On October 7th, a group of Palestinian militants opened fire on an Israeli settlement in Gaza, killing seven Israeli civilians. The Israeli government claimed that the attack was an act of terrorism, but there has been plenty of evidence to suggest otherwise.
00:01:03.080So, of course, it's a big topic, and I kind of want to go through at least the beginning, all of the history here of what we're dealing with when it comes to Israel and Gaza.
00:01:11.040This goes back way further than October 7th.
00:01:13.700But we had some voices in the media kind of pretending that this really just out of nowhere on October 7th, you know, Hamas attacked and it was completely out of the blue or whatnot, right?
00:01:23.760We have a long history here as a sort of land theft and kind of a campaign really against the Palestinians in the region.
00:01:29.600But we've been offered, I'd say, very, very small scale evidence of some of the claims from Israel's side, or at least there is evidence.
00:01:43.760But we had these kind of embellished claims, I'd say, of, you know, 40 beheaded babies.
00:01:48.400You had the children that had been put in ovens, etc.
00:01:53.160There was other claims as well that seemed exaggerated.
00:01:55.580I'm wondering, like, do they really have to do this?
00:01:57.540Or if they do have it, can they pretend it?
00:01:59.580Can they not, you know, show some of that, right?
00:02:02.500Because you had this special screening as well for the media, which was kind of interesting,
00:02:07.840where Israel invited certain reporters to view some of the footage.
00:02:12.760And then kind of by third hand or like second hand, these reporters then were kind of told to go out and report on what they saw on the news.
00:02:19.840And we had one British journalist, Owen Jones, just the other day that kind of revealed that some of the things that they claimed they saw in the footage,
00:02:27.140they didn't actually see, such as the rapes and things like this.
00:02:30.040So that was kind of a contradiction in and of itself as well there.
00:02:33.140But anyway, we have had some testimony from Israelis as well, some of them living in these kibbutzes that were attacked and things like that.
00:02:40.640And a lot of radio interviews with some of these people.
00:02:43.120We've played a couple on the show throughout the last few months here, really.
00:02:46.560And it looks to me, Ron, that Israel, and even this is true for some military accounts as well,
00:02:53.580seem to have just kind of fired in some cases indiscriminately at some of these kibbutzes.
00:02:58.460And I'm not saying the majority maybe of people that they claim Israelis that died on October 7th were from the military.
00:03:04.620But in the wake of that, they seem to have actually definitely increased that number.
00:03:09.440So what do you say of that in terms of like how Israel have managed this conflict so far?
00:03:16.940And even the raw numbers changed fairly dramatically.
00:03:20.220In other words, for nearly a month, the figure had been 1,400 Israelis who'd been killed by the Hamas in the Hamas attack.
00:03:27.920And then suddenly, I'd actually been a bit skeptical of that number, you know,
00:03:31.840since there was quite a lot of evidence that some of the bodies of the alleged victims were actually Hamas militants
00:03:39.340who'd been killed by the Israeli forces and were misclassified as Israeli victims.
00:03:45.220And, you know, yet after a month of the 1,400 figure being almost universally presented everywhere in the media,
00:03:52.140they suddenly sharply reduced it to 1,200.
00:03:54.860So in other words, you know, the Israeli government has admitted that their initial figures were wrong for really probably three or four weeks.
00:04:02.500Now, aside from that, one of the key issues is how many of the unarmed civilian victims were actually killed by Israeli military forces rather than by the Hamas attackers.
00:04:15.140And the whole thing about it is there's quite a lot, you know, just as you mentioned,
00:04:19.400there's quite a lot of firsthand testimony by some of the individual survivors of the attack
00:04:25.080that most of the Israeli victims, at least in their vicinity, were killed by tank fire or hellfire missiles by the Israeli forces when they attacked the militants.
00:04:37.980Now, Israel, for about 40 years now, has had a very controversial policy called the Hannibal Directive,
00:04:46.660which it's documented, anybody can check it.
00:04:49.100The Israelis in the past had a situation where when one or two or three Israeli soldiers were captured by Hamas or by other Palestinian militants,
00:05:00.160they eventually were then traded for large numbers of Palestinians imprisoned by the Israelis.
00:05:06.340And so for that reason, Israel adopted a new policy, I think it was in 1984, 1986,
00:05:12.860that if any Israeli were captured by a Palestinian militant and couldn't be easily rescued,
00:05:22.100it was necessary for the Israeli and the militants of necessary to all be killed by the Israeli forces.
00:05:28.960In other words, it was utterly important that no Israeli captives ever be successfully taken by Palestinian militants.
