This article is Part 2 of a series of on the current conflict in Gaza. The opinions are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of Valiant News. Please click here for Parts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, Bonus Round as they are published.
The topic of Israel has a way of turning normally-objective and otherwise-sane people into rabid unthinking animals, for one side or the other (this author included). Due to the abundance of propaganda on both sides of the current conflict, I found while researching this article series that most fairly well-informed people – even experts – were completely misinformed about what’s actually going on. So this will be an attempt to distill something resembling the truth from the raging torrent of propaganda and blinding fury that has flooded the internet, not to mention practically every mainstream media outlet covering the conflict.
I will attempt to apply a filter of sanity to the biggest questions and myths surrounding the conflict:
- Are we headed to World War III?
- Were the 10/7 attacks an Iranian operation or an inside job?
- Is the U.S. government run by Israel or vice versa? What role does Christian Dispensationalism play?
- Is Israel committing war crimes or crimes against humanity?
- What does this mean for the peace process?
BONUS ROUND: What’s the deal with the USS Liberty, Jonathan Pollard and the Talmud? Also the one conspiracy theory that’s factually true.
2) Were the 10/7 attacks an Iranian operation or an inside job?
It is telling that, while evidence was emerging from the start that Iran helped plan and fund the 10/7 attacks, neither the Biden nor Netanyahu administrations are saying so. The Biden Administration certainly isn’t enthusiastic to point the finger at Iran just weeks after transferring $6 billion to them as ransom for a prisoner swap – not to mention the billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars that support Hamas through the generous annual budget of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) . The Iranians themselves, while applauding the attacks, have also refused to take credit.
As I’ve already explained in my first article, it is in no-one’s interest to start the war with Iran – a war that the Israeli public would demand if Iranian involvement were publicly accepted as true.
The predictable effects of the attacks have, however, been an immense coup for Iranian foreign policy goals. Israel has been proven to be vulnerable; their forces are now focused on Gaza, not Iran, Lebanon or Syria. Meanwhile, the signature foreign policy achievement of the Trump presidency – the Abraham Accords, which promised peace between Israel and neighboring Sunni Arab states such as Saudi Arabia – has been effectively kneecapped. The fallout of the war even threatens Israel’s peace treaty and working relationship with Egypt, which is a mortal threat to the survival of the Jewish state.
The Abraham Accords were a historic achievement because they turned decades of old Israel policy on its head, by refusing to badger the Israelis to stop building settlements or the Palestinians to stop committing terrorist attacks; instead, Trump side-stepped the traditional peace process entirely by forging ties directly between Israel and the Arab world – with the promise of increased trade and tourism as a sweetener.
It was brilliant. Previous attempts failed because there was simply no reconciling the dealbreakers between the two sides. Even as the years wore on and new generations of Palestinians began to imagine a more flexible approach, increasing Israeli demands for security outpaced Palestinians’ alleged increasing openness to compromise. The Palestinian negotiating position was hobbled as well by the fact that – no matter what their leaders might consider offering – there was no guarantee that they could sell their own people on actually adhering to a peace deal when they’d always been promised “death or victory” over the Jews at any cost.
The least successful Israel-Palestine diplomacy of all took place during the Obama Administration: as one of the first acts of his presidency, Obama personally rejected recognition of Israeli settlements and demanded an immediate halt to any further construction of homes within them – or in East Jerusalem – in a 2009 Cairo speech, . Netanyahu agreed to temporary freezes, but – with all the pressure focused on the Israelis – the Palestinians never took him up on further offers to negotiate. After all, they couldn’t possibly be seen as less demanding than the Americans in terms of preconditions.
Trump’s move also took advantage of a little-known fact in the West: the elites of the Arab world positively loathe Palestinians. Arab elites hate Palestinians as much or more than the common Arab on the street hates Jews. Since the Palestinian exodus in 1948, they have promoted terrorism and revolution in every major Arab country that welcomed them; it is why Egypt and Jordan, the only existing nation-states other than Syria with cognizable legal claims on Israeli territory, relinquished them in an attempt to wash their hands of it all.
Consider this jaw-droppingly racist anti-Palestinian screed by a Saudi, whose interpretation that the Qur’an promises Israel in perpetuity to the Jewish people and accusation that Palestinians aren’t even real Arabs is a minority view among Muslims to say the least, but it demonstrates a mentality that dominates backroom conversations about the conflict in the halls of Arab power.
WOW 👏🏽👏🏽 The entire conflict in a nutshell– from a SAUDI. There's a reason Arab nations won't take even 1 single Gazan into their land.
Every sentence he says is better than the last.
Brutal honesty 👇🏽#Israel #Gaza pic.twitter.com/JUoMLFztOf
— Iscah 𓂆 יסכה 🇮🇱 (@jess_ih_ka) October 15, 2023
In other words, the Abraham Accords threatened to break justification for continued resistance, end Israel’s reputation as a spoiler for Arab diplomacy and force the Palestinians to the negotiating table – as every minute that passed without a peace deal worsened their position.
That door is firmly closed, for now. Even worse for the West, the Saudis – after years of grumbling about Obama/Biden appeasement of Iran – have apparently decided that they are better served by abandoning their anti-Iranian rivalry instead of waiting in vain for Americans to be better allies. They instead hosted a summit – which Iran and Turkey both attended – where Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman led Muslim nations in condemning Israel’s “illegal” counterattack and “war crimes”. “MBS” may simply be cynically playing both sides against each other, but the fact that this happened at all is a breathtaking foreign policy defeat for the Biden Administration.
The good news, again, is that the Iranians continue to appear reluctant to enter direct conflict with the West. My father, who was the last of the Iran Hostages to retire from the U.S. State Department, wrote an excellent article for the Washington Post in 2012 explaining the dangers of attempting to negotiate a deal with Iran that was all carrot and no stick. Their cultural style is essentially provocative rather than aggressive or reactive, so it is entirely in-character for them to precipitate a brutal terrorist attack to inflame Israel and then back down before starting an existential war. This isn’t a matter of cowardice – the Iranians simply prefer to do whatever they believe they can get away with.
As for the idea that Israel either planned the attack themselves, invited it or allowed it to happen… That is an understandable belief to have given the legendary reputation of Israeli intelligence, technology and military skill, but it’s fairly ridiculous if you’re familiar with the situation.
The truth is that Hamas cunningly exploited Israeli over-reliance on high-tech gadgets and general complacency. For instance, remote-controlled gun turrets at the border were disabled by low-tech drones dropping grenades into wireless towers… but that’s all besides the point.
10/7 was a worse shock to Israel than 9/11 was to the United States. Imagine if, instead of merely flying planes into buildings, the 9/11 hijackers had also attacked military bases to drag off the wives and children of American soldiers. Then imagine that most of them got away with it scot free.
So Hamas released some more footage of of them engaging armour, this time inside Gaza city itself
I'll make this a little thread to just shake my head at the IDF and their conduct.
They tended to pride themselves as being the urban warfare specialists, yet they make basic errors pic.twitter.com/rTnhaypOJx— Fennec_Radar (@RadarFennec) November 5, 2023
This wasn’t just a military defeat or a terror attack – this was a bloodcurdling humiliation. There are also indications that the initial reports of a slow Israeli response are false, but that the truth is more embarrassing than nefarious: there are allegations that Israeli reinforcements were massacred and female IDF soldiers in particular were brutally raped before a coordinated rescue could save them. That the attacks themselves happened at all was painful enough; it’s hardly inconceivable that the IDF would prefer a story where the response was “slow” instead of disastrously crushed.
Many commentators have observed cases where the IDF was lying and assumed that some dastardly Jewish scheme was going on. Occam’s Razor suggests a simpler explanation: that the real cover-up is about how IDF troops are being slaughtered in a bombed-out shooting gallery of their own creation.
One telling example is of the IDF tank battalion that saw the crews of dozens of tanks – roughly half their full number – killed or captured in a botched Gaza City assault. IDF command blamed the commanding officer for cowardice, while the tankers involved blamed lack of air support.
The sad truth is that Hamas fighters have been furiously training for the last decade specifically for this kind of warfare – guerrilla ambushes in a bombed-out city – and the IDF found itself woefully unprepared. On a strategic level, the IDF has been reacting predictably in a blind rage, playing right into Hamas’ hands.
Heyyyyyyyy, so remember that battalion I mentioned that pushed into central Gaza city that ate shit and was compelled to withdraw?
I was mostly relying on Hamas affiliated sources for that observation, but uhhhhh, apparently that absolutely happened https://t.co/fl4A59AqFQ
— Analytica Camillus (@AnalyticaCamil1) November 28, 2023
“The Israelis sent their army and their air force at Gaza in retaliation for 10/7… and Gaza’s still fighting,” said retired U.S. Army artillery officer Major Tyler Weaver in an exclusive interview with Valiant News. Weaver is a fantasy author and attorney who makes international conflict commentary on Twitter and Telegram as Armchair Warlord. “The initial response to the 10/7 attack was piecemeal and took heavy casualties. The IDF seemed to have been in an incredibly complacent security posture at the time though. Really inexcusable stuff. The way they had their border defenses set up was largely to facilitate incursions into the Strip; they weren’t that worried about anyone coming out of it.”
The conversation may not have penetrated into American circles, but Israelis are absolutely furious with their own government. According to a poll by Israeli newspaper Ma’ariv, 80% of Israelis believe Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu should take responsibility for the attacks – including 69% of his own Likud party.
The Jerusalem Post also reported that another poll by the Dialog Center found that 56% of Israelis want him to resign at the end of the current crisis, something which could land him in prison given preexisting legal troubles. Netanyahu’s domestic brand as “Mr. Security” is likely irreparably ruined.
Cutting-edge urban warfare tactics from the world's most effective army, apparently.
If the Russians were doing this people would be writing PhD dissertations on this website about how hilariously incompetent they were. Also Oryx would claim Hamas captured all of these lol.… https://t.co/f3fAbtLMQG
— Armchair Warlord (@ArmchairW) November 14, 2023
So there is simply no possible benefit that war with Gaza could offer Israel which could justify intentionally allowing this humiliation of their military and intelligence services, which directly threatens both Netanyahu personally and the deterrence value of their armed forces moving forward. Netanyahu didn’t get “saved” by 10/7 – it’s more likely his political career and legacy are ruined.
The idea that this was done to scuttle the Israeli-Palestinian peace process doesn’t make sense either, because that had already been on ice for years and was already being sidestepped entirely through the Abraham Accords, which are now effectively dead.
In short: before, they were winning in every way that matters and, now, they’re losing in every way that matters. There is absolutely no upside to the current state of events for Israel or Israeli leaders. If it were an “inside job”, it’d be the dumbest inside job conceivable and the Israelis – though they aren’t perfect – simply aren’t that dumb.
Ultimately, the ones who stood the most to gain from the attacks were Hamas, with Iran as a runner-up. Whether or not Iranian training and finance perfected the operation, the reality is that the attacks themselves are entirely in keeping with Hamas’ interests and capabilities. Assigning responsibility to another party is an unwarranted diminishment of their agency.
This article is Part 3 of a series of on the current conflict in Gaza. Please click here for Parts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, Bonus Round as they are published.
