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Who Must Share Responsibility for the Events of Oct. 7?

Smoke rises following Israeli strikes in Gaza, October 7, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Mohammed Salem

JNS.org – The former head of the Mossad, Uzi Arad, was very critical of Benjamin Netanyahu in an Oct. 4 interview with Shira Rubin of The Washington Post. Netanyahu, he said, “championed a radical reconceptualization of Israel’s approach to Hamas.” It was a strategy of “containment that relied on shoring up the group’s government in Gaza with financial support from intermediaries while keeping its military capabilities in check with occasional bombing campaigns.” Arad, however, is of the opinion that “it was self-delusion. And there wasn’t anyone who challenged it.”

Conceptualizations have been the bane of Israel’s security failures before, most notably regarding the 1973 Yom Kippur War. That debacle, at least, was one in which the government was convinced a full day earlier that war would break out, unlike Netanyahu’s cabinet. Whereas Israeli premier Golda Meir and her ministers decided not to act preemptively on the information available to them and based on army intelligence, Netanyahu was not even woken up to digest the incoming reports or given a chance to make a wrong—or correct—decision until 6:29 a.m. on the day Hamas crossed the border.

Journalistic investigations into the debacle of the performance of the Israel Defense Forces leading up to Oct. 7, including lack of reinforced shelters and arms training, as well as the near-total collapse of any effective organized defense action until well after midday by the IDF, make for painful reading. Even if Israel’s governments preferred to simply contain Hamas—and worse, allowing themselves to be convinced that Hamas was deterred—it is the army’s responsibility, at the very least, to be prepared to confront attacks.

No one in the IDF, in the Mossad, in the GSS thought to alert the prime minister of a possible dangerous development in Israel’s south. Even Maj. Gen Aharon Haliva, now retired, the former commander of the IDF’s Military Intelligence Directorate, slept through the night while other commanders discussed and debated the situation.

The most senior commanders, in the two previous years, had either ignored or suppressed indications of a change in Hamas strategy from the field spotters. Herzi Halevi, appointed as IDF Chief of Staff by Benny Gantz (over protests that were ignored by the State Attorney General, appointed by Gantz’s government on the recommendation of Gideon Sa’ar) was previously the commander of the Israeli Southern Command, responsible for Gaza, and before that, the chief of the Military Intelligence Directorate. It would appear that the IDF’s role in the debacle is not incidental. One decision was to remove rifles from the members of the emergency intervention teams of the communities. Another was to close the Open Source Intelligence unit and merge it, making it less effective.

The army, however, was only part of the problem of a wrong and misguided conceptualization. The political echelons over the years contributed to the willingness of the senior command to dismiss or minimize the threat that Hamas represented.

The idea—the belief that peace is obtainable by convincing the Arabs that Israel is willing to compromise—only fed their convictions that the Zionist entity is weak. Ever since the Oslo Accords, and even previously, territorial surrender combined with a strengthening of the military capabilities of the Arab terror groups, mainly via Iran, undermined Israel’s strategic security. It needs be acknowledged that between Gaza and Iran, Israel’s governments viewed the threat of a nuclear enemy as one that demanded the most attention.

It is another matter if Netanyahu had ordered the army these past few years to operate in a much more aggressive manner and if those opposing his policies would have applauded that approach. For example, what has occurred in Judea and Samaria—the elimination of more than 600 mainly Hamas terrorists over the past year, including drone strikes and aerial bombings—would have been unacceptable if not for the Oct. 7 invasion.

An unexpected voice highlighting a different approach to responsibility is that of Aviad Bachar. A resident of Kibbutz Be’eri, he lost his wife and son Carmel. They were killed in their safe room during the overrunning of the kibbutz. His right leg required amputation. The kibbutz belongs to the historic Mapai stream—founded in 1946 as one of the “11 points in the Negev”—and was a center of Habonim settlement training. An island of socialism.

Touching on the responsibility of a political conceptualization that weakened, perhaps, security planning, back in February, he said, “Migration is a solution. The State of Israel must encourage emigration. … Physically expel them, so that there will not be one there.”

Interviewed recently on Israel’s Channel 12, he added, “Those who live on the other side there, they don’t talk to you about life, and you can’t negotiate with them about people, only land. They understand land. By the way, they didn’t kill us because of our Jewishness, and massacred us with unbearable brutality, because they simply wanted this land.”

He is not the only one to reconsider their ideological positions and the responsibility of those positions for what led to Oct. 7. In Haaretz, you could read this headline in February: “‘Settlers Are Right’: The Kibbutz Movement Should Break Away From the Left, Outgoing Leader Says.” Well-known chef Meir Adoni announced that he was that he was “ashamed that he was part of the delusion of the delusional left who don’t understand that we are surrounded by extreme Islam monsters who have no interest in peace and normalcy, and only want to burn us alive.” He even asked forgiveness for having identified as left-wing.

Another peace activist, Yael Noy, who heads Roads to Recovery—the group that drove Gazans into Israel for hospital treatment—while refusing to yield on the need for the continuation of such volunteering, admits: “Even people on the left say that we should flatten Gaza. Both sides have become more and more radicalized.” While a minority still, there is no doubt many left-wingers are less comfortable in their ideologies than previously.

Returning to the IDF’s responsibility, there is a need to reflect on two post-Oct. 7 events: the promotions of senior officers who were involved in the failures, such as Shlomi Binder; as well as the removal of officers supposedly considered “too assertive” and too identified with rightist, nationalist outlooks, like Ofer Winter and Yaniv Asor. Asor had urged a stricter attitude towards the reservists and volunteers promoting the campaign of the Brothers in Arms group to refuse to serve. That campaign is widely believed to have encouraged Hamas in its decision to attack, seeing it as a weakening and a collapse of Israel society.

There is much to be investigated. It must be a broad and deep process. No one—from the prime minister (and former prime ministers) to IDF commanders—should be immune. But it must be done to identify not only who failed but how to be victorious in the future.

The post Who Must Share Responsibility for the Events of Oct. 7? first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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Doorstep Postings: The unbearable lightness of Justin Trudeau’s final Hanukkah as prime minister

This is a special year-end edition of Doorstep Postings, the periodic political commentary column written by Josh Lieblein for The CJN.

You all know the story that we tell this time of year: a group of Jews decided they were done with Jewish particularism and said, “Let us go an make a covenant with the nations around us” (1 Maccabees 1:11) and decided to gaslight the rest of the community into seeing things their way—and it ended very, very badly for them.

As such, Hannukah is a time for the revealing of secrets, the banishing of shadows, and the airing of grievances. Having recently reached a milestone age associated with acquiring Jewish wisdom, my own personal miracle is that after enduring 40 years of threats/promises of the imminent collapse of society and sweeping revolution, 40 years of lectures about the moral and physical decay of the West, 40 years of the most obnoxiously self-righteous folks walking the planet breathlessly informing us all of the latest irreconcilable contradiction within capitalism, I’ve finally gotten to the point where I can’t muster anything more than an eye roll anymore. 

This is because, just like every year before it, 2024 was a year of unmitigated disaster for our self-appointed reformers. I’m not just talking about Trump’s resurgence, Ukraine’s persistence, the overthrow in Syria, Hamas’s withering away, proclamations that we have reached ‘peak wokeness’, the rise of artificial intelligence and the tech bros, and the failure of centrist electoral projects everywhere but here in Canada. This was the year where the left willingly and gleefully discarded the one thing they had going for them: their tenuously held moral authority.

The success of any left-wing project hinges on successfully convincing a critical mass of undecideds that they are not like the amoral and callous right who wants you to die for their profit motive. They’ve got your best interests at heart. They’re going to sit down and hear you out and govern with joy and hope and kindness, which are alien concepts to those weird, cruel, genocidal and greedy conservatives. 

Now those of us who have been on this merry-go-round for a few turns know that it’s not that simple. Plenty of left-folks want to actively harm the rich and those they deem to be colonizers, bigots, and other associated ruling class bootlickers. The violence perpetrated by those in power justifies violence in return. This is a somewhat difficult platform to get elected on, however, because people have a bad habit of hardening their hearts in response to being threatened. And so we need suitable empty vessels to try and convince the voters that the radicals are just that: loud angry voices on the margins. The political operatives charged with laundering the baser left-wing impulses must carefully use language to make it seem that there is some daylight between them and the ends-justify-the-means crowd. 

This is a difficult task to perform because it involves not only fooling a plurality of people, if not all of the time, then for as long as the particular political project lasts. First, the operatives must trick themselves into believing in their own unimpeachable moral authority. Only once they have convinced themselves that they are the most empathic and equity-minded folks to ever draw breath can they engineer the rise of someone like Justin Trudeau. Anyone who was paying attention a decade ago could see the parallel rise of two movements: lifelong Liberals working on earned media pieces announcing the return of the Trudeau dynasty, and mostly anonymous lunatics on Tumblr who were still licking their wounds from the failure of the Occupy Movement, claiming that it was literally impossible to be racist against white people because ‘racism’ against white people wasn’t systematic. 

And as it happened, a lot of the self-proclaimed radicals bought the hype, because they saw in Trudeau something they know all too well in themselves. The desire to be loved and celebrated and told they are good, kind and moral despite, and in many cases because of, their own desire to commit and justify violence in the name of creating a better and more equal world. The Trudeau of 2015 was no less authoritarian than the figure clinging to power at the end of 2024. All that’s changed is that the radicals can no longer excuse Trudeau’s narcissism while holding out for him to bring about a world that is more equal—which is to say, a world where they have the power to do harm to their enemies. These days, Mr. Grow the Economy From the Heart Outward seems more interested in trying and failing to implement GST holidays while forcing Canada Post workers back to actual work. 

Still even as the Liberals try to envision a future without Trudeau, they remain engaged in other muddled projects, such as trying to sell the idea that Canada is engaged in an ongoing genocide but must somehow endure lest we be absorbed into the sucking Trumpist hellhole directly below us. Clearly, the Liberal Party is no longer a place for voters who are into sexy CEO-murderers, or who think Oct. 7 was an act of righteous resistance to oppression, or take China’s claims of imminent world domination seriously while denouncing Elon Musk’s similarly ridiculous pronouncements. 

But even though both the more and less radical wings of the progressive movement have had an off year and are barely speaking to one another again, we can rest assured that so long as they have to convince themselves of their own goodness they will continue to try and split this atom. Attempts to reject binaries will lead to more black and white thinking. Progressive governments will fall back into the status quo. Tumblrs will give way to Blueskys. Trudeau will fall out of favour for a few years only to be asked back after a few years of Poilievre—or some other Liberal saviour will rescue the brand. They will cast about for a new podcast hero or a leftist version of the Hawk Tuah Girl. They will insist that senile politicians are fit as fiddles, anoint barely literate fan-fiction writers as cultural arbiters, and cast lawbreakers as secular saints while vilifying anyone who’s afraid of being attacked on the street or public transit.

If the past 40 years are anything to go by, they will be as confused as ever as to why capitalism persists, why people don’t accept carbon taxes, why the world fails to condemn Israel to their liking, why poor and rural folks don’t “vote their interests”, why voters fall for Poilievre’s slogans, and why there are attempts to draw an equivalence between CEOs who condemn people to death and the people who kill those CEOs. The answer to all these questions are the same, and it’s that impure oil just burns differently—and trying to pass it off as holy can only come off as gaslighting. 

Josh Lieblein can be reached at joshualieblein@gmail.com for your response to Doorstep Postings.

The post Doorstep Postings: The unbearable lightness of Justin Trudeau’s final Hanukkah as prime minister appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.

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Doorstep Postings: The unbearable lightness of Justin Trudeau’s final Hanukkah as prime minister

This is a special year-end edition of Doorstep Postings, the periodic political commentary column written by Josh Lieblein for The CJN.

You all know the story that we tell this time of year: a group of Jews decided they were done with Jewish particularism and said, “Let us go an make a covenant with the nations around us” (1 Maccabees 1:11) and decided to gaslight the rest of the community into seeing things their way—and it ended very, very badly for them.

As such, Hannukah is a time for the revealing of secrets, the banishing of shadows, and the airing of grievances. Having recently reached a milestone age associated with acquiring Jewish wisdom, my own personal miracle is that after enduring 40 years of threats/promises of the imminent collapse of society and sweeping revolution, 40 years of lectures about the moral and physical decay of the West, 40 years of the most obnoxiously self-righteous folks walking the planet breathlessly informing us all of the latest irreconcilable contradiction within capitalism, I’ve finally gotten to the point where I can’t muster anything more than an eye roll anymore. 

This is because, just like every year before it, 2024 was a year of unmitigated disaster for our self-appointed reformers. I’m not just talking about Trump’s resurgence, Ukraine’s persistence, the overthrow in Syria, Hamas’s withering away, proclamations that we have reached ‘peak wokeness’, the rise of artificial intelligence and the tech bros, and the failure of centrist electoral projects everywhere but here in Canada. This was the year where the left willingly and gleefully discarded the one thing they had going for them: their tenuously held moral authority.

The success of any left-wing project hinges on successfully convincing a critical mass of undecideds that they are not like the amoral and callous right who wants you to die for their profit motive. They’ve got your best interests at heart. They’re going to sit down and hear you out and govern with joy and hope and kindness, which are alien concepts to those weird, cruel, genocidal and greedy conservatives. 

Now those of us who have been on this merry-go-round for a few turns know that it’s not that simple. Plenty of left-folks want to actively harm the rich and those they deem to be colonizers, bigots, and other associated ruling class bootlickers. The violence perpetrated by those in power justifies violence in return. This is a somewhat difficult platform to get elected on, however, because people have a bad habit of hardening their hearts in response to being threatened. And so we need suitable empty vessels to try and convince the voters that the radicals are just that: loud angry voices on the margins. The political operatives charged with laundering the baser left-wing impulses must carefully use language to make it seem that there is some daylight between them and the ends-justify-the-means crowd. 

