Losing The Info War: The Israeli Front
Following up on this morning’s post, Anglo-Zionists Panicking As They Lose Info War. That post focused on the latest Anglo-Zionist pivot in the war on Russia. Having lost the war in Ukraine, Blinken has pivoted to a new war—on RT. I placed that pivot in the larger context of the globalist ruling class’ panicked realization that they no longer are in total control of the public narrative, they no longer are able to simply impose their narrative on the public without pushback.
Obviously this is true with the war on Russia. Blinken admits that the Anglo-Zionists have not been able to make their case to the public—not around the world and not even domestically, despite massive propagandistic support for the Anglo-Zionist narrative from the MSM. It turns out that too many people have too much information and the Anglo-Zionists have gone to the propaganda well too many times for the public to be duped again. Thus both the government organs of the Intel Community as well as the MSM have ramped up a campaign in favor of censorship and ever more explicitly against democracy—which is now portrayed as a threat to, um, “democracy” as understood by Progs.
However, even more telling in this regard is the failure to sell the narrative justifying the Israeli genocide against Palestinians. As we’ve noted in the past, polling shows that, with the exception, basically, of Boomers, Americans are lukewarm to appalled by what’s going on. The younger the respondent, the more outrage. The Anglo-Zionists had assumed that after years of indoctrination in the righteousness of Zionist displacement of Palestinians and endless wars on “terrorists,” the narrative of Israel’s moral superiority was unchallangeable. Play the “anti-semite” and “leftist” cards against any dissenters and that would be the end of any opposition. It hasn’t turned out that way. At all.
Shamefully, the Uniparty—including the Populist wing—remains in thrall to Anglo-Zionist Big Money—thus the spectacle of the “debate” between Kama Sutra and The Donald. For all the “fact checking” against Trump, Kama Sutra openly played the Hamas mass rape hasbara with impunity. Not only did she go un-fact checked, but neither did Trump call her out. The debate degenerated into dueling professions of love for Israel. This in spite of plentiful polling that demonstrates that a broad swath of the American people would have welcomed an informed debate as to what the hell our actual policy in the Middle East is, and why we’re flirting with yet another war (beyond the war on Russia and the threatened war on China) for which we are unprepared. And which would be equally unjustifiable. The Uniparty and the Ruling Class are raising up a generation of Americans who see them as the enemy.
Now, on the subject of Israel, Danny Davis this past week featured an excellent and thoughtful interview with Professor Omer Bartov. Bartov is a veteran of the IDF and is now the Samuel Pisar Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University. He is considered one of the world's leading authorities on the Holocaust and on genocide in general. I highly recommend the entire interview:
Israel: Deeply Disturbing - Former IDF Soldier and Historian Prof. Omer Bartov
The interview arose from an article that Bartov wrote (I quoted the article extensively in a previous post—find the link here) in which he recounts a recent trip to Israel to present a lecture on the Gaza genocide at Beersheba University. To his dismay, although it seems entirely predictable, he was shouted down by organized demonstrators. However, to his great credit, he persisted and was able to meet with those demonstrators and engage in a dialog of sorts. It turned out that among the demonstrators were IDF soldiers who had served in Gaza. In addition, Bartov speaks of his dismaying experiences speaking with Israeli friends, who exhibit zero empathy for Palestinians generally and for the dead in Gaza specifically.
But he then goes on to discuss the issue of the actual nature of the IDF—”the most moral army in the world.” The picture he paints corresponds almost exactly to what I described at the end of last year. For that matter, his picture of Israeli society generally corresponds just as closely with the views of Alastair Crooke and Max Blumenthal. I’ll let Bartov speak first:
OB: There were many people I spoke with [during his most recent trip to Israel] who are strongly critical of the Netanyahu government, who have no love lost for people such as Smotrich and Ben Gvir, the right-wing extremists in his government. [These were people] who would like to see an exchange of hostages and a ceasefire, but they have no interest whatsoever in what's happening to Palestinians. And when I spoke with them about that and said, 'Look, there are tens of thousands of people being killed, there are thousands of children who have died there because of Israeli action'--I could see their eyes glaze over and they would just change the subject. They did not want to talk about that at all, and that was quite disturbing to me. And that's quite apart from the encounter with the soldiers [at Beersheba University] that we can talk about--that raised a whole lot of other issues, as well.
