What is driving Israel’s war on Gaza? (Land, Hamas, ideology or something else?)

Ron Unz—I think that a complex mixture of all those different factors is responsible, each being uppermost for different individuals. But obviously the triggering event was the extremely successful Hamas raid on October 7th and the total shock and horror it inflicted upon a very complacent Israeli society. As I wrote in December:

For years, many thousands of Palestinians had been held without trial as prisoners in Israel, often under brutal conditions, and these captives included large numbers of women and children. So Hamas hoped to seize some Israelis who could be traded for their freedom, and they succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, carrying around 240 prisoners back to Gaza. In later interviews with Israeli and foreign media outlets, the released or rescued Jewish hostages described how well and respectfully they had been treated by their Hamas captors.

This stunning military achievement was a direct consequence of the arrogance and over-confidence of the Israelis, who had assumed that the many hundreds of millions of dollars they had invested in their Gaza border defenses, featuring banks of high-tech electronic sensors and remotely-operated machine-guns, made them impervious to any attack from Hamas. But the latter used inexpensive small drones and other innovative tactics to disable those defenses, then breached the barrier at numerous points. This allowed 1,500 lightly-armed Hamas militants to cross over and overrun a number of army bases, military kibbutzim, and police stations, some of them deep inside Israeli territory. The IDF was literally caught napping, with many of their sentries asleep or away from their posts, and Hamas achieved an initial success far greater than their expectations.

The Israeli response to this devastating, totally unexpected military attack was panic-stricken, disorganized, and very trigger-happy, with Apache helicopter pilots unable to distinguish friend from foe on the road and merely blasting anything that moved. Video footage shows that hundreds of Israeli cars were incinerated by Hellfire missiles, with some of those vehicles driven by Hamas militants with or without Israeli hostages and others driven by fleeing Israeli civilians.

Since the mid-1980s, Israel has adopted a controversial military policy known as the Hannibal Directive, under which any Israelis captured by Palestinian militants who cannot be readily rescued must be killed to prevent them from becoming hostages, and an Israeli official described what happened on October 7th as “a mass Hannibal.” High explosive tank-shells and missiles were used to blast buildings occupied by Hamas fighters and their Israeli captives, killing everyone.

Based upon the existing evidence, I think that perhaps as few as 100-200 unarmed Israeli civilians may have been killed by the Hamas fighters, in many cases inadvertently, while all the rest died at the hands of Israel’s own trigger-happy military. But admitting such embarrassing facts would have dealt a tremendous blow to the Israeli government, so instead propaganda efforts were put into overdrive, promoting the most ridiculous lies and atrocity-hoaxes involving beheaded babies, babies baked in ovens, and widespread Hamas gang-rapes and sexual mutilations, none of which seem to have any basis in reality.

Not only did this wave of dishonest propaganda help to conceal Israel’s military humiliation, but it also stoked enormous popular anger, producing almost universal support for the brutal retaliatory massacre of tens of thousands of Gaza’s helpless civilians that soon followed. According to Max Blumenthal, polls have shown that up to 98% of Israelis support the massive ongoing attacks on Gaza, with nearly half believing that Israel’s military response has actually been too restrained.

There are no words. pic.twitter.com/47DQo3FqXC

— UNRWA (@UNRWA) February 17, 2024

This strategy also dovetailed perfectly with the longstanding goals of the most extreme members of Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet, who for religious reasons have always demanded the expulsion of all Palestinians and the creation of a Greater Israel stretching “from the River to the Sea,” populated solely by Jews. The survival of Netanyahu’s government depended entirely upon that small political faction, and he believed that their support would be solidified if his military operation succeeded in killing or driving out all the Palestinians.

Such an outcome would also establish him as a towering figure in Israel’s national history, the leader who finally achieved the permanent territorial expansion that many of his predecessors had long desired. Meanwhile, every week of continued fighting delayed any public investigation of his disastrous failure on October 7th, which he hoped might eventually be redeemed by a sweeping military victory and territorial conquest.

⚡️The Red Heifer sacrifice ✡️
⚡️Third Temple