A Hannibal Directive by Any Other Name
The IDF is Accused of Causing Mass Civilian Casualties on 10/7
“Only innocent people can afford long-term plans. Flagrant guilt requires audacity. And we have accomplices who share our danger.” - Gaius Silius [Tacitus, Annals, XI.26]
Introduction: “Unlawful, Unethical, Horrifying”
On Friday, January 12th, ynetnews, a major Israeli new website, released the stunning results of an investigation titled, “The First Hours of Black Saturday.” It was released with such little fanfare that though I was actively looking for it, having seen an earlier preview, I could not find it until The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal posted it to Twitter on Tuesday. It remains so hