Much has been made of the spectacular failure of Israeli intelligence and surveillance capabilities in the wake of the unprecedented attack by the militant group Hamas against Israel on October 7, exactly fifty years and a day after the start of the 1973 Yom Kippur War. How was it possible for such a sophisticated, well-planned, and coordinated attack that saw more than 1,000 Hamas fighters infiltrate the fortified Gaza-Israeli border to have occurred without Israeli military and intelligence officials having the slightest idea it was coming?
Millions of people across the world watched on their television screens as black-clad Hamas fighters marched, rode, drove, and paraglided into Israel, taking at least 240 prisoners and maiming and killing more than 1,200 soldiers, police, and civilians in what the resistance group called Al-Aqsa Flood.
This operation, in part, sought revenge for the “desecration” earlier this year of the Al-Aqsa Mosque by Israeli Jews who wish to construct a “second temple” in its place, and for unchecked, daily assaults and pogroms against Palestinian villages by Jewish settlers in the West Bank. In 2022 alone, these attacks claimed more than 150 Palestinian lives, the highest death toll since the end of the second Palestinian Intifada in 2005. The sheer magnitude of this operation—which almost certainly took months, if not years, to plan—surprised and shocked Israelis and many others around the world. Whatever its outcome, Al-Aqsa Flood will have succeeded in permanently altering the status quo of at least the past thirty years.
What many see as the failure of highly advanced intelligence and surveillance capabilities by one of the most technologically sophisticated nations in the world might better be understood as the glaring gap between technology and humanity. Reliance upon ever more innovative, specialized, and refined methods of communication, isolation, and control—often in the most sinister of ways—has opened a chasm between knowledge and understanding. Technological progress often serves to alienate us even more from a fundamental ability to comprehend the sources of human conflict and pain—and from elemental human decency.
Such advanced technology in the hands of governments and police often helps facilitate a shift from democratic to totalitarian methods of governance and control; it atomizes and isolates individuals from their social roots.
Additionally, we must consider the stunned reactions of Israelis and their Western allies to be the result of deeply embedded racist notions that have for decades portrayed Palestinians as inferior beings incapable of such complex and well-planned raids into the heart of a nation deemed as having the fourth most powerful military in the world.
The development and sales of advanced weaponry by the United States and Israel—weapons designed to eliminate problems rather than resolve them—should be looked at within this larger context. The weaponry the United States and Israel are now using unsparingly against the population of the Gaza Strip highlights a mindset of dominance requiring obedience and fear. Such advanced technology in the hands of governments and police often helps facilitate a shift from democratic to totalitarian methods of governance and control; it atomizes and isolates individuals from their social roots.
The dehumanization, concentration, and separation of one people from another too often has had devastating consequences, evident today in Israel’s ongoing war crimes against the Palestinians. No advanced intelligence or surveillance machinery should have been necessary to figure out that the Gaza Strip would one day erupt like a volcano. Human beings can be treated like refuse for only so long. If anything, the vast array of surveillance equipment deployed against Palestinians has only allowed Israel to avoid a resolution of the fundamental matters of land and rights that have plagued the region for more than seven decades.
If seventy-five years of persecution, murder, imprisonment, theft, and dispossession offered no inkling of impending catastrophe, all the surveillance in the world would have failed to do so as well. All the bombs, missiles, bullets, and artillery—and all the death, suffering, and despair they have wrought—will never eradicate a people determined to resist this treatment. The memory of even a partial attempt at genocide or ethnic cleansing on such a vast scale lies dormant in the collective human memory for only so long until it calls forth absolute revulsion and opposition to such methods.
Since its founding in 1948, Israel has been the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. military assistance in the world, having received more than $200 billion dollars’ worth of bilateral assistance and missile defense funding. Israel now receives $3.8 billion in military aid annually, and, on October 20, in the wake of Al-Aqsa Flood, U.S. President Joe Biden pledged an additional $14 billion in military aid.
Hamas has an estimated fighting force of 15,000-30,000, while Israel has at least 600,000 active duty and reserve soldiers. Hamas’s annual military budget is estimated to be about $150 million, while Israel’s is $24 billion. Hamas has no regular standing army, navy, or air force; no chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons. Israel has all of the above, in addition to paratroopers, special operations forces, armored personnel carriers, tanks, artillery, missiles, advanced fighter jets, helicopter gunships, warships, an “Iron Dome” missile defense system, drones, a suffocating seventeen-year blockade, and the backing of one of the most powerful militaries ever known to mankind.