00:05:38.560So in this case, the evidence seems to be that in some of the cases, for example,
00:05:43.500with the kibbutzim that were taken over by Palestinian militants,
00:05:47.640the Israeli forces realized that they would have a very difficult time rescuing any of the hostages,
00:05:53.680you know, without suffering very heavy casualties themselves.
00:05:57.140So after a few hours of indecision, they finally decided to use tank fire and Apache hellfire missiles
00:06:05.820to basically blast the buildings and kill everybody.
00:06:09.520And that's been reported by a few of the very few surviving hostages.
00:06:15.460One of the kibbutzim that, you know, they're basically,
00:06:18.520you're probably talking about that radio testimony of one of the 12 captives who was taken,
00:06:24.940who ended up surviving, explaining how the attacks from the Israeli forces ended up killing everybody in the crossfire.
00:07:21.900Basically blasting any of the cars in the vicinity of the dance festival,
00:07:28.600because they simply couldn't distinguish between the Palestinian militants and anybody else.
00:07:33.580And they basically, especially in the first few hours after the attack, the attack was so surprising and so shocking.
00:07:40.860And the Israelis were taken by surprise that they basically reacted in a very trigger happy sort of way.
00:07:47.260And in fact, there's the testimony of one of the helicopter pilots saying that they had a very difficult time distinguishing the militants from Israeli civilians.
00:07:55.780And so they basically shouted anything that moved.
00:07:58.980And in fact, afterwards, there are scenes that were shown of something like 100 or 150 burned out Israeli civilian vehicles
00:08:09.900that clearly had been destroyed by hellfire missiles, not by anything that militants had.
00:08:15.620And in fact, Max Blumenthal, in some of his podcasts, ended up showing the scenes of some of the devastation
00:08:22.080and saying it looked exactly like the same scenes of hellfire missile damage in Gaza or in other parts of the Palestine area.
00:08:31.780So in other words, it's very clear that at least many of the Israeli hostages were killed by the Israeli forces
00:12:58.620I'm not sure if there really was intention that way.
00:13:01.760In other words, if they could have easily rescued the hostages, I think they would have done so.
00:13:06.820You know, I mean, Israeli public opinion would be incredibly angry.
00:13:11.620I mean, there would be a gigantic backlash if it were felt they deliberately killed the Israeli civilians simply to increase the number of victims.
00:13:19.100I mean, the truth is the Hamas militants were well entrenched in the buildings on the kibbutz, and the Israeli forces would have probably suffered serious casualties if they tried to go in after them and probably would have failed anyway.
00:13:33.460And the hostages probably would have mostly been killed.
00:13:35.300So, you know, under those circumstances, they simply decided the best approach was simply to blast everything with tank fire, tank cannon fire, and with Apache Hellfire missiles.
00:13:46.820And certainly early on, I mean, a large fraction of the civilians killed obviously were individuals who'd been at the dance festival.
00:13:57.740And there, I think it was simply that as one of the helicopter pilots admitted, they simply had no idea which cars were only occupied by Israeli civilians, which were filled with Hamas militants, and which were filled with Hamas militants and Israeli captives.
00:14:15.900So, I mean, they basically just shot anything that moved.
00:14:20.000And I mean, the thing about it is, you know, the attack was so shocking, and Israel was taken by surprise.
00:14:25.520In other words, I mean, some of Israel's best military units suffered very heavy casualties, unexpectedly heavy casualties, compared to, by all accounts, what Hamas had thought that they would succeed in doing.
00:14:38.660And so, under those circumstances, with so many Israeli troops having been killed, with bases having been overrun, I mean, the Israelis obviously panicked.
00:14:47.800And their Apache helicopters just blasted anything they thought might be a Hamas unit, and killed a lot of Israelis in the process.
00:14:58.860What do you make of the warning from Egypt early on?
00:15:02.320There are some reporting in the Times of Israel that intelligence officials in Egypt says Israel ignored repeated warnings of something big.
00:15:10.620I'm still trying to piece that together, like they have supposedly such great intelligence services, and they have everything is monitored, the walls essentially around Gaza and all that.
00:15:21.280It's like one of the most surveilled areas in the world, I believe.
00:15:24.480And here an Egyptian official said, which apparently often serves as a mediator between Israel and Hamas, had spoken repeatedly with the Israelis about something big, but they hadn't elaborated on it.
00:15:35.960And then some of the suggestions was that, well, Netanyahu, they looked the other way.
