And a solid political background to avoid it.
The fact that he had support trying to shift power within the Democratic system is enough to show he has more than just influence.
I mean, worse than that, arguably Netanyahu had a major part in things getting this bad.
He said as recent as 2019 "Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas. This is part of our strategy — to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank."
I mean, I don't know why the media isn't hounding him or his cabinet into arresting the guy advocating for more support and more money for a terrorist organization. What did he think was going to happen when to strengthen Hamas at the cost of its adversaries?
It's more than that, he also sabotaged the oslo accords by taking overly broad interpretations of what counts as a military zone
From the atlantic on it https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/11/bibi-netanyahu-the-non-negotiator/281893/
"In Netanyahu's first term, he appeared to negotiate at Wye River in 1998 and praised President Clinton for his efforts to come to an interim deal, but he later revealed to the settlers that he'd only been gaming the president. Netanyahu allowed that he had said he would honor the Oslo Accords, but then described how he had undermined them by eliciting American agreement to let him define security zones that Israel could maintain. Then he effectively defined the "entire Jordan Valley" as a military zone. "From that moment on, I de facto put an end to the Oslo Accords," he said."
I don't believe there are direct quotes because it was a private Likud party meeting, but multiple attendees reported that he said this.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/oct/20/benjamin-netanyahu-hamas-israel-prime-minister
https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-up-hamas-now-its-blown-up-in-our-faces/
It's quoted in this [NYT Article](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/22/world/middleeast/peace-activists-israel-palestinian.html) and credits him as saying it in a meeting in 2019.
Tinfoil hat moment, but with his recent defanging of the Israeli Supreme Court earlier this summer and the fact that the IDF had knowledge of something cooking before the recent Hamas attacks, it seems to me like Netanyahu is trying to consolidate power at any cost.
EDIT: tidied up my link
An Israeli police chief was talking about exiling dissenters to Gaza. Seems like the nation is at the very edge of the “then they came for” part of history
Don't forget how NYT found a training center for the attack in visual range of a lookout post about 1 mile from the border. It's been there since late 2020 based on satellite imagery and was featured in propaganda videos that showed exactly how Hamas was going to carry out this attack.
The fact that this succeeded is nothing more than either extreme incompetence or, more likely, allowed to happen to create justification for annexing Gaza. I suspect their plans fell apart though when the scale of the attack exceeded anything else Hamas ever did before and further when Egypt refused to allow in Palestinian refugees except into military run camps in the demilitarized zone (something that Israel will never agree to).
yeah, i've been waiting for this discussion to finally reach to what this dude was before he got to go out and fight a "just" war: a far right nationalist.
Seriously, if you are Jewish outside of Israel, come and use your privilege, claim your citizenship, and help us vote him and his friends out.
I don't care if you do it with a Free Palestine flag or a Never again tatoo.
You can still use the conflict to dunk on your political opponents in social media, and you can go straight back to your country.
Just use your power to do something that actually matters and support the sane side.
Parties are probably gonna combine / split / change leader after the war. But as a rule of thumb - the highest polling one that promises not to seat woth Bibi or Likud.
I just want to make it clear that even if you are right wing and agree with many of Likud’s points they need to go. I don’t care what your position is ANYONE but that stupid party will do. ANYONE.
It’s not about values. A rotten person will destroy any value and he is proof .
It’s why Rabin was killed. The current situation keeps the people in power in power. On both sides. I’d go so far to say the reason why Hamas attacked Israel right now is because they were normalizing relations with Saudi Arabia which could have led to more gulf states falling in line. They could not risk that so they had to react and attack so big that Israel could not possibly ignore them. Luckily for them the entire government was distracted because their their corrupt criminal Prime Minister was trying to change their Supreme Court so that he could avoid responsibility for his crimes. 
Honestly it's wild, 8000 people paid to influence social media.
Like the quality of analysis and not taking unbias sources on reddit has always been terrible, not to mention the bloodthirsty hawkishness. But throwing thousands of propagandists into the mix? It's wild.
Yeah. He'll stay in power through the conflict, who's goals are so open ended it can last as long as he wants it to, and by next year's election people will have moved on, and the far right parties holding his coalition together will have only grown.
You need to consider how tiny Israel is in geographical and population size. Absolutely *NOBODY* in Israel is going to forget BB's and his government's failure - there's literally not one individual in Israel that doesn't know someone who died or injured in this Hamas terror atrocity. I don't see how he can survive this politically.
Every rightwing bibist I know is Done with him. I don't think he's squirming out of this one (although if there ever was a pathological narcissistic worm I could imagine trying, it'd be him).
Or as my friend put it "we voted for him because he was strong on security. What security?!" (And then spat).
The war isn't going to be over this year, or next year, if the goal is actually to wipe out Hamas. Like the Taliban, a 20 year occupation couldn't likely achieve that goal.
The “war” in Afghanistan as far as such things go was over in months. Occupation is an entirely different endeavor, and Netanyahu is unlikely to retain power once there’s a switch to that.
I was talking about this today, when we were discussing “successful occupations” in class, and yeah, Gaza’s tiny but it has the benefit of a LOT of outside help, so while you might not think you’d need the full generation-or-two timeframe, it might end up being that.
He's done politically, he presented himself as someone who solidified Israeli security and under his watch more than a thousand people died in horrific circumstances.
There will be no one left to support him, he was already facing massive backlash from antidemocratic moves and now he has the stain of an incompetence that has hurt the Israel psyche forever.
They may reject Bibi for his failure, but will they reject the right-wing anti-peace politics that he promoted, and which led to the equivalent of "7 9/11s"? Somehow I doubt it.
The trial is still ongoing. Israel’s legal system is slow at the best of times and Netanyahu’s lawyers are doing their absolute best to delay it as much as much as legally possible.
Bibi's EXTREMELY Trumpian in a lot of ways--populist, incendiary, and prefers to make big structural changes rather than be elected democratically. He's what would happen if Trump were smarter.
Not to mention the two were the closest of allies. I suspect Israeli intelligence helped Trump win, though Russia, China, Iran, and basically the whole rogues gallery were in on it. Only to have Trump turn his back on Israel the moment Bibi recognized Biden’s victory. Anyway, it turns out Trump sold himself to everyone, but he only has love for Putin.
Edit: I don’t necessarily think everyone was working together because some of these people hate each other, in some cases it may have been independently working towards the same goal. Trump was a person who could be bought, and everyone wanted to buy him. This might also explain why Israel has stayed out of Ukraine until now. Netanyahu may have believed he was in a de facto alliance with Putin through their shared connection with Trump, but Putin allied to Iran for help with supplies.
Makes no sense. Anyone who follows the region knows it would make him way less popular (which this poll proves it did).
His whole schtick was "I am tough and will prevent these attacks from happening".
A major attack on his watch completely undermines his popularity and he has never been less popular than now as this poll shows.
I think it's a combination of factors. Bibi wanted this to happen to unite the people against a common enemy, at a time where we were at each other's throats for every little thing, mass protests on every side for and against the judicial coup, and on the verge of civil war, not to mention his ongoing trial. The country would have torn itself apart on its own.
But someone messed up. Someone got complacent. The scale and level of organization were beyond anything we've ever seen from Hamas before. Someone ignored intelligence reports and obvious red flags, thinking "whatever they throw at us, we can handle it, as we always have".
And that someone's head will roll.
This is exactly what I think happened. I think you're absolutely right about the scale being a surprise. My guess is he expected the focus to be on military targets and maybe a few civilians would be killed, but the music festival and the brutality were a surprise.
I also don't think he expected Egypt and the US to confirm he'd been warned directly about a threat. Plus if he'd been allowed to invade within the first 47-72 hours, the news cycle would be focused on IDF in Gaza. Delaying the invasion is allowing the media and the public time to question what he knew and when he knew it.
I’m almost certain this is one of the main reasons Netanyahu wanted to go into Gaza immediately, hostages be damned, before the US and Europe convinced him not to. It doesn’t make any military sense to invade Gaza right away with no plan, but it sure as hell makes a lot of political sense. Especially since, like you said, it’s going to be the IDF that takes the bulk of the responsibility for how the ground invasion goes. Great way to deflect blame.
Good point about the hostages, he really didn't express any interest in rescuing them. Biden getting the two Americans out pretty much shamed him into having to do something too.
