It was all about October 7th, remember.
While almost all talk or argument about Israel/Gaza now and in the last four months has been – rightly – about the ongoing bombardment and the continuing humanitarian catastrophe, I want to reassert (as I did before here) the importance of not taking our gaze away from the events of October 7th itself.
If the Israeli state’s spokespersons – from Mark Regev and Ben Shapiro to the increasingly unhinged Tzipi Hotovely – want to keep citing October 7th as the sacred premise for everything Israel has done since, then we are obligated to keep looking at that day and its events.
In short, Oct. 7th is what they keep holding in our faces: and so Oct. 7th is what we need to keep holding the mirror up to.
Because if the Oct. 7th narrative collapses, then so too does the basis for four months and counting of relentless assault on the population of Gaza.
It’s been a while since I’ve covered the Israel/Gaza situation here, so I think it’s helpful to reiterate some previously established points first: and then we can move to newer information.
To start with, here are four key points that need to be understood or reinforced for key context to this whole conflict;
(1) The Israeli state had advanced warning of the Hamas attack on October 7th via Egypt (see here): and at least two weeks ahead of time. This was already public knowledge by October 8th.
(2) The Israeli state easily has the capabilities to have prevented the October 7th attack, which occurred along one of the most surveilled and secure borders in the world: and presumably chose not to.
The simple logic for this was argued here back in October.
(3) It is not clear at all whether *all* of the allegations of brutal murders or war crimes carried out by Hamas fighters are true or not. Oft-cited video ‘evidence’ of massacres, beheadings, etc, appear not to exist in the public domain.
The only evidence we have consists of a mixture of IDF claims and supposed video evidence that was shown by the IDF only to carefully selected journalists and public figures.
These have not been shown to the broader public.
(4) What is known is that, in addition to all the Israelis killed in exchanges with the Hamas marauders, an unknown number of the Israeli victims of October 7th were killed by Israeli forces. This is testified to by a number of survivors and witnesses, including at the Kibbutz Beeri, which was indiscriminately shelled by Israeli tanks, resulting in numerous deaths of Israeli citizens.
Israeli helicopters were also claimed to have opened fire on Israeli civilians at the music festival, killing a number of them.
It is therefore difficult to distinguish how many victims were killed by Hamas and how many were killed by Israeli forces and later blamed on Hamas fighters.
All of the above are facts we already established here back in October: but they’re important to reinforce, because we continually need true context for the fact that Israel’s entire current modus operandi is based on refuted narratives and/or outright sleight of hand.
Again, the entire basis of Israel’s assault on the Palestinians living in Gaza, which has now been going on for four months, is October 7th.
And, as illustrated above, the October 7th narrative is very problematic when put under scrutiny.
In addition to everything highlighted above, it has also emerged that someone(s) in the Israeli security circles actually deleted a substantial amount of video evidence of the Hamas massacres.
Again, all of the oft-cited footage of Hamas fighters apparently carrying out brutal massacres and things like beheadings and rapes *has not been seen* by anyone other than carefully selected journalists, celebrity influencers and politicians.
The very existence of such video evidence is only hearsay, consisting of ‘we have it on good authority’ type statements.
As was argued here months ago, the video footage that exists in the public domain only shows the Hamas fighters attacking security posts, exchanging fire with sometimes unknown opposition, or taking hostages.
Everything else shown is vague and uncertain.
Again, as I always reiterate, this is not a defense of Hamas or of *any* violence or unlawful killings. I have never condoned or liked Hamas or its affiliates.
But the wool has been pulled over people’s eyes in regard to who did what, what evidence exists, and – more broadly – what happened on Oct. 7th.
Do we remember the harrowing scene of all the burnt out cars lining the road? That was probably the defining image of October 7th.
It has to be said: the idea that all those vehicles were burnt/charred by Hamas fighters with rifles and hand weapons never seemed to make sense in the first place.
Given the subsequent revelations that Israeli forces, for example, shelled Kibbutz Beeri indiscriminately and killed over a hundred of its own citizens there, it now seems to make much more sense that those burnt out cars were probably the result of Israeli shelling.
Which would also imply that alleged images of burnt bodies and of charred corpses in the blackened cars (images supposedly included in the IDF’s special presentations to the select journalists) might’ve been victims of Israeli forces and not Palestinian terrorists.
The picture that logically emerges then is that the Hamas operation of October 7th was purposefully allowed to unfold by key elements of the Israeli state (a conclusion I already found unavoidable even by October 8th): and that Israeli forces in fact did what they could to maximise the death toll where it could (such as in the Kibbutz Beeri or at the Nova music festival) in order to maximise the subsequent propaganda and outrage.
In that equation, the Hamas fighters themselves were in fact pawns or useful idiots that were playing precisely into the hands of their puppet masters to bring about the scenario that the extremists who’ve taken over the Israeli state wanted.
This would not be new, however, as we already know that Hamas was created by Israel in the first place: a fact publicly admitted by Israeli military figures (see here).
October 7th then can be distilled down to the Israeli state allowing Israeli citizens to be attacked by a militant group created by the Israeli state itself: and Israeli forces even killing some its own civilians in order to maximise the national trauma and international outrage.
Moreover, the Israeli state’s game has been largely supported by governments – Britain, the United States, Australia, Germany and others – that would be fully aware that the upheld version of October 7th’s events is highly suspect.
