Palestinian work permits: a Trojan horse?
The coverage from CNN:
The men in the wedding hall at the Dheisheh refugee camp in the West Bank spend most of their days and nights glued to their phones, smoking, constantly refreshing their news feeds. They look exhausted, the horrors of the last few days clearly visible on their faces.
These 180 men – they are all men – are refugees from Gaza. They are among the roughly 18,000 residents of the enclave who have Israeli work permits and are allowed to cross the border back and forth. When the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) shut all access to Gaza following Hamas’ deadly attack last Saturday, these men became stuck.
Way way down in the article you read this:
Israel began issuing thousands of work permits for Gazans to cross into Israel as part of an economic incentive strategy Israeli authorities had hoped would deter Hamas from further armed conflict.
The whole article is about “the poor poor Palestinians,” and the only mention of the reason they are detained is the phrase “Hamas’ deadly attack” – an attack that isn’t further characterized or discussed. It’s not even called a “sneak attack,” or “brutal attack”, or an “attack on civilians.”
Here’s another piece on the anguish of Gazan workers expelled from Israel. It’s behind a paywall, so I can only see the beginning, but it looks quite similar:
The 48-year-old Gazan is one of the few thousand Palestinians from the enclave authorized to work on the other side of the fence that separates the Gaza Strip from Israel. After the deadly Hamas attack on October 7, in the villages near the border, these workers were either expelled to the West Bank by Israeli police or voluntarily sought refuge there for fear of reprisals.
And note the same language: “deadly Hamas attack” – as though it was just rockets, or soldiers attacking soldiers, and we aren’t even told exactly who attacked.
And yet Reuters surprises by coming through with some context. The article was written early on, before the “poor Palestinians” narrative really got going, during the brief “poor Israelis” moment shortly after the attack:
Saturday’s assault, the worst breach in Israel’s defences since Arab armies waged war in 1973, followed two years of subterfuge by Hamas that involved keeping its military plans under wraps and convincing Israel it did not want a fight.
While Israel was led to believe it was containing a war-weary Hamas by providing economic incentives to Gazan workers, the group’s fighters were being trained and drilled, often in plain sight, a source close to Hamas said.
In one of the most striking elements of their preparations, Hamas constructed a mock Israeli settlement in Gaza where they practiced a military landing and trained to storm it, the source close to Hamas said, adding they even made videos of the manoeuvres.
“Israel surely saw them but they were convinced that Hamas wasn’t keen on getting into a confrontation,” the source said.
Meanwhile, Hamas sought to convince Israel it cared more about ensuring that workers in Gaza, a narrow strip of land with more than two million residents, had access to jobs across the border and had no interest in starting a new war.
“Hamas was able to build a whole image that it was not ready for a military adventure against Israel,” the source said.
Since a 2021 war with Hamas, Israel has sought to provide a basic level of economic stability in Gaza by offering incentives including thousands of permits so Gazans can work in Israel or the West Bank, where salaries in construction, agriculture or service jobs can be 10 times the level of pay in Gaza.
“We believed that the fact that they were coming in to work and bringing money into Gaza would create a certain level of calm. We were wrong,” another Israeli army spokesperson said.
An Israeli security source acknowledged Israel’s security services were duped by Hamas. “They caused us to think they wanted money,” the source said. “And all the time they were involved in exercises/drills until they ran riot.”
A few days later, there were articles about how incredibly detailed the maps and other information the terrorists carried were. How was all that detailed information gained? Daniel Greenfield has something to say about that, and I agree that it is probably the case that some or many of the Gazans who worked in Israel were gathering intelligence to facilitate the attack:
The Hamas invasion succeeded so well because the terrorists had an intimate knowledge of the communities they were targeting because they had worked there or had intelligence from those who had worked there. The attackers had detailed maps and building layouts. One woman whose husband and son were murdered said that the Hamas terrorists knew the names of the people, how many children they had and even which of them owned dogs.
Last year, Secretary of State Blinken addressed a J Street even and told the anti-Israel lobby that the Biden administration had pushed Israel to “improve the lives of Palestinians” by, among other things, “issuing thousands of work permits for Palestinians in Gaza”.
The number of exits from Gaza into Israel rose sharply under the Biden administration and the left-wing Bennett-Lapid government which handed out an unprecedented number of work permits.
Even Netanyahu’s government thought the program could continue and that it was working. A fatal error.