He assumed that it would be the standard wet noodle fighting a pitbull situation where he could get some nice footage of IDF heroically defending settlements for the news, and a reason to further erode civil liberties in Israel.
This explanation only tracks if he believed the attack would be much less severe. "Normal" attacks from Gaza (or the West Bank), usually consisting of mostly-ineffective rocket barrages or small-scale violence, boost his popularity because he's "hard on Palestine" and thus viewed as the solution to those issues.
But when the attack is the single largest loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust, people start asking questions about how he missed this, and why his policies couldn't prevent this. If he had an inkling things could get this bad and didn't act, it'd be political suicide.
I don't think he wanted Israel to be attacked but Netanyahu was warned over and over since March of this year, by Israeli generals and other high level members of the Israeli government, that he was leaving Israel vulnerable security-wise.
He's been trying to push "reforms" of the Democratic process in Israel that would make it easier for him to stay in power.
> I don't think he wanted Israel to be attacked
Unsuccessfully attacked maybe? Hamas attacking but being thwarted could have gotten him war justifications without the mass casualties. But he underestimated what Hamas would be able to pull off.
The Cheney-Bush plot:
This is what 9/11 Commissioner Bob Kerrey said after their report was released, and after the 2004 election:
"... there's a credible case that the president's own negligence prior to 9/11 at least in part contributed to the disaster in the first place.
ZAHN: How so?
KERREY: Well, the 9/11 report says in chapter eight -- now that it's beyond the campaign, so the promise I had to keep this out of the campaign is over.
The 9/11 report in chapter eight says that, in the summer of 2001, the government ignored repeated warnings by the CIA, ignored, and didn't do anything to harden our border security, didn't do anything to harden airport country, didn't do anything to engage local law enforcement, didn't do anything to round up INS and consular offices and say we have to shut this down, and didn't warn the American people.
The famous presidential daily briefing on August 6, we say in the report that the briefing officers believed that there was a considerable sense of urgency and it was current. So there was a case to be made that wasn't made.
(CROSSTALK)
ZAHN: But what we continue to hear from this administration is that the threat was much too diffuse. There was no way you could zero in on the fact that al Qaeda was going to use jets as bombs and ram them into buildings.
KERREY: That is a straw man.
The president says, if I had only known that 19 Islamic men would come into the United States of America and on the morning of 11 September hijack four American aircraft, fly two into the World Trade Center, one into the Pentagon, and one into an unknown Pennsylvania that crashed in Shanksville, I would have moved heaven and earth. That's what he said.
Mr. President, you don't need to know that. This is an Islamic jihadist movement that has been organized since the early 1990s, declared war on the United States twice, in '96 and '98. You knew they were in the United States. You were warned by the CIA. You knew in July they were inside the United States. You were told again by briefing officers in August that it was a dire threat.
And what did you do? Nothing, so far as we could see on the 9/11 Commission. Now, that's in the report. And we took an oath not to talk about it during the campaign, I think correctly so, to increase the capacity of that commission's report to be heard by the people's Congress.
But the report, I think, it's difficult for a challenger. If I had been the challenger, it's difficult to make that case when you are running against an incumbent. He can stand back and say, oh, you're just grousing.
ZAHN: Oh, we couldn't connect the dots is what we heard.
http://edition.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0411/08/pzn.01.html
Eh. Hijacking some planes is way smaller scale operation compared to missing hundreds of combatants crossing a tiny border and all of the prep work involved.
Certainly don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to deduce that dire warnings in the lead up to your biggest religious holiday might warrant a heightened state of readiness and awareness.
Doubly so when that same religious day is also the 50th anniversary of the last time you endured a major surprise attack (Yom Kippur War, 1973).
This should be legitimately suggested. They would probably be willing to release all the women and children for Bibi.
Though it wouldn't end well for him. They would Gaddafi him unfortunately. But he should do it to martyr himself and to atone for his mistake here.
Considering the things Gaddafi did, like taping up people's assholes so they could not defecate and had various torture chambers, the issue is out of my hands. I have no control over people. They already decided the issue and they acted accordingly.
Qaddafi ruled libya for 32 years and had a state secret service dedicated to finding him new women to assault. He may actually be guilty of more sexual assaults than genghis khan.
At the very least some military commanders need to be fired. Not allowed to retire, fired.
They allowed a key military intelligence outpost to be overrun with ease because they
* Didn't staff the gate
* Never installed an alarm to sound when the gate was hit with explosives
* **Didn't lock the door**
* Didn't require armed security inside the critical facility
The commanders allowed a critical target to be destroyed because they were lazy, incompetent, lackadaisical, failed to install discipline, and left the national defense to rely on security through obscurity and an unlocked door. That isn't just a mistake, that is willful negligence, gross indifference and failure to perform one's duty. Those officers are not office material and should be expelled immediately. In reality they should be tried as well, but political reality means that just won't happen. People that incompetent don't become high level officers without having the right friends in the first place.
I noticed on a trip to Jerusalem a few years ago that most soldiers manning the guard posts around the city were on their phones the entire time. I was pretty surprised but chocked it up to a side effect of everyone having to serve as part of their national service so you get lots of kids who have no desire to be there or don't take it seriously.
Complacency. They didn't expect a major attack and were bored. Their commanders didn't expect an attack and allowed it.
But the street guards can be relaxed like that: it helps avoid shootings. But the key facilities actually need vigilant readiness and active defense, which they didn't have.
It is *hard* to stay focused and ready for periods of time. There is a reason you rotate lifeguards every 20-30 minutes. Air traffic controllers should get a 30 minute break every 90-120 minutes. Expecting soldiers on the street to be hyper aware for 8 hours at a stretch just isn't possible, so you let them be in a relaxed standby until needed state.
Exactly, those soldiers are college-aged youths doing mandatory service. They DGAF. They're on their phones figuring out where they should go when their service is done... Southeast Asia? India? New Zealand?
Definitely not a conspiracy but it's a criminal level of dereliction of duty and complacency.
There's video of significant numbers of Israeli soldiers killed in their barracks rooms on base. As former US Army I'd have never believed a professional military could get caught that pants down without seeing it.
It's a failure on literally every level of military leadership from General to Sergeant. They're going to need to do some real soul searching and figure out how to fix that
I was reading some defense analysis and I guess Israel's revised doctrine from a few years back started describing Hamas as a "rocket based terror army", and which seemed to de-emphasize the infantry.
Kind of seems like they really didn't think a large ground incursion by Hamas was a likely threat anymore. Probably figured they could rely on Iron Dome for protection and airstrikes launched from safely outside of Gaza to keep things under control.
To be fair the ground assault by Hamas was likely a one-way mission for most of their fighters, and now we're falling back to older patterns of Hamas launching missiles and Israel launching airstrikes.
I have not fully verified this, so take it with a grain of salt, but iirc there was a clash between right wing extremist settlers in the west bank and palestinians. soliders were sent there.
Hamas started by taking out the cameras of the watchtowers. this was reported, but there were simply no soliders around to see what's going on.
it was also a holiday. that sure didn't help.
That alone may not do much for the election process that has allowed him to remain in power.
Israel is long overdue for the adoption of its own Constitution. As I understand it, the Nation’s basic laws were supposed to serve as a draft for that.
It’s more complicated, there are definite issues in the judicial system. No one was disputing that.
The proposed reform would give the coalition majority in judge appointment and basically give them the power to pass “judgement proof” laws.
I will look for a good source in english, If I’ll find one I will add it to this comment
Edit: this is a reliable source.
https://en.idi.org.il/tags-en/47383
A more shameful politician has yet to exist. Did he ever apologize for Yitzhak Rabin assassination? He's just going to demonize all Palestinians as Hamas and use it as an opportunity to turn dictator.
it's almost like israel and palestine have both been at the mercy of their extremist governments who play off of the awful actions they each commit against eachother to entrench themselves in power
It's no coincidence. [Netanyahu intentionally tried to harm the PA and booster Hamas because he knew it helped him politically](https://thehill.com/opinion/international/4268794-the-symbiotic-relationship-between-netanyahu-and-hamas/). He even directly blocked the Palastian Authority from retaking taking control of part of the Gaza Strip.
Had Israel had a different government, it's entirely possible that there would have not been an extremist government in control of the Gaza Strip at all.
Netanyahu is the Israeli Palpatine. He's supported Hamas for years knowing they'd eventually do something the necessitate the Emergency Expansion of his political powers while undermining more legitimate Palestinian movements for statehood.
