Commentary

Why Israel was caught unprepared against Hamas

October 13, 2023

Peter Zeihan (Commentary Contributor)

Peter Zeihan delves into recent Israeli-Hamas conflict developments, providing answers to viewer questions. — Image credit: Getty Images

All opinions expressed in this article are solely the opinions of the contributors.

On Friday, Oct. 13, the Israeli military ordered the evacuation of the northern Gaza region, home to over a million people. Meanwhile, Iran’s Foreign Minister, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, hinted that terrorist organization Hezbollah could soon join the war. These developments coincide with the visit of U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to Israel for high-level meetings.

In light of these events, Straight Arrow News contributor Peter Zeihan clarifies why Israel might not have anticipated the attack, assesses the potential involvement of Iran and provides insights into what can be expected in the ongoing conflict.

An excerpt from Zeihan’s Oct. 13 “Zeihan on Geopolitics” newsletter:

In the early hours of October 13, Israeli military officials issued an evacuation order for the residents of Gaza City, a sprawling metropolis with over 1 million people. This evacuation order has warranted an early release of our Q&A video, initially scheduled for Monday.

Within this video, I’ll break down what’s going on with Israel and Hamas, what this means for the Gaza Strip and the implications for relations in the region and wider world.

Make SAN preferred on Google Show Transcript

All opinions expressed in this article are solely the opinions of the contributors.

