By Daniel Greenfield October 31, 2023 @ Sultan Knish Blog
A
week before its attack Hamas agreed to another truce with Israel. The
agreement negotiated by Qatar, Egypt and the United Nations traded an
end to border attacks for more imports, a bigger fishing zone and more
work permits that allowed over 20,000 Gaza Muslims to enter Israel.
Qatar, a state sponsor of Hamas and an ally of the United States, claimed that it had “succeeded in de-escalating the situation in the Gaza Strip by mediating an understanding.”
Hamas ended the border riots and Israelis went into the Sukkot holiday with an apparent calm. The Israeli army and security forces continued to focus on the West Bank, where much of the violence appeared to be coming from, rather than the Gaza Strip which seemed quiet.
But the border attacks and the negotiated ceasefire had all been part of a feint.
Hamas
had been working on a large-scale attack for two years. During this
time it had calculatedly tamped down some of the violence and appeared
amenable to informal truces in exchange for benefits. The results
appeared so impressive that Biden's National Security Adviser Jake
Sullivan bragged to Foreign Affairs magazine about “deescalating Gaza
and restoring diplomacy”. These claims would be removed from the online
version of the article.
More seriously, Israel's intelligence
apparatus was so focused on Iran that it had stopped eavesdropping on
Hamas as a waste of time. Two years without a major confrontation had
convinced too many in Jerusalem and Washington D.C. that the situation
was under control.
2023 had been the deadliest year in some time,
but the violence was coming out of the West Bank. And that's where the
Israeli military and its domestic security forces were focused.
At
the Gaza border, a reduced force, sufficient to cope with border riots
and small groups of infiltrators, had been left in place. Hamas had
spent years closely watching its routines and spotting its weaknesses
while developing a plan of attack in plain sight.
When Hamas began conducting exercises
on kidnapping Israelis and “storming settlements” in plain sight in
September 2023, experts dismissed it as posturing to extract more
concessions. In an article five days
before the attacks, the default assumption by a Western diplomat and
Israeli defense officials was that Hamas was running short of money and
an infusion of Qatari cash along with more work permits, which brought
$2 million a day into Gaza, would appease it.
An expert quoted
in the media described Hamas border violence as a “tactical way of
generating attention about their distress. It’s not an escalation but
‘warming up’ to put pressure on relevant parties that can come up with
money to give to the Hamas government.”
It was in this state of
tactical blindness, the equivalent of America’s obliviousness before
9/11, that the Hamas attacks executed on the conclusions of the High
Holy Days took place.
Israel did not entirely drop its guard.
Army units were still watching the border and a unit of the Shin Bet,
its domestic security agency, had been dispatched in anticipation of an
attack. There had been warnings that something was coming, but in line
with previous attacks, the most Israeli security personnel anticipated
was a 7-10 man incursion by a Hamas strike force.
No one expected
over 2,000 terrorists breaking through at multiple points for a
full-scale invasion of neighboring Israeli towns and communities. But
they should have.
The Hamas campaign has been described as
Israel’s 9/11, but it has more of an analogy to another disaster in
America’s military history. In January 1968, Communist forces in Vietnam
launched the Tet Offensive, taking advantage of a local holiday truce
and the conviction of American military leaders that enemy forces were
not capable of an attack on that scale.
The ambition of the
attack took everyone by surprise. The Viet Cong were able to attack even
the U.S. embassy in Saigon and take control of cities like Hue where
they murdered and tortured whomever they pleased. While the Tet
Offensive failed, it broke the morale of the Vietnamese and helped end
Democratic Party support for the Vietnam War.
Like the Tet
Offensive, the Hamas attacks violated a cease-fire and depended on
diverting Israel’s attention away from the Gaza border and to the West
Bank. The border riots and the agreement had lulled Israel into a false
sense of security about the scale of Hamas ambitions. Like the Tet
Offensive, rocket attacks were followed by a large-scale assault
targeting populated areas deeper inside Israel that were not properly
hardened. Gazan workers who had been given work permits guided the Hamas
terrorists with information about those communities.
Israeli
deployments at the Gaza border had been aimed at countering the two
usual scenarios over the years: attacks across the border and
infiltration by small groups. During border riots, a limited number of
IDF soldiers would warn off the rioters, often by firing in the air, and
snipers would be on watch for long range attacks. The border fence had
been built to block any but the most determined infiltrators and to
quickly alert response teams to any incursions. In the event that the
border fence was breached, Israeli special units would quickly intercept
the terrorists.
In these scenarios, a relatively small number of
soldiers could secure the border. No one had planned for a third
scenario or brought in sufficient numbers of soldiers to cope with it.
Like most militaries, the IDF had focused on winning the wars as they
were being fought now.
And that is always a fatal error.
Hamas
had carefully studied the Israeli military's routines. It fired rockets
while knowing that Israeli soldiers would follow their usual procedures
of seeking shelter. With the soldiers pinned down, it attacked the
communications infrastructure that provided command and control
functions, and also provided some internet and phone access to nearby
communities.
The border fence had been designed to alert Israel
to individual breaches so that military forces could quickly converge on
the area. But now there were far more breaches than forces. While
overwhelmed Israeli border forces tried to stop the invaders, more of
them were breaching at multiple points and heading toward their real
targets: communities inside Israel.
Unlike the Jewish communities
that had existed in Gaza before the disastrous ‘disengagement’ that
forced them out in the name of peace or the Jewish ‘settlements’ in the
West Bank, the ‘kibbutzim’ were not especially hardened. Whereas Jewish
‘settlements’ tend to be more religious and heavily armed, the
equivalent of small towns in Texas, the communities near Gaza attacked
by Hamas were more approximately Boston suburbs. They were not entirely
helpless: but they were dependent on security teams who kept weapons in a
central location.
