The Seeds of Oct. 7
The Oslo Follies
When there has been a conscious decision—or unconscious decision for that matter—not to provide security for civilians when it is obvious that security is sorely lacking, the solution can only be a cosmetic one, though, when the situation is far gone, even empty gestures can offer some improvement. That is, until the next terrorist attack. There was a sigh of relief when a bridge was built that precluded the need to travel along the shared stretch of road with Gazan Arabs until the turn into Gush Katif at the White House intersection. That hot point was cancelled, and we could now zip over the Arab traffic on our way to and from Gush Katif just as the Arabs zipped under Jewish traffic on their way to and from Rafah. That’s the way it seemed, at first.
The level of betrayal felt by the Jewish settlers of Gush Katif when Arik Sharon announced his intention to abandon Jewish settlement in Gaza cannot be overstated. This was because Sharon had a rightfully earned reputation as a friend of the settlers. This friendship was expressed in many ways over the years, but never more so than on the eve of the Peres/Rabin government of the Oslo Follies. Sharon told the settlers of Judah and Samaria “to run and take the hills. What you grab now will remain Jewish in any future arrangement.” In Gush Katif, he used all his power as outgoing Minister of Housing to construct additional housing in each of the Gush Katif settlements in record time, so that we could absorb additional Jewish settlers. This at least provided a dim ray of hope in the dark abyss that we could clearly see approaching. I remember blessing him in my heart for doing what he could at the time.
Time flies when Jews are having fun, playing as peacemakers using semantic games. Such as delineating victims of terrorist attacks “sacrifices of the peace process,” inadvertently recalling the dark past of human sacrifice in primitive societies. The Arab terrorists of course interpreted this verbal hallway-pass as a declaration of open season on Jews. And what good hunting it was for the Arab terrorists. Buses blowing up, restaurants blowing up. Limbs of Jews flying in all directions. “Sacrifices of the Peace Process!”
Near the end of the Jewish presence in Gush Katif, Sharon, facing pressure from within his own Likud party, announced that the Likud would hold a referendum of its delegates and that he would accept the results of the referendum whatever it may be. The settler movement saw an opportunity to forestall the expulsion and called on all settlers and their supporters to take to the streets and to visit the Likud delegates to convince them to vote against their leader’s plan. It was a wildly successful effort, and Sharon lost the referendum by a large margin. So, he did what democratically elected leaders of Israel have done more than once and ignored the democratic will of his own party and reneged on his pledge to honor the referendum and continued with his plan as if nothing had happened. He knew that he had the support of the Israeli intelligentsia and the media, and that was enough.
One of the settlers of Gush Katif who was on her way to join the effort against the expulsion was the pregnant Tali Hatuel, along with her four daughters. She had just crossed the bridge when two terrorists, after emerging from the same hiding spot as the two terrorists who had attacked my daughter Naama and myself a few years earlier, and after walking undisturbed towards the road while remaining observable from at least two military positions, calmly opened fire on Tali’s car, which came to a stop on the side of the road. The two then calmly approached the car and pumped additional bullets into Tali and her girls, and into Tali’s unborn fetus.
A new reality was upon us. One mile from the place of the incident was a military camp with a company of combat-trained soldiers. From the watch tower at the north-west corner of the camp, with standard binoculars, the terrorists could have easily been observed, the warning could have gone out and Tali could have been stopped at the Gush Katif end of the road. And if not, then a rapid reaction team could have been on site at least in time to prevent the terrorists from taking the final kill shots. The army would vehemently deny it, as would the rest of the Israeli security apparatus, but we knew: with the end of the Jewish presence in Gaza in sight, no commander wanted to risk the lives of his soldiers unnecessarily. The order of the day for that company of soldiers changed from protecting the lives of Israeli civilians driving on the road, to making sure that all of the soldiers returned home in one piece. They had been trained for combat, but now they had been conditioned to avoid combat. In order to avoid combat, there is a need to redefine the enemy. And slowly, but steadily, with the enthusiastic support of the main stream media, religious Zionist settlers became the enemy, with their messianic, religious right-wing fervor.
Surely, we thought at the time, the murder of Tali and her daughters would open the eyes of every Israeli and they would finally see what we had been seeing: the absolute and unredeemable depravity of the Arab enemy. Remember, these were not the rock-throwers of the First Intifada; these were professionally trained terrorists, receiving military instruction from the finest special forces in the world, including those of the US and Great Britain, among others. This was the hard end of the stick, whose other end floated in the mirage of the “New Middle East” of Shimon Peres and his minions, who spoke of the importance of respecting Arab “Honor.” That’s all they want, Peres would say, just some good looking uniforms and shiny assault rifles. Oh, and a state with Jerusalem as its capitol. There was one small catch. This insistence on respecting “Arab Honor” always ended up with some poor Jew bleeding to death on the side of the road.
By then we had already borne witness to the most absurd clown show of the modern Jewish State. After each terrorist attack, acolytes of the Beilinite persuasion, or Pundakists, would figuratively make a pilgrimage to the high temple of terrorism in Ramallah, and implore the “Reis” to condemn the latest attack. He would answer: “Sure. OK. It was horrible,” and the acolytes would shout in victory: “He condemned it! He condemned it! There is a partner for peace!” as they passed Ramallah’s “Martyrs Square,” and streets named after terrorists who had blown up buses and supermarkets and restaurants, the families of those same “martyrs” receiving reward money to this day in thanks for the terrorists’ service to the cause.
To his credit, Sharon put an end to this clown show. He had the almost unanimous support of the religious right when he ran against the hilarious-but-for-the-dead-Jews Ehud Barak. He vowed to take the battle to the terrorists, and he did, successfully, and he built the much-maligned security fence which put an end to the large-scale terrorist attacks. Then, as in an unplausible plot-twist in a bad play, Sharon’s sons got involved in some shady deals, as allegedly Sharon did himself, and with a “wink wink, hint hint,” recommendation from his leftist opponents to get with the two-state program or go to jail, Sharon twisted his bull-like body and character around 180 degrees like a ballerina from hell and turned on the settlers of Gush Katif. At the time the mayor of Gush Katif, Zvi Hendel, said: “As extensive the investigations, so will extend the expulsions.”
As it turned out, eyes were not opened and the murder of Tali and her girls was presented as further proof of the necessity of making Gaza Judenrein. The residents of Gush Katif, traumatized and in disbelief, decided to hold a memorial service for Tali and her girls at the site of the murder, about a week later. The army prepared for the event and when I arrived to participate I was pleased to see a tank parked off to the side, just in case.
The memorial service was not to be, but what did transpire that day was an accurate reflection of reality for Jews at that time and in that place, and further, was an accurate precursor of what was in store for the Jews down the line. As a puff of wind off the west coast of Africa becomes a mighty hurricane by the time it encounters the land mass of the Americas, so too did the Hatuel family murders and the intended memorial track directly to the October 7 massacre, and so too did the mind-set back then track to the mind-set that led to the massacre, a mind-set that not only allowed the massacre to happen, but invited it to happen. This mind-set was a mass subconscious mania wherein a certain level of aggression against the Jewish State was entertained with forbearance. Kill some Jews, we understand that you must, just not too many too fast. Shoot some rockets, just not more than our Iron Dome can handle. Don’t be greedy; don’t overdo it.
I was among the first to arrive for the demonstration. Soon tens of cars arrived, some carrying entire families. How sad we were as we milled around. I remember feeling that it was good and proper to hold a memorial service for the Hatuels right there were they were slaughtered. It was important to show the other side that we were not intimidated, and it was also important, if unsaid, that we her neighbors begin the healing that seemed so impossible at that time. It was true that the Arabs did not intimidate us, but we were intimidated by our own government, by Jews who were willing and able to uproot fellow Jews from their hard-earned settlements in the Holy Land. These types of impotent thoughts were running through my head when the shooting started.
As we dove for cover my mind simply continued its inner dialogue of disgust. What were we thinking? This was so obviously meant to happen that we could not pretend to be surprised. This was widely acknowledged after the fact. But in real time, we were under attack. Heads cleared quickly, including mine, and within moments many of us were returning ineffective fire against the assault rifles of the enemy with our 9mm peashooters. We had one or two security people with rifles, and they too returned fire, but the enemy fire from somewhere in the bushes about eighty yards away did not stop. Within a couple of minutes, the women and children and unarmed men had found effective shelter. The rest of us, “holding the line,” began wondering after a long ten minutes of this improbable stand-off: where the hell was the army?
Our attention turned towards the tank that was parked fifty yards to the east of the action. It was silent, parked, and locked down. The dust in my face and mouth combined with a nauseous thought that the crew was asleep. Another long five minutes passed while I heard our security people contacting the base holding a company of combat trained soldiers a mile from the action. They could be on site within a minute. But the tank! It could put an end to this nonsense in a second. I thought to shoot at the tank and ping it just to make sure the crew was awake. Later, many of my friends told me that they had had similar thoughts.
Just then the tank started up. I was thinking now the enemy will know the full wrath of the God of Israel. They will pay for their audacity. And again, what was I thinking? I watched in disbelief as the tank, instead of blowing right through the bushes and crushing the enemy, rode to-and-fro churning up dust with its tracks and releasing some smoke, all in an attempt to conceal the targets—us—from the attackers. This was how low we had fallen. A tank full of sound and fury, while terrorists continued to shoot at us from behind it. After a half hour the shooting stopped. The terrorists must have run out of bullets. I was thinking, morbidly, that they had just gotten bored of pinning the Jews down and had gone home to play video games. They certainly were not chased off by the dancing tank of the Israeli Defense Forces. Then again, they may have succumbed to laughter at the grotesque theatre of Jewish ineptitude playing out before them.
This is what a policy of well-meaning nonsense wrought when it reached the lower levels of society and encountered reality. Once the world bought into the Oslo illusion, and Arafat paid lip service, the was no room for second thoughts. Any shouting back up the ladder that these ideas were not working out so well in the trenches was drowned out by the original media echo chamber. There were many “original sins” during the Oslo follies, each one superseding its predecessor in inanity and arrogance. The relevant sin here was the most pitiable. It was clear to all, Oslo supporters included, that the true nature of our enemy or “partner for peace” was murderous and bloodthirsty. No one believed that they would cease to be so after the Jews were driven out of Gaza. There was an immediate need for a covering fiction that would calm the peasants.
Thus, was born the grand fiction that allayed the fears of normative Israelis and allowed the Oslo illusion to continue. “They will be there (in Gaza), and we will be here, and if they dare to even throw one stone over the border, we will be free to blast them to smithereens.” That is the genius of echo chamber public relations. The sound bites are perfect. Unarguable. And those of us living the life of Tali Hatuel and her daughters were left saying: “You are wrong. And we will all pay the price.” That message did not travel up the ladder to the Israeli leadership, among other reasons because it received little airtime in the mainstream media, but it did reach our neighbors in the kibbutz settlements surrounding the Gaza Strip who were our fiercest ideological opponents, and who tragically answered: “That’s fine, because we know how to get along with our Arab neighbors.”
This is not to say that we foresaw Oct.7. No, but we did foresee what transpired for the eighteen years until the massacre. Though not in all its glory. We knew that the kibbutz and moshav settlements surrounding the Gaza Strip would be on the receiving end of the recently discovered “perfect weapon” of the Gazan Arabs: mortar fire. When this weapon was introduced, there was no way of warning those on the receiving end. Later, the genius of Israeli High-Tech did develop an early warning system, and the children playing in the sand boxes of their kindergartens had a full four to five seconds to run for cover. Once there was a warning system in place, and later, after the Gazan Arabs developed more advanced missiles and in response Israeli High-Tech developed the Iron Dome system to shoot down those missiles, then the bombardment from Gaza became accepted and normative. No more talk of the freedom to blast the terrorists to smithereens now that the Jews were no longer in Gaza. No, at most, usually when a rocket succeeded in breaking through the iron dome system and in killing a Jew or two, the mighty IDF would tippy toe into Gaza and “mow the grass,” until the next time. While the IDF was mowing the grass the Gazan terrorists were digging an underground fortress beneath the tanks and infantry.
Slowly but surely, the policy that had allowed for limited Jewish bloodletting in Gush Katif transmogrified over the years into a policy that allowed for significant daily bombings as far as Ashdod and Beer-Sheva. We suffered from a double dose of illusion. The Gazan terrorist magician misdirected our attention by waving his projectiles and telling us to keep our eyes on the missiles, while we dazzled ourselves with the fantastic technology of the Iron Dome. And all the while in the Gaza Border communities and in the town of Sderot a generation of bed-wetters grew into young adulthood, an entire generation suffering TSD—not PTSD—because there was no “Post” involved; it was, and is, an ongoing trauma that has been criminally neglected.
Make no mistake: none of this comes to explain the surprise attack on Oct.7. That, as a military commentator on one of my earlier pieces said, comes with warfare. There are surprises. The extent of the surprise is evidence of a major failure of the Israeli Intelligence apparatus, but that too happens in armed conflicts. The question that I am trying to address here (and in previous posts—links below) is this: What explains the absence of the Israeli Army and the Israeli Air Force for twelve hours after the attack? And what explains that even then, only small units arrived that conducted piecemeal counterattacks? The only resistance in those first hours were by the front-line soldiers who were understaffed and un-warned, but who still fought bravely, and the security personnel of the surrounding villages, especially the few who knew what dwelled on the other side of the fence and had trained for just such an attack, and many individuals who on their own initiative raced towards the danger from all over Israel, and in Sderot, a magnificent station of standard policemen who fought like lions and in so doing prevented a huge slaughter in that town. All this proved that the Jewish fighting spirit was alive and well.
The missing ingredient was a fighting spirit in the ranks of the high officers. Many of our best fighting units were ordered not to proceed to the area of the fighting, and when individual soldiers protested, some were threatened with court-marshal. There was a need to follow strict military protocol and prevent anarchy on the battlefield, these officers claimed. This while Israeli civilians were being gang-raped and burned and beheaded by the Gazan savages. When every second counted.
These officers were acting as they were programmed since the beginning of the Oslo folly. Every young officer at the time, including the company commander overlooking the site of the Hatuel murders and the subsequent disgrace at the demonstration with the dancing tank and its clouds of dust and smoke, knew that to advance in the officer’s corps, they had to toe the Oslo line faithfully. Those who didn’t were kicked out. Ironically, the kicked-out officers, now in the reserves, and because their advancement had been stalled, remained field commanders, and led the untainted young soldiers in the impressive fighting that followed the initial attack.
The officers who toed the Oslo line were the ones responsible for institutionalizing the madness of Oslo in every facet of the Israeli Security apparatus, from the army to the air force to the internal security service and finally, to the lower officers who they had the responsibility to appoint. To replace these poisoned ranks will take ten years, under the condition that the poisoned ones do not do the appointing. There is no precedent for this, unless we take to shooting those who were personally responsible for the fiasco and those who appointed them and those underlings who were appointed by them and supported them. That is not going to happen in Israel, so the only remedy will have to be a sea-change in the souls of the present officer corps.
And this is not going to happen in Israel if it is left up to the machinations of men. Everyone feels it, and that is why there seems to be a national state of depression, even when for the first time in two thousand years the Jewish nation is not under an existential threat. This is a stiff-necked people, and a stiff-necked officers’ corps, and a stiff-necked political leadership. There is a general lack of humility, and a great need for the people of Israel to return to their God in Heaven and pray for final deliverance.
Some previous posts for additional reading from last year:
The story of my narrow escape with my daughter near where the Hatuels were murdered:
This is depressing to the bones.
Excellent article. Indispensable reading if Israel is to move forward.