00:15:40.360Maybe it was hubris, maybe they thought, ah, they'll never do anything, blah, blah, blah.
00:15:44.060But regardless, there seemed to have been warnings, but it was ignored, but then they were still caught by surprise.
00:15:50.960How do you piece this together? Is there any contradictions here in your opinion?
00:15:53.900I think the emphasis on those warnings from Egypt probably is more than it should be, unless more information comes out.
00:16:00.680In other words, you know, it's unclear, for example, it's quite possible that the Egyptians had warned of Hamas doing something many times in the past.
00:16:09.900You know, there's the old question of crying wolf.
00:16:11.760In other words, without specific warnings on the nature of the attack, the size of the attack, the timing of the attack, simply saying that they suspected Hamas was up to something big.
00:16:22.180You know, if they issued half a dozen previous warnings over the last year or two, and nothing had ever happened, the Israelis obviously would have ignored it.
00:16:31.180And also, I mean, Israel prides itself on having one of the world's best intelligence services.
00:16:37.200You know, having the sort of service that, you know, I mean, the notion of the Egyptians knowing something about what was going on in heavily surveilled Gaza that the Israelis wouldn't know is probably something the Israelis would disregard it.
00:16:51.720Now, what's interesting is just in the last couple of days, a much more detailed account has come out in the Israeli press saying that what amounted to a very detailed description of exactly what happened had come to the attention of the Israeli authorities a year before, and it was dismissed by the Israeli government.
00:17:13.580In other words, for apparently a year, the Israelis had had what amounted to, you know, exactly this sort of plan.
00:17:20.160In other words, the Israeli authorities apparently regarded the planned Hamas attack as being so large, so grandiose, that they were sure it was beyond their resources, that Hamas was basically bluffing.
00:17:34.160And so, you know, it went up the chain of command and was totally ignored.
00:17:37.100And so, you know, basically, if Israel had disregarded a very detailed intelligence attack from their own local people on the scene for a year, and nothing had happened during that year, it's very easy to imagine that if then Egypt came up with some sort of vague warning about Hamas planning something in the near future, the Israelis would then disregard it.
00:18:02.420And, you know, I mean, the whole thing is, the Israelis had simply made a sort of intelligence decision that Hamas had given up on any sort of attack.
00:18:12.220I mean, there'd been no major breakout of Hamas for years.
00:18:16.200Hamas, they felt, had basically agreed, had, you know, expressed its willingness to avoid any confrontation with Israel in return for some of these work permits, so that, you know, a large number of Gazans could work in Israel.
00:18:29.360And that was sort of the intelligence decision, the ruling, that was made at the very high level.
00:18:36.820So, you know, then when these reports came out a year before on all the training evidence that Hamas was training for something, the Israeli authorities had just ignored it at the time.
00:18:48.260And a year had gone by, Hamas had done absolutely nothing.
00:18:51.260And that convinced the Israeli authorities that they'd been right for a year.
00:18:55.640And so that's why I think they were so taken by surprise when this huge attack happened.
00:19:00.860Now, it's perfectly possible that they might have suspected that at some point Hamas would launch a raid, you know, a dozen militants trying to break through the fence, maybe taking a couple of Israelis hostage.
00:19:12.700But, I mean, that's the sort of thing that they felt that they could very easily cope with.
00:19:17.920And, you know, even if they suspected something like that might be in the works, what actually happened was a hundred times larger.
00:19:26.140It was so different in magnitude, it was different in kind.
00:19:30.000And, I mean, basically, the Hamas militants were able to use very innovative tactics, their drones to disable the cell phone towers that controlled the Israeli surveillance machinery, disable the automatic firing machine guns.
00:19:46.920I mean, basically, they used tactics that the Israelis had not expected in ways that they had not expected.
00:19:53.440And the size of the attack, 1,500 militants breaking through the fence in so many different places, was obviously something totally beyond any Israeli expectations.
00:20:04.520And that's why the Israelis were so panicked initially.
00:20:07.580Now, one reason I'm very skeptical of some of these conspiracy theories floating around, that this was a deliberate allowance to have it happen on the part of someone like Netanyahu,
00:20:19.880is that, you know, everybody agrees that Netanyahu's political life is over.
00:20:25.380I mean, his popularity in Israel, I think, is now below single digits.
00:20:29.060I think it's down to like 5% approval.
00:20:31.900So, in other words, Netanyahu's career has been destroyed.
00:20:35.320And this was the greatest military disaster in 50 years of Israeli history.