Western mainstream media has also, in three months of continuous coverage of Israel/Gaza, failed to draw any attention to these eyewitness accounts of Israeli forces killing their own citizens. These things *have* been covered in domestic Israeli media (in Haaretz and Times of Israel, for example) – but not picked up on at all in Western press.
Even when, more recently, three Israeli hostages in Gaza were executed by IDF soldiers, no mention was made in Western media of the Hannibal Directive or of Israeli state killing of Israeli citizens on October 7th.
Yet, not only is a highly suspect version of events being upheld by many countries, but the out-of-control and murderous military operation that came from it has also been continuously supported and validated by most Western political establishments.
Simply put, we are aiding and abetting. Only in recent weeks has the dialogue started to change a little in the hopes of restraining the Israeli campaign a little.
But only because certain governments are worried about losing votes in upcoming elections.
Certainly whatever criticism exists of Israel’s military campaign, there is no interest or willingness in either the media or our political establishments to actually question the events of October 7th itself or deal with inconvenient information.
The Oct. 7th narrative has become a sacrosanct and inviolable ‘truth’ around which both political and media establishments have built a moat that is not to be crossed: just as happened with 9/11.
The propagandists’ claim on October 8th, therefore, that this was “Israel’s 9/11” is absolutely spot-on. In more ways than one.
Thanks Saj, my comments regarding 911 were pointless. Sorry about that. You make a great point regarding the official stories of both events. In the case of October 7th, the rape element is especially bizarre as there is actually no evidence whatsoever of any Hamas fighter or other Palestinian doing anything like that, but even the U.N are paying lip service to what has now emerged clearly as a brazen genocide enabling lie.
Those claims were bouncing around quite early and then faded away. Now they’re back again big time. I guess it’s the new 40 beheaded babies.
Thanks for that. The operation in Gaza is a Western military operation. Along with the US supplying Israel with most of the weapons they have used to murder tens of thousands of civilians, both the US and Britain are ADMITTEDLY flying surveillance drones over Gaza.
https://www.declassifieduk.org/u-s-flies-routine-spy-flights-from-uks-cyprus-base-near-gaza-for-third-party-governments/#:~:text=US%20surveillance%20drones%20are%20also,%E2%80%9Cretained%20sites%E2%80%9D%20on%20Cyprus.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/02/uk-surveillance-aircraft-to-search-for-hamas-hostage-sites-in-israel-and-gaza
Pentagon acknowledges flying unarmed drones over Gaza
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-67317218
The flights are spun as being part of a “search for hostages” but that is complete nonsense. The data gathered is shared with Israel, it is simply a supplement to Israel’s intelligence gathering in the war.
Israeli is just a Western colony with a unique victim narrative used to mask it’s true nature that is taking place at a very odd time to build a colony (the post-colonial era).
The British base in Cyprus is also alleged to have been heavily involved in the Six day War of 1967.
There is a very interesting book called “Operation Cyanide that centres on the attack on the USS Liberty that touches on these issues.
The hypothesis of “Operation Cyanide” is that the attack on the Liberty was a deliberate attack conducted by Israel at the request of the US, who planned to attack Egypt after the ship was sunk and all onboard were dead.
A sub plot involves the evidence for the involvement of British and US fighter jets in the initial devastating attack that wiped out the Egyptian and other Arab air forces.
http://www.narrowbandimaging.com/incoming/Operation%20Cyanide%20by%20Peter%20Hounam%20(2003).pdf
What a joke it is for the US to publicly criticise Israel for the conduct of the operation whilst planning to send billions of military aid in addition to the regular several billion dollars of annual support.
I appreciate this but also feel that even if every word of the pathetic Israeli atrocity propaganda were true it wouldn’t justify anything that they have done in Gaza because the operation in Gaza has been a textbook case of collective punishment where every single person in Gaza is being terrorised and dispossessed regardless of their (non)-involvement in the events of October 7th.
I understand the parallels you are drawing with 911 but these events were not similar.
October 7th probably was a Pearl Harbour type of event that was deliberately allowed to happen. But Pearl Harbour was carried out by the Japanese military, October 7th was carried out by Hamas fighters, even though the Israelis killed many people also.
911 is nothing like that. There was no authentic element of the 911 events. There was no al Qaeda attack on the US with hijacked passenger jets, none of that stuff happened. None of it. Hope I am not being a petty pedant but they are very very different.
Everything that happened on 911 was done by Westerners. Everything.
Thank you James for contributing a lot of substance here.
The US/UK drone activity wasn’t something I knew about yet, but it doesn’t surprise me. It also adds even more weight to what the Houthis say is their motive in the Red Sea in disrupting US and UK supplies to Israel. All this talk of protecting international trade by attacking the Yemenis smelt like BS.
Thanks for the link regarding the attack on the USS Liberty. My knowledge of that has been only that the US allowed the Israelis to get away with the attack. Clearly, there’s more to it: and I will read this stuff, hopefully others will as well.
About the 9/11 comparison: I agree with you 100%. The comparison I was making was not so much about the actual operational reality/details, but the way the official ‘truth’ was set in stone and not challenged while the prefabricated foreign policy reaction was launched like there was no tomorrow. That’s really what I meant.
Regarding the actual 9/11 event itself, you’ll get no arguments from me at all.