The Big Story

Inside Israel, everyone is waiting for the full ground war to start and the other shoe to drop. With 300,000 reservists called up in a mass mobilization after Saturday’s attack by Hamas, entire cities are now empty of military-age men. Israel’s forces are massed on the border with Gaza, poised to begin a ground invasion that will certainly make this war deadlier and more brutal than previous rounds of fighting in Gaza. While the desire to destroy the enemy that carried out the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust is palpable inside Israel, there is also tremendous uncertainty about what kind of war this will be—whether a second front will open up on Israel’s northern border with Hezbollah, what victory would look like, and how the country can possibly heal.

Today’s Scroll is devoted exclusively to covering the war and its impacts on Israelis, Palestinians, the broader Middle East, and Jews across the world.

The following is an excerpt from an exclusive Scroll conversation with the Israeli political commentator Caroline Glick. The full interview can be found in today’s Back Pages.

In order to protect our standing in the region, or rebuild it after the low depth to which we’ve fallen, we cannot come away with half measures. We need a victory in this war, as I see it, that will … at least equal what we had in ’67, if not dwarf it. To achieve that kind of a victory, we need to take out Iran’s entire system. We need to take out Hamas not only in Gaza but also in Judea and Samaria, which is the Palestinian Authority. What we need to do is we need to take serious action to devastate Hezbollah and its war-fighting capabilities in Lebanon. We need to undermine the stability of the Iranian regime and take out its ability to transform the nuclear capabilities that it now fields into a nuclear arsenal.

These are things that Israel needs to do. And I don’t even think that there’s a question that we can get away with less. And my fear from the American embrace is that they’re here to prevent that from happening. Because the way that the Americans have behaved toward us to date is as a colony, telling us how we’re supposed to organize our government, giving us grades for everything that we do—every stupid, silly, ridiculous little piddling thing that the government does, it gets a response and a grade from the Biden administration.

The Rest

→ As news of the wholesale slaughter of Israeli civilians broke over the weekend, protestors gathered in Western cities to express their support—for Hamas. Crowds in downtown Toronto came together to shout “Allahu Akbar” and “Free Palestine!” At least 5,000 people showed up outside the Israeli embassy in London, cheering the attacks, waving Palestinian flags, and carrying signs calling for sanctions on Israel. In Sydney, people waving Palestinian flags chanted “Gas the Jews” and “Fuck the Jews” outside the city’s iconic opera house. In light of the Sydney protests, Israeli journalist Haviv Rettig Gur issued the following warning to Australians:

It’s not just Australians and Canadians, though. In New York City, at a rally outside the Israeli consulate endorsed by the local chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), listeners cheered a speaker who boasted that Israelis had been having a “great time” at “some sort of rave or desert party” until “the resistance came in electrified hang gliders and took out at least several dozen hipsters”—a reference to the Supernova festival at which more than 260 Israelis were killed. 

That speaker, it turned out, was activist journalist Eugene Puryear, who earlier in the week appeared as a guest on the podcast hosted by Briahna Joy Gray, the national press secretary for Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign. After footage of the rally went viral, DSA-affiliated New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez issued a statement condemning “the bigotry and callousness expressed in Times Square on Sunday.” Other elected New York Democrats close to the DSA, including Congressman Jamaal Bowman and state Sen. Julia Salazar, declined to comment on the rally. 

Read more here: https://nypost.com/2023/10/09/most-of-nycs-democratic-socialist-pols-refuse-to-condemn-hateful-pro-palestine-rally/

→The DSA members’ silence shouldn’t come as too much of a shock given the reaction elsewhere on the American left. As detailed by Compact’s Matthew Schmitz, a number of leading millennial socialists greeted the massacre of Israelis with something approaching glee. Economist Nathan Tankus on Saturday analogized the Hamas attacks to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. Noah Kulwin, a contributing editor at Jewish Currents and associate editor at trendy left-literary mag The Drift, compared the killings to John Brown’s raid at Harpers Ferry, likened critics of Hamas to American defenders of slavery, and chastised “left-liberals” for not developing a “more nuanced appraisal of mass hostage taking and terror as a tactic.” Lake Micah, of Harper’s and The Drift, had this to say about Saturday’s events (points if you can translate it into English): “a near-century’s pulverized overtures toward ethnic realization, of groping for a medium of existential latitude—these things culminate in drastic actions in need of no apologia.” Meanwhile Gabriel Winant, of the formerly trendy left-literary mag n+1, said that asking supporters of Palestine to condemn the violence was “politically useless … if not worse” and “like demanding racial justice advocates denounce black-on-black crime.” In other words: gauche. 

