Israel is Coming Apart at the Seams, It Seems

I'm hesitant to say that the solution to Hamas is more Hamas, but it's be interesting to see if the two other wings go after the military for fucking everyone else over so badly. I get the impression there was no plan in place for dealing with the inevitable and completely forseeable retaliation, or even any sort of military strategy beyond the initial attack and taking some hostages.

I think eventually even the most rabid "Free Palestine" people are going to lose patience with Hamas for how badly they botched this.

https://x.com/bellingcat/status/1711788647425409104?s=46&t=iYW3foyqIA6Tn8VWwn3nwQ

Researchers have uncovered a propaganda network of 67 accounts on the X social platform that are coordinating a campaign of posting false, inflammatory content related to the Israel-Hamas war.

While such information has proliferated on X after Saturday’s attack, the research is believed to be the first concrete evidence that deliberate propaganda to mislead people about the conflict has gone unchecked on the platform. Combined, the accounts’ misleading posts and videos have millions of views.

The accounts — many of which previously focused on more innocuous topics like professional basketball or life in Japan — previously showed no outward association, but suddenly began posting similar content over the weekend as news of the attacks broke, according to Alethea, a company that analyzes social media.

In many cases, the accounts would post the exact same phrases. It’s not clear if the accounts were created for the express purpose of posting the misinformation, or if they were hacked or sold.

After NBC News emailed X, formerly known as Twitter, for comment Tuesday, the company began suspending some of the accounts, though others are still visible. The company responded with an automated message: “Busy now, please check back later.”

In addition to generally inflammatory content around the conflict, most of the accounts posted at least one of two misleading videos. Both of the videos take footage of Russian government officials speaking in Russian and overlay inaccurate English subtitles to falsely indicate that the officials said they wanted to escalate military conflict in Israel. Alethea declined to attribute the videos to a particular country or intelligence operation.

One video is a clip from Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s speech to the United Nations in January, in which he complained about right-wing commentator Tucker Carlson not being on Fox News anymore. The other is Russian President Vladimir Putin saying in January that while the global threat of nuclear war was growing, Russia would not launch a nuclear weapon first.

The videos posted by the X accounts, however, overlaid those clips with captions that made both men seem to threaten the U.S. with overt military support for the Palestinians.

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/misinf...l-hamas-war-network-disinformation-rcna119696

Curious.

https://x.com/iwriteok/status/1711987596157763737?s=46&t=iYW3foyqIA6Tn8VWwn3nwQ

So I’m gonna freestyle for a bit. Just stream of consciousness stuff… FF kinda stuff if you catch my drift…

Professional v Unprofessional is on a different scale from Brutal v Painless.

You can argue that the IDF can be Brutal but they are at least Professional.

HAMAS showed themselves to be both Brutal and Unprofessional.

Their first hit was to IDF and Israeli police stations.

Those were legit targets in this kind of war/occupation.

If they had then captured those vehicles and weapons and then moved on and attacked the next echelon of defenses most everyone would have been… okay? I’m not sure what the right word for me would be as FUCK HAMAS but also those would be legit targets.

Instead most of them broke up into smaller groups, fanned out and raped, murdered and pillaged all the civilians around them they could get to.

From the videos we are seeing after the initial wave (presumably of their best trained/disciplined troops) everyone else quickly devolved into wonton violence, rape and thievery.

And that once their initial (presumably most trained/disciplined) wave faced organized opposition they then turned back and devolved into similar activities as they quickly made their ways back to Gaza.

Which is a big condemnation on the IDF’s response as there were hours between when the initial wave of HAMAS got pushed back and when the IDF moved forward and liberated those areas they could.

It all depends on how the next days and weeks go.

9/11 didn't exactly persuade the American public they should vote for politicians who interfere less with the Middle East

The London blitz did nothing to make Britain want to stop fighting Germany.

Hamas attacks on Israel have never made it's population want to give up.

And similarly, whether the strikes are justified or not, every hospital flattened, every ambulance blown up, every family wiped out, every child crushed and burned to death, and every person made homeless and destitute leaves behind survivors, some of whom are more likely to decide that with nothing else left the only thing to do is fight.

That's why it's so crucial that even as Israel goes after Hamas (and no matter what any of us argue about, there's no doubt there will be more attacks in Gaza to that end) they extend the olive branch to the Palestinians who currently don't want to fight, and allow them a path to a better future.

https://x.com/osinttechnical/status/1711988838275379614?s=46&t=iYW3foyqIA6Tn8VWwn3nwQ



https://x.com/iwriteok/status/1711997418798244175?s=46&t=iYW3foyqIA6Tn8VWwn3nwQ

Normally I criticize Biden, but I think this is probably the best move for the moment. My feelings on refugees is they are hard to fully place elsewhere because they are not willing relocations, but Isreal does need to get control of this area and stop the damage from inside the country.

