Blackcap Blog

Published at 22:10 on 8 November 2023

Why did Hamas stage their attacks on the 7th of last month?

What first comes to mind are the standard reasons for any Palestinian attack on Israel. They lost their homeland, resent having lost it, and Israel is a huge part of the reason they lost it. Pretty much any people in their situation would contain at least a few individuals who feel motivated to launch attacks. But that’s unsatisfactory, as it fails to explain the exceptional viciousness of the attacks. So perhaps a better question would be: why did Hamas just take their attacks on Israel to an entirely new level?

Three main reasons come to mind:

• Hatred. It’s the obvious one, and it’s hard to rule it out when all the best available evidence now indicates that they did in fact plan to butcher civilians.
• Delusion, much of it faith-based. Not thinking through the likely consequences. Perhaps expecting divine intervention from a deity believed to be on their side. I would execute caution about this one, however. Hamas definitely was competent enough in planning and executing last month’s invasion. Such competence is not the hallmark of seriously deluded minds.
• Emotion (which includes the aforementioned hatred, plus frustration, anger, etc.) They really wanted to do something big, to strike at the despised enemy, and this desire trumped a lot of rational thinking through about likely consequences. Probably a big one.

What’s interesting is that the final one applies to Israel as well. The October attacks have been called Israel’s 9/11, and Israel has invaded Gaza without much of a firm plan for what happens next, much like the USA charged into Afghanistan and Iraq in the wake of 9/11. Not much reason to expect things to go much better for Israel than they did for the USA, either. Or, for that matter, much better than they did when Israel pulverized Lebanon in July 2006. When the dust settled, Hezbollah, the enemy being retaliated against, was stronger than ever.

As to what to do about the current situation, that comes in the next post.

Published at 18:52 on 7 November 2023

Initially, I thought they had been, simply because the attacks make so little sense from a strategic point of view. (Israel is by far the most militarily powerful country in the region. Hamas is comparatively a military pipsqueak. As such, there was a pretty obvious foreseeable aftermath to the attack: basically what we are seeing now.)

Then I shifted to a model based on mutual misunderstanding coupled with a desire on Hamas’ part to acquire hostages to use as bargaining chips for negotiating prisoner releases. Basically, Israel misunderstood Hamas, was not expecting Hamas to attack and had scaled back border defences, while Hamas misunderstood Israel, was unaware of this, and believed they had to hit very hard in order to have any reasonable chance of scoring any hostages from their more powerful opponent. Hamas was not expecting to overwhelm Israeli defences, had no contingency plans for what to do if they did, and then latent hatred manifested in mostly unplanned attacks and violence against civilians.

The above has the advantage of helping to explain Israel’s intelligence failure. If it was Hamas’ idea all along, and had been planned solely inside Hamas, it becomes easier to conceal those plans. Plans hatched in, say, Iran and communicated to Hamas have many more chances to be discovered by Israeli spies than completely internal ones.

But recently, reports have been circulating in the media that Hamas was planning this sort of murderous mayhem all along. But what is curious about these is their provenance: they come from sources other than the Israeli military. This struck me as strange, because the Israeli military were ones who initially responded to repel the invaders, meaning they are the ones most likely to discover such documents on the bodies of their enemies.

Plus, if such documents are found, it is in Israel’s interest to publicize them. I will also note that faking such documents where none exist is not in Israel’s interest: any such lies will soon be detected by independent experts, causing them to serve the exact opposite purpose of the intended one. (What is known to have happened is bad enough, and there is no need to embellish on it. Instead of instilling sympathy for Israel, the result will be to expose Israel as a dishonest nation.) Tellingly, official IDF sources always refused to confirm the rumours (later shown to be false) of as many as 40 babies being beheaded en masse by Hamas.

Well, at least one official press release does mention such documents. It is surprising that more prominence has not been given to this on Israel’s part (it would make great propaganda), but it does really seem likely that at least some of the pogroms were planned in advance.

I do think that the overall scope of them was significantly larger than planned, because I find it hard to believe that Hamas expected border security to be as weak as it was. But, to reiterate, at least some deliberate butchering of civilians was probably always at least part of the intent.

Which, once again, raises the puzzle of whether or not any external power put Hamas up to it all. My guess is: probably not. The reason is, to reiterate, the intelligence failure leading up to the attacks. I find it highly implausible that, if this was being coordinated from abroad, all three of: Israeli intelligence, US intelligence, and the intelligence agencies of third parties such as the non-US Five Eyes countries all would have missed it. (On the latter part, anything that significant would have been shared with the USA, which would have in turn passed it on to Israel in some form.)

The next question then is: Why? Why would Hamas do that, particularly given that the expected response would be, to reiterate, something very much like what we are seeing right now? That is a subject for a future post.

Published at 07:21 on 10 October 2023

The criticism of Israel that Sharansky is worrying about is probably coming, there is a good reason for this, and for the most part it is not antisemitism.

It is very similar to the situation between Ukraine and Russia in many respects. When Putin sent troops into Ukraine, he started a war, and now he has one. Attacks against Russia by Ukraine are seen in this context. If Putin wants the war to end, he can order his troops out of Ukraine.

The situation between Hamas and Israel is quite similar. There is very little criticism of Israel’s right to forcibly apprehend or remove the invaders from its territory and re-secure its internationally recognized border. The issue is what happens after that mission is accomplished.

One difference is that in this case, the invaded is significantly more militarily powerful than the invader. Nobody with even half a brain doubts Israel’s ability to accomplish the above. In fact, it has already in large part been accomplished.

Then what? As I opined yesterday, an Israeli occupation of Gaza seems all but inevitable. That is when the real problems will begin for Israel when it comes to international public relations. As they should.

