It is inconceivable that the best spies in the world all failed to see Hamas coming. As much as anything else, the Shin Bet created it out of the late Sheikh Ahmed Yassin's popular religious revival movement. The idea was to weaken the old PLO, and as recently as 2019, Benjamin Netanyahu was calling for Hamas to be nurtured and funded as part of a strategy of driving a wedge between Gaza and the West Bank. That had been working. It has always worked. Hamas has always done what it was designed to do. The best spies in the world, indeed.
But now, Netanyahu has co-opted his opponents, he has marginalised and neutralised his rivals on the Right, he has silenced the judges, and he has usefully exposed the Western elites as cheerleaders for collective punishment and for genocide. Of course, they have always been a lot more than mere cheerleaders for those evils. If Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad had ever launched something such as we saw a week ago, then Israel was always going to win at least the immediate war. And here we are. At last, the ageing Netanyahu will rank with his brother.
Western media dare not mention Netanyahu's culpability, or they do not wish to do so. For that, you need Haaretz. The Los Angeles Times has withdrawn its rape allegations, and even the IDF has intervened to make it clear that there had been no beheaded babies, but whole families have been and are being killed as they fled along the approved route from northern to southern Gaza. They cannot go any further, as Israel has controlled the border with Egypt ever since the treaty of 1979. The British Government refuses to evacuate British citizens.
The use of white phosphorus has been denounced even by Alicia Kearns, who with Crispin Blunt is putting the Official Opposition to shame. We all know who gets to chair the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, so this is all publicly too much even for MI6 and GCHQ. Good for them. They know that a surprise attack of this kind would have been impossible. They can see what is really going on here.
Sadly you're right, Netanyahu has let this happen for his own purposes.
ReplyDeleteA lot of the most effective politicians are on that sociopath-psychopath spectrum, so to speak. They would get far less done if they were not. But they are.
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