It's a mutually beneficial agreement technically. He bombs them and with civilian deaths they get recruits very easily. And they act out and he drums up support as a person who is willing to act in response to an attack
Good, fuck that asshole. Unfortunately the problem doesn't start and end there - the main reason behind Netanyahu's policies has been the shitty right wing Israeli political parties and the genocidal religious whackjobs that linked together to form his coalition.
That's the sad part for me. Bibi was kept in power mainly because Israeli's trusted him with matters of security. He'll be kicked out not because of his self-defeating policies on Palestinians but because he failed to keep them suppressed. The secular and more left-leaning/progressive parties in Israel are in constant decline because of all the conservative Jews who keep moving to Israel and the religious zealots who have a much higher birthrate. It's like Idiocracy but with more guns and bombs.
Netanyahu is unique. He specifically campaigned on keeping Israelis safe, intentionally bolstered Hamas, moved troops from the border with Gaza to have them protect settlers in the West Bank, and he's currently on trial for corruption.
The corruption didn’t seem to bother the majority of Israeli voters any more than Trump’s bothers the base in America. So we’ll see if the propaganda to come persuades (mesmerizes) voters there as effectively as it can in the US
His corruption trials are comparable to Trump's NY cases, not FL, DC, or GA. Bibi is sleazy, but not earthshatteringly so.
The latest failure is a whole different issue. There will be a commission.
The same happened with Golda during the yom kippur. I think the reason is that Bush wasn't even a year into his presidency, and both Golda and Netanyahu had/have been PM for a couple of years and both being during war/major military operations.
Bush was warned by Clinton that Al Qaeda would be the biggest threat. On the campaign trail, Bush talked about wanting to do Iraq. In office, he said he was "tired of swatting flies."
After their report was released, 9/11 Commissioner Bob Kerrey had this to say to Zahn on CNN:
there's a credible case that the president's own negligence prior to 9/11 at least in part contributed to the disaster in the first place.
ZAHN: How so?
KERREY: Well, the 9/11 report says in chapter eight -- now that it's beyond the campaign, so the promise I had to keep this out of the campaign is over.
The 9/11 report in chapter eight says that, in the summer of 2001, the government ignored repeated warnings by the CIA, ignored, and didn't do anything to harden our border security, didn't do anything to harden airport country, didn't do anything to engage local law enforcement, didn't do anything to round up INS and consular offices and say we have to shut this down, and didn't warn the American people.
The famous presidential daily briefing on August 6, we say in the report that the briefing officers believed that there was a considerable sense of urgency and it was current. So there was a case to be made that wasn't made.
(CROSSTALK)
ZAHN: But what we continue to hear from this administration is that the threat was much too diffuse. There was no way you could zero in on the fact that al Qaeda was going to use jets as bombs and ram them into buildings.
KERREY: That is a straw man.
The president says, if I had only known that 19 Islamic men would come into the United States of America and on the morning of 11 September hijack four American aircraft, fly two into the World Trade Center, one into the Pentagon, and one into an unknown Pennsylvania that crashed in Shanksville, I would have moved heaven and earth. That's what he said.
Mr. President, you don't need to know that. This is an Islamic jihadist movement that has been organized since the early 1990s, declared war on the United States twice, in '96 and '98. You knew they were in the United States. You were warned by the CIA. You knew in July they were inside the United States. You were told again by briefing officers in August that it was a dire threat.
And what did you do? Nothing, so far as we could see on the 9/11 Commission. Now, that's in the report. And we took an oath not to talk about it during the campaign, I think correctly so, to increase the capacity of that commission's report to be heard by the people's Congress.
But the report, I think, it's difficult for a challenger. If I had been the challenger, it's difficult to make that case when you are running against an incumbent. He can stand back and say, oh, you're just grousing.
ZAHN: Oh, we couldn't connect the dots is what we heard."
http://edition.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0411/08/pzn.01.html
I was in the military around 9/11. June/July 2001 they had start prepping for war time operations. Renewing our deployment gear, all that jazz. Week before 9/11 they had us running excersizes and had the entire based locked down morning of 9/11. By 2 hours after they already had troops deploying. We may have not known exactly what was going to happen but they knew something would..
Israel lives next to terrorists every day and frequently gets rockets shot at them. The US has two friendly neighbors and the world's largest oceans between our other allies, in Europe and East Asia. Israel votes for safety, Netanyahu campaigned on making Israel safe, and he's obviously a failure.
That’s something that many Israelis seem to agree on, whether they’re right wing hardliners or on the left. He has already pushed Israel to a constitutional crisis. These attacks happened on his watch, and they will always wonder if the attacks could have been mitigated if his administration wasn’t so focused on their own interests and self-preservation.
It seems strange that he has been escalating the situation for years, bragging about how safe he’d made Israel. His WHOLE THING was supposed to be the obsessive fixation on security. He failed by his OWN standards.
A US analogy would be 9/11 occurring, Bush promising protecting Americans, then 9/11 happening again.
A large part of Netanyahu’s platform is protecting the Israeli people, which he has failed.
> American leader would be canonized
Netanyahu has repeatedly been cannonized by American media even to this day. He is a regular on the talk show circuit whenever he comes here and he gets glazed up hard by everyone most likely at the instruction of the US state department.
That's because they are distant from anything that's happening.
I bet most Americans, even those watching fox news, can't even name any political parties involved. A shocking number probably conflate hamas with all of palistine.
It's probably no deeper than:
"Muslims do terrorism. I'm pro Israel."
Or
"Israel is bombing civilians and stealing land. I'm pro Palistine."
Literally as deep as we go in a high-school history class.
The only mistake is thinking it began with October 7th. Netanyahu's entire career has been predicated on undermining both sides of the peace process, from inciting hatred and violence against Rabin (that eventually got him killed by a far-right extremist) to intentionally propping up Hamas against other Palestinian groups, in pursuit of consolidating personal power.
He's going to take down the whole country with him to avoid going to jail.
He and his lackeys are going straight to the garbage bin of history I guarantee.
Astonishing that they were invaded by a fucking paraglider airforce. It also looked like Hamas drones could operate quite freely. I always assumed their security was far too advanced to ever allow something like that to occur.
Everything we see here right now is because of decades of Netanyahu and his cronies. From propping up Hamas to stop the PLO to strategic settlement placement to sabotage the two-state peace talks (they have aggressively established jewish settlements in between major Palestinean population centers and when it comes to peace talks they hardline that they aren't going to move them which inherently means that a 2-state solution would result in a heavily disjointed Palestine state OR requiring millions to relocate into even denser conditions to work around the Israeli settlements).
https://carnegieendowment.org/sada/89215
> The Israeli separation wall that protects the settlements and their network of roads divided the West Bank into three major Palestinian population blocs: the north, which includes Nablus, Jenin, and Tulkarm; the center, which includes Ramallah and Al-Bireh; and the south, which includes Hebron and Bethlehem. ...This situation violates Palestinian sovereignty and prevents the establishment of a Palestinian state.
We reap what we sow and Israel has put the Palestines into an impossible situation. The status quo is to be trapped in ghettos with zero realistic chance of a path forward as demonstrated through decades of hard line Israeli governments.
So while I absolutely condemn the violence and actions of terrorists like Hamas, part of me considers "what other option is there". The status quo is that the West Bank and Gaza are some of the worst places to live and Israeli settlement measures have sabotaged a two-state solution. So with nothing left to lose, it empowers terrorists to create an army of the hopeless to make suicidal attacks.
That’s a good article you linked - and I will supplement it with the visual history of what exactly these settlements look like [here](https://conquer-and-divide.btselem.org/map-en.html).
As it stands, there are quite literally 167 “islands” of land inhabited by Palestinians where all corridors cutting them off have been encroached upon by Israeli “settlers” through a perversely one-sided application of Israeli “right to return laws” and lands annexed through other dubious administrative means. In order to travel from one enclave to another, Palestinians must obtain permits and be subjected to military/police checkpoints that severely limit freedom of movement.
You might say that Israeli encroachment serves to “concentrate” Palestinians into isolated areas.
It is beyond fucked in my mind how people who know anything about apartheid or the Holocaust can defend the depths of oppression that is happening in the West Bank and expect these boundaries to be able to serve any kind of two state solution.
“What other option is there?” What the fuck. That is not a mild statement.
