Tuesday, October 08, 2024
From Ian:
Brendan O'Neill: The fight for civilisation is only just beginning
Brendan O'Neill: The fight for civilisation is only just beginning
Even I could not have imagined that left-wingers in my own country would describe Hamas’s Jew-slaying spree as a ‘day of celebration’. Even I did not foresee mobs of upper-middle-class youths on our streets cheering the Houthis, a violently racist movement whose flag grotesquely issues ‘A Curse Upon the Jews’. Even I could not have foretold mobs of Israel-haters assembling outside the Sydney Opera House to chant ‘Fuck the Jews!’, and, worse, the left saying nothing about it. A left that spent the past decade damning everything it dislikes as ‘fascism’ – Trump, Brexit, gender-critical feminism – staying shamefully silent in the face of actual fascism. In the face of the slaughter of Jews, and the rank apologism for it in our own cities. Reprehensible doesn’t cover it.The Failed Concepts That Brought Israel to October 7
The West’s moral failures in the aftermath of 7 October were of an entirely new order. They exceeded even my grim fears. They shone a harsh, inescapable light on the retreat from reason and abandonment of Enlightenment many of us have warned of for years. In the hours and days after the pogrom, a dawning, chilling realisation came: the West’s activist class and its educated elites were sympathising more with the pogromists than with the pogrom’s victims. They went from saying ‘Never Again’ to saying ‘All Right Then, One More Time’. The delirium of our post-civilisational era emerged into broad daylight. It was undeniable now: the West is in the stranglehold of a profound moral crisis.
And it continues to this day, the first-year anniversary of that wicked intrusion into Israel. Think about this: today is the anniversary of the worst act of racist violence of modern times, and yet so-called anti-racists will not be marking it. They won’t be putting a black square on their Instagram pages. They won’t hold any vigils. Not one tear will touch their cheeks for the thousand human beings murdered by racists a year ago today. No ‘anti-fascist’ will decry this fascism. On the contrary, they will spend today doing what they always do: feverishly hating on Israel, puking yet more wordy bile on to the Jewish State. They will hijack this day of Jewish remembrance to further their defamatory hatreds of the Jewish nation.
What we have seen over the past year is that when the young in particular are invited to reject Western civilisation, they might very well be tempted into the arms of its opposite: barbarism. When you educate a new generation to be wary of the West, to view our claim to be enlightened as just so much white man’s arrogance and bluster, you might just push them towards the West’s enemies. When you depict Western society as fallen, racist, phobic, shit – as so much fashionable thought does right now – you make anti-Westernism, even violent anti-Westernism, seem exotic, enticing. The sympathy for Hamas on our campuses and streets is fundamentally an extension of the West’s own crisis of meaning, of our denial of our own insights, of our betrayal of our history.
A war for the soul of humanity must now be fought. On two fronts. On the physical front of Israel’s borders, where some of the most regressive movements on Earth, sponsored by the Islamic Republic of Iran, openly lust and agitate for the destruction of the world’s only Jewish nation. And on the intellectual front here at home. In the academy, in politics, in hearts and minds. Only a full-throated defence of the virtues and wonders of Western civilisation might see off the moral derangement of our times and the Jew hatred it has nurtured. We owe it to the dead of 7 October to stand by Israel and repair our own broken societies.
One year ago today, an armed force of at least 3,000 men managed to penetrate a hostile border, overrun fixed and mobile defenses, commandeer army bases, and occupy for long hours a broad swath of Israeli territory in which they went house by house and village by village killing, burning, mutilating, raping, and abducting. For Israel, this was both an intelligence failure and a combat failure. A plot involving so many fighters and such careful and rehearsed action should not have been missed by military intelligence, and a territorial invasion, even with the element of surprise, should have been successfully resisted by a standing army well before the horrors of that Saturday reached their unfathomable nadir.Jonathan Schanzer: The October 8th War
This essay will not look at either the intelligence or the combat failures. Lesson-learning in both of those domains should be straightforward enough. Beyond those limited tactical failures, however, are larger conceptual frameworks that were vigorously held onto in the years leading up to October 7 and that have not yet been entirely abandoned. These mental models weren’t just products of ignorance or applications of prejudice. They were comprehensive conceptual toolkits for assimilating new information and processing policy dilemmas. On October 7, they failed completely. An honest appraisal of them is crucial for any postwar policymaking.
Tactical lesson-learning is relatively easy because it doesn’t require us to abandon cognitive conceptions that we might have a heavy moral investment in. There might be a personnel investment, but personnel can be replaced, especially following a crisis. Bad ideas are different. Dislodging them often involves parting from something central to ourselves.