Hey everybody, Peter Zion here coming to you from Colorado the morning of October 13, we just had our first very light snowfall. The news is that last night, my time and early in the morning on the 13th, the Israeli government ordered all the citizens, the Palestinians of Gaza City to evacuate to the South because their assault is imminent. The Israelis are going to be rolling in with a significant ground force with the intent of rooting out the entirety of the Hamas leadership. And maybe they even have some indication as to where their hostages are evacuating a million people plus, which is what lives in Gaza to other places within the Gaza Strip, which is the most densely populated spot of humanity on the planet is a practical impossibility. Of course, people on the other side of the argument are going to say it would have been merely nice if Hamas had given the Israelis 24 hours to evacuate before their assault problems on all sides. Anyway, we had recorded a lengthy video answering as many of your questions as possible on what’s going on with Israel and Hamas and the Gaza Strip and what it means for wider relations in the region and beyond. The intent was for that to publish on Monday, but in light of this development, we decided to go ahead and release it. Now, everybody, Peter Zion here coming to you from fall in Colorado, lots and lots and lots and lots of you who had questions about what’s going on, in Israel with Gaza assaults, I’ll do my best to kind of rapid fire through these. So many questions. Okay. Question number one, how did the Israelis not know? Israel supposedly, is the gold standard for intelligence. And there aren’t a lot of things in the area that honestly they need to worry about all that much. If you look at the big picture, Lebanon is a known quantity. Yes, Hezbollah there is a problem that Hezbollah is a political party in Beirut. And so there are lines of communications, there’s phones, you can tap. And while they’re always worried about fighters in the hills of southern Lebanon, launching attacks, whether rockets or missiles or artillery across the border, it’s kind of a known quantity. And there are avenues to gather information. So it’s an issue, but it’s not a critical one series in Civil War, there hasn’t been a problem on the Syrian border in over a decade, actually, honestly, has been a problem on the Syrian border in three decades, especially since the Israelis literally controlled high ground in the Golan Heights. So Afghan issue, Jordan is a satellite state that is dependent upon Israel for economic support. So that goes away. Egypt is functionally an ally. And the bulk of the Egyptian population is on the other side of the Suez Peninsula. So there’s just not people there that can theoretically cause problems. That just leaves the Palestinians. And there is no one thing for the Palestinians, its Palestinian territories are broken into two chunks. The first one is on the west bank of the Jordan River, and kind of a crescent around Jerusalem. And here you’ve got the PLO who is basically calling the shots. And while the relations between the Israelis and the PLO are Palestinian Liberation Organization, for those of you who don’t drink Kool Aid, while relations aren’t ever good, it is a semi functional local government, and there are relations. And that means there’s ways to monitor what’s going on. And so that area has been relatively quiet. And then there’s Gaza, where Hamas took over what’s been about 15 years now. Gaza is basically an open air prison that houses 3 million people, it’s about twice the size of the District of Columbia. So it is one of the most densely populated places on Earth, heavily industrialized lifestyle, but no industrial inputs, all the food from 90% of the food 90% of the energy is imported, along with all the liquid fuels. So to think that this zone could create a industrial power that could channel is Israel’s, of course, laughable. But to think that people living in a prison camp knowing that the height that they could aspire to a TV, Mayor of the prison, that’s as good as it gets. You can understand why some less than savory ideologies might bubble up and why people might think that the situation is hopeless. So when I go kill a bunch of people, I mean, that is justification just as explanation. Anyway, this is the one the one the one thing that the Israelis have always been obsessed about. That’s where all of their microphones are pointed. And so the fact that they missed this is just mind boggling, because there were hundreds of fighters involved. Dozens of vehicles using six different transport options, and the Israelis missed it all. Which leads me to the second point in Israel, there will be a political connotations here and it will lead to the fall of the Israeli government. Now, the Israeli government was never particularly popular, and so they’re enjoying at the moment went to a bit of a rally around the flag moment. And then yeah, it was smart, and reached out to all the opposition parties to create a national war council to prosecute the conflict. He really needed to do that he did do that. But the civilian government underneath that, that’s someone that’s in trouble. Part of its demographic, the Israelis have some laws that protect basically people who commit themselves to Judaism. So if you’re studying to become a religious scholar, and all you do is study the Torah, you don’t have to pay taxes, and you don’t have to serve in the military. And that means that you can have lots of kids and don’t have to pay for them, which is encourages people to have kids. And that means somewhere between 10 and 30% of the population based on where you draw, the line of the population basically doesn’t work, but can still vote. And think of that relative you have who’s on disability insurance. And doesn’t work. It just sits in his Lazy Boy all day and bitches about how people are screwing up the world. And they are a rising demographic because of population growth, I mean, their demographic. And that means that they have been the kingmaker in any number of governments in recent decades. And they are a strong, strong minority within the Israeli system, and there’s no way to get rid of that. One of the many, many outcomes of being Jewish in a post all the cost world is that you value the opinion, and you refuse to silence the voices of anyone within your community. So the political system in Israel, it works on something called proportional representation where you vote for a party. And if the party gets 10% of the vote, they get 10% of the seats. Normally, if you’re going to have a political system like this, you want to have a floor so that the real whack jobs don’t get into government. In Israel, there really isn’t one functionally because they don’t want to silence anyone’s voices. So you have this whole rainbow of whack job right wing parties, right wing is probably not the right term was called religious fundamentalist parties who are supporting the current government. And they’re not very good at what they do, because they’re coming from a stock of people that doesn’t value secular education at all. So here in the United States, we’ve got Matt gates, gets the Florida guy who caused the downfall of speaker McCarthy, and basically made the American Congress non functional, take him, take his awesome hair away, and clone him. And that is roughly 40% of the Israeli government right now, people who are absolutely mind numbingly incompetent, but have very firm ideas on how the world should work. And they’re the ones who are now having to explain how they have presided over the greatest intelligence debacle in the world in the last 50 years, that will have consequences. So let’s do a run next. At the moment, there are no smoking guns indicating that Iran is behind this, but I would be shocked if they didn’t put their finger on the scale, at least for the timing, also, considering the various ways that the Hamas fighters launched into Israel, that required non standard supplies, which had to come from the outside and Iran is the most likely suspect. But really, it’s about the timing. The Saudis and the Israelis, were working on a normalization process, that if it would have completed, you would have taken the most powerful country in the Arab world, Saudi Arabia, economically and as was one of the larger ones, and put it basically in the same bucket for security issues as the Israelis. And that would have triggered a number of other countries to follow suit, including places like Oman and Kuwait. And if that would have happened, basically, the Iranians would have been facing a wall wall opposition throughout the entire region. Because remember, the Iranians are Shia and Persian, where most of the region is Sunni and Muslim, Sunni, Shia B into the two sects of Islam and Persians and Arabs being the ethnicities. If that had happened, Israel would have been able to basically work through the Arab world to contain the the Persians that the Iranians and it would have been a downhill slide from there, no matter what happens with policy for anyone in the rest of the world. So they had a vested interest in disrupting that. And we will probably find out in a month if it worked or not, there’s an argument going on in Saudi Arabia right now about what to do, and how much value to ascribe to the Palestinians. There was one pro forma news release that came out a couple days after the attack. And that’s been it.