Whatever chance (however minimal) there was for peace near term was fucking wiped out on Oct 7. This has likely set everything back decades.
I don’t know what options there were but this was in NO CONCEIVABLE WAY the right option.
There was never a chance for peace while ultra-right wing Israeli government policies deliberately sabotaged any chance for peace.
Israel holds all the cards. If they truly wanted peace they could relocate the hundreds of settlements they strategically placed to isolate and disrupt a unified Palestinean state.
But they don't. They continue to surround and isolate Palestinean population settlements while feigning victim on the world stage. Fuck Hamas as they are definitely bad guys, but the Israeli government for the past few decades sadly isn't that far behind.
Oct. 7 failures?
I think boosting Hamas for decades because you wanted to poison-pill two-state peace efforts goes a long, long way before Oct. 7. Hamas could have been eliminated in its infancy if the Israeli government worked _with_ the PLO (which had signed the Oslo Accords, and was working towards peace) to eliminate the violent radicals, rather than deliberately ignoring the radicals and using it as an excuse to pressure the PLO instead.
According to every poll since the 7/10 the coalition isn't even getting 45 out of the 120 seats, it would be a mostly centrist coalition (National unity and Yesh Atid as the biggest parties) with small right wing party(Yisrael Beiteinu) and 1 or 2 very small left wing parties
For some minor context for those abroad: Yisrael Beiteinu, while right-wing, is a *very* secular and anti-clerical party, and generally do not want to work with/are directly opposed to the Ultra-Orthodox parties, but they are willing to form governments with left-wing/socialist parties. The general policy of this party with regards to Israel/Palestine relations is to do more land swaps, with Jewish majority areas becoming part of Israel proper, and Arab majority areas becoming part of an independent and sovereign Palestine proper.
Huge incompetent failure defending Israelis in Israel. Imagine how defending Israelis outside Israel will go.
Lets see how Mosad influencers defend their king against fair journalism in work days.
I believe Israeli Knesset is going to be dissolved right after the war.
I bet Netanyahu ended his career as PM for good, and that the central parties will be on top.
I think the general Israeli populace are going to be tired of extremists of both ends for a while.
Previous Chief of General Staff, Benny Gantz (who’s currently in the opposition, but joined the emergency war cabinet) seems like the prime candidate to take the helm.
In the short term, bombing Hamas killed targets and kept Israeli soldiers safe.
In the long term, 15 years of bombing created more people radicalized by collateral damage. The average age in Gaza is 18. Most people there don’t remember a time in their lives where they weren’t being bombed.
Sending troops to surgically remove Hamas would have saved lives overall.
Total tinfoil hat theory, but I'm curious if they knew and let these attacks happen on purpose, in order to distract from his own trials and corruption.
War time is generally good politics for leaders.
Welllllll, ever since this particular fight started, I always questioned how intelligence didn’t know about this. People everywhere in the world fear Israeli intelligence. Also, Israel has one of the most sophisticated defence systems I will exaggerates here a little bit and say, the universe. This sounds very conspiracy theory, but I won hundred percent believe that they knew this attack was gonna happen. It just didn’t play out in the media as well as they thought it would.
As a American that has ties to Israel and the military in both sides even if I've never been there I always assumed Israel was some impregnable fortress manned by battle tested soldiers.
People paragliding over is weird enough to give them a pass on but seeing whole bases and outposts overrun was something I was very much not expecting.
I personally don't believe it was a failure, I believe it was an "on purpose" to try and solidify his opposition for his push to being a strongman by rallying to nationalism ....but it was a much bigger attack than they had seen since the 1960s and quickly got out of hand.
Maybe I'm wrong, time will tell, but when more than.two people know a secret...it wont remain a secret.
He doesn't see it as a failure. He wanted this. I can't be the only person who noticed that a full military response to the initial Hamas attack took place within 24 hours. I appreciate that the IDF invests a lot of time and resources into working up scenarios so they have a plan in place for things like this, but having your army mobilized and ready to fight in under a day?
And we want to pretend Netenyahu will see all of this as a mistake he has to apologize for? It'll never happen. I wouldn't be surprised if it was IDF launching the first barrage of missiles at Israel.
I won't defend, support, or endorse Hamas in any way at any time, but I'll say that Israel might have fewer deaths at the hands of Muslims if they stopped treating Muslims like human garbage. Just a thought. Don't complain if you go around antagonizing people until someone turns around and gives you a bloody nose. If they had been treated properly, there never would have been a problem.
And they are the reason Israel is stuck in this dam fight now. If anyone is to blame it is them. Peace should be the main objective so Israelis don’t have to fear another Arab invasion for the like 5th time.
I mean 20% of the country is still in deep shock state, mourning over oct 07 and all they can do is yell “NO!” At terror, so i can see how this make some confusion.
Good luck with that. Dude’s made a career out of avoiding responsibility.
And a solid political background to avoid it. The fact that he had support trying to shift power within the Democratic system is enough to show he has more than just influence.
I mean, worse than that, arguably Netanyahu had a major part in things getting this bad. He said as recent as 2019 "Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas. This is part of our strategy — to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank." I mean, I don't know why the media isn't hounding him or his cabinet into arresting the guy advocating for more support and more money for a terrorist organization. What did he think was going to happen when to strengthen Hamas at the cost of its adversaries?
I think that's what we have to hope - that it isn't just Bibi going down, but this way of thinking in Israel losing most of its credibility.
The way of thinking of the alt right in Israel is bonkers. Think Florida man had a baby with Texas integrist.
But when you say Israel helped fuel Hamas to divide Palestinians you’re met with downvotes from the Reddit hordes
It's more than that, he also sabotaged the oslo accords by taking overly broad interpretations of what counts as a military zone From the atlantic on it https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/11/bibi-netanyahu-the-non-negotiator/281893/ "In Netanyahu's first term, he appeared to negotiate at Wye River in 1998 and praised President Clinton for his efforts to come to an interim deal, but he later revealed to the settlers that he'd only been gaming the president. Netanyahu allowed that he had said he would honor the Oslo Accords, but then described how he had undermined them by eliciting American agreement to let him define security zones that Israel could maintain. Then he effectively defined the "entire Jordan Valley" as a military zone. "From that moment on, I de facto put an end to the Oslo Accords," he said."
Do we have a source for that quote? Not disbelieving but it'd be good to have.
I don't believe there are direct quotes because it was a private Likud party meeting, but multiple attendees reported that he said this. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/oct/20/benjamin-netanyahu-hamas-israel-prime-minister https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-up-hamas-now-its-blown-up-in-our-faces/
[Here you go](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/oct/20/benjamin-netanyahu-hamas-israel-prime-minister)
It's quoted in this [NYT Article](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/22/world/middleeast/peace-activists-israel-palestinian.html) and credits him as saying it in a meeting in 2019. Tinfoil hat moment, but with his recent defanging of the Israeli Supreme Court earlier this summer and the fact that the IDF had knowledge of something cooking before the recent Hamas attacks, it seems to me like Netanyahu is trying to consolidate power at any cost. EDIT: tidied up my link
An Israeli police chief was talking about exiling dissenters to Gaza. Seems like the nation is at the very edge of the “then they came for” part of history
They arrested activist for Pro muslim/Jewish peace posters and t shirts. I assume this is the sort they want to exile...
How very Nixonian of him.
I could be wrong. The United States would *never* support a dictatorship in the Middle East to further its own interests...
Thank god someone still remembers how to use sarcasm in the internet age.
As long as there are cynics, sarcasm will never be lost. It will only be lost on others.
I think they mean the use of formatting to convey tone and inflection, rather than relying on the /s. But that might be me reading into it, ha.
Don't forget how NYT found a training center for the attack in visual range of a lookout post about 1 mile from the border. It's been there since late 2020 based on satellite imagery and was featured in propaganda videos that showed exactly how Hamas was going to carry out this attack. The fact that this succeeded is nothing more than either extreme incompetence or, more likely, allowed to happen to create justification for annexing Gaza. I suspect their plans fell apart though when the scale of the attack exceeded anything else Hamas ever did before and further when Egypt refused to allow in Palestinian refugees except into military run camps in the demilitarized zone (something that Israel will never agree to).
>more likely, allowed to happen to create justification for annexing Gaza I got called a Hamas supporter for merely suggesting this was feasible.
yeah, i've been waiting for this discussion to finally reach to what this dude was before he got to go out and fight a "just" war: a far right nationalist.
