Israelis and Palestinians have to deal with religious radicalism to gain legitimacy.

First some important guardrails to this position piece:

a. Criticism of Israel and solidarity with Palestinian liberation is not anti-Semitic.

b. Criticism of Palestinian movements and the larger Muslim world that tend to be very sympathetic to them is not Islamophobic.

(1) I write this as someone deeply sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinians and firmly in solidarity with their struggle for freedom. I have written in a past article how I believe Islamic radicalism has destroyed any hopes of the same and I continue to maintain that position.

(2) I also maintain the position that Zionism and the state of Israel are fast destroying any sympathies for the Jewish community and any anti-Semitism they might face. Religious radicals tend to erode at humanitarian sympathies others might have for the people who identify with that religion.

(3) It’s my honest opinion that the only way out of this horrendous atrocity that is the Zionist state and its primarily Islamic enemies is a single, secular, democratic state over all of Israel-Palestine with 1948 borders (naive and utopian as it may sound).

(4) The real enemy is and always has been religious radicalism. There can simply be no way forward to ending the suffering and endless cycles of hatred unless the very religious radicals that cause them in the first place are rendered powerless.

(5) This is the time for moderates to rise. I don’t know if it’ll happen any time soon. Passions are inflamed, with an unequal conflict between a brutal, ethno-fascist first world military power and a loose coalition of well-armed militant groups backed by less militarily advanced, equally brutal, theocracies. It’s easy to see how this could rage into a much bigger regional war.

(6) But as I’ve said before, one can always hope. It’s the only thing one can do really – apart from feeling completely useless.

***

Broken Shackles Media | Citizen Journalism | Oct 31 2023

Whisper it quietly: grassroots conservatives are slowly turning against American militarism.

(1) It is common knowledge that American soldiers and veterans lean heavily right-wing in their political biases. What is less commonly known however is how heterogenous those biases can become following their service.

(2) This is what one researcher, Tyson Chatagnier, at the London School of Economics observed. In a 2022 study done over two phases comprising nearly four thousand participants, over half of whom were veterans, Chatagnier found that the results told “a consistent stort in three parts”:

“First, more conservative individuals are more likely to volunteer for military service. Second, conservatism is tempered by the service, which has a moderating effect. Subsequent analyses indicate that this is driven primarily by social issues, perhaps suggesting that the development of close ties to a broad group of comrades-in-arms instils more socially tolerant attitudes. Third, the socialization effect is not strong enough to override the selection effect—in the end, veterans remain more conservative than their non-veteran counterparts.”

https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/usappblog/2022/11/09/conservatives-are-more-likely-to-volunteer-for-military-service-but-their-conservatism-is-reduced-by-their-service/

(3) This is consistent with my own interactions with veterans in previous lines of work – especially combat veterans who had served in the field. I was always amazed at the heterogeneous nature of their political analyses, while still quite nationalist and conservative, displayed deep critiques of the governments that sent them into battle. Being in the field – whether as a military veteran or any other frontline position such as an aid worker, human rights activist, or journalist – changes a person radically.

(4) In an era of increasingly democratized mass communication outlets and accessible media platforms, people have started displaying a rapidly decreasing tolerance for naked militarism; Both on the traditional left and right of old-school political spectrums (that in and of themselves are getting more heterogeneous) for the simple goddamn fact that people are not monoliths.

(5) Indeed, a brief look-see at the 2020 election results saw military bases in a hard swing away from Republicans. Imagine that.

https://www.economist.com/united-states/2021/10/14/military-bases-swung-hard-away-from-republicans-in-2020

(6) I remain hopeful that this trend will have a sobering effect on warmongering. After all, hope is in short supply. So why not be hopeful and encourage this wave of anti-militarism on the left and right? As a citizen of the United States – the world’s foremost sponsor and perpetrator of state terror – it’s the least I can be, considering I face none of the brutality from the various nationalist conflicts happening in various parts of the globe that the US sponsors in some way or the other, apparently for my benefit.

(7) We must not fall prey to the machinations of elitist chicken hawks sending American workers to fight imperialist wars of plunder and occupation. So on second thought, let’s be outright forceful, if a tad naive, in saying:

NO MORE WAR!

NOT IN OUR NAME!

PEACE NOW!

