Readings and videos for October 7

Here are three videos and several articles on October 7 that are worth watching and reading.

First, one from Coleman Hughes: “Inside Israel’s war room: what really happened after October 7.” (Subtitle: “Israel’s leaders hated one another. They fought a war anyway. Elliot Kaufman takes us inside the room where it happened.”) Kaufman is an editor of the Wall Street Journal, and imparts a number of facts about the war (and subsequent “peace”) that haven’t been widely reported.  It’s a long conversation, and I haven’t yet finished, but Kaufman is eloquent, Hughes asks good questions (as usual), and you’ll learn a lot.

Click to watch it at the Free Press (subscription required).

Free on YouTube:  “Israel regained deterrence. The U.S. lost it.” Bret Stephens is interviewed by Times of Israel editor deputy editor Amanda Borschel-Dan about all manner of Israel-related items: the war, why Israel won despite losing world approbation, the Democrats vs. the Republicans on Israel, is the New York Times anti-Israel?,  and so on. The one bit that irritated me was when Borschel-Dan asks Stephens whether the NYT is anti-Israel. It of course is, but Stephens weasels a bit, which he probably has to do to keep his job. Otherwise, it’s a good conversation.

A short video of Natasha Hausdorff being interviewed on October 7 by Julia Hartley-Brewer. Note the two big truths that Hausdorff says have been neglected by the media but which we must recognize.

The front page of the Free Press is loaded with articles appropriate for this day. You’ll have to subscribe to read any, though. Note the ones at upper left and lower right, which go against the prevailing narrative.

From Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib’s piece:

As the grim third anniversary of October 7 befalls a decimated Gaza Strip, the state of the discourse among many in the so-called “pro-Palestine” movement remains as embarrassing, dismal, and disastrous as it was when Hamas initiated the attack in 2023. Over the past three years, I have seen countless posts by self-described Zionists criticizing the conduct of Israel’s government, the behavior of Israeli officials, and the excesses of the Israeli reaction to October 7. And yet, I have struggled to see even a dozen posts by “pro-Palestine” activists, advocates, or organizations explicitly condemning Hamas for triggering the most catastrophic chapter in contemporary Palestinian history.

And let’s be clear: That’s exactly what this is. Three years after October 7, the Palestinian people face their greatest crisis of the modern era.

I begin on the ground, in Gaza itself. The majority of Gaza’s buildings are partially or fully destroyed. Tens of thousands have lost their lives, including entire families wiped out by ferocious Israeli bombardment. People will argue to the moon and back about who was ultimately responsible for the level of devastation in Gaza. I personally believe Israel killed far too many civilians, including dozens of my own family members. Israeli air strikes destroyed both of my childhood homes. I will never not be angry or upset about this.

But I will also forever be furious at the fact that Gaza would still be standing had Hamas simply kept its terrorists at home on October 7. I will forever be rageful at the fact that Hamas not only weaponized every aspect of Gaza’s infrastructure but also held Israeli hostages in a manner that was inevitably going to invite more devastation and suffering for Palestinian civilians. I will forever be resentful of the useful idiots who ignored Hamas’s sadistic tactics, hiding behind vacuous appeals to “international law” despite there being no legal framework to justify a terrorist group entrenching itself in medical facilities, educational spaces, markets, and areas meant to shelter the displaced.

. . . In other words, three years after the October 7 attacks on Israel, Palestinians have seen their homes decimated, their reputations destroyed in both Israel and the Arab world, and the actions of their supposed allies in the West amount to nothing. Yes, this has been the most catastrophic three years in modern Palestinian history.

However, a narrative shift is of paramount importance. To promote a fundamentally different future for the Palestinian people in Gaza and beyond, we must acknowledge that within the massive power differential between Israel and the Palestinians, there exists an immense margin for Palestinian agency, responsibility, and accountability. Recognizing that is far from “blaming the victims,” as many of my detractors allege; it is, in fact, the first step toward empowering the Palestinian people.

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From Douglas Murray’s article:

Each day’s news is filled with declarations of defeat. The online world is filled with shrill declarations that Israel has lost this war.

But as we approach the third anniversary of the October 7 attacks, I stand by what I wrote here this time last year: that Israel and her allies have been winning the war on the ground even as they have lost the PR war around the world. The PR war matters. But it matters less than the war itself. Better to win the ground war and lose the PR war than the other way around.

Three years after the attack that Yahya Sinwar started, it is worth reiterating the successes of the nation he tried to defeat—and the utter decimation of the people who started this war.

. . .Once the mullahs [in Iran] had deliverable nuclear weapons, they believed they would be invincible—effectively able to continue repressing the Iranian people for the indefinite future and hold not just the Middle East but also the wider world by the throat. That was, effectively, what their mouthpieces in the Western media wanted. Only one great miscalculation prevented them from getting there: Sinwar’s launch of the October 7 attacks.

With the hindsight of three years of war, we can now see more clearly how complete the devastation of Iran’s plans has been. Piece by piece, the government of Benjamin Netanyahu took apart the Iranian axis.

First, they took apart Hamas in Gaza. They did this despite constant attempts to make them stop, which came not just from the negligibly important “allies” in Europe but from President Joe Biden’s White House. Throughout the years during which the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) attempted to finish its mission in Gaza, the Biden administration consistently tried to pull it back. But the Israeli government refused. Even as Kamala Harris declared that she had “studied the maps” and the hashtag “All eyes on Rafah” went global online, the IDF went into Hamas’s last stronghold. There they cornered Sinwar and killed the mastermind of the attacks. There was no “massacre” in Rafah, as the online world had predicted. There was simply another Israeli victory.

People will beef at Murray’s praise of Netanyahu, but there’s a nice ending, referring to last week’s failed hijacking attempt of a FlyDubai airplane:

Sinwar was a psychopath, and so he probably would have launched his war anyway. But by any analysis, what he started on October 7 was one of the greatest military missteps in history. Everybody alongside and above him in the chain of command is now dead. Neither Hamas, Hezbollah, nor the Iranian regime has a noose ready to pull around Israel’s neck anymore. Three years ago, this set of victories would have seemed unthinkable. Today, it is an average day’s news. That a large share of the Israeli hostages who Hamas claimed on October 7 were eventually returned alive is an additional victory worthy of scripture.

Only one part of the war has been lost, and that is the war for public opinion—especially among the young. That is both concerning and unsurprising. The terrorist-linked regime in Qatar, among others, has been superb at using its mouthpieces at Al Jazeera and other, more covert propaganda channels to influence global opinion. These outlets started making false claims that Israel was committing “genocide” in Gaza beginning in October 2023. Sadly, large parts of the world have believed this lie, and weak governments like that of the UK have decided to pander to a part of their domestic political base by repeating and feeding it.

In the years ahead, that will be their problem. But for the time being, what happened in the skies above Saudi Arabia on Wednesday morning stands as a metaphor for three years of war. The Israelis saw an existential threat, took matters into their own hands, and decided their own course. The rest of the West will have to decide whether it will follow the Israeli model or let its own future be dictated by terror and the hijacking of its entire society.

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From It’s Noon in Israel; click the headline below to read. Tatarka and Segal paints two worlds: the “Nova world” described this way:

The Nova world is a world of good and evil. Evil is the entity that raped and pillaged its way through the Gaza envelope, kidnapped 251 people and sacrificed Gazans on the altar of its deity, death. It is the militia that fired on the north and drove tens of thousands of Israelis from their homes. And it is the regime in Tehran that armed and funded them both, the Great Satan of this world.

and the “October 8 world”, in which Israel is the evil and hapless entity:

The other world dates its birth to October 8, omitting the day its ideology won its greatest victory and its goals were realized: October 7. This “October 8” world has even fewer shades of gray than the Nova world. Its black is Israel, the unholy nation, the spearhead of Western colonialism and the last obstacle to the world’s redemption. Its white is the Gazans, victims of oppression and genocide, who have replaced Jews as the archetypal persecuted other. It has adopted the jihadist’s categories: “settlers” and Israelis are one and the same, as are terrorists and civilians.

An excerpt:

Reality conforms to neither narrative entirely.

The hostages have come home. Hamas is shattered, Hezbollah decapitated, Assad gone, and Iran struggling for breath. By almost any military measure, Israel has never been stronger. And yet France, the U.K., Canada and Australia have recognized a Palestinian state, and visitors to the Netherlands are having their bags rifled through for products from Judea and Samaria.

That does not make the two worlds equally wrong. The October 8 world’s distortions are too many to count. The most fundamental is its refusal to see non-Westerners as actors in their own right. In its telling, every event is written in Jerusalem or Washington. Hamas didn’t choose to attack; it was provoked. Hezbollah didn’t choose to open a second front, and Iran didn’t choose to build an axis; they were simply defending themselves from Israeli aggression.

The Nova world’s error is subtler, and for Israel, more dangerous. Before October 7, Israel fell for a conceptzia of safety: the belief that Hamas was deterred, contained, and bought off. Three years later, it risks the opposite, a conceptzia of unsafety, in which every threat is existential and every problem is answered with force. Israel has become a hammer in search of nails. This complicated region is fluent in the language of force, but it is not monolingual, and those who insist Israel speak only that language will miss the larger opportunities its military victories have created.

Criticizing the Nova world is not the same as doubting it. On the question that matters most, it was right: evil is real. Today, three years on, a letter by an officer of Shayetet 13, the Israeli Navy’s special forces unit, has been published. I will let it speak for itself.

עַם יִשְׂרָאֵל חַי