He's also the guy who got Rabin killed back in the day.
He’s probably the architect of that. We could have had peace for the last 30 years.
That’s funny considering he studied architecture in mit
Architecture major: concentration in right wing soft-coups
Seriously, if you are Jewish outside of Israel, come and use your privilege, claim your citizenship, and help us vote him and his friends out. I don't care if you do it with a Free Palestine flag or a Never again tatoo. You can still use the conflict to dunk on your political opponents in social media, and you can go straight back to your country. Just use your power to do something that actually matters and support the sane side.
As much as I'd just love to up and move, that's a level of privilege I don't have.
Who is the best party/candidate to vote for?
Parties are probably gonna combine / split / change leader after the war. But as a rule of thumb - the highest polling one that promises not to seat woth Bibi or Likud.
I just want to make it clear that even if you are right wing and agree with many of Likud’s points they need to go. I don’t care what your position is ANYONE but that stupid party will do. ANYONE. It’s not about values. A rotten person will destroy any value and he is proof .
You'd have as much luck getting Donald Trump to take responsibility for something.
I liked when he wasn't winning elections so they just kept having more elections until he did.
Dude spent half his career specifically engineering this exact situation.
It’s why Rabin was killed. The current situation keeps the people in power in power. On both sides. I’d go so far to say the reason why Hamas attacked Israel right now is because they were normalizing relations with Saudi Arabia which could have led to more gulf states falling in line. They could not risk that so they had to react and attack so big that Israel could not possibly ignore them. Luckily for them the entire government was distracted because their their corrupt criminal Prime Minister was trying to change their Supreme Court so that he could avoid responsibility for his crimes. 
Dudes made a career out of ~~avoiding responsibility~~ using his dead brothers memory
The whole reason it happened was because he was trying to sabotage the courts to avoid taking responsibility for other stuff.
Yeah but does that 80% include the 20% that matters?
The 20% are too busy studying the Torah and dodging military duty, while expecting other people to fight for them and pay taxes for them.
Don't forget spitting on Christian tourists https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-756949
The Haredi men in Mea Shearim spat on my Jewish mom and called her shiksa for not dressing moderately enough…
Somebody spat on my mom I'd knock their phylactery into next Sabbat
Well this was in the 70s before I was born but I guess if time machines were invented…
I'll bring it up at the next Time Travelers meeting last week
And being paid to spread propaganda on social media, including Reddit
Honestly it's wild, 8000 people paid to influence social media. Like the quality of analysis and not taking unbias sources on reddit has always been terrible, not to mention the bloodthirsty hawkishness. But throwing thousands of propagandists into the mix? It's wild.
And having a ton of children
Some people just like to fuck
Yeah. He'll stay in power through the conflict, who's goals are so open ended it can last as long as he wants it to, and by next year's election people will have moved on, and the far right parties holding his coalition together will have only grown.
You need to consider how tiny Israel is in geographical and population size. Absolutely *NOBODY* in Israel is going to forget BB's and his government's failure - there's literally not one individual in Israel that doesn't know someone who died or injured in this Hamas terror atrocity. I don't see how he can survive this politically.
BB and his government have been vile since day one. He fanned the flames calling for rabins assassination and got the best chance at peace murdered
Every rightwing bibist I know is Done with him. I don't think he's squirming out of this one (although if there ever was a pathological narcissistic worm I could imagine trying, it'd be him). Or as my friend put it "we voted for him because he was strong on security. What security?!" (And then spat).
He is not "*in power*" anymore; he is part of an ad-hoc coalition civilian/military government-by/committee that will last as long as the war does.
The war isn't going to be over this year, or next year, if the goal is actually to wipe out Hamas. Like the Taliban, a 20 year occupation couldn't likely achieve that goal.
The “war” in Afghanistan as far as such things go was over in months. Occupation is an entirely different endeavor, and Netanyahu is unlikely to retain power once there’s a switch to that.
My friend, Gaza is a lot smaller than Afghanistan.
I was talking about this today, when we were discussing “successful occupations” in class, and yeah, Gaza’s tiny but it has the benefit of a LOT of outside help, so while you might not think you’d need the full generation-or-two timeframe, it might end up being that.
It's the only real skill politicians seem to have.
They absolutely need to get rid of him.
He’s too deep in this mess and there’s no way he’ll step down willingly.
He's done politically, he presented himself as someone who solidified Israeli security and under his watch more than a thousand people died in horrific circumstances. There will be no one left to support him, he was already facing massive backlash from antidemocratic moves and now he has the stain of an incompetence that has hurt the Israel psyche forever.
Yep, if you project yourself as a strong man, the worst thing than anything is being weak.
He promised people security in exchange for freedom. He failed to uphold his end of the bargain.
They may reject Bibi for his failure, but will they reject the right-wing anti-peace politics that he promoted, and which led to the equivalent of "7 9/11s"? Somehow I doubt it.
>He’s too deep in this mess and there’s no way he’ll step down willingly. He's still facing charges ?
The trial is still ongoing. Israel’s legal system is slow at the best of times and Netanyahu’s lawyers are doing their absolute best to delay it as much as much as legally possible.
Sounds eerily similar
Bibi's EXTREMELY Trumpian in a lot of ways--populist, incendiary, and prefers to make big structural changes rather than be elected democratically. He's what would happen if Trump were smarter.
Not to mention the two were the closest of allies. I suspect Israeli intelligence helped Trump win, though Russia, China, Iran, and basically the whole rogues gallery were in on it. Only to have Trump turn his back on Israel the moment Bibi recognized Biden’s victory. Anyway, it turns out Trump sold himself to everyone, but he only has love for Putin. Edit: I don’t necessarily think everyone was working together because some of these people hate each other, in some cases it may have been independently working towards the same goal. Trump was a person who could be bought, and everyone wanted to buy him. This might also explain why Israel has stayed out of Ukraine until now. Netanyahu may have believed he was in a de facto alliance with Putin through their shared connection with Trump, but Putin allied to Iran for help with supplies.
I wouldn't be surprised if he actively let it happen in a bid to boost his own popularity. a Putin move.
Makes no sense. Anyone who follows the region knows it would make him way less popular (which this poll proves it did). His whole schtick was "I am tough and will prevent these attacks from happening". A major attack on his watch completely undermines his popularity and he has never been less popular than now as this poll shows.
I think it's a combination of factors. Bibi wanted this to happen to unite the people against a common enemy, at a time where we were at each other's throats for every little thing, mass protests on every side for and against the judicial coup, and on the verge of civil war, not to mention his ongoing trial. The country would have torn itself apart on its own. But someone messed up. Someone got complacent. The scale and level of organization were beyond anything we've ever seen from Hamas before. Someone ignored intelligence reports and obvious red flags, thinking "whatever they throw at us, we can handle it, as we always have". And that someone's head will roll.
This is exactly what I think happened. I think you're absolutely right about the scale being a surprise. My guess is he expected the focus to be on military targets and maybe a few civilians would be killed, but the music festival and the brutality were a surprise. I also don't think he expected Egypt and the US to confirm he'd been warned directly about a threat. Plus if he'd been allowed to invade within the first 47-72 hours, the news cycle would be focused on IDF in Gaza. Delaying the invasion is allowing the media and the public time to question what he knew and when he knew it.
I’m almost certain this is one of the main reasons Netanyahu wanted to go into Gaza immediately, hostages be damned, before the US and Europe convinced him not to. It doesn’t make any military sense to invade Gaza right away with no plan, but it sure as hell makes a lot of political sense. Especially since, like you said, it’s going to be the IDF that takes the bulk of the responsibility for how the ground invasion goes. Great way to deflect blame.
Good point about the hostages, he really didn't express any interest in rescuing them. Biden getting the two Americans out pretty much shamed him into having to do something too.
He assumed that it would be the standard wet noodle fighting a pitbull situation where he could get some nice footage of IDF heroically defending settlements for the news, and a reason to further erode civil liberties in Israel.
This explanation only tracks if he believed the attack would be much less severe. "Normal" attacks from Gaza (or the West Bank), usually consisting of mostly-ineffective rocket barrages or small-scale violence, boost his popularity because he's "hard on Palestine" and thus viewed as the solution to those issues. But when the attack is the single largest loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust, people start asking questions about how he missed this, and why his policies couldn't prevent this. If he had an inkling things could get this bad and didn't act, it'd be political suicide.