Read the rest here: https://compactmag.com/article/millennial-socialists-embrace-atrocities

→You can catch up on all of Tablet’s coverage so far here:

• Tablet Editor-in-Chief Alana Newhouse and Deputy Editor Jeremy Stern provide a quick backgrounder to understand the who (Hamas and Iran), the how (massive Israeli intelligence failure and U.S. support for Iran), and the why (to derail Israeli-Saudi rapprochement and kill Jews) of the past weekend’s attacks: Hamas’ War on Israel: Everything You Need to Know.
• On that Israeli intelligence failure: How did Hamas catch one of the most capable and technologically sophisticated militaries in the world off guard? Geopolitical strategist Edward Luttwak explains: Israel’s Intelligence Failure.
• Reports over the weekend confirmed that Hamas’ operation was planned and backed by Iran. The Iranian regime, in turn, has received tens of billions of dollars in cash from the Obama and Biden administrations as part of their long-term goal of realigning U.S. interests in the region toward those of Tehran. Lee Smith explains: Why the Iran Deal Matters.
• The Biden administration not only has strengthened Iran but also has spent the better part of a year attempting to kneecap the sitting Israeli government, argues Tablet Editor-at-Large Liel Leibovitz: America’s Betrayal of Israel.
• Liel Leibovitz interviews survivors of the Supernova music festival in southern Israel, where more than 260 people were massacred early Saturday morning: Eyewitness Accounts of the Rave Massacre.
• “While the Islamist version of [antisemitism] is potent for the purposes of mobilizing the impoverished and uneducated masses, the ‘left-wing’ or secular version—couched in the language of Fanon and Karl Marx, of human emancipation, equality, anti-capitalism, and social justice—is the more effective means of mobilizing opinion among the Western intelligentsia. The point is that they are two sides of the same coin, the value of which is set in Jewish blood.” Hussein Aboubakr Mansour dissects the cruelty and hopelessness of the Palestinian “liberation” struggle: The Savage Nihilism of ‘Free Palestine.’
• In America, social media reactions to the attacks have been split. Jews have condemned them. Activists on the left have celebrated them as an example of “decolonization” in action. And many have remained silent—because, in their world, supporting Israel is worse than celebrating murder. Ani Wilcenski and Isaac de Castro on the third group: Why Are All of You Silent?
• “Israel must now weigh the survival of American hostages against neutralizing active threats against other groups of civilians, and also against the country’s stated war aim of disarming Hamas.” Tablet staff writer Armin Rosen on the American citizens captured by Hamas, and the difficult decisions facing the U.S. and Israeli governments: Hamas Takes ‘Dozens’ of Americans Hostage in Gaza.
• The fundamental promise of the Israeli state is that it will protect Jewish life. On Saturday, it failed spectacularly in that mission. Yoav Fromer discusses the implications of Israel’s newly discovered vulnerability: The Hamas Holocaust.
• VIDEO: Liel Leibovitz hosts a roundtable discussion with Jacob Siegel, Tony Badran, Michael Doran, Lee Smith, and Gadi Taub on the situation in Israel: Israel’s War: What Happened, What’s Next.

→ If actively defending the murder of innocents seems too extreme, maybe doing PR stunts for Hamas is more your speed. On Monday, social media users resurfaced footage from July of the E.U. ambassador to the Palestinians, Sven Kühn von Burgsdorff, flying a paraglider in Hamas-controlled Gaza—yes, the same sort of paraglider that Hamas used to bypass Israeli border defenses—to “draw attention to Israel’s occupation in Gaza” and “prove that everything is possible in Gaza.” With all due respect to Herr von Burgsdorff, who has a long track record of blaming Israel for Palestinian violence, Hamas seems perfectly capable of proving what is possible in Gaza without his help. 

→ But don’t hurl your laptop, phone, or tablet out the window just yet. In the Middle East, Israelis—black and white and Bedouin, secular and religious—came together to prepare for the fight ahead. 

→ About that fight ahead: Hamas’ operation was, by any conventional standards, a resounding success. The terror group outwitted Israeli intelligence, outgunned Israeli troops, and struck real fear into the hearts of Israeli civilians for the first time in more than a generation. As Haviv Rettig Gur argues, however, that brief—and by all accounts unexpected—victory may prove to be the terror group’s undoing:

Hamas’s threat, then, is double-edged: the raw cruelty of the assault on the one hand and the impossibility of ever satisfying the assailant’s demands on the other.

And so Israelis are uniting, from left to right, liberal to Haredi. None of the domestic fractures are healed, none of the political problems resolved. But Hamas brought home to Israelis the intolerable weakness of a divided Israel. And this weaker Israel that now faces Hamas, and with it the many allies and murderous ideologues who stand behind it from Lebanon to Iran, believes it has been left no choice but to fight desperately to ensure Saturday’s images never return.

Read the rest here: https://www.timesofisrael.com/a-wounded-weakened-israel-is-a-fiercer-one/

The Back Pages

On Oct. 10, The Scroll interviewed the American-born Israeli journalist and political figure Caroline Glick, who is now a senior contributing editor at Jewish News Syndicate and served as assistant foreign policy advisor to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 1997–1998. The interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Leaving aside the intelligence failure, there appears to have been a massive operational failure in securing the southern border, with multiple breaches occurring over a period of hours and reports of civilians being stranded for up to eight hours before any Israeli security forces arrived. What happened?