Although, and I can’t underline this enough. This is not an alliance and Hamas is not a proxy of Iran. Hamas is doing Hamas things for Hamas reasons that are defined by their position in Gaza, living in a prison camp. The Iranians think at best that the Palestinians are animals. Remember, there’s a religious and an ethnic split here, Hamas Like the Saudis are Sunni, and are Arab. And so the Iranians officially considered Hamas, the Palestinians and the Arabs in general to all be apostates, and therefore worthy of elimination. So if there was a deal on the table for the Iranians, from anyone, on any thing, like trying to get a discount at Red Lobster, they would sell out Hamas in a heartbeat. And that may well happen considering everything being up in the air these days, diplomatically in the region. Okay, fourth thing what to expect next in the war,
it’s going to be awful. Hamas is not a unified organization. And you know, they’re they’re not talking about the Catholic Church here,
we’re talking about an institution that officially runs the place, but they import all their energy and their food. So they are in charge of a little bit of distribution. And that’s about it. Security is managed by dozens of independent factions who pay at most lip service to the central government, of the Hamas led Gaza and government. And that means that each faction does their own thing in their own way. And the challenge that the Israelis have always had is figuring out who to hold responsible when one of these groups does something. And because if you punish the Hamas, formal civilian government, for something that a militant group did, it’s not like the formal civilian government has tools or even awareness over some of these factions. And best guess here is that we have a new faction in play, because we see new tactics, new approaches, new aggressiveness, new embracing of absolute brutality that we have never seen in the Palestinian movement before. And with that, in play, the Israelis are doing what now they can and they’re trying to dismantle all have Hamas. So everyone that they are aware of who is in the Hamas chain, Amanda and any faction, they’re targeting for elimination now. And they’ve already delivered something like 4000 tons of explosives into the Gaza so far, basically wiping out the entire human infrastructure of the entire organization, every individual faction. But considering the intelligence failure, that means they’re probably missing the one that actually did the attack. And the only way that the Israelis might be able to find and eliminate those people, is by going into Gaza hard on the ground, and going building by building a room by room until they find the people that they’re looking for, and kill them all. So you’re talking about a building by building scouring of the zone with 3 million civilians, that will likely take months, if not years, and the human damage will be immense, because again, this is a zone densely populated industrial area with no food, or water, or power. The scale of the devastation is something we have not seen since at least, World War Two, I think the closest one that I can imagine would be the Russian seizure of Graziani in the 90s, which conservatively killed 20,000 people out of a population of a quarter of a million. You’re talking about a zone with so many more people. So no matter what side of this that you are on, be careful who you condemn. No one is in a good situation. No one is going to come out of this looking good. No one is going to come out of this anything but bloodied and bruised and scarred. So careful who you condemn, except, of course, the terrorists who did the attacks, pick those guys. Okay. Finally, the American angle, the idea that the United States didn’t see this coming, that doesn’t really strike me as an intelligence failure, because we have to focus us has a lot of interest in a lot of places and a lot of eyes and ears. But it has to focus on the places where it sees a strict national interest. Of late most of that activity has been in the Ukraine zone. So Mascar Kyiv places in between in order to assist with the war effort. Israel is a capable country that largely takes care of itself. And we have zero interest in Gaza because there’s nothing economically there. It doesn’t sit astride any sort of transport routes. It has no resources. It’s not a manufacturing hub. It’s not an intellectual or technological hub. It’s a camp. So we basically let the Israelis deal with that, because if they’re concerned, that’s how we deal with pretty much any zone where we don’t have a direct national interest we outsource to the locals. Okay. But we now know that at least a handful of Americans who were involved in the attacks on the receiving end and who were kidnapped and taken back into Gaza. And that’s a problem. The United States is not a perfect place. But part of the social contract between the American population and the American government is no matter who you are, no matter where you are, no matter what you have done, we will send to the Marines for you. But first, we have to know where you are. And since the Israelis had such a colossal intelligence failure, there’s no one to ask, which puts the US in an awkward position, there are really only two approaches. Approach number one is you put every I in every year that you can spare on the Gaza, just to find a couple dozen people. That’s a huge expenditure of effort for very little payback, we’re going to do it. But that’s a lot of things we can’t be doing instead. And once we know that, that we will send in the Special Forces and maybe a marine group, and basically blaze a path in and get them out. And hopefully, it’ll go better than what happened in Iran in 1979. Feel free to Google that if you’re under the age of 14, you don’t really catch the reference. There’s only one other approach that might Garner something, working from the theory that the Iranians put their finger on the scale for this assault. Iranians are the only people who have meaningful access to the people who actually carried out the assaults. The first rule of intelligence is you have to go where the information is. Sometimes Americans forget that when we put a lot of effort into breaking people who had nothing to do with it, because they just happen to be proximate, for example, waterboarding, Osama bin Laden’s driver didn’t get much. But in this case, the people who know something, are friends, or least coworkers, with the Iranian government. And that means one of the very, very, very, very few places where the United States can turn For information on where to send those special forces is Tehran. So regardless of what you think of the Trump administration, or the Biden administration, or American approaches to the Middle East in general, we now have a clear and present reason to engage with the Iranians in order to get the information that we need to fulfill one of our most basic sacred social contracts. And that’s the only way forward for us. What happens in the rest of Gaza, from the American point of view has now become secondary. It’s all about getting our people back. And that is not going to be a pretty process. Okay, one of these days people are going to ask me friendly questions, but that’s probably not going to be for a while now. So everyone take care. And I will see you again soon.

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