Ukraine has been warned by the West, multiple times, not to turn this into an excuse for occupying Russian territory. It is not antisemitism for the same standard to be applied to Israel.

Published at 17:50 on 9 October 2023

It has already been documented by reliable sources that Hamas gunned down unarmed civilians at a music festival, and it appears they might have lit houses on fire at Kibbutz Be’eri, shooting those who escaped. That, and rounding up people kidnapping them en masse are things right out of the Holocaust. Israel’s war crimes — while not justifiable — tend to be more indirect, such as taking risks with Palestinian civilian lives. Directly and deliberately targeting civilians is worse.

Published at 16:58 on 9 October 2023

It’s not that unusual for Israel to invade Gaza. This weekend, when I was away from the Internet, Hamas invaded Israel.

Because that’s what it was: an invasion. That is what it is called when one side’s military forces enter another side’s territory and takes land by force.

The more interesting question is who put Hamas up to it.

Because someone basically had to. The invasion makes no sense from a realpolitik angle.

You’re Palestinian, you want your homeland back. Is it really a practical strategy to try and get it back by invading and occupying Israel, who possesses what is indisputably the most powerful military in the region? Provoke a fighting war with Israel and Hamas loses. There really is no other realistic outcome.

Someone put Hamas up to it, by playing on their hatred for Israel.

That someone does not have the Palestinian (or even the Hamas) best interest at heart, because as I said earlier, the only realistic outcome one can anticipate is that Hamas will lose.

And when Hamas loses, it will be particularly humiliating for the Palestinian side. More than likely, Israel will respond by invading and (re-)occupying Gaza. Because, unlike Hamas, Israel actually has enough military power to occupy and hold enemy territory indefinitely, this occupation will last indefinitely. This is no doubt what the Netanyahu meant when he said the Hamas attack would “change the Middle East.”

So given how badly this is all set to backfire for Hamas, who could have put Hamas up to it, and why did they do it?

Published at 19:58 on 3 October 2023

McCarthy compromised to avoid a shutdown, and just was punished for it by being the first Speaker of the House in history to get fired. This makes it highly unlikely that whomever his replacement is will be interested in following in his footsteps.

The Republicans could have avoided this fate if they showed continued interest in compromising and cutting deals. The Democrats actually made some overtures in this direction, but McCarthy chose to snub them. So here we are.

Historically, these sort of antics have not turned out well for Republicans. If the Democrats are at least halfway savvy (not a given, sadly), they will now be preparing a messaging campaign painting the other party as irresponsible and incapable of governing.

Also expect a prolonged process for selecting a new permanent speaker. It took McCarthy fifteen votes to secure his speakership in this Congress. There is no reason to believe that his successor will have a significantly easier job of it.

Published at 19:21 on 18 September 2023

Seems India probably was involved. And I told you so.

Really, not a huge surprise that a right-wing Hindu supremacist government would resort to violence against a non-Hindu minority group like this.

Published at 12:24 on 24 August 2023

Of course Putin did it. There is a well-established history of Putin’s adversaries suffering unfortunate “accidents.” The chances of this being a bona-fide accident are somewhere between slim and none.

Putin had to do something like this to regain some strength after showing himself to be the pathetic weakling who ran away and hid when threatened and then thanked his challenger for standing down. That is emphatically not how a strongman deals with his adversaries. Unfortunate “accidents,” by contrast, are a classic.

The trouble is, Putin still turned tail last June, and still then thanked Prigozhin for standing down. He can’t undo those things. He’s regained some strength, but he has a ways to go before he looks once again like the strongman Putin of old.

More challenges to Putin’s authority are still possible. Likely, even.

Published at 22:33 on 23 August 2023

Trump has been warned not to threaten jurists or poison potential jurors.

So of course he will. He has no self-control, and his whole life up to this point has taught him that as a hereditary member of the wealthy class, the laws that apply to the little people do not apply to him.

At that point, again it becomes put up or shut up time for the legal system (just like it did when Trump instigated an insurrection). Norms that are not upheld cease to be norms.

Published at 19:21 on 9 August 2023

This spring, it was coming Real Soon Now.

The anticipated start date came and went, and it was still coming Real Soon Now.

Then it basically dropped off the news radar and we stopped hearing about it. There have been no stories about the sort of big territorial gains one would expect given a successful counteroffensive.

This is, by contrast, exactly what we would expect given a failed counteroffensive. No belligerent will ever admit their grand plans have failed. If the counteroffensive had yielded significant territorial gains, you had darn well better believe it would be all over the media. But a failure will just get swept under the rug and not talked about. As we have seen.

Overall, the conflict has still gone far better for Ukraine than originally anticipated (remember, I was expecting Kiev to fall and the situation to degrade into an prolonged occupation facing guerrilla warfare). It’s just that this particular phase of it has gone significantly worse than anticipated for Ukraine.

This should not be reason for despair. No war goes exactly as planned even for the eventual victor. The Confederates scored important battle victories over the Union. The Axis defeated the Allies in many battles, and even ended up completely occupying some of them.

This was always going to be a long, ugly, bloody slog. Like it or not, if the Russian leadership wants to be in Ukraine, Russian troops will be in Ukraine, and there is really not much Ukraine or the West can do to stop that (at least not overnight).

Russian troops will only cease to be in Ukraine there when the Russian leadership decides to withdraw them. This is a natural consequence of the disparity in military strength between the two nations. The Russian military is not particularly well run, but Russia is so much larger a country that it still is the more militarily powerful of the two.

It is a situation much like Afghanistan (for both the Soviet and US-led invasions). Both the USSR and the USA were (and in the case of the USA are) much more powerful than Afghanistan. So long as the occupier wanted to be there, it was there. It was only when the occupier decided that the costs of the occupation were no longer worth it that the occupier decided to leave. And getting to that latter decision took many years.