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Great article. Excerpted, much more at link.

http://www.danielgreenfield.org/2023/10/the-hamas-inside-job-truthers-dont.html

THE HAMAS ‘INSIDE JOB’ TRUTHERS DON’T UNDERSTAND ISRAEL OR WAR

Daniel Greenfield October 17, 2023

There have been two kinds of conspiracy theories circulated by ‘truthers’ after the Hamas massacre of Israelis.

The first kind essentially denies there was an attack or nitpicks the details. Those arguments are made in obvious bad faith by people who simply hate Israel and side with the terrorists. Any evidence presented to them is dismissed as fake.

The second kind of conspiracy theory is of the “inside job” variety most often involving a “stand down” order that allowed Hamas to massacre over 1,000 people without any military intervention. Some of the people pushing this stuff are the usual suspects, alt-righters and anti-semites, some of it’s coming from anti-war leftists and libertarians who treat every war as a vast conspiracy, and some from fringe figures in Israel.

The idea that Prime Minister Netanyahu or top generals would have issued a “stand down” (apart from being horrifying) makes no sense. Before this attack, he was the longest-serving prime minister in Israeli history. Now he’s been forced to join a unity government and polls show that most Israelis want him to resign. His political career may be over. In Israel top generals transition into politics. That is a whole lot less likely to happen now.

The Yom Kippur War disaster tanked Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan despite their heroic stature. There’s no political gain to letting the enemy murder over a thousand of your people in a preventable attack.

Finally, Israel is a small country. A whole lot of people know each other and are related or friends with each other. This conspiracy theory requires you to believe that military personnel who had friends and family living in these communities decided to ignore calls for help and sit around playing cards. Not to mention ignore attacks on their own bases and allow their fellow military personnel to be murdered, tortured, and taken hostage.

But since it is out there, let’s address it. Israel is a mighty fortress and its security is second to none, so how could this have happened?

1. Israel is a mighty fortress and its security is second to none, so how could this have happened?

Most forms of this ‘trutherism’ claim that Israel’s security is so great and its intelligence apparatus so solid that there’s no way that the Hamas attack could have happened without some sort of complicity.

Sorry, no.

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Israel’s intelligence has been hyped a lot, but it’s mostly offensive intelligence. That means it’s pretty good at doing what it does now, learning the locations of enemy targets and taking them out. Its defensive intelligence has been a mixed bag at best. Israel’s track record at preventing terrorist attacks using intelligence is only a little better than ours.

Ask where a particular terrorist is and they stand a good chance of being able to answer, ask where the next terrorist attack is coming from, and the answer is no more useful than our color-coded homeland security alerts. There’s usually ‘chatter’ and some ‘sources’ say something, but ‘other sources’ say something else. Analysts pore over it and then someone higher up settles the debate.

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Intelligence is not the same thing as ‘intelligence’. Information doesn’t come perfectly packaged and wrapped in a bow. Human beings have to look at it and draw conclusions. Sometimes they draw the right ones, often they draw the wrong ones. And for every piece of information they see, there’s a thousand pieces of information that they don’t see.

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Israel knew that something was coming. It sent a small security team expecting to intercept maybe 5 or 7 attackers. Instead, it was overwhelmed by a massive assault that no one saw coming because it was unprecedented.

And that’s the real issue.

Yes, Israel had been distracted by months of leftist riots. And it was the last day of the High Holy Days which is usually a major celebration. But most of all no one had anticipated something on this scale taking place.

That takes us to the second point.

2. Why did Israel let Hamas rampage for so long without intervening?

Estimates are still preliminary, but reports are that Hamas sent in 2,500 terrorists into Israel. Israel had not been prepared for an invasion on that scale. It did not have the manpower in place to quickly and decisively respond to it.

It’s a disaster that emerged from poor planning and worse assumptions.

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The errors here were catastrophic, there will be protests and heads will roll. But this wasn’t a conspiracy, it was government incompetence.

Should the attack have been seen coming, should there have been a faster response? Obviously yes.

It’s a catastrophic failure, not just of intelligence, but of strategic planning. It shows the cost of becoming complacent, of playing defense and letting the terrorists learn how you operate, while assuming that they wouldn’t shake up their strategy.

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Israel is very far from perfect. Its failures and failings are many. This was among the worst. I’ve written at length elsewhere about those failures, but some people need to believe that government is uber-competent and that its failures can only be explained by a conspiracy, not by the reality that governments are innately incompetent.

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Israelis deserve a military leadership as good as the men and women who serve on the front lines. And the victims deserved a military leadership that would have planned for this scenario. Sadly, they didn’t get it.

Hopefully, next time they will.

[More at link, worth reading in its entirety]