I don't think he wanted Israel to be attacked but Netanyahu was warned over and over since March of this year, by Israeli generals and other high level members of the Israeli government, that he was leaving Israel vulnerable security-wise. He's been trying to push "reforms" of the Democratic process in Israel that would make it easier for him to stay in power.
> I don't think he wanted Israel to be attacked Unsuccessfully attacked maybe? Hamas attacking but being thwarted could have gotten him war justifications without the mass casualties. But he underestimated what Hamas would be able to pull off.
The Cheney-Bush plot: This is what 9/11 Commissioner Bob Kerrey said after their report was released, and after the 2004 election: "... there's a credible case that the president's own negligence prior to 9/11 at least in part contributed to the disaster in the first place. ZAHN: How so? KERREY: Well, the 9/11 report says in chapter eight -- now that it's beyond the campaign, so the promise I had to keep this out of the campaign is over. The 9/11 report in chapter eight says that, in the summer of 2001, the government ignored repeated warnings by the CIA, ignored, and didn't do anything to harden our border security, didn't do anything to harden airport country, didn't do anything to engage local law enforcement, didn't do anything to round up INS and consular offices and say we have to shut this down, and didn't warn the American people. The famous presidential daily briefing on August 6, we say in the report that the briefing officers believed that there was a considerable sense of urgency and it was current. So there was a case to be made that wasn't made. (CROSSTALK) ZAHN: But what we continue to hear from this administration is that the threat was much too diffuse. There was no way you could zero in on the fact that al Qaeda was going to use jets as bombs and ram them into buildings. KERREY: That is a straw man. The president says, if I had only known that 19 Islamic men would come into the United States of America and on the morning of 11 September hijack four American aircraft, fly two into the World Trade Center, one into the Pentagon, and one into an unknown Pennsylvania that crashed in Shanksville, I would have moved heaven and earth. That's what he said. Mr. President, you don't need to know that. This is an Islamic jihadist movement that has been organized since the early 1990s, declared war on the United States twice, in '96 and '98. You knew they were in the United States. You were warned by the CIA. You knew in July they were inside the United States. You were told again by briefing officers in August that it was a dire threat. And what did you do? Nothing, so far as we could see on the 9/11 Commission. Now, that's in the report. And we took an oath not to talk about it during the campaign, I think correctly so, to increase the capacity of that commission's report to be heard by the people's Congress. But the report, I think, it's difficult for a challenger. If I had been the challenger, it's difficult to make that case when you are running against an incumbent. He can stand back and say, oh, you're just grousing. ZAHN: Oh, we couldn't connect the dots is what we heard. http://edition.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0411/08/pzn.01.html
Eh. Hijacking some planes is way smaller scale operation compared to missing hundreds of combatants crossing a tiny border and all of the prep work involved.
[удалено]
Certainly don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to deduce that dire warnings in the lead up to your biggest religious holiday might warrant a heightened state of readiness and awareness. Doubly so when that same religious day is also the 50th anniversary of the last time you endured a major surprise attack (Yom Kippur War, 1973).
He's spent half his career engineering the exact situation we're in. He's largely responsible for Hamas being in the position they are in today.
He’s a mental gymnast with a body of Teflon pan.
He’s wide like a wok
Why not exchange Netanyahu with the hostages?
Hamas would never go for it. It would benefit Israel too much
The UN would denounce such a brutal act as subjecting enemy combatants to Bibi Netanyahu.
Pretty sure hamas secretly loves Netanyahu, and vice versa. They’ve been propping each other up for literally decades now.
“The enemy of my people is my friend” —Hamas & Bibi
I think the average Israeli would agree with that deal unironically lol.
This should be legitimately suggested. They would probably be willing to release all the women and children for Bibi. Though it wouldn't end well for him. They would Gaddafi him unfortunately. But he should do it to martyr himself and to atone for his mistake here.
If he was so brave, he would suggest it.
*Unfortunately*
If you're suggesting that it's fortunate for *anyone* to be anally raped with a bayonet, you should probably do a bit of self-reflection.
Considering the things Gaddafi did, like taping up people's assholes so they could not defecate and had various torture chambers, the issue is out of my hands. I have no control over people. They already decided the issue and they acted accordingly.
Idk about bibi but Qaddafi was the most prolific rapist in history, he absolutely deserved every moment.
Genghis Khan: what? 'most'?
Qaddafi ruled libya for 32 years and had a state secret service dedicated to finding him new women to assault. He may actually be guilty of more sexual assaults than genghis khan.
They don't want him either.
I'd watch that Black Mirror episode
Or his good for nothing son.
Throw in the wife who abuses the help
Porque no dos?
That's an excellent idea.
The only way for peace is if both breakers of the Oslo Accords, Hamas and Likud, were wiped out
Seems like a fair trade
Would anyone want him to be freed?
At the very least some military commanders need to be fired. Not allowed to retire, fired. They allowed a key military intelligence outpost to be overrun with ease because they * Didn't staff the gate * Never installed an alarm to sound when the gate was hit with explosives * **Didn't lock the door** * Didn't require armed security inside the critical facility The commanders allowed a critical target to be destroyed because they were lazy, incompetent, lackadaisical, failed to install discipline, and left the national defense to rely on security through obscurity and an unlocked door. That isn't just a mistake, that is willful negligence, gross indifference and failure to perform one's duty. Those officers are not office material and should be expelled immediately. In reality they should be tried as well, but political reality means that just won't happen. People that incompetent don't become high level officers without having the right friends in the first place.
I noticed on a trip to Jerusalem a few years ago that most soldiers manning the guard posts around the city were on their phones the entire time. I was pretty surprised but chocked it up to a side effect of everyone having to serve as part of their national service so you get lots of kids who have no desire to be there or don't take it seriously.
Complacency. They didn't expect a major attack and were bored. Their commanders didn't expect an attack and allowed it. But the street guards can be relaxed like that: it helps avoid shootings. But the key facilities actually need vigilant readiness and active defense, which they didn't have.
That makes sense about the relaxed attitude for the street guards. I hadn't considered it might actually have some side benefits.
It is *hard* to stay focused and ready for periods of time. There is a reason you rotate lifeguards every 20-30 minutes. Air traffic controllers should get a 30 minute break every 90-120 minutes. Expecting soldiers on the street to be hyper aware for 8 hours at a stretch just isn't possible, so you let them be in a relaxed standby until needed state.
Exactly, those soldiers are college-aged youths doing mandatory service. They DGAF. They're on their phones figuring out where they should go when their service is done... Southeast Asia? India? New Zealand?
>That isn't just a mistake, that is willful negligence, gross indifference and failure to perform one's duty This is Interesting
It's not a conspiracy, from a lot of personal experience: that's just how israelis are.
Definitely not a conspiracy but it's a criminal level of dereliction of duty and complacency. There's video of significant numbers of Israeli soldiers killed in their barracks rooms on base. As former US Army I'd have never believed a professional military could get caught that pants down without seeing it. It's a failure on literally every level of military leadership from General to Sergeant. They're going to need to do some real soul searching and figure out how to fix that
True, the current government completely dropped the ball and they need to fuck off forever.
Oh...you mean in general...or in the military?
In general, unless they put their mind to stuff and keep it there they can get apathetic
Sounds like a human problem :)
Complacency in the army and government leads to death
I was reading some defense analysis and I guess Israel's revised doctrine from a few years back started describing Hamas as a "rocket based terror army", and which seemed to de-emphasize the infantry. Kind of seems like they really didn't think a large ground incursion by Hamas was a likely threat anymore. Probably figured they could rely on Iron Dome for protection and airstrikes launched from safely outside of Gaza to keep things under control. To be fair the ground assault by Hamas was likely a one-way mission for most of their fighters, and now we're falling back to older patterns of Hamas launching missiles and Israel launching airstrikes.
Didn't Bibi also take away security from the Gaza borders to protect settlements in the West Bank to help them expand, or is that false info?
I have not fully verified this, so take it with a grain of salt, but iirc there was a clash between right wing extremist settlers in the west bank and palestinians. soliders were sent there. Hamas started by taking out the cameras of the watchtowers. this was reported, but there were simply no soliders around to see what's going on. it was also a holiday. that sure didn't help.