00:20:41.560Not only that, but the fact that it occurred despite Israel having allegedly such effective intelligence machinery, surveillance machinery, tremendously effective Mossad, Shinbeth, Unit 8200 Intelligence Services,
00:20:57.820has destroyed the reputation of Israel for, you know, basically its effectiveness.
00:21:04.280And, I mean, that's something it would take Israel a very long time to recover.
00:21:09.000Bombing the helpless civilians of Gaza does not repair the damage done to the credibility of the Israeli military and the credibility of the Israeli intelligence services.
00:22:13.080And if they could get their way, they would probably just clear Gaza out of the Palestinian population altogether and just annex it, to be honest.
00:22:21.240But, I mean, you know, part of it also is simply that Netanyahu's interests are desperately trying to stay in office as long as power is possible.
00:22:30.740I mean, his approval rating is so low.
00:22:32.720Once the conflict ends, once the fighting ends, he's a political goner.
00:22:37.080And the investigations, as they come out with these facts, that, you know, Israel had pretty much the entire plan reported from their local people on the ground for a year and did nothing, never alerted their people, never took proper action.
00:22:53.120I mean, that will further damage Netanyahu's position.
00:22:55.720So I think what Netanyahu might be doing, in effect, is rolling the dice.
00:23:00.320In other words, if he can use this opportunity, this disaster, as an opportunity to clear the Palestinians out of Gaza and the West Bank, he might hope that sort of strategic generational victory would be enough to salvage his reputation among the hardline voters who are his base.
00:23:21.600I doubt that would be the case, but, I mean, that's basically his one chance.
00:23:25.580And Netanyahu knows perfectly well that once, basically, he's out of office, he's probably in prison for the rest of his life.
00:23:33.560I mean, the tremendous hostility of half of Israel's population towards him because of, you know, all of the corruption scandals around him probably mean it's the end of his career and also the end of his freedom.
00:23:45.360So while I certainly doubt that he allowed this to happen deliberately, allowed this huge military disaster to happen deliberately, he certainly is desperate to keep the fighting going as long as possible, to basically stay out of prison.
00:24:01.100So there is a benefit to him, regardless, right?
00:24:04.980So what does this say, just quickly here maybe, about the, then basically the military, Israeli military intelligence and thing, it's not kind of the apparatus that we've been led to believe that it is?
00:24:17.580I mean, basically, you know, most people around the world, probably whether supportive of Israel, hostile of Israel, would have agreed that Israel, the Mossad, you know, at 8200, it's probably among the world's best intelligence services, certainly one of the two or three best.
00:24:34.340And it's one thing, for example, if they fell down on the job on something in another part of the world, but for them to have been taken totally by surprise on their own doorstep and lose hundreds of their own military men in a Hamas attack is just a disastrous blow to Israel's reputation.
00:24:53.900In other words, why would someone buy Israeli surveillance technology if they've seen that it's failed on their own doorstep, where they had every access, you know, drone footage, everything, you know, to be able to see what was going on in Gaza.
00:25:09.220So, I mean, overall, it's a huge, huge setback, I think, to Israel's reputation.
00:25:16.360And, you know, again, if it leads to a wider war and brings in Hezbollah, brings in possibly Iran, brings in even possibly Turkey, I mean, the end result of that is quite possibly the destruction of Israel.
00:25:30.080And so, you know, it's the sort of thing, you can imagine Netanyahu rolling the dice and simply risking everything in hopes of salvaging his own reputation and staying out of prison.
00:25:42.300But taking those sorts of risks as an individual are very different than taking those sorts of risks for a country.
00:25:48.660So I just find it extremely doubtful that there was any sort of conspiratorial plan on the part of the Israeli security forces to let this happen.
00:25:58.480I mean, for one thing is, there are certainly a lot of reports that large segments of Mossad and the other security forces are very hostile to Netanyahu.
00:26:07.780In fact, there were some reports they were organizing the demonstrations against Netanyahu to try to drive him from office.
00:26:14.660So if there was any even slight evidence that Netanyahu deliberately allowed this attack to take place,
00:26:22.900I think there would have been massive leaks and Netanyahu would have been driven from office immediately.
00:26:29.940So, you know, it's one thing, for example, for everybody to admit that they made a terrible mistake.
00:26:35.140You know, Netanyahu, the intelligence services, the military, that they were caught napping, that they failed on the job.
00:26:42.020But I mean, that's very different than anybody arguing that it was deliberately done by anybody,
00:26:47.840either in the intelligence services or on the other side with Netanyahu.
00:26:52.580So, you know, again, I'm just very skeptical of those sorts of conspiratorial theories.