On Israel, Hamas, and what to do when all the answers are wrong

Part 1: What really happened in the desert on Saturday, and where Israel stands now

PART 1 OF 2

(WARNING: GRAPHIC PHOTO BELOW)

This time the mass killers of Jews didn’t need to round them up and run trains across the Polish flatlands.

This time the Jews came to them. For a rave.

The news out of the Israeli desert this weekend was so shocking and repulsive that you can be forgiven for avoiding its details.

Hamas, the Palestinian terror group that controls the Gaza Strip, breached the fence separating Israel from Gaza - a tiny territory between the Negev desert and the Mediterranean coast. It sent teams to attack the Israeli villages nearby, along with thousands of young people gathering for an all-night dance party a few miles away.

The attack completely surprised Shin Bet, Israel’s famous intelligence agency. Hamas’s fighters overwhelmed the undermanned Israeli military and police units near the border and rampaged for hours.

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But “rampaged” does not capture the flavor of the violence, its deliberate horror.

The terrorists raped and kidnapped and executed unarmed civilians and prisoners. They posted videos of their atrocities online to celebrate. They killed more than 260 people at the rave alone, hundreds more villagers nearby. As one survivor wrote of what happened after she and another attendee were captured:

The guy who was with me didn’t stop crying and begging for his life. I tried to explain to him that he needs to stop crying, “It annoys them, stop crying and everything will be fine.”

They had knives and hammers. I realized we were in danger. At first he listened to me but very quickly he returned to his initial and fell on his knees and again screamed and begged for his life.

And then - he didn’t scream anymore. They murdered him in front of my eyes.

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(A roomful of dead Jews)

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Understand this attack was not an invasion in any conventional sense.

Hamas knows it cannot control Israeli territory. Its fighters are lightly armed (hammers and knives) and minimally trained. They have no chance to hold ground against a modern military force. Israel’s counterattack has already driven them back to Gaza.

But against unarmed civilians, hammers and knives will do just fine. These men came to rape and capture and kill. On that score they were more successful than they could have hoped.

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Fifty years ago, Israel was a poor, scrappy country filled with refugee Jews who knew firsthand what the world might do to them if they dropped their guard. (Even so they faced a surprise attack in 1973.)

Those Jews are gone now. Even their children are on the way out. The new Israel is rich and technologically advanced. For 20 years, since Israeli broke the second intifada, it has been relatively peaceful.

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($55 million for a Tel Aviv penthouse. Funny, you don’t look like a war zone.)

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More recently, Israel has grown focused on its internal political strife, which roughly parallels the MAGA v Democratic battle in the United States. But Israel faces the added complexity of a third faction, a growing number of ultra-Orthodox Jews who are exempt from military service (and societal obligations in general) because they “serve the society through prayer and study.” (Must be nice!)

In other words, Israel has grown distracted from the existential threats it still faces. In part because of the success of its “Iron Dome,” the system that protects its cities from rocket attacks, it may have grown too confident in its ability to substitute technology for boots-on-the-ground manpower.

Saturday’s attacks were the ugliest imaginable wakeup call (short of a nuclear attack on Tel Aviv, which, fortunately, is past Hamas’s capability).

Now Israel must figure out how to answer the alarm - without giving Hamas what it wants, a regional war that destroys the slow rapproachement between Israel and some of its more moderate neighbors.

(PART 1 OF 2)