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It's not technically culture war, but Hamas has just attacked Israel en-masse, overwhelming the Iron Dome with 5000 rockets and even sending raiding parties into Israel. It looks like Haman and/or Shabak haven't done their job at all, and Israel has been caught with its pants down.
For the culture war angle, I think the biggest question is of retribution. On one hand, Israeli public will now demand a reaction that makes the ongoing Hamas attack pale in comparison. On the other hand, what can Israel do to a very densely populated Gaza strip that won't be branded as a war crime or ethnic cleansing?
How do y'all suppose Israel was so blindsided? An operation of thousands of people and Mossad etc had no clue it was coming? Smells a bit off
There's basically always been an operation consisting of thousands of people looming just over the horizon, for more than a decade prior. Getting a few thousand guys together to cross the border and wreak havoc isn't much of a challenge, particularly given the very small size of Gaza and the distributed storage and management of weaponry across individual Hamas members - sending a few kids on foot or on bikes to spread the word on impending assault destinations and times is very easy, everyone mostly brings weapons they already had been given weeks/months/years ago for just such an event, and if the groups and destinations are determined even a little in advance then there's practically nothing left to do but go. I wouldn't be surprised if operations of that scale could be called up in a few hours, even factoring in planning time. And as others in the thread have noted, even well-prepared defenders can get caught with their pants down if the enemy makes an unexpected-enough move, so most of the ground-level chaos was caused while the IDF was still figuring out what was even happening.
What raises eyebrows is the size of the stockpiles of weapons, particularly the thousands of rockets launched out of Gaza on the day of the assault. Stuff that blows up doesn't tend to last long in Gaza, and the IDF regularly conducts operations to clear out ammo warehouses. Either they've somehow systematically missed thousands of stockpiled rockets over several years, implying Hamas has been unusually effective at keeping them out of sight over a prolonged period with many changing leaders... or a whole ton of rockets arrived at once from some sponsor, and were smuggled in on very short order by unknown means. I'd bet money on the latter.
My point is, it's entirely possible that a single well-exploited mistake allowing rockets to be smuggled into Gaza by the thousands was the difference between havoc and status quo for Israel this week. Right now, I don't think we can realistically conclude much about the competence of Mossad or western intelligence from single catastrophes, other than "they aren't perfect"; though I expect in the coming weeks we'll see lots more narratives and fingerpointing as Israel tries to understand how this happened and how to prevent it in the future. I definitely don't think there's any need to reach for conspiracy to explain the magnitude of the event, either; it's a sufficient, but hardly necessary, explanation to yield this outcome, and right now there's enough grieving people seeking retribution against someone as an emotional relief valve that basically any publicly visible conspiracy investigation is unquestionably compromised by emotion.
My best guess is, Hamas and Iran pulled a single good trick on Israel, and this sort of disaster was always one bad day away.
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I mean weapons of mass destruction weren't found in Iraq. I think intelligence agencies of all stripes have a hubris that enables blind spots. Combine that with human error, and I think negligence (less than diligence) and misestimation is the correct interpretation. If these security agencies only have their failures recorded, not counting the near misses and unreported intelligence successes, the wrong interpretation would be to draw conclusions from their failures as the only evidence. The CIA didn't do 9/11, and similarly this failure of Mossad I think can be judged similarly.
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