Source: Unz.com
A couple of weeks ago, the smoldering political landscape of the Middle East suddenly exploded as the Hamas militants of Gaza launched a surprise attack against Israel, unprecedented in its size and success. News reports now place Israeli fatalities at around 1,400, more deaths in a single day than the country had ever suffered in any of its previous wars, and greater losses than in all of those conflicts combined since 1973, while as many as 200 Israelis were captured and taken back to Gaza as prisoners and hostages.
In recent years, Israel had focused upon technological solutions for its border defense, relying upon numerous sensors and remote-control machine-guns to guard the Gaza perimeter, but Hamas used small drones to quickly disable these and the signal-towers that controlled them. Meanwhile, discipline at the nearby IDF garrisons had apparently grown very lax with the sentries asleep or away from their posts, so the bases were easily overrun and the soldiers killed in their beds, by some accounts suffering up to 600 deaths in just a matter of hours, a tremendous military disaster.
The IDF had been widely regarded as one of the world’s most formidable military organizations, while Hamas consisted of lightly-armed Palestinian militants lacking any heavy weaponry, so the very serious losses the former suffered at the hands of the latter constituted an enormous national humiliation.
Indeed, decades of boastful Israeli propaganda had inspired such an exaggerated sense of the invincibility of the IDF and its Mossad intelligence service that there were widespread conspiratorial claims all across the Internet, not least among the columnists and commenters of our own website, that the Israeli government must have deliberately allowed the attack to take place. It has long been known that the Israelis originally promoted Hamas as a means of dividing the Palestinians and weakening the PLO, so some even seized on that fact to argue that the Hamas attack had probably taken place under Israeli orders.
Although such conspiratorial beliefs were most common among sharp critics of Israel, they actually attained far broader acceptance. Charlie Kirk is the leader of a large pro-Israel conservative organization, and in an interview, he set forth exactly those same dark suspicions.
Charlie Kirk speculates on whether the Israeli military was told to STAND DOWN and let Hamas run riot… pic.twitter.com/XkBd3Lhlcl
— Ben Kew 🏌️♂️ (@ben_kew) October 15, 2023
For many months, the Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had been facing enormous public demonstrations by his bitter political opponents, representing a historic division in his own society that was even verging on civil war. So according to this theory, Netanyahu had deliberately allowed that attack to take place, hoping to use it as his “Pearl Harbor” or “9/11” to solidify his own political position, perhaps even providing him an excuse to expel the Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank, thereby achieving the political goal of the more extreme members of his coalition by expanding Israel’s frontiers while permanently solving the festering “Palestinian problem.”
Despite its apparent popularity, the likelihood of this scenario disintegrates upon any careful consideration. Israel probably suffered the worst one-day defeat in its national history, a strategic disaster. Even aside from the huge loss of life in such a small population, the tremendous Hamas success punctured the powerful myth of Israeli military strength, which for three generations has been the cornerstone of the country’s national security strategy. Such heavy losses suggested that the IDF had become a paper-tiger, greatly amplifying the lesson of its 2006 military setbacks at the hands of Hezbollah in Lebanon. If poorly-armed Hamas militants could achieve such a serious blow, all of Israel’s regional adversaries were surely emboldened, and this would have been obvious to any Israeli national security officials who might have considered such a gambit.
We should also remember that Israel had been on the very verge of achieving normalized relations with Saudi Arabia, the wealthiest and most influential Arab state, a prospect that has now completely vanished. Israeli leaders had been pursuing that particular objective for decades and it seems very unlikely that Israel’s government would have sacrificed that opportunity by deliberately enabling a large Hamas attack.
But suppose that Netanyahu had actually been so politically desperate and so irrational that he had decided to allow a successful Hamas assault by standing down his own security defenses. How could he have possibly done so?
Aside from its regular army, Israel has three separate intelligence services, Mossad, Shin Bet, and Unit 8200, all of which tend to be rivals. So as former CIA Analyst Larry Johnson noted, Netanyahu would have needed to enlist the leadership of all three of those organizations in his treacherous plan to facilitate a successful Hamas attack, while making sure that none of the relevant rank-and-file officers disagreed and leaked the ultra-explosive story to the fiercely anti-Netanyahu media. This seems an impossibility.
Moreover, as already mentioned, Israeli society has recently been extremely divided, with the bulk of the nation’s elites lined up against Netanyahu and trying to drive him from office. According to media reports, the leadership of Mossad was squarely in the anti-Netanyahu camp with claims that Mossad agents were even helping to orchestrate the huge public demonstrations demanding his resignation. Surely if they had gotten the slightest hint the Netanyahu was deliberately opening the country to a huge Hamas attack, they would have used that fact to destroy him.
Also, Netanyahu is running a coalition government, with many of his top ministers hating him and eager to undermine his reputation. Even his own lieutenants might welcome his fall so that they could replace him and rise to power and it’s difficult to believe that so deadly a secret could have been kept in such a political snake-pit. And now that so many hundreds of Israeli civilians have been killed, a single outraged leaker could have Netanyahu and his fellow conspirators put on trial or even lynched. According to Seymour Hersh’s Israeli sources, Netanyahu’s long political career cannot possibly survive the aftermath of the military disaster his country has now suffered.
Reports that an Egyptian warning of a planned Hamas attack were ignored may or may not be a sign of negligence; perhaps numerous previous warnings along similar lines had always turned out to be false alarms. More serious are reports that Netanyahu had recently redeployed two of the three Israeli battalions based on the Gaza border to the West Bank in order to support Jewish settlers in their aggressive actions against the local Palestinians. But that seems more a sign of complacency and incompetence than treasonous plotting.
Under normal circumstances, the notion that the Hamas attack was an “inside job” facilitated by Israel’s own government seems so totally absurd I would hardly have given it a single sentence. But with so many on the Internet promoting the idea, it was worth explaining some of the obvious flaws, not that this may do much good. Kevin Barrett is a Muslim convert who has spent decades as an active participant in the 9/11 Truth movement and embraced a very wide range of other conspiracy theories, but when he doubted that this one was correct, most of the commenters angrily disagreed with him, and I got the same reaction when I took a similar position.
Based upon my experience, I’d say that 90-95% of all the so-called “conspiracy theories” floating around on the Internet are false or at least unsubstantiated. But the remaining 5-10% still provide a shocking catalog of important exceptions, and when many individuals first discover the reality of these, they often begin to gullibly accept all too many of the others as well….