You may now work full-time from the convenience of your own home! As technology and simple internet connection make it easier to locate online job, nearly 57 million people in the United States alone have already shifted to self-
employment…. https://bizzworld1.blogspot.com/
Judging from the diplo/military talking heads (92% left-politicos) on Israeli english speaking tv news/talk, this circumstance has already been absorbed as one pillar among many in the campaign now well underway to eliminate Netanyahu from Israeli politics. Fatal in more ways than the worst, then.
To a terrorist everything is a weapon.
What was the line we heard for years here, “extreme vetting”? That certainly wasn’t done there and even if 99% were only interested in work, that’s still 200 potential agents. I’m sure just getting maps of the layouts of various places wouldn’t take an agent, just a payment. We should all take solice that 100% of those crossing the Southern border are loyal….
In this post, Neo has cited an article, from “Le Monde,” that’s behind a paywall. If anybody wants to read the whole thing, here’s a link https://archive.ph/5gLu8.
It’s even worse than you might imagine. Oh, those poor Palestinian spies who facilitated a gruesome massacre. I feel so sorry for them, now that they’re stuck in Israel and feeling lonely.
I offer an example: “No fuel is allowed to enter Gaza as part of the humanitarian aid going in.”
So, that’s a condition of allowing the “aid” in the first place. Ok. Sure.
20 18 wheelers enter in, traveling tops 2 miles in and out. Fuel tanks filled to the brim, 150 gallons each, 2 tanks per truck, 300 gallons/truck. Going in.
Exiting? Empty! What d’ya know, 6,000 gallons of fuel, give or take, moves into Gaza!
Thanks, Joe Biden! Kisses, from Hamas!
https://issuesinsights.com/2023/10/18/why-couldnt-gaza-be-another-hong-kong/
‘Secretary of State Blinken addressed a J Street even and told the anti-Israel lobby that the Biden administration had pushed Israel to “improve the lives of Palestinians” by, among other things, “issuing thousands of work permits for Palestinians in Gaza”. ‘
And that’s all that ye need to know.
(That and the fact that for some reason, Lapid, understandably, and Bibi—far less so—somehow believed “Biden” (or at least in the case of Bibi, believed he had no choice but to continue the humanitarian project.)
OTOH, Bibi so dearly wishes to be loved. (Don’t we all?)
Why he skedaddled to DC at the first opportunity (after being kept waiting for so long by “Biden” and for obvious reasons) is something that may be wondered about. Didn’t he know that he was despised and reviled.
And if he didn’t quite want to know it, wasn’t “Biden”‘s encouragement and sponsorship of the protests against Bibi’s government proof enough (on top of “Biden”‘s encouragement and tremendous funding of Iran)?
And should one also have to bring up Chickens**t-gate?
The default position of the left (and the palaeotrash right) is that Jews are objectionable for expecting to go about their business and not be subject to slaughter. Ergo, all retaliation is illegitimate.
If we consider whatever portion of the world’s two billion Muslims hate Jews, plus other anti-Semites, plus other mental health issues, the combination could be considered in financial terms as “principle”.
It’s enormous. And its growth in population and resources is likewise enormous and can be considered “interest”.
This combination expends only part of its interest in attacking Israel. Israel is doomed to fight an inexhaustible source of enmity, since it has no way of affecting the principle.
Big numbers suggest themselves; destroying Iran’s refinery capacity would make–not enough of–a difference.
And so on.
Perhaps the final justice is the Samson Option.
Or perhaps finding a way to make the fusion reactor a reality….
@ sdferr – I hope Mossad monitors this blog, and Iran does not.
It is clear that one of the things that made the Hamas attack possible was a massive failure of Israeli intelligence. And one aspect of this failure was the difficulty of knowing an enemy’s intentions as opposed to their capabilities. It is relatively easy to learn an enemy’s capabilities. How many soldiers do they have? How many guns (tanks/ships/planes) do they have? Where are they positioned? Knowing that gives some idea as to what they might do. But what do they actually plan to do? That is the hard bit. And if you get that wrong it can mean disaster.
Deception is a weapon of war used especially well by the clever and evil Hamas. Also they excel at manipulation of public opinion, exploiting their weakness and losses as a propaganda tool, e.g., dead and wounded children. Those civilian losses are technically martyrs and they are swiftly carried to paradise, so it’s all good.
Thanks sdferr on October 21, 2023 at 1:54 pm for the keen insight.
Even Netanyahu’s government thought the program could continue and that it was working. A fatal error.
Once the program was in place, it was politically much harder to stop. As these stories suggest, imagine the outcry over all the poor suffering Palestinians losing their livelihoods if Netanyahu had ended or curtailed the work permits. Whereas if it had not begun or been expanded in the first place, there would have been nothing to criticize.
