported and stockpiled in Gaza, and an influx of cash to make it all happen could have possibly occurred without the tacit blessing if not active facilitation by Mossad and/or the CIA
Almost immediately after the attack, the corporate state media launched a propaganda blitzkrieg to offer all manner of excuses for how Israeli intelligence “failed” to detect the most obvious buildup possible, precisely because it’s so patently obvious to anyone with common sense that nothing of the sort was possible that such a PR blitz is necessary to get out in front of the narrative. The provable untruth is any corporate state narrative is directly proportional to the intensity with which is is forced down the American public’s throat.
They claimed the IDF was caught off-guard because of Yom Kippur – despite the fact that Israel’s enemies launched a surprise attack decades ago on the same holiday. They offered the excuse that the IDF had moved its forces to the West Bank to quell uprisings against settlers.
The excuses defy basic logic.
In such situations, it’s also wise to ask the golden question: Cui bono? Who benefits?
Bibi Netanyahu and Ali Khamenei, the self-styled “Supreme Leader of Iran” are eternally bloodthirsty because war is the health of the state. There exists no better remedy for a political jam than an old-fashioned war. The vicious tribal animosities between Jews and Muslims existed long before either of these figures assumed power, but they exploit and capitalize on them for their own purposes.
On the American home front, as it seems funding for Ukraine may not be politically feasible in the long term, the weapons contractors that live off of perpetual war are going to feast on whatever larger-scale conflict emerges from the Gaza debacle.
Chickenhawk Josh Hawley is already calling to redirect Ukraine war funding to Israel. You can expect this rhetoric to ramp up in the coming days and weeks.
Calls for censorship of “misinformation” and “hate speech” on social media from the likes of the ADL will surely ramp up. Here’s the censorious ADL spokesman yesterday on MSNBC making hay of the attack. If you criticize whatever war the U.S. gets involved in coming up on behalf of Israel, you’re going to be labeled an anti-Semite Nazi, your social media accounts will be suspended (to the extent dissidents still have them), and your bank accounts will be frozen.
The governing authorities never let good tragedies go to waste. More often than not, their fingerprints are all over said tragedies.
Ben Bartee, author of Broken English Teacher: Notes From Exile, is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs.
Follow his stuff Substack if you are inclined to support independent journalism free of corporate slant. Also, keep tabs via Twitter.
For hip Armageddon Prose t-shirts, hats, etc., peruse the merch store.
Insta-tip jar and Bitcoin public address: bc1qvq4hgnx3eu09e0m2kk5uanxnm8ljfmpefwhawv