I really don't know of a better solution because this seems to be what will go on while the palestinians remain.

Based on the reports saying it was more successful than they expected and the age of many involved I wouldn't be surprised if they had some groups with specific missions, and then others there to basically act as cannon fodder.

Like that.

This doesn't tell civilians in Gaza to stop fighting, to get out of the way. Attacks like this tell them they can die running from their enemy, or die facing them.

If this was a Bond movie all the raping and pillaging would be a distraction from their real goal, but it seems like the raping and pillaging was the real goal. Even the attacks on the police and military just seems like a means to an end, to make sure they raping and pillaging didn't get interrupted too soon.

Gaza is going to pay such a high price for that attack, and for what? For the men of the military wing of Hamas to have the most fun weekend of their lives? There's got to be some internal blowback for this.

EU warned Elon about fake Hamas news

Plus: Crypto is funding Hamas.

Again, a bit FF’ed so gonna be rambly.

I don’t think most westerners understand what undisciplined troops are like.

When I was in Iraq Muqtada al Sadr had just been made Interior Minister and folded his JAM (Jaesh al Mahdi - Mahdi’s Army) Shi’ite militia into the IA (Iraqi Army) and put them into positions of responsibility (because a politician should have that power *rolleyes*).

So the regular IA were a bunch of fucking thugs.

My battalion (1/23 INF 3-2 SBCT) were the bad guys. We were Regional QRF (Quick Reaction Force). We didn’t have a place we were in charge of, our only mission was to go to places having issues with locals and stomp out those issues.

[Sidenote - I quickly got labeled a Hajji Hugger and put in charge of our Terps (interpreters) who I picked up some Arabic from.]

Anyway. Even to us (who has the ‘honor’ of being the most investigated unit in Iraq during our time/the Surge [again we also did the most fighting - and the VAST majority of complaints ended up unsubstantiated]) we knew these bastards were thugs.

We had a rule that no IA ‘soldier’ was allowed in a room without an American. Otherwise they would pillage like motherfuckers and rough up the locals/THEIR OWN PEOPLE.

No way they could be allowed into a compound unsupervised. Real bad shit in those scenarios.

On night raids I’d shout out ‘Jundi Emerki! Thm’Allah, Thm’Allah’ (American Soldiers, God’s Calm, God’s Calm) when we were busting in so they wouldn’t think we were Iraqi soldiers. It’s sad but that was the best way to keep folks cool and not grabbing guns and getting themselves tor up unnecessarily. They might not have liked us the most but they damn sure trusted us more than their own military. (Though to be honest most Sunnis in the Baghdad area really liked us and took good care of us. Like bringing out tea and water to us on the streets while patrolling. Best falafels in the world come from Ahmadiyyah… would love to be able to go back one day…)

Well, here's the Google translate, that any moron could have used to find out what was said:
Des nourrissons, des enfants de moins de 2 ans ont été décapités par le Hamas dans le Kibboutz de Kfar Aza. C’est une horreur, un massacre.

Infants and children under 2 years old were beheaded by Hamas in the Kibbutz of Kfar Aza. It is a horror, a massacre.

Here's David Ben Zion, Deputy Commander of the unit that retook Kfar Aza Kibbutz, saying in English that they found beheaded women and children:
https://twitter.com/i24NEWS_EN/status/1711781404344721828?s=20

Here's Insider reporting that they spoke with Major Nir Dinar that the IDF soldiers found decapitated corpses of babies. What he couldn't confirm was the number of beheaded babies. There have been reports of 40 infants being killed.
https://www.businessinsider.com/idf-says-hamas-decapitated-babies-in-israel-2023-10

And here's the original report from the Kibbutz:
https://twitter.com/HenMazzig/status/1711732906412884432?s=20

Now could they be lying, as the source is the IDF? Sure. Could they be mistaken as to the scope? Absolutely, we know that it's possible that things get exaggerated in the telling.

But we certainly know they murdered children in cold blood - yes, it's on video - and we know that they've beheaded people.

These are what the proud boys would be if they were actually armed and dangerous. This is not a professional military. This is mainly chinbeard local gang guys who are playing pretend military. (Of course they are there for the brutality, because they are uneducarted and raised in hate. If we had a different environment here in the US our Hamas would be people like FF and UA. They are angry young incels with the promise of retribution to the Isreali elites who they blame for their existence.

They are people, but most are on the level of the trump fans in mental capacity and thought. They are just more rabid and hungry because they do not live in the land of Golden Coral, chinese goods, TV, and little pink houses. You hear the same sort of hate and blame of women, glbt, and other ethnicities that you hear from, an alex jones or nick fuentes. You have the same rabid tyope leaders with MTG, Donald Trump, and Jim Jordan. It is just that over here in america the idiots are much more taken care of, so there is some extra resistance to raping and pillaging when they do not get their way, but we see there is a possibility they would still do it if the right conditions came around. If you abuse the trump people more, you just increase their violent nature. If they actually suffered apartheid like discrimination every trump voter would become a rapey thug.

It is just a type of human being.

IDF bombs whole Gaza neighborhoods to hit Hamas targets - official

'Member when people would lose their shit when an errant (or in some cases "errant") US bomb would blow up civilians in some place like Iraq, Afghanistan, or any of the shitloads of other places that we've hit over the years? I remember.

Yeah, I saw that toward the beginning of this. IMO it's misleading.

Yes, there are three different bureaus that run Hamas, including the welfare, political, and military, and yes, they can be insular from each other.

But the ones that oversee the entire thing my understanding is the Shura Council. The clerics. And the clerics are the real political control of Hamas, the actual leadership that makes decisions for all three bureaus.

While the majority of the political bureau most likely wouldn't know, as they are basically figureheads like in many theocratic regimes, the leaders of Hamas absolutely knew. Nothing would have been done without their support.

Here's a decent overview:
https://counterterrorismethics.tudelft.nl/hamas/

And of course I'd put this in the same territory as Iran's leadership claiming they had nothing to do with it. Considering they almost certainly paid for and provided weapons for it, this seems unlikely.

As to what to be done with the Palestinians, I agree with the @14thDoctor - you can't expect Israel to just take attack after attack from a population that supports Hamas. Even if it's only 40%, that 40% is willing to murder anyone who disagrees with them, even their own people. And they've controlled the education system for many years now, so those kids are being taught shit that is abhorrent.

You can try to put in a more friendly government. But in the past that just means the more militant forces, like Fatah in the early days or Hamas now, kills them.

In theory you could migrate them to a friendly nation or nation, then have the rich countries of the world send resources to help them build a life. Call it reparations. Make Israel pay as well, they are a rich country and have a vested interest in the endless generations of hate ending.

But here's the rub.

NO ONE FUCKING WANTS THEM.

Because they are insanely violent.

It isn't IDF propaganda that they've tried to overthrow multiple Muslim regimes in the region, primarily because those regimes 1) sheltered them and 2) made peace with Israel.

This attack is almost certainly because Saudi Arabia was making peace with Israel, and that runs counter to Hamas stated mission of killing every single Israeli they can find. Indeed, to them it's a holy mission. There Hadiths explicitly say the end time fight will largely be against the Jews - note this is from the saying of Mohammed in the 7th century. Which makes sense, as their were Jewish tribes that helped the heathens in Medina, and the very first people that the Muslim Arabs slaughtered other than other Arabs were Jews. This 'we respect Jews as the people of the book' is only one side of the story, and absolutely is dependent on those Jews accepting dhimittude of Muslim rule.

Oh, by the way, they also say Jesus is going to come down in the 2nd coming to help the Mahdi defeat ad-Dajhal, the false prophet that will lead the oppressors of Islam, who are stated to be mostly Jews. Paint by numbers religion.

And of course this is one of the reasons why they feel absolutely justified killing other Muslims who make peace with Israel. You know, like Islamic Jihad did with Anwar Sadat when he won the nobel peace prize for the Camp David Accords.

The Israelis have their own nutters, who are smaller in percentage, but a couple of their zealots killed Yitzhak Rabin for making peace with Islam. For the same reason. Our end time religious prophecy absolute nonsense means we have to be here to build the 3rd Temple.

The best you are going to do is force a leadership change in the Gaza strip.

And that won't last.

Leading us right back here.

I’m gonna cut you short and ask you WHICH ‘Palestinians’ you are talking about.

Israel and the Kingdom of Jordan have been the two states to give Palestinians citizenship.

Jordan estimates that 43% of their population has pre ‘48 West Bank (their measure includes basically all of Israel/Palestine west of the Jordan River) heritage from at least 1/4 of their ancestry.

Israel is ~23% Arab-Israeli NOT including those Palestinians in the Golan Heights and East Jerusalem who refuse to acknowledge the annexation of those territories and are only Permanent Residents (which will be passed down along with the option of being a citizen to their children).

I raise these points because while initially hostile both populations seem to be more or less… ummm… settled.

In my mind it seems that it is the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories (and in this case Gaza) that seem to be the issue.

And while not an expert but just looking at it it seems like there is a correlating scale. The more ‘Palestinians’ are treated like fully human beings and given all the rights and privileges of regular people the more likely they are to act like regular people.

Conversely if we were to just zoom in on the Occupied Territories and just using the current situation it appears that those ‘Palestinians’ in the West Bank (who have more rights and freedoms) are behaving much differently than the ‘Palestinians’ in Gaza (I will again state I do not believe HAMAS represents all Gazans).

All that combined I am led to the possibility that AT BASE this might not be an issue of an inferior/prior to violence ethnicity but MAYBE an issue of an ethnicity reacting to various levels of oppression/acceptance.

As to the IDF bombing the Rafah crossing, that's ridiculously stupid and inhumane. My guess would be they don't want senior Hamas leadership in Gaza to escape in that manner but it's not very effective, and just goes counter to their instructions to flee the area. Not that Egypt will let most of the Palestinians leave via that method anyway, apparently you have to have citizenship in another nation with said passport to use the one crossing in Egypt's wall. Egypt has forward deployed it's armies, as Hamas has attacked the wall itself in the past.

As to why Egypt doesn't want Palestinian refugees, that's due to the war the current Egyptian government is waging against the Muslim brotherhood over control of Egypt, which Hamas fighters have joined against the Egyptian government. Hamas, of course, is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood. Both Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood have been outlawed in Egypt. History doesn't just rhyme, sometimes it just copies and pastes.

As to Hamas, there are reports that it's flooding social media with the urging of Palestinians NOT to leave areas that the IDF is telling civilians to leave as they are going to be bombed.

https://www.memri.org/reports/hamas...trip-residents-do-not-evacuate-areas-about-be

@Demiurge Not sure why you are facepalming. If you look above I have been quite consistent in my belief that folks use the term ‘Palestinian’ with not nearly enough specificity.

These distinctions matter.

Thought it was pretty clear: As to what to be done with the Palestinians, I agree with the @@14thDoctor - you can't expect Israel to just take attack after attack from a population that supports Hamas.

Plus contextually @14thDoctor was speaking about the ones in Gaza and how to deal with their recent attack on Israel and it's reprisal.

Yes, that's what we've all been talking about.

Yet the population in Gaza is governed by and largely supports a theocratic terrorist organization that rejects peace in any form with Israel. They aren't asking for just a two nation peace treaty. They renounce that entirely.

And as to the 'success story' in Jordan, there's still hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in refugee camps that receive no aid from Jordan, and are reliant solely on the UN for humanitarian aid.

And of course this is after Black September, the expulsion of the Fedayeen into Lebanon, which led directly to the Lebanese Civil War as they sought political power there at the end of a gun barrel.

And then the assassination of Jordanian Prime Minister Wafi Tal, and the same group were responsible for the Munich massacre. And oh yeah, the first multi-plane terrorist hijacking.

King Hussein suggested the Federation Plan following all this, that Jordan would incorporate the West Bank into it's own kingdom as equal citizens, giving the Palestinians there the ability to live in their homeland under Muslim rule.

Pretty much everyone hated that idea for some reason (damn it seems reasonable now), but especially the PLO's Palestine National Council, which, you guessed it, called for the overthrow of King Hussein for having the audacity of suggesting it:
[we must] engage in a struggle to liberate Jordan from the subservient royalist regime which is a mask for the effective Zionist domination of the East Bank and acts as a hired guardian of the Zionist occupation of Palestine"

Nobody wants more of that insanity brought to their doorstep.

As to how Jordan got to the place it is with most of it's Palestinian settlers - with a lot of martial law. From 1967 to 1991 the nation was under martial law. Past 91 there were still severe restrictions on Palestinians rights, especially protest. Police clashed with and killed Palestinians several times. King Hussein disbanded the legislature, already just an advisory body in large part, due to Palestinian influence, in the 80s.

When Israel opened up travel restrictions on the West Bank in the 90s Jordan clamped down, as huge numbers of refugees were traveling there and not leaving - in one year 10% of all the West Bank's population.