***

Broken Shackles Media | Citizen Journalism | Oct 28 2023

Moderate Israelis are the only people who can bring about an immediate ceasefire.

https://www.aljazeera.com/program/inside-story/2023/10/23/what-risk-would-an-israeli-ground-offensive-pose-to-captives-held-by-hamas

(1) The above image is of a protest held by the families of Israeli hostages kidnapped by Hamas. As clear as day, the families are demanding a ceasefire to all hostilities between Israel and Hamas, so that the safe release of hostages can be secured.

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-10-16/ty-article/.premium/how-netanyahus-approval-ratings-have-hit-rock-bottom-in-israel/0000018b-38b3-dd09-a1bf-3abb69c70000

(2) Netanyahu’s government is facing an unprecedented lack of popularity among Israel’s citizenry despite the country currently being at war. Israel’s citizens might be militantly nationalist, but they also have diverse and heterogenous rationales.

https://www.vox.com/world-politics/2023/10/21/23926304/israeli-hamas-war-netanyahu-opinion

(3) One hopes that the majority will see the futility of rabid fascism and how destructive it can be to their collective well-being. Netanyahu and his coterie do not have their best interests at heart and they are walking into military traps against foes with a lot less to lose; traps that that Israel might not escape from in the long run, to the detriment of Israeli society.

+https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2023/10/benjamin-netanyahu-israel-hamas-attack-failure/675722/

(4) It is absolutely vital that the moderates of Israeli society demand a ceasefire lest their country gets dragged into a lengthy war it can ill afford by a clique of fascist robber barons. Yes, there is still popular support for Israel in the West and a responsibility to defend it’s last settler colonial project – but it is getting increasingly limited.

(5) For humanity’s sake, a ceasefire is the only sane and rational option. Only Israel’s citizenry can make that happen in the current state of affairs.

***

Broken Shackles Media | Citizen Journalism | Oct 23 2023

How radical Islam destroyed Palestinian liberation and ensured the shaky existence of a Zionist state.

I write this as someone committed to the liberation of my fellow humans from oppression, understanding the need to be cognizant of how competing structures of oppression can intersect in a person’s life.

Some common sense caveats before the more polemical analytics:

(1) Our goal as a species should be to end all human suffering.

(2) The only “bias” in this article is humanity.

Onward…and please read only if you’re interested in a rational discourse.

There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that radical Islam has destroyed any hopes of Palestinian liberation. As someone resolutely in solidarity with Palestinian liberation and the liberation of other colonized peoples, this makes me immensely sad.

It benefits the major Islamic power players and it benefits Israel. An antagonistic symbiosis if ever there was one.

Western colonialism created this unique situation of a first world colonial project surrounded by, and under occasional siege from, third world states;

With power mongers and robber barons on all sides taking advantage of obscurantist beliefs;

Beliefs rooted in badly written science fiction meant to control bronze age peasants.

Leaving that be, let’s examine the situation with a dummy’s geopolitical lens.

Iran has baited Israel and Israel is taking the bait, essentially cornering the West into unmitigated support for what might be known as The Abrahamic World War.

Both countries are facing unprecedented internal challenges to their respective religious autocracies. Israel and Iran both need this Abrahamic War to maintain their autocratic status quos.

The only way out of this mess is for states and citizenry that are guided at their core by religious nationalism to realize that moderation and modernity is the only way forward. Their citizenry must demand nothing less than genuine social freedom and keep chipping away at traditional diktats such that conservatism holds the center, rather than constantly veering towards fascism and autocracy.

States with religious doctrine encoded into their constitutions and legislations need to become religious in name only, finding that middle ground of pacifying the religious radicals among their citizenry, while slowly having them wither away to the forces of modernity and capital in a few generations.

Failure to do this will only result in ever more human suffering. People across the world, due to the spread of mass communication and social media, have become increasingly aware and intolerant, albeit ever so slowly, of autocracy.

One hopes this might just be the “world war” that the vast majority of the world refuses to take part in.

As the Pulitzer-prize winning poet and journalist, Carl Sandburg, once said: “Some day they will give a war…and no one will come.”

***

Broken Shackles Media | Citizen Journalism | Oct 19 2023

Western foreign policy makers need to analyze Hamas, Palestine, and Iran as rational state actors.

“We have yet to understand: that if I am starving, you are in danger.”

James Baldwin

https://apnews.com/article/lebanon-israel-palestinian-hamas-hezbollah-iran-2ccfaa49139358e6d2add89878a0cfe4

(1) I present a common sense fact of warfare ever since humanity devolved, many thousands of years back, into tribalistic intra-species competition for resources: The terrorism of the oppressor state will always be met by the far more unequal terrorism of the community being oppressed. There is no exception to this fact. Of course history is written by the oppressor, which is why only the oppressed are called terrorists in popular nomenclature, despite the fact that terrorist states cause far greater death and destruction.

(2) There is a breaking point for every individual in a distinctly oppressed geopolitical community where the rationale of martyrdom outweighs the rationale of survival, especially if the oppression doesn’t reduce at least a little. This results in generational flashpoints as said oppression continues over multiple lifetimes. Palestinians residing under Israeli occupation in Gaza and the West Bank happen to probably be the most well-known of such communities. However, there are several such communities all across the globe right now and this rationale applies to every human being on earth.

(3) Now, obviously radicalized members of the oppressed community don’t have the hardware to fight back and inflict terror against their oppressor state. So what do they do? They go towards state patrons who might be near-peer adversaries of said oppressor – essentially another oppressor state. Iran is a near-peer adversary of Israel and – like most countries around the world today – a terrorist state with a large, modern military much like Israel, albeit less powerful. Palestinian militants are going to get funding from wherever they can. The enemy of my enemy is my friend and so on. You don’t need to be a genius to figure this out.

(4) I say this as someone who has faced pretty much zero oppression my entire life. Indeed, it’s a useful rationale to understand if we’re truly oppressed. Are you willing to actually commit to a life path of (brutal) martyrdom to get release from the conditions you exist in? Whether that be through suicide, terrorism, or a combination of both. I can categorically say that, for all the traumas and stresses I have faced in my life, it is nothing compared to what actually oppressed communities go through. I have never once felt like killing or being killed in order to release myself from my socioeconomic conditions. Why? Because I had so much to lose. On the contrary, I live in constant fear of losing all the amazing life gifts that I have rather than in a constant state of humiliation and dehumanization. My rationale for existence would be very different had I been born in Gaza. For a dehumanized people who don’t have anything to lose, militancy makes a lot of sense in order to feel a sense of self.

(4) It is this rationale of the oppressed that Western policy-makers – who probably lead some of the softest, most privileged lives anywhere on the face of the planet – need to take into account. The multi-decade hypocrisy and outright racism of Western foreign policy makers was always going to result in blowback. The terrorism of the oppressed will not stop until the oppressor is cut to size.

(5) Western foreign policy makers have to curtail their egomania and step down from their traditional hubris. Else, the only stalemate winner in the Western world from this ongoing global conflagration, (that too out of just the dumb luck of geography) is going to be America. Not Europe. Europe seems too busy cannibalizing itself while wallowing in entitlement and superiority. So personally, I don’t see this internal growth happening any time soon. Though one can always hope for saner sensibilities to prevail.

(6) The West needs to understand that it can’t just care about the deaths of white people. I don’t say this out of a belief in the goodness of any human’s heart, leave alone Western policy makers. I say this from the standpoint of a purely utilitarian rationale. The elites of the world would be wise to heed the haunting words of James Baldwin I started this article with. I repeat it for good measure (with emphasis):

“We have yet to understand: that if I’m starving, you are in danger.”

***

Broken Shackles Media | Citizen Journalism | Oct 18 2023

Palestinians account for over 95% of the casualties in this “conflict” – yet Israel’s existential danger keeps increasing.

(1) Any person of a rational mind and scientific temper would agree that this is not so much a conflict between near peer adversaries as much as it is a brutal, one-sided terror campaign by a powerful oppressor, resulting in occasional terroristic blowback from militants resisting said oppression.

Mind you, this graph is just from 2008 to 2020.

(2) You see those spikes in the red injury graphs for Palestinians? That’s the policy of Israeli soldiers deliberately targeting and disabling Palestinian protesters. It’s quite representative of the larger history of this occupation prior as well.

(3) Occupation, apartheid, and colonization will have blowback, including the terroristic kind. This graph will look a little different after it’s updated for 2023, taking into account the nearly 1500 Israeli deaths that have already taken place (even before the ground invasion of Gaza has started).

(4) The slight equalizing of the playing field in asymmetric warfare means that the oppressed are able to hit back at their oppressor in ways that can genuinely hurt. This includes war crimes committed by militants in order for their oppressors to feel a fraction of the war crimes the oppressed faced.

(5) Except now – as displayed by Hamas’ strategic sophistication in it’s terror operation – the oppressed are able to access a variety of tactical options with greater ease.