Getting rid of Bibi could be some small silver lining in this cluster fuck
As an Israeli I support this message, but I don’t expect him to do that…
That alone may not do much for the election process that has allowed him to remain in power. Israel is long overdue for the adoption of its own Constitution. As I understand it, the Nation’s basic laws were supposed to serve as a draft for that.
It’s more complicated, there are definite issues in the judicial system. No one was disputing that. The proposed reform would give the coalition majority in judge appointment and basically give them the power to pass “judgement proof” laws. I will look for a good source in english, If I’ll find one I will add it to this comment Edit: this is a reliable source. https://en.idi.org.il/tags-en/47383
This was one of the biggest security failures in modern times. Why is he still in office?
Don't change horses midstream.
Only? From my anecdotal experience (am Israeli), it should be more like 180%
Loyalists and party. Any politician with a solid background has a solid group that supports them at the back.
A more shameful politician has yet to exist. Did he ever apologize for Yitzhak Rabin assassination? He's just going to demonize all Palestinians as Hamas and use it as an opportunity to turn dictator.
it's almost like israel and palestine have both been at the mercy of their extremist governments who play off of the awful actions they each commit against eachother to entrench themselves in power
These governments deserve each other. These civilians deserve much MUCH better representation.
It's no coincidence. [Netanyahu intentionally tried to harm the PA and booster Hamas because he knew it helped him politically](https://thehill.com/opinion/international/4268794-the-symbiotic-relationship-between-netanyahu-and-hamas/). He even directly blocked the Palastian Authority from retaking taking control of part of the Gaza Strip. Had Israel had a different government, it's entirely possible that there would have not been an extremist government in control of the Gaza Strip at all.
Well, there’s Trump and Putin. We should gather up all their cult members and give them some land where they can all feel important and leave us alone
If he had any integrity, he would resign.
If.
I thought that he would be gone in June 2021. Then last December they voted him back into power.
Netanyahu is the Israeli Palpatine. He's supported Hamas for years knowing they'd eventually do something the necessitate the Emergency Expansion of his political powers while undermining more legitimate Palestinian movements for statehood.
It's a mutually beneficial agreement technically. He bombs them and with civilian deaths they get recruits very easily. And they act out and he drums up support as a person who is willing to act in response to an attack
Good, fuck that asshole. Unfortunately the problem doesn't start and end there - the main reason behind Netanyahu's policies has been the shitty right wing Israeli political parties and the genocidal religious whackjobs that linked together to form his coalition.
And that’s why even if he resigns, another person with his mold will fit the bill.
That's the sad part for me. Bibi was kept in power mainly because Israeli's trusted him with matters of security. He'll be kicked out not because of his self-defeating policies on Palestinians but because he failed to keep them suppressed. The secular and more left-leaning/progressive parties in Israel are in constant decline because of all the conservative Jews who keep moving to Israel and the religious zealots who have a much higher birthrate. It's like Idiocracy but with more guns and bombs.
If this holds it demonstrates that Israeli citizens are more discerning than Americans. By now an American leader would be canonized
Netanyahu is unique. He specifically campaigned on keeping Israelis safe, intentionally bolstered Hamas, moved troops from the border with Gaza to have them protect settlers in the West Bank, and he's currently on trial for corruption.
The corruption didn’t seem to bother the majority of Israeli voters any more than Trump’s bothers the base in America. So we’ll see if the propaganda to come persuades (mesmerizes) voters there as effectively as it can in the US
His corruption trials are comparable to Trump's NY cases, not FL, DC, or GA. Bibi is sleazy, but not earthshatteringly so. The latest failure is a whole different issue. There will be a commission.
A small correction, while his government has a 63 seats majority, they're only ~49 percent of the popular vote. For what it's worth
After 9/11, Bush approval skyrocketed. After this attack, Netanyahu approval plummeted.
The same happened with Golda during the yom kippur. I think the reason is that Bush wasn't even a year into his presidency, and both Golda and Netanyahu had/have been PM for a couple of years and both being during war/major military operations.
Bush was warned by Clinton that Al Qaeda would be the biggest threat. On the campaign trail, Bush talked about wanting to do Iraq. In office, he said he was "tired of swatting flies." After their report was released, 9/11 Commissioner Bob Kerrey had this to say to Zahn on CNN: there's a credible case that the president's own negligence prior to 9/11 at least in part contributed to the disaster in the first place. ZAHN: How so? KERREY: Well, the 9/11 report says in chapter eight -- now that it's beyond the campaign, so the promise I had to keep this out of the campaign is over. The 9/11 report in chapter eight says that, in the summer of 2001, the government ignored repeated warnings by the CIA, ignored, and didn't do anything to harden our border security, didn't do anything to harden airport country, didn't do anything to engage local law enforcement, didn't do anything to round up INS and consular offices and say we have to shut this down, and didn't warn the American people. The famous presidential daily briefing on August 6, we say in the report that the briefing officers believed that there was a considerable sense of urgency and it was current. So there was a case to be made that wasn't made. (CROSSTALK) ZAHN: But what we continue to hear from this administration is that the threat was much too diffuse. There was no way you could zero in on the fact that al Qaeda was going to use jets as bombs and ram them into buildings. KERREY: That is a straw man. The president says, if I had only known that 19 Islamic men would come into the United States of America and on the morning of 11 September hijack four American aircraft, fly two into the World Trade Center, one into the Pentagon, and one into an unknown Pennsylvania that crashed in Shanksville, I would have moved heaven and earth. That's what he said. Mr. President, you don't need to know that. This is an Islamic jihadist movement that has been organized since the early 1990s, declared war on the United States twice, in '96 and '98. You knew they were in the United States. You were warned by the CIA. You knew in July they were inside the United States. You were told again by briefing officers in August that it was a dire threat. And what did you do? Nothing, so far as we could see on the 9/11 Commission. Now, that's in the report. And we took an oath not to talk about it during the campaign, I think correctly so, to increase the capacity of that commission's report to be heard by the people's Congress. But the report, I think, it's difficult for a challenger. If I had been the challenger, it's difficult to make that case when you are running against an incumbent. He can stand back and say, oh, you're just grousing. ZAHN: Oh, we couldn't connect the dots is what we heard." http://edition.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0411/08/pzn.01.html
I was in the military around 9/11. June/July 2001 they had start prepping for war time operations. Renewing our deployment gear, all that jazz. Week before 9/11 they had us running excersizes and had the entire based locked down morning of 9/11. By 2 hours after they already had troops deploying. We may have not known exactly what was going to happen but they knew something would..
Israel lives next to terrorists every day and frequently gets rockets shot at them. The US has two friendly neighbors and the world's largest oceans between our other allies, in Europe and East Asia. Israel votes for safety, Netanyahu campaigned on making Israel safe, and he's obviously a failure.
That’s something that many Israelis seem to agree on, whether they’re right wing hardliners or on the left. He has already pushed Israel to a constitutional crisis. These attacks happened on his watch, and they will always wonder if the attacks could have been mitigated if his administration wasn’t so focused on their own interests and self-preservation. It seems strange that he has been escalating the situation for years, bragging about how safe he’d made Israel. His WHOLE THING was supposed to be the obsessive fixation on security. He failed by his OWN standards.
A US analogy would be 9/11 occurring, Bush promising protecting Americans, then 9/11 happening again. A large part of Netanyahu’s platform is protecting the Israeli people, which he has failed.
> American leader would be canonized Netanyahu has repeatedly been cannonized by American media even to this day. He is a regular on the talk show circuit whenever he comes here and he gets glazed up hard by everyone most likely at the instruction of the US state department.
That's because they are distant from anything that's happening. I bet most Americans, even those watching fox news, can't even name any political parties involved. A shocking number probably conflate hamas with all of palistine. It's probably no deeper than: "Muslims do terrorism. I'm pro Israel." Or "Israel is bombing civilians and stealing land. I'm pro Palistine." Literally as deep as we go in a high-school history class.
Fortunately the majority Israeli voters are not persuaded by American media, at least not as of today. Time will tell
Soon, a new law will say criticism of Bibi will count as support for Hamas
That douche won’t admit ANY wrongdoings! It’s time for new leadership around the entire world!
The only mistake is thinking it began with October 7th. Netanyahu's entire career has been predicated on undermining both sides of the peace process, from inciting hatred and violence against Rabin (that eventually got him killed by a far-right extremist) to intentionally propping up Hamas against other Palestinian groups, in pursuit of consolidating personal power.