DD: You said some of those who came to your speech were Israeli soldiers, as well, and there has been some some claim that the Rules of Engagement from the outset have been, "anybody who moves in the target zone is an enemy," and you don't even have to worry about identifying anybody, you just shoot everybody who's there, which--at least by some accounts--is why those three Israeli hostages were killed earlier in the conflict, when they were discovered and they tried to say, 'I'm Israeli!' but, whatever, they were all just shot on the spot. What is your understanding of what the Rules of Engagement are? Are they actually the right thing written down but just not being executed on the ground? What is your understanding?
OB: Well, you know, we don't actually know precisely what the Rules of Engagement are, because they haven't been published. They haven't been made public. But clearly--from that event that took place already quite a while ago--it was clear that, uh, ... There are areas in which--and we know that even before they were in Gaza, in previous operations in Gaza--there are areas in which the Army declares that this area will be an area of operations and therefore it tells the population to leave, and it gives the population a certain amount of time to go, and after that time passes hypothetically anybody who is there is considered to be an enemy and can be shot at. And that's apparently what happened in this case.
But if you talk about Rules of Engagement you're speaking also about military discipline. I mean, whether there are or there aren't Rules of Engagement, is anything being enforced? And the impression is--and in fact the soldiers that I was speaking with also confirmed that--there is a great amount of indiscipline within the ranks of the IDF in Gaza, in the regular army and even more so among the reservists. And that is an expression of the, I'd say, the mid-ranking echelons, the battalion commanders, brigade commanders, many of whom are much more right-wing and much more fanatical, than the upper echelons of the army. The top echelon of the Army wants them to operate, there is a kind of decline of motivation generally because this War has being going on for so long, but it does not quite know how to enforce discipline on these soldiers. The best indication of that is, of course, the postings by soldiers--which are illegal!--postings which show brutalities, which show theft, looting, wanton destruction of property. And the army tells those soldiers, 'You're not allowed to do that, it's bad for our reputation,' and yet the soldiers do it anyway and rarely is anyone punished.
And so you have a situation where the army is operating, it's obviously overwhelmingly more powerful than it's enemies, but there is a clear sense of growing indiscipline--both for ideological reasons and simply because of attrition in the ranks of the army.
DD: Now I want to get into one of the things that you're kind of mentioned or you alluded to, which also stood out to me in in the article that you wrote. It's a common thing that a lot of people say, 'history didn't start on October 7th of last year, things go back further,' but you talked about that, even from the other side of the equation, they also didn't start from October 7th, and you specifically refer to a 1987 incident that happened in the IDF. You say:
"When the first Palestinian Infitada or Uprising broke out in late 1987 I was teaching at Tel Aviv University. I was appalled by the instruction of Yitzhak Rabin, then minister of defense of the IDF, to, quote, 'break the arms and legs,' end quote, of the Palestinian youths who were throwing rocks at heavily armed troops. I wrote a letter to him warning that, based on my research into indoctrination of the armed forces of Nazi Germany, that was going to be a problem."
I wonder if you can explain, because you went into some detail about how Rabin wrote back a couple of times. What was the result of that, and what was your concern even back in 1987?
Well, I was I was quite young then. I was an assistant professor at Tel Aviv University. I had just written my PhD dissertation and published my first book, which had to do with the brutalization of the German Army, particularly fighting on the Eastern front, and that brutalization was caused by a combination of the kind of education that they received in the Third Reich in Nazi Germany, indoctrination in the Army, and then the realities of warfare on the Eastern Front--which were very brutal and that led to the killing of millions of Soviet civilians. Altogether, about 30 million Soviet citizens were killed during the German invasion of the Soviet Union between 1941 and 1944. So I had come back from this research and I was still a reserve officer [in the IDF] and was likely to be called up when the First Intifada, the first Palestinian Uprising, began in December 1987.
And Rabin then issued this statement, 'break their arms and legs,' and what made me particularly sort of aware of what was going on was that there was a particular case where a few military police picked up a Palestinian boy, took him on their Jeep and then threw him out of the Jeep and he fell and was killed. I was totally appalled, and so what I meant in writing [to Rabin] was to say, 'Look, the army under your leadership is on a slippery slope. You are calling for brutalization, you're inciting this kind of violence. You have to stop that.’ And the interesting thing was that, two weeks after I sent him this postcard that I never expected him to answer, I received a letter from from the Ministry of Defense. I opened the letter and there was a response with his signature, saying, 'How dare you compare the Wermacht, the German Armed Forces, to the IDF, to the Israeli Defense Forces!' I wrote him a second letter explaining my thinking and my research, and again he responded to me with the same line, more or less.