(6) Failing to take this into context will result in nothing more than bloodshed. This cycle of unequal violence cannot be resolved with more terrorism by the oppressor state, such as what Israel is nakedly attempting right now. It’s strategically impossible to completely oppress a people. At some point in time the costs of survival for the oppressed outweigh the benefits, which results in the inevitable violent pushback.

(7) Ceasefire, negotiations, compromise, and the difficult work of moving from occupation and apartheid to a shaky, very unequal democracy is the only way forward. The Israeli state is suffering from a hubris that is going to take a lot of Palestinians and Israelis down with it.

(8) Only the citizens of Israel can prevent this cycle of self destruction. This is not a large country, population wise, and cannot actually afford to be dragged into a lengthy multi front war. Iran and Hezbollah have been very clear in their intentions to draw more battle lines with Israel should they move forward with a full fledged ground invasion of Gaza.

(9) Sadly it doesn’t look very optimistic at the moment as Israel seems hell bent on invading, maybe even completely re-occupying, Gaza. Netanyahu and his gang are practically salivating at the opportunity to warmonger again (thereby also ensuring Bibi doesn’t go to prison on corruption charges).

(10) This will result in a protracted, potentially multi-front war that Israel can only fight with much more direct help from the US. That’s not good for the prospects of a more peaceful world.

(11) Also, America’s support for Israel is not as much of a long term given as it once was. America’s anti-war factions across the political spectrum are only growing. Israel should pay heed to this and stop the madness.

***

Broken Shackles Media | Citizen Journalism | Oct 15 2023

Hamas – a militant monster created by a terrorist state (with its citizenry as collateral).

(1) A 2009 article in the Wall Street Journal reveals how Israel helped spawn Hamas. The link is pasted below for reference. It quotes a senior Israeli official, who was responsible for religious affairs in the region until 1994, basically admitting as much, “Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation.”

(2) This is hardly conspiracy theory, but rather straight out historical fact and open secret. Israel (and the West for that matter) have detested indigenous secular/leftist resistance movements against colonization and imperialism in the Muslim world, especially as many were sympathetic to the erstwhile Soviet Union and continue to be sympathetic to Russia and China in the present day. There has been a consistent effort by Western power players to fund and covertly bolster Islamist radicals.

(3) This happened with the Palestinian resistance as well. In order to torpedo the secular core of the Palestinian liberation struggle, as represented by groups like Fatah and the PFLP, Israel directly funded an offshoot of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood – the militant monster we know as Hamas today. How did they do this? A certain Brigadier General who was military governor of Gaza in the early 80s.

https://web.archive.org/web/20090926212507/http:/online.wsj.com/article/SB123275572295011847.html

(4) Brigadier General Yitzhak Segev. As mentioned, he was the Israeli military governor in Gaza in the early 80s. Segev was the man who directly funded Hamas as a counterweight to the more secular and leftist parts of the Palestinian resistance.

(5) As per an in-depth investigative piece by The Intercept (link pasted below):

“Segev later told a New York Times reporter that he had helped finance the Palestinian Islamist movement as a “counterweight” to the secularists and leftists of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Fatah party, led by Yasser Arafat (who himself referred to Hamas as “a creature of Israel.”)

“The Israeli government gave me a budget,” the retired brigadier general confessed, “and the military government gives to the mosques.”

“Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation,” Avner Cohen, a former Israeli religious affairs official who worked in Gaza for more than two decades, told the Wall Street Journal in 2009. Back in the mid-1980s, Cohen even wrote an official report to his superiors warning them not to play divide-and-rule in the Occupied Territories, by backing Palestinian Islamists against Palestinian secularists. “I … suggest focusing our efforts on finding ways to break up this monster before this reality jumps in our face,” he wrote.

https://theintercept.com/2018/02/19/hamas-israel-palestine-conflict/

https://theintercept.com/2018/02/19/hamas-israel-palestine-conflict/

(6) This historical fact cannot be ignored and presents a very different context to the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas, maybe even Hezbollah in the days to come. The Western world needs to take heed of this and not be played for patsies.

(7) Israel wants the Palestinian resistance to be Islamized and virulently unwilling to compromise on the existence of a Jewish nation-state. Because it helps whip up nationalist sentiment, and ultimately provides cover for their ethnic cleansing and historic land grab goals. Islamist radicalism benefits Western imperialism.

(8) Lest we forget what the ultimate goal of the Israeli state is, here’s Bibi at the UN recently giving a presentation on “The New Middle East”. Notice what’s missing in the map of Israel? Any mention of Palestine. It’s basically stating what Israel has always wanted – all of historic Palestine, including the West Bank and Gaza. A bit of genocide and a lot of ethnic cleansing to complete the occupation and establish a full-fledged apartheid state without the liberal veneer.