Even calling them “bad ideas” is an injustice. The failed concepts covered in this essay didn’t lead to disaster because they were obviously bad, but rather because they seemed to work, or at least presented a reassuring front to those who wanted to believe they were working, for so long.
Until the moment they collapsed.
In this essay, I’ll review four interrelated categories of flawed thinking in four expanding circles of blunder. The obvious starting point is Israel’s long-serving prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. He cannot escape responsibility for Israel’s biggest security fiasco ever. But his failings are only part of the story. It is impossible to understand them without understanding the ideological aspect of his governments’ miscalculations about Gaza, especially the way that a particular right-wing religious ideology has distorted Israel’s policy priorities over the last fifteen years or more—and above all in the last two.
Ending the dissection of conceptual dead-ends there would be ideologically appealing to some and ideologically appalling to others, but it would be analytically inadequate. For neither Netanyahu the man nor messianic settler Zionism can tell the whole story. A third set of concepts has characterized the approach to Arab-Israeli conflict resolution of the people and ideas we have come to call the “peace processors.” These ideas—divorced from centuries of accepted practice in conflict mediation—are beloved by establishment liberals in the West who see themselves as genuine friends of Israel and the Jewish people, and whose repeated failures seem to have no effect on these ideas’ shelf life.
But the delusions of the peace processors can’t by themselves satisfactorily explain the failure that has brought the Middle East to such a catastrophic war this past year. For that we need to look at a fourth set of failed conceptions, those of the broader international community, from the UN to all the various self-styled humanitarian organizations, which have focused their efforts in the Arab-Israeli arena on methods that exacerbate conflict rather than mitigate it and that incentivize violence rather than reduce it. The combined result of the international community’s efforts is the creation of a unique form of governance, a veritable new category of constitution, that exists only around Israel’s borders, where non-state militias exercise a kind of sovereignty that leaves them in control of arms but without any institutional responsibility for welfare, education, food, or public utilities and without any moral responsibility not to kill their neighbors or even to protect the lives of their own citizens.
An unfathomable number of keystrokes (we don’t talk about spilling ink because that’s no longer a thing) was devoted yesterday to the anniversary of the October 7 massacre. Appropriately so. That attack by the Hamas terrorist organization kicked off a seven-front war that has now dragged on for a year. However, when historians look back on this conflict, October 8 may be viewed as a more significant marker.
October 8, 2023, was the day that Hezbollah, Iran’s more powerful proxy, began firing at Israel from Lebanon. The volume of fire that Israel has sustained since then is not well understood. Hezbollah has launched an estimated 10,000 rockets, missiles and drones at Israel since the fighting began. Entire swaths of Israel’s northern territory have been evacuated. The damage has yet to be assessed.
This war is still evolving. The Israelis are hammering Hezbollah relentlessly right now, with a combination of lethal air strikes and limited ground maneuvers in southern Lebanon. But this was not the case for nearly eleven months. The way the war evolved in the north was downright bizarre.
Even as Israelis sustained blow after blow from the Iranian proxy, they limited their responses to tit-for-tat, commensurate strikes. This remarkable restraint was encouraged—perhaps ordered—by the Biden White House. Under any other circumstances, the Israelis would have flattened Dahiyeh, Hezbollah’s stronghold in Beirut, long ago. They would have carried out a massive campaign in southern Lebanon to remove the threat along their northern border.
But they didn’t. The Biden White House was petrified of a Lebanon war. The Israelis didn’t want one either. And for good reason. Hezbollah is perhaps the most deadly foe Israel has faced in its entire history. Israeli security officials believe the group’s military capabilities are on par with a mid-size European military (think Czech Republic or similar). The group has (or at least it had) an estimated 200,000 projectiles. It has precision-guided munitions. It has a fleet of underwater and aerial drones. And its fighters have trained alongside the Russia and Iranian militaries.
The Israelis have spent years trying to prevent advanced Iranian weapons from reaching Hezbollah. This was the thrust of the “Campaign Between the Wars” that Israel waged for roughly a decade before the current war erupted. The goal was to delay the inevitable. But that clock ran out on October 8.
Given the gravity of the threat and given that Hezbollah had clearly joined the war less than 24 hours after the Hamas pogrom in southern Israel, there were many in the Israeli security establishment who were inclined to head north to fight Hezbollah immediately after 10/7. Biden said don’t. He set the Israelis on the path of war with Hamas in Gaza, and that postponed the inevitable for a time.
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