The Hamas terrorists, who had used the Gaza
work permits to gain detailed intelligence on their targets, were well
aware of this. Security in these communities had been set up to cope
with the usual threat of one or two terrorists, but was completely
unready for 70 or 90 heavily armed attackers with detailed maps of their
targets and a plan to secure their objectives. And that included
knowing where the security teams and IDF personnel in those communities
lived.
In some communities, members of security teams and
ordinary civilians heroically fought back. The story of Inbar Lieberman,
a 25-year-old woman who served as the security coordinator for Kibbutz
Nir Am, who rallied her neighbors, killed 5 terrorists and saved the
kibbutz has been widely told. But other communities were not so lucky.
That was where the massacres happened.
The system fell apart and those on the ground improvised. Troops on the ground used WhatsApp to request fire support from choppers. Commando units used WhatsApp groups
to locate veterans with military experience and deploy them to targeted
areas. “Suburbanites and urbanites, including some retirees, simply
holstered their guns, jumped in their cars, and drove maniacally down
South – saving their kids, their grandkids, or mere strangers.”
Where
the IDF had been overwhelmed and tied down, an informal IDF of veterans
stepped into the breach. And without them, Hamas might have achieved
its overall objectives.
Hamas had waited two years and deployed
over 2,000 terrorists not just to carry out a few large scale massacres,
but to seize and secure the targeted communities as forward operating
bases, expanding its territory, and seeking to move beyond them in a
battle for all of Israel. Its Jihadis wore cameras and recorded their
atrocities to use them as a rallying call to summon Arab Muslims in the
West Bank and inside Israel’s ‘Green Line’ to join a battle for all of
Israel.
The ultimate plan was
“to seize the Gaza corridor and open a pathway to Tel Aviv”: a not
unthinkable distance of 44 miles away. Hamas moving its atrocities to
Tel Aviv would have been the perfect equivalent of the Tet Offensive.
As the Hamas attacks were underway, Al Jazeera reported that mosque
“minarets in the West Bank began making calls of ‘Allahu Akbar’ in an
expression of support” and “massive processions set out in a number of
places in the West Bank… in Jenin, Tubas, Ramallah… in Hebron, and
Bethlehem… to celebrate the ‘Al-Aqsa Flood’ battle.”
The images
of the hostages, the kidnapped children and abused women were intended
to panic Israelis and convince Arab Muslims to join a battle on the
verge of being won. The Hamas message was that Israel was weak and ripe
for destruction. But no real support arrived. Despite its initial
victories and massacres, Hamas was unable to sustain its momentum. Like
the Tet Offensive, the High Holy Day atrocities were a political victory
and a military defeat.
Estimates are that Hamas left behind as
many as 1,500 dead inside Israel and more along the border. The
Jihadiis, fueled by captagon, known as “the drug of jihad”, a popular
amphetamine in the Middle East mass produced by the Assad regime in
Syria, and widely used by Islamic terror groups from ISIS to Hezbollah,
felt invulnerable and gleefully tortured, mutilated and raped their way
across communities, heady with the conviction that they could not be
stopped.
The captagon high of ‘poor man’s cocaine’ also made them
slow to respond as the tide of battle turned. Many fought and died
rather than strategically pull back. A surprise attack had turned into a
rout. Like Al Qaeda and ISIS, the larger plans of Hamas resembled those
of most Islamists whose military strategies were rooted in a mixture of
Marxist guerrilla tactics, Mohammed’s conquests and prophecies of final
battles when the end times arrive.
Islamic terrorists and
guerrillas execute an attack in the expectation that the larger ummah of
the Muslim world will rally to their banners. Islamists like Marxists
see all battles as primarily ideological. Victory or defeat in any
individual battle is less important than raising morale, terrifying
enemies and using that to generate recruitment. The Marxist and Islamist
guerrilla aims not as much at winning battles as maintaining a higher
level of morale and staying power.
Hamas had won and lost before.
Each time it emerged with more financing, fame and manpower. To defeat
Maoist forces in the field, you have to actually destroy them. Or make
them completely irrelevant. The Tet Offensive had failed at achieving
its military objectives, but demonstrated how the Communists intended to
win. That is what Hamas had also set out to do.
Israel had spent
so much time focusing on Hamas tactics that it lost track of the
terrorist group’s actual long term objectives. That is a mistake that it
cannot afford again with either Hamas, Hezbollah, Fatah or any of the
Islamic terrorist groups that it is confronting. Washington’s bad habit
of looking at Islamic terrorists through the eyes of realpolitik had
rubbed off on Jerusalem. Believing that Islamists want what we all want,
that Hamas considerations were driven by $2 million a day or fishing
zones rather than a religious mandate to destroy Israel was an error.
Counterterrorism
is inherently reactive. Israel excelled at counterterrorism, but that
success was also a trap. While the Israelis built better mousetraps,
they had come to think of the enemy as a mouse. The more they reacted to
what Hamas was doing, the better able they were to stop it in the short
term, but the more they lost track of countering its larger plans in
the long term.
Islamists engage in terrorism, but it was a
catastrophic mistake to think of Hamas as merely a terrorist group and
to reduce it to its tactics. The Hamas attacks discarded terrorism and
turned to guerrilla warfare, drawing on everything from classic
Mohammedan warfare to ISIS attacks to Marxist campaigns in Southeast
Asia. Hamas stepped out of the box to launch an operation that
overwhelmed Israeli forces still thinking of it in terms of
counterterrorism rather than all-out war.
To win a war, you must
know the enemy. Israel had lost sight of who its enemy really was. But
so has every nation in the free world facing a religious war that is
over a thousand years old.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation. Thank you for reading.
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