(9) One fears, however, that unless Israel pulls away from this fascist brutality and naked oppression of the Palestinians, they will have an existential crisis the likes of which they’ve never faced.

(10) Only the citizenry of Israel can prevent this madness and they need to know that this Israeli government is not on their side. As this is written, the families of the Israeli hostages are being actively ignored, even attacked by Netanyahu supporters for seeking the return of their loved ones.

(11) But Israel might just be looking at their own hostages as nothing more than collateral damage in their desire to occupy Gaza and eventually the West Bank. Channel 4 News interviewed a long-time Israeli hostage negotiator, Gershon Baskin, who has currently opened back channel negotiations with Hamas, desperately hoping to get women, children and vulnerable hostages in exchange for Palestinian women and children prisoners held by Israel. However, when pressed on the goals of the Israeli government, he admitted, “my assessment is…that the government, the military, and the majority of the people of Israel are willing to sacrifice the hostages.”

***

Broken Shackles Media | Citizen Journalism | Oct 15 2023

Lest We Forget Burma: A brief policy overview of the ongoing Myanmar Civil War (and an opinion on it’s implications for Israel)

[Note: I use Myanmar and Burma interchangeably for this report, mostly because I don’t know which one is more acceptable so I’m just shamelessly hedging.]

(1) By most measures the Myanmar Civil War is the world’s oldest, still ongoing, civil war. It’s been raging since 1948, but has seen a significant upswing in hostilities and violence ever since 2021, when the Junta (yet again) dissolved the nascent civilian government in a coup-de-tat. The people of Burma, long forgotten by pretty much the entire world have basically had enough. This feels like it for that southeast Asian country.

(2) Myanmar is a region of violently contested nationalities – both dominant and subaltern. More recently, significant generational splits in the dominant Bamar community are coming to a head.

(3) At a more macroscopic level, anecdotally at least, it feels like brute military suppression is fast losing it’s sell-by date for authoritarian, robber baron regimes across the world to maintain power. Information simply cannot be controlled the way it could be, even a decade ago. The asymmetrical warfare of the oppressed also has operational teeth in a manner we’ve rarely seen after gunpowder and aerial bombardment widened the military gap between state militaries and guerilla fighters. On to the reportage…

https://www.cfr.org/article/myanmars-junta-losing-civil-war

(4) A World Politics Review report, cited by the Council on Foreign Relations, states that the Junta is “hemorrhaging troops” and has lost control of vast swathes of the country. They are slowly losing this civil war but they are taking as many people down with them as possible. The fact that the Junta never really had control of these territories to begin with is a whole other historical question.

(5) The ethno-national paramilitaries (especially those of the Kachin, Karenni, and Chin ethnicities) fighting the Bamar-majority Junta have always been relatively strong and have maintained militaristic de-facto nation-states of their own. Now they’re training a whole new army of young recruits (including many disillusioned Bamar youth) as People’s Defense Forces. This is changing the game on the ground and resulting in brutality from the skies.

(6) Resorting increasingly to devastating air raids as they’re unable to defeat the combined forces of the various paramilitaries and the PDF on the ground, the Junta’s days might well be numbered (but that number is still large and very bloody).

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-civil-war-in-myanmar-no-end-in-sight/

(6) The Brookings Institute wonders if this long ignored civil war is a new battle front in a new cold war between America and China? It’s no secret that, without Chinese support, the Junta in Myanmar couldn’t have survived this long. What is less known is the fact that there is scant, and mostly only back-channel, Western support for the various ethno-national paramilitaries for decades now. The West really doesn’t have as much of a foothold in Burma as the Brookings folks might think (or wish). This feels like cold war hype rather than any real boots-on-the-ground research.

(7) But the paramilitaries and PDF can convert this disadvantage to an advantage in their war against the Junta. If they can take on the tough task of making themselves and their struggle apparent to the Western media and finding a spot in the public narrative (This is something the Israel-Palestine conflict doesn’t have a problem with). Velvet chair foreign policy analysts in DC would love for America to look like the savior of the Burmese people. At the cost of sounding a little cold and calculating, it feels like the people of Myanmar can use this to their advantage in their ongoing civil war. To do so they might have to publicize easily accessible imagery, social media communiques in English, and stories of defiance to strike a romantic revolutionary chord and create traction in the emotional psyche of the West.