I really don’t know. My suspicion is that our levels of defense were penetrated because two bases or three bases were overrun. They burned soldiers alive in their offices and they never got alerted. They burned them alive. That’s why it took so long, from what I understand. We’re talking about something where it’s hard to say where the operational failure begins and where the intelligence failure ends. Because something happened here that is otherworldly.

The operations officer for the Gaza Division said on the radio that the army was in all of the places very quickly, but that they were there with skeletal forces because of what had happened in these places and in the breach—that it happened so quickly and that so many people were killed. He also said that he and a division commander put together a small force, and they were going from community to community. I take him at his word. He is a person that I know quite well, and I genuinely trust him, so I think that to the extent that there were forces available, they were there and fighting. But I don’t know because that seems to contradict what everybody else was saying and all of the stories that we heard for three days. I don’t get it. It just adds another layer to the mystery of what happened.

I saw that in Tablet you’ve rightly been pointing an accusatory figure at the Biden administration, because they are responsible to a very large degree for what’s happened. This never would’ve happened if Trump was president—and I say this as somebody who was not, like, a crazed Trump supporter. I’m just saying it’s true. His policy was rational and Biden’s policy was treacherous. But we have to keep our eye on the ball here, which is on the jihad. That is what we’re facing, and it’s been waged against us forever. The reason that Hamas is suddenly coming out of the closet as ISIS and not some sort of milquetoast, moderate jihadists or something like that is not because they’ve become more extreme. It’s because they have more capabilities.

If Hamas is the same organization it has always been, how has their capacity increased?

I’ve been arguing for a long time that the second Lebanon War was not a war between Israel and Lebanon. Lebanon was a base of operation where Iran carried out its first war against Israel, and that war began in Gaza with the kidnapping of Gilad Shalit and the murder of his tank crew, and then with a significant rocket and mortar and missile assault from Hamas into Israel that lasted throughout the war and was superseded on July 12 with Hezbollah’s bombardment and their kidnapping of two soldiers. We forget that, and we refused to recognize this truth at the time, but Hamas has been incrementally integrated into the Iranian war machine since before it seized power in Gaza in 2007. We ignored that here, and the Americans, of course, have been ignoring it because they simply do not want to countenance the fact that at some time they were supposed to deal with Iran. They just wanted to wash their hands, but we don’t want to deal with it either. So when you ask about the rise of Hamas capabilities, look, they have been the effective sovereign in Gaza since 2007. And even before that, they really were the dominant force there.

Prior to the attack on Saturday, a small number of Israelis, including former military officers such as General Yitzhak Brik, warned that the IDF had been hollowed out and was no longer prepared for a major war. Is that right?

Yes, absolutely, because we fell in love with our technology. And look at how well that stood us on Saturday. So, yeah, it’s true and it’s not overheated and all of Brik’s warnings have been borne out.

The United States seems to be trying to constrain Israel by pushing for an early cease-fire while also issuing warnings to deter Hezbollah and other groups from opening a second front. How do you see America’s role in this war?

In order to protect our standing in the region, or rebuild it after the low depth to which we’ve fallen, we cannot come away with half measures. We need a victory in this war, as I see it, that will … at least equal what we had in ’67, if not dwarf it. To achieve that kind of a victory, we need to take out Iran’s entire system. We need to take out Hamas not only in Gaza but also in Judea and Samaria, which is the Palestinian Authority. What we need to do is we need to take serious action to devastate Hezbollah and its war-fighting capabilities in Lebanon. We need to undermine the stability of the Iranian regime and take out its ability to transform the nuclear capabilities that it now fields into a nuclear arsenal.

These are things that Israel needs to do. And I don’t even think that there’s a question that we can get away with less. And my fear from the American embrace is that they’re here to prevent that from happening. Because the way that the Americans have behaved toward us to date is as a colony, telling us how we’re supposed to organize our government, giving us grades for everything that we do—every stupid, silly, ridiculous little piddling thing that the government does, it gets a response and a grade from the Biden administration.

The [Israeli] public wants a unity government, and the public should get what it wants right now. And the public is unified and the political leadership has to unify in order to fight this war even if on a visceral level, I completely oppose it. Look, Netanyahu is a dead man walking at this point. If he is to survive in politics, if that’s important to him, or even if it’s not even important to him and he sees this as his swan song—however he looks at it, he has to lead us to the victory that I described. And I don’t need to tell him that. I trust that he has the strategic judgment to understand this.

How do you think Netanyahu sees victory, and what are the key goals that he would need to accomplish to achieve it?

The end of Hamas as an entity with any capacity to self-organize at all, and a critical weakening of Hezbollah’s capabilities in Lebanon, and I would assume a significant downgrade of Iran’s capacity to develop nuclear weapons. But he might settle for two out of the three, with Gaza being nonnegotiable.