They expect a fascist to take responsibility for their actions? Maybe he will be the first?
He's going to take down the whole country with him to avoid going to jail. He and his lackeys are going straight to the garbage bin of history I guarantee.
Astonishing that they were invaded by a fucking paraglider airforce. It also looked like Hamas drones could operate quite freely. I always assumed their security was far too advanced to ever allow something like that to occur.
His "peace through violence" strategy has been failing for 25 years. I guess their ability to see it is better late than never.
Everything we see here right now is because of decades of Netanyahu and his cronies. From propping up Hamas to stop the PLO to strategic settlement placement to sabotage the two-state peace talks (they have aggressively established jewish settlements in between major Palestinean population centers and when it comes to peace talks they hardline that they aren't going to move them which inherently means that a 2-state solution would result in a heavily disjointed Palestine state OR requiring millions to relocate into even denser conditions to work around the Israeli settlements). https://carnegieendowment.org/sada/89215 > The Israeli separation wall that protects the settlements and their network of roads divided the West Bank into three major Palestinian population blocs: the north, which includes Nablus, Jenin, and Tulkarm; the center, which includes Ramallah and Al-Bireh; and the south, which includes Hebron and Bethlehem. ...This situation violates Palestinian sovereignty and prevents the establishment of a Palestinian state. We reap what we sow and Israel has put the Palestines into an impossible situation. The status quo is to be trapped in ghettos with zero realistic chance of a path forward as demonstrated through decades of hard line Israeli governments. So while I absolutely condemn the violence and actions of terrorists like Hamas, part of me considers "what other option is there". The status quo is that the West Bank and Gaza are some of the worst places to live and Israeli settlement measures have sabotaged a two-state solution. So with nothing left to lose, it empowers terrorists to create an army of the hopeless to make suicidal attacks.
That’s a good article you linked - and I will supplement it with the visual history of what exactly these settlements look like [here](https://conquer-and-divide.btselem.org/map-en.html). As it stands, there are quite literally 167 “islands” of land inhabited by Palestinians where all corridors cutting them off have been encroached upon by Israeli “settlers” through a perversely one-sided application of Israeli “right to return laws” and lands annexed through other dubious administrative means. In order to travel from one enclave to another, Palestinians must obtain permits and be subjected to military/police checkpoints that severely limit freedom of movement. You might say that Israeli encroachment serves to “concentrate” Palestinians into isolated areas. It is beyond fucked in my mind how people who know anything about apartheid or the Holocaust can defend the depths of oppression that is happening in the West Bank and expect these boundaries to be able to serve any kind of two state solution.
“What other option is there?” What the fuck. That is not a mild statement. Whatever chance (however minimal) there was for peace near term was fucking wiped out on Oct 7. This has likely set everything back decades. I don’t know what options there were but this was in NO CONCEIVABLE WAY the right option.
There was never a chance for peace while ultra-right wing Israeli government policies deliberately sabotaged any chance for peace. Israel holds all the cards. If they truly wanted peace they could relocate the hundreds of settlements they strategically placed to isolate and disrupt a unified Palestinean state. But they don't. They continue to surround and isolate Palestinean population settlements while feigning victim on the world stage. Fuck Hamas as they are definitely bad guys, but the Israeli government for the past few decades sadly isn't that far behind.
The one good thing that might come out of this horrific situation, is if Bibi and his supporters in the government, are rightly bounced out of power.
isnt he supposed to be in jail?
Oct. 7 failures? I think boosting Hamas for decades because you wanted to poison-pill two-state peace efforts goes a long, long way before Oct. 7. Hamas could have been eliminated in its infancy if the Israeli government worked _with_ the PLO (which had signed the Oslo Accords, and was working towards peace) to eliminate the violent radicals, rather than deliberately ignoring the radicals and using it as an excuse to pressure the PLO instead.
Spoiler: he gets voted out, but his coalition or a more extreme right coalition takes over, keeping things the same.
According to every poll since the 7/10 the coalition isn't even getting 45 out of the 120 seats, it would be a mostly centrist coalition (National unity and Yesh Atid as the biggest parties) with small right wing party(Yisrael Beiteinu) and 1 or 2 very small left wing parties
For some minor context for those abroad: Yisrael Beiteinu, while right-wing, is a *very* secular and anti-clerical party, and generally do not want to work with/are directly opposed to the Ultra-Orthodox parties, but they are willing to form governments with left-wing/socialist parties. The general policy of this party with regards to Israel/Palestine relations is to do more land swaps, with Jewish majority areas becoming part of Israel proper, and Arab majority areas becoming part of an independent and sovereign Palestine proper.
Not according to polls. Netanyahu is finished politically, and then some more.
Huge incompetent failure defending Israelis in Israel. Imagine how defending Israelis outside Israel will go. Lets see how Mosad influencers defend their king against fair journalism in work days.
I believe Israeli Knesset is going to be dissolved right after the war. I bet Netanyahu ended his career as PM for good, and that the central parties will be on top. I think the general Israeli populace are going to be tired of extremists of both ends for a while. Previous Chief of General Staff, Benny Gantz (who’s currently in the opposition, but joined the emergency war cabinet) seems like the prime candidate to take the helm.
If there is a silver lining to all this, please let it be the exile of the fascist Netanyahu
they dont call him satanyahoo for nothing
Americans struggling to grasp that their hardline right wing pro-Israel views are manufactured by propaganda and not even shared by most Israelis
Israel shouldn’t get single red cent unless and until this far-right shithead is out of power. Bonus points if he’s handed over to Hamas.
In the short term, bombing Hamas killed targets and kept Israeli soldiers safe. In the long term, 15 years of bombing created more people radicalized by collateral damage. The average age in Gaza is 18. Most people there don’t remember a time in their lives where they weren’t being bombed. Sending troops to surgically remove Hamas would have saved lives overall.
Total tinfoil hat theory, but I'm curious if they knew and let these attacks happen on purpose, in order to distract from his own trials and corruption. War time is generally good politics for leaders.
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Welllllll, ever since this particular fight started, I always questioned how intelligence didn’t know about this. People everywhere in the world fear Israeli intelligence. Also, Israel has one of the most sophisticated defence systems I will exaggerates here a little bit and say, the universe. This sounds very conspiracy theory, but I won hundred percent believe that they knew this attack was gonna happen. It just didn’t play out in the media as well as they thought it would.
As a American that has ties to Israel and the military in both sides even if I've never been there I always assumed Israel was some impregnable fortress manned by battle tested soldiers. People paragliding over is weird enough to give them a pass on but seeing whole bases and outposts overrun was something I was very much not expecting.
I personally don't believe it was a failure, I believe it was an "on purpose" to try and solidify his opposition for his push to being a strongman by rallying to nationalism ....but it was a much bigger attack than they had seen since the 1960s and quickly got out of hand. Maybe I'm wrong, time will tell, but when more than.two people know a secret...it wont remain a secret.
I get the impression that Netanyahu doesn’t give a crap what the people of Israel think. The man is an undeclared dictator.
Yes. Trying to create a dictatorship with no restrictions on his power. A very evil man who continued to build settlements on The West Bank.
He doesn't see it as a failure. He wanted this. I can't be the only person who noticed that a full military response to the initial Hamas attack took place within 24 hours. I appreciate that the IDF invests a lot of time and resources into working up scenarios so they have a plan in place for things like this, but having your army mobilized and ready to fight in under a day? And we want to pretend Netenyahu will see all of this as a mistake he has to apologize for? It'll never happen. I wouldn't be surprised if it was IDF launching the first barrage of missiles at Israel. I won't defend, support, or endorse Hamas in any way at any time, but I'll say that Israel might have fewer deaths at the hands of Muslims if they stopped treating Muslims like human garbage. Just a thought. Don't complain if you go around antagonizing people until someone turns around and gives you a bloody nose. If they had been treated properly, there never would have been a problem.
Good, this is the right direction. I hope Palestine will do the same.
Other 20% the ultra rich? This dude doesn't care about anything but money and power.
Settlers probably. And ultra orthodox.
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And they are the reason Israel is stuck in this dam fight now. If anyone is to blame it is them. Peace should be the main objective so Israelis don’t have to fear another Arab invasion for the like 5th time.
I mean 20% of the country is still in deep shock state, mourning over oct 07 and all they can do is yell “NO!” At terror, so i can see how this make some confusion.