To highlight the stark disparities between these unequal parties is hardly the point; rather it is to ask how, with all of its superior capabilities, Israel has failed so abysmally to end its endemic woes. The answer is obvious and yet elusive: No amount of money, no “security” through advanced weaponry, will ever silence a people’s demand to be equal, deserving, and valued human beings. Israel cannot “wipe out” Hamas—as Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant threatened—any more than it can beat an entire people into submission forever.
No advanced intelligence or surveillance machinery should have been necessary to figure out that the Gaza Strip would one day erupt like a volcano. Human beings can be treated like refuse for only so long.
In Western news reports, we hear little mention of historical context: of broken agreements, illegal settlements, wide-scale theft of resources, settler violence, the piecemeal or outright annexation of territory, the expulsion or transfer of non-Jewish populations into other countries or isolated urban ghettos within an effectively annexed West Bank. The dispossession of rights, homes, heritage, and humanity is largely lost on Western audiences subjected to the distortion or suppression of facts. We are led to believe the atrocities happening before our eyes in Gaza are somehow justifiable. All of Gaza has become Hamas; all of Palestine is the enemy. “Human animals” must be dealt with as such, Gallant declares. The logic of transfer and annihilation is clear.
Withering scenes of mass destruction play out before our eyes: blazes of orange-and-black bombing raids flash day and night, up and down the Gaza Strip; emergency crews pull—barehanded—parents and children, dead and alive, from under concrete ruins of blasted apartment buildings. Few bulldozers help because there is no fuel with which to power them; water is dirty and food scarce; electricity is gone, except that which can be obtained from backup generators. Hospitals overflow with the dead and wounded, the latter often treated without anesthesia and with vinegar instead of alcohol or iodine, and wrapped in bandages made from torn clothing, ragged and bloody.
Friends write to me of bombs from above, tank fire from the east, and gunboat shells from the west, all raining down on crammed neighborhoods as residents choke and cough on the gunpowder-filled air. Residents of cities like Khan Younis and Rafah have taken as many as thirty people into a single home—the twice-removed refugees who fled south after Israeli airplanes dropped leaflets demanding the evacuation of 1.1 million Palestinians in the north.
To what will they return? Will they even be allowed to return? Terrified, they fled in cars, trucks, donkey carts, and on foot; they sleep in alleyways or in the shadows of shops, or on the street—only to be bombed there as well.
People line up for hours each morning to buy bread where it is still available—thirteen bakeries have already been bombed as of this writing, a friend tells me, so many families must resort to sacks of rice, lentils, or spare boxes of pasta. Without fuel or electricity, grocery stores offer no fresh vegetables or fruit. Aid trickles in, but it comes in drops among an ocean of need.
Some refugees have returned north because they see that no place is safe, and they would rather die in their homes—if those homes are still standing.
Thousands crowd into schools operated by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East; more than 60,000 are taking refuge in the Al Shifa hospital complex, underneath which, we have now been told, run the tunnels to the Hamas “command and control bunker”—a lie that prepares Western viewers to temper any outrage when the hospital itself is bombed.
“Life is dependent on your luck,” one friend writes to me. “The northern half of Gaza will be annexed,” some speculate. “We will be pushed into Sinai,” others lament, even as Egypt registers fierce opposition. Operation Al Aqsa Flood has become an immediate reason and a convenient pretext for Israel to do to Gaza what it has always wanted: to obliterate it.
Operation Al Aqsa Flood has become an immediate reason and convenient pretext for Israel to do to Gaza what it has always wanted: to obliterate it.
Americans ought to be asking themselves what their billions of tax dollars are actually doing. Surveillance has failed, intelligence has failed, mass expulsion, transfers, and imprisonment have failed. Mass killing will fail, and yet hundreds of billions of tax dollars are feeding an insatiable war machine unable to halt 30,000 roughly trained guerrilla fighters with primitive rockets in a desperate strip of land across an ocean, a sea, and a continent. Wouldn’t we all be better served if those federal dollars were spent to address crucial needs here at home?
The celebrated public intellectual Noam Chomsky once stated, “Everyone’s worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s a really easy way: Stop participating in it.” Perhaps Americans and others should object to what their tax dollars are doing in Israel, the Middle East, and elsewhere around the world because that spending has betrayed us and failed to provide a modicum of genuine security despite—and partly because of—the misery it has caused. After all, the colonized, the Native Americans, the Indigenous peoples of South America, the Libyans, Cubans, Haitians, Salvadorans, Nicaraguans, Guatemalans, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Laotians, Congolese, Black South Africans, Kurds and Yazidis, Maoris, Australian Aboriginals, the Irish, Pacific Islanders, Inuit, Rohingya, Iraqis, Afghans, Sahrawis, the tortured, enslaved, brutalized, and massacred peoples of Africa, and countless other Indigenous, exploited, and persecuted peoples are still with us—and are solidly behind the Palestinians.