Now, what was interesting in this was that I think that Rabin specifically understood at some point--and it wasn't me, of course, it was a much larger issue than what I wrote him. He began to understand that this was what was happening as a consequence of the occupation that began in 1967 and that Israel would not be able to sustain that occupation in the long run--militarily, politically, and morally--and that it would corrupt the army, it would corrupt society, and it would become nonviable for Israel internationally. And that was partly why he became involved in the Oslo process, which for all his thoughts was an attempt to resolve this issue, to create two separate states.
Again, the entire interview is worth your time.
Here are some links on the purely military aspects, but also including references to that “slippery slope” that Bartov speaks of. First, my post:
That post discusses the disastrous performance of the IDF in the 2006 war on Hezbollah, in which a surprised world realized for the first time that the IDF isn’t actually a professional, Western style army. It is, instead, more akin to a tribal militia—not terribly well trained or disciplined. Since 2006 the IDF has largely confined its activities to brutalizing the civilian Palestinian population. Thus, no matter how many times Netanyahu calls for war on Hezbollah, and in spite of overwhelming support for such a war by the Israeli public, the IDF command knows it would be an even worse disaster than 2006—perhaps far worse. Which is why Netanyahu keeps trying to get the US to do it for Israel, while the US just as adamantly tries to keep a distance.
In that post—which I do highly recommend, it has aged well—I quote several sources. One is an analysis of the Israeli 2006 debacle in Lebanon, written by the U.S. Army Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth. The analysis is unsparing in its criticism of the IDF’s performance, terming it a comprehensive failure at all levels. It also traces at least some of the problem to the years before 2006 devoted to brutalizing civilian populations. That pattern continued from 2006 to the present, with predictable results. Here’s a brief sample:
Another crucial factor in the IDF’s reverses in southern Lebanon was the dismal performance of its ground forces. Years of counterinsurgency (COIN) operations had seriously diminished its conventional warfighting capabilities. The IDF was completely dismayed to find that its land forces could not conduct a successful ground campaign in southern Lebanon. Although Naveh was heavily criticized, his observations are astute and timely. “The point is, the IDF fell in love with what it was doing with the Palestinians,” he stated. “In fact it became addictive. You know when you fight a war against a rival who’s by all means inferior to you, you may lose a guy here or there, but you’re in total control. It’s nice, you can pretend that you fight the war and yet it’s not really a dangerous war. ...
In the conventional arena, the IDF ground forces performed unsatisfactorily. The fight at Wadi al-Saluki, for example, revealed the failure of tank commanders and crewmen to use their smokescreen systems, the lack of indirect-fire skills, and the total absence of combined arms proficiency. The IDF lost many of these perishable combat skills during its long years of COIN operations against the Palestinians.
Here are links to two articles by Alastair Crooke that also analyze the 2006 war:
How Hezbollah Defeated Israel: II Winning The Ground War
A telling quote from the second part:
After-battle reports of Hezbollah commanders now confirm that IDF troops never fully secured the border area and Maroun al-Ras was never fully taken. Nor did Hezbollah ever feel the need to call up its reserves, as Israel had done. “The entire war was fought by one Hezbollah brigade of 3,000 troops, and no more,” one military expert in the region said. “The Nasr Brigade fought the entire war. Hezbollah never felt the need to reinforce it.”
Reports from Lebanon underscore this point. Much to their surprise, Hezbollah commanders found that Israeli troops were poorly organized and disciplined. The only Israeli unit that performed up to standards was the Golani Brigade, according to Lebanese observers. The IDF was “a motley assortment”, one official with a deep knowledge of US slang reported. “But that’s what happens when you have spent four decades firing rubber bullets at women and children in the West Bank and Gaza.”
IDF commanders were also disturbed by the performance of their troops, noting a signal lack of discipline even among its best-trained regular soldiers. The reserves were worse, and IDF commanders hesitated to put them into battle.