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/burma-myanmar/new-cold-war-hein-myers

(8) Now, how might this apply to Israel and it’s current ongoing war with Hamas?

This is speculative, but all signs point to this latest bloody conflict in Israel-Palestine being an Israeli false flag operation gone wrong, an operation aimed at whipping up national sentiment at a time of political-economic crisis, with the larger goal of annexing the entirety of Gaza and the West Bank. (Below is a picture of him at the UN showing exactly this in his map of “The New Middle East”).

Netanyahu and the Israeli far right might just be working towards their multi-generational dream of a single Jewish supremacist state over all of historic Palestine, with a combination of partial genocide, partial conversion of the occupied population into second class citizens, and a slow ethnic cleansing to follow.

This is their plan, but it’s mind bogglingly stupid.

For this is where Burma comes in.

Israel has just created for itself a civil war to end all civil wars.

They are the new Junta of the Middle East.

And the people have had enough, all ways around.

This feels like the beginning of something much more ominous and threatening to our species.

Love is not so much an option as much as it is the only part of the human condition we hold onto to maintain our sanity.

Well…

Love and absurdity.

***

Broken Shackles Media | Citizen Journalism | Oct 10 2023

Hindutvadis are sabre rattling on behalf of Israel.

https://scroll.in/article/1057325/how-the-bjp-is-using-the-israel-palestine-conflict-for-domestic-gain

(1) Recent articles in Scroll and The Telegraph reveal how BJP supporters and the larger Hindu nationalist social media universe are beating the drums of vengeance on behalf of Israel every since the Hamas terror attacks.

(2) This is both ludicrous and bloodthirsty, yet sadly seems par for the course when it comes to the absolutely shameless levels that the BJP and it’s supporters are willing to sink for electoral gain.

https://scroll.in/article/1057325/how-the-bjp-is-using-the-israel-palestine-conflict-for-domestic-gain

(3) The BJP has gone so far as to use the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas in an election video against the opposition with the tagline “Never Forgive, Never Forget”.

(4) Mind you, they do this while an all out civil war rages on in the northeastern Indian state of Manipur, a state they currently hold power in but have effectively abandoned due to it’s electoral insignificance.

https://www.telegraphindia.com/india/bjp-uses-israel-palestine-conflict-to-attack-congress-but-remains-silent-on-manipur-crisis/cid/1972302

(5) Religious nationalists the world over might just be dragging humanity to World War 3, despite the more reasonable tendencies in our species.

(6) Now more than ever…memento mori.

***

Broken Shackles Media | Citizen Journalism | Oct 9 2023

Netanyahu needs to be held accountable to the victims of this war. It may be more than a mere “intelligence failure” by Israeli power players.

https://apnews.com/article/israel-hamas-gaza-attack-intel-a5287a18773232f26ca171233be01721

(1) Multiple news outlets are reporting on a severe warning from the highest levels of Egyptian intelligence sent to the highest levels of the Israeli state-military apparatus that Hamas was up to “something big”. This was either negligently or willfully ignored by Israeli power players.

(2) One has to start questioning whether this was a false flag operation gone wrong. If so, Netanyahu and his cohorts have to be held accountable by the citizens of Israel.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/egypt-intelligence-official-says-israel-ignored-repeated-warnings-of-something-big/

(3) Egypt has a viable rationale in maintaining the peace, especially with this current regime. Egypt is quite easily Israel’s closest Arab ally.

(4) There is every reason to believe in this report.

https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20231009-egypt-israel-ignored-warnings-something-big-was-coming/

(5) Of course Israel has issued the usual denial. But questions remain. For lest we forget, Hamas have often been the useful idiots for the Israeli far right.

(6) They are impoverished terrorists keen on Israel’s destruction, but with scant means to do so. The one thing they do really well is unify the Jewish nationals of Israel whenever they attack, and divert attention from very real internal problems.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-up-hamas-now-its-blown-up-in-our-faces/

(7) It turns out that the useful idiots might have pulled a real fast one on the Israeli state and military apparatus.

(8) But did they only make it so untenable such that a complete occupation by Israel of, both, Gaza and the West Bank, is now the only option?

(9) With a bloody, protracted guerilla war; essentially a bi-national civil conflagration in a soon to be single apartheid state?

(10) Worse still, is this what Bibi and his coterie actually wanted?

***

Broken Shackles Media | Citizen Journalism | Oct 9 2023.