This is a difficult task to perform because it involves not only fooling a plurality of people, if not all of the time, then for as long as the particular political project lasts. First, the operatives must trick themselves into believing in their own unimpeachable moral authority. Only once they have convinced themselves that they are the most empathic and equity-minded folks to ever draw breath can they engineer the rise of someone like Justin Trudeau. Anyone who was paying attention a decade ago could see the parallel rise of two movements: lifelong Liberals working on earned media pieces announcing the return of the Trudeau dynasty, and mostly anonymous lunatics on Tumblr who were still licking their wounds from the failure of the Occupy Movement, claiming that it was literally impossible to be racist against white people because ‘racism’ against white people wasn’t systematic. 

And as it happened, a lot of the self-proclaimed radicals bought the hype, because they saw in Trudeau something they know all too well in themselves. The desire to be loved and celebrated and told they are good, kind and moral despite, and in many cases because of, their own desire to commit and justify violence in the name of creating a better and more equal world. The Trudeau of 2015 was no less authoritarian than the figure clinging to power at the end of 2024. All that’s changed is that the radicals can no longer excuse Trudeau’s narcissism while holding out for him to bring about a world that is more equal—which is to say, a world where they have the power to do harm to their enemies. These days, Mr. Grow the Economy From the Heart Outward seems more interested in trying and failing to implement GST holidays while forcing Canada Post workers back to actual work. 

Still even as the Liberals try to envision a future without Trudeau, they remain engaged in other muddled projects, such as trying to sell the idea that Canada is engaged in an ongoing genocide but must somehow endure lest we be absorbed into the sucking Trumpist hellhole directly below us. Clearly, the Liberal Party is no longer a place for voters who are into sexy CEO-murderers, or who think Oct. 7 was an act of righteous resistance to oppression, or take China’s claims of imminent world domination seriously while denouncing Elon Musk’s similarly ridiculous pronouncements. 

But even though both the more and less radical wings of the progressive movement have had an off year and are barely speaking to one another again, we can rest assured that so long as they have to convince themselves of their own goodness they will continue to try and split this atom. Attempts to reject binaries will lead to more black and white thinking. Progressive governments will fall back into the status quo. Tumblrs will give way to Blueskys. Trudeau will fall out of favour for a few years only to be asked back after a few years of Poilievre—or some other Liberal saviour will rescue the brand. They will cast about for a new podcast hero or a leftist version of the Hawk Tuah Girl. They will insist that senile politicians are fit as fiddles, anoint barely literate fan-fiction writers as cultural arbiters, and cast lawbreakers as secular saints while vilifying anyone who’s afraid of being attacked on the street or public transit.

If the past 40 years are anything to go by, they will be as confused as ever as to why capitalism persists, why people don’t accept carbon taxes, why the world fails to condemn Israel to their liking, why poor and rural folks don’t “vote their interests”, why voters fall for Poilievre’s slogans, and why there are attempts to draw an equivalence between CEOs who condemn people to death and the people who kill those CEOs. The answer to all these questions are the same, and it’s that impure oil just burns differently—and trying to pass it off as holy can only come off as gaslighting. 

Josh Lieblein can be reached at joshualieblein@gmail.com for your response to Doorstep Postings.

The post Doorstep Postings: The unbearable lightness of Justin Trudeau’s final Hanukkah as prime minister appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.

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IDF Releases Investigation into Discovery of 6 Hostages’ Bodies

i24 News – The IDF released on Tuesday the investigation into the murder of six abductees at the end of August: Carmel Gat, Eden Yerushalmi,

Goldberg-Polin, Alexander Lubnov, Almog Sarusi, and Sergeant Ori Danino.

According to the findings of the investigation, when the IDF operation began in the area of the tunnel, Major General Nitzan Alon did not believe abductees would be in the area. As the operation continued, the military assessment said the probability was even lower.

The abductee who was extricated, Qaid Farhan Alkadi, was found alone, as neither he nor additional terrorists taken from the area provided indications to the additional abductees.

In the absence of new information, the operation continued in the area, the investigation said. Only then did the forces locate the bodies of the six abductees. In addition, forensic findings were found indicating that Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar had been there. It remains unclear whether he gave the order to murder the abductees himself. No signs of struggle during the murder were found in autopsies.

IDF Spokesperson Daniel Hagri visited the tunnel and described the harsh conditions in which the six abductees endured. “They were heroes who were cold-bloodedly murdered by terrorists who build tunnels under children’s rooms,” he said. “We will hunt them down and know exactly who they are, we will find the one who murdered them. The teams here collect all the evidence from the scene.”

“We didn’t know the exact location of the hostages in the tunnel. They were killed before we could reach them. We are investigating the incident of their names being leaked prior to their rescue. This is a very serious event that is harmful to the families and the security of the forces on the ground.”

The post IDF Releases Investigation into Discovery of 6 Hostages’ Bodies first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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