We see the same thing with the electricity, gas, and water that Israel supplied Gaza. Lots of criticism from the left for cutting it off. No good deed goes unpunished.
Gaza is a pesthole that would be better for a thorough cleaning, sort of like what the Russians did to East Prussia. The EU and the UN and the Biden regime will squawk but Israel has some serious decisions to make. This is as close to catastrophe as they have been since 1967.
Related:
“This is the drug Hamas terrorists took to help them slaughter Israelis
Captagon pills were found in the pockets of Hamas terrorists.”—
https://www.jpost.com/health-and-wellness/article-769250
(Now all they have to do is give it out free to all their supporters around the world…)
Excellent post from Middle East Forum pulling together all of the info on the Israeli’s failure to predict / prepare for the attack (or most of the info; there may still be unknown unknowns).
Much has already been discussed here, of course, but there were a few items that were news to me. It helps to have everything in one place.
https://www.meforum.org/65054/behind-israel-momentous-failure
by Amatzia Baram, Geopolitical Intelligence Services (GIS), October 20, 2023
Bottom line:
“They forgot the parable about the scorpion and the frog: violence is simply in Hamas’s nature. Naively, they believed – some out of humanitarian motives, others out of cold political calculation – that an Islamist-nationalist movement could be pacified, or at least muzzled. Neither side of the Israeli divide accepted that an extreme religious-nationalist ideology would be more powerful than life itself.”
And look—surprise!—who has “the Big Mo”…
“Thousands of protesters demanding eradication of Israel clash with NYPD”—
https://nypost.com/2023/10/21/thousands-of-nyc-protesters-demand-eradication-of-israel/
(…Or think they do…. And who knows? Maybe they’re right…)
@ Jimmy > “Once the program was in place, it was politically much harder to stop.”
This is true of all the well-intentioned (to be charitable) programs we have been saddled with here and internationally.
The ratchet effect is not always (if ever) noticed by the public, which generally dismisses or mocks warnings as conspiracy theories, but it is deftly exploited by the Left and self-serving politicians of all factions.
See also Frogs in Boiling Pots.
I’ve been binge-reading Greenfield et al. today.
Take a look and see if you’ve missed anything.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/
Good point about intentions versus capability.
Once you settle on somebody’s intention, it’s easy to–in your own mind–meld what you know of the capability to fit the intention. Then it all makes sense.
Capability is measured by the number of things–weapons, trucks and other vehicles, road capacity, –landing craft, and is, as has been noted, is easy compared to figuring out what the Big Guys plan, especially as there could be any number of fakes. Fake “leaks” are cheap.
The dangerous thing is when presumed intent begins to comfortably match what your own capacity to resist most effectively.
People who try to point out the inconvenient possibilities are treated the same in all times and places.
Why all this intellectual waste of time. ??? A Muslim is a Muslim is a Muslim!!!
Israel would be wise to consider the full implications of this CNN article. It requires incredible hate and extreme deception to work with someone, to develop personal relationships, and even to discuss their families, all the while planning to kill them. Israel must recognize that there never will be peaceful coexistence with the Palestinians.
All courses of action (CoAs) developed by Israel must take this new recognition into account. Israel may have to negotiate initially to get some of the hostages back, but some point, the gloves have to come off. Just as the US targeted Soleimani, Israel must target the leadership of Hamas including those in Qatar.
Small point. My guess is most of this employment is not self employment. But over time more of it will be. And someone could work for A in the morning & B in the afternoon. Presumably more of that will happen too.
“People who try to point out the inconvenient possibilities are treated the same in all times and places.”
Indeed. Here’s a well-formulated article on the government response to “manufactured” crises of note over the past several years, starting with Covid—the so-called “scientific” response to which was foisted on an unsuspecting population by most governments except, notably, Sweden, and perhaps, if for other reasons, by India and various African nations—and followed up by so-called Climate Change, and other woke/WEF Shibboleths; IOW the role of government in foisting and fomenting other crises so as to establish chaos and control.
The article’s jumping off point is the latest failure of Israel’s current government to uphold its most solemn oath, contract and covenant: protecting its citizenry from being massacred.
“The Social Contract Is Shredded”—
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/social-contract-shredded
+ Bonus:
The entire revelation (though it CONTINUES TO be assiduously /concealed/ignored/covered up by the corrupt media) of the BIG LIE behind the George Floyd campaign…
…which is, of course, not really a “revelation” given that it’s been known/understood/suspected since DAY 1…by anyone bothering to keep their eyes open.
“Medical Examiners Bullied Over George Floyd’s Death”—
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2023-10-21/medical-examiners-bullied-over-george-floyds-death
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