They banned people from Gaza entry at all during this time period, for three years.

Anyway, the march from Black September to relative stability for Jordan was decades, and still remains incomplete.

And on a counter balance, the day after the PLO removed the call for the destruction of Israel from it's charter, Shimon Perez removed objection to the two nation resolution from their party platform. It works both ways.

Though IMO at this point no two party solution is possible. Israel is sick of the attacks, and Hamas won't budge from it's desire to destroy Israel.

There is no possibility of a negotiated peace as long as Hamas is in power.

How do we get rid of Hamas? We'll see what the Israelis do. Hypothetically a peace keeping mission could be helpful, but that's yet another decade long 'forever war' you are asking for countries to sign on for. We just saw how that end game played out in Afghanistan. Maybe it could be different in Gaza, as the situation and especially the terrain and logistics are different, but to this point I fail to see any political will for it to happen.

No one here but you is talking about any groups other than Hamas and the resolution of what can be done with the population in Gaza that is currently under attack. The context of this discussion is pretty clear. It did strike me as more than a bit pedantic to try to broaden it, especially in a post of that size.

We certainly aren't addressing Jordanian citizens of Palestine descent.

There is a resource on polls of Palestinians in the WB and Gaza.

I've not waded through it, but between a cursory look through that and the student elections, I get the gist that Hamas is popular with around half the citizenry, which gives us an exciting new civilian category of well-deserved collateral damage.

Be nice if there was a way to get the ones not happy at playing human shield to Hamas out there, and leave the rest and the IDF to go full Thunderdome.

The rampaging bit I put down to a religious thing. You get any religious group together and they tend to Voltron into a fuckhead.

Muslim and Arabs just happen to MVP the fuck out of that for some reason.

Oh, and just a fun bit of trivia on why people are very wary of letting any group that includes extremist Muslim forces, especially Palestinians, into their lands.

The current King of Jordan is Abdullah II. Prior to that was King Hussein, who assumed the throne in 1952 after a brief interregnun by his uncle, Talal. Prior to that was King Abdullah I, whose reign was cut short in 1951.

Why?

C'mon. You know why.

He was assassinated by a Palestinian nationalist.

Hell, it's affected us as well. Jack Kennedy goes down, his brother Bobby becomes a Senator and certainly had a real shot at higher office, running for the Democratic Primary in 68. It's theoretically possible he beats Nixon in '68. Imagine a world where Nixon wasn't President.

But he made the mistake of giving a speech supporting Israel, so a Palestinian Nationalist assassinated him. That's it. Nothing more than that.

Ummmmmm so what’s up with BLM?

https://twitter.com/blmchi/status/1711793142742073573?s=46&t=5aZSVQnFQ1P3I81ZDJtFug

Looks like Israel was warned but Bibi screwed up (accidentally or purposefully), which comes with a lot of consequences, not least a good chance that any two-state solution is done for, for at least a generation - there's no way an independent WB gets to exist whilst something like this is a concern, Jerusalem and Tel Aviv are too close.

Hamas were probably expecting to be pushed back a lot sooner, and not have the nutters unleashed as they were, and so not expecting the kind of response they're getting, and going to keep getting for a time yet.

This is also going to eclipse some of Israels shitty actions in the WB.

Socialists back Palestine, and seem to be willing to overlook what Hamas does in their name. You know, because anything you do to a colonist is justified.

Of course, how you get to 'Jews are colonists is Israel' is a whole 'nother kettle of fish. The single largest Jewish demographic in Israel are Mizrahi, who are Jews that can trace their lineage back to ancient Israel and have lived in the Middle East under the Diaspora. But I guess that the Muslim Arabs conquered the Levant so long ago that they are 'native' now.

Yeah, I'm not sure the legitimacy of this particular polling group but it's the only game in town.

And I remember seeing this one when it dropped:

94% of the Palestinians reject the “Deal of the Century;” large majorities support various responses to the plan including ending the WBGS split, the withdrawal of PA recognition of Israel, the ending of security coordination with Israel, the ending of the implementation of the Oslo agreement, and the resort to armed struggle; more than 80% believe the plan returns the conflict to its existential roots; support for the two-state solution drops to its lowest level since the signing of the Oslo agreement; and while about two-thirds endorse president Abbas’s policy against the plan, about 70% believe that he will not keep his word or follow through'

http://pcpsr.org/en/node/799

So there appears to be a real thread of truth that this is yet another fuckup by Donald J Trump. The Deal of the Century was Trump's peace place.