ISRAEL prides itself, not unreasonably, on its intelligence-gathering capabilities. This applies internationally, with Israeli apps offering the go-to spying software to a range of reprehensible regimes. But within Israel and the Palestinian territories it occupies, it’s on a different scale.
The sweeping up of electronic data is supposedly supplemented by informers in every Palestinian organisation. Further, as former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter puts it, “Gaza is the most photographed placed on the planet, and between satellite imagery, drones and CCTV, every square metre of Gaza is estimated to be imaged every 10 minutes.”
How Shin Bet and the various military intelligence agencies were apparently clueless in advance about last Saturday’s events may perhaps be explained by the Israeli inquiries that inevitably lie ahead. Ritter blames it on an overreliance on AI to sift through massive data troves, and suggests that Palestinian tech warriors worked out how to fool Israeli algorithms.
If true, that exposes the inadequacies of state-of-the-art surveillance technology. It has also been reported, though, that Egyptian warnings about Hamas planning “something big” went unheeded, reflecting a parallel with the Yom Kippur war when, 50 years earlier, a joint Egyptian-Syrian attack took Israel by surprise. Back in 1973, the information suggesting something was in the offing was disregarded because, surely, ‘they wouldn’t dare’.
Israelis should realise why resistance is inevitable.
Israel shortly regained the upper hand with US help, but that war shifted the dynamics in the Middle East. So will the current conflict, even though this time the surprise blow to Israel’s arrogance comes not from the largest Arab army, but from a relatively small militant group that controls a festering wound called the Gaza Strip.
But there’s another imperfect parallel to be drawn from 80 years ago, when the surviving inmates of what was then the world’s largest prison — superseded only by Gaza more than 60 years later — decided to resist the odds. The Warsaw Ghetto had been set up in late 1940 by the Nazi occupiers to incarcerate the Polish capital’s Jewish population. It was essentially a way station to Treblinka or other death camps where the hellish process of industrialised mass slaughter was being honed.
The fewer than 60,000 Jews who remained in the ghetto by early 1943 resolved they would not take any further depredations. Despite being infiltrated by informers, they mapped out their response, mostly with improvised weapons, and when the Nazis came for them in April, they fought back almost for a month, the last of them dying when the Germans burned the area down.
Jürgen Stroop, the SS commander in charge of the extermination, was later hanged. What’s striking is the similarity between the language he used for the Jews, and the words Benjamin Netanyahu and his colleagues are deploying in describing Gaza’s imminent fate, with the prime minister talking about reducing the enclave to rubble, and his defence minister, Yoav Gallant, decreeing that “no electricity, no food, no water, no gas” will be allowed into Gaza, because “we are fighting animals”.
Such terminology might once have been considered verboten but the Zionist hierarchy has always looked upon the natives of Palestine as Untermenschen — lesser beings — and treated them accordingly. It seems the lesson they learned from the Nazi experience wasn’t ‘never again, full stop’, but rather, ‘never again until we are the unchallengeable arbiters of everyone’s fate’.
Not surprisingly, that hasn’t worked out well for Palestinians since 1948, and the vague promise of the Oslo Accords 45 years later has since been buried alongside the fantasy of a two-state solution. There have been sporadic explosions ever since, and what’s surprising about the latest one is that it did not occur in the West Bank, which has lately been the focus of brutalisation under the neo-fascist reincarnation of the Netanyahu regime.
No one can condone the war crimes committed by Hamas after its audacious prison break-out last Saturday. At the same time, no one who condemns them should ignore the state and settler terrorism to which Palestinians are subjected, with no end in sight.
Israel will no doubt reclaim the hierarchy in the mathematics of death — at the time of writing, Israeli fatalities apparently outnumber Palestinian casualties — but what lies beyond is uncertain. Likewise, the international dynamics, stretching from Iran and the Saudis to the US and the moribund Palestinian Authority. What cannot be overlooked, though, is the reminder of the past few days that peace in the Middle East will remain elusive as long as the occupation persists. The so-called international community recognises that much in Ukraine. Whether it can stretch its horizons as far as Palestine remains to be seen.
Published in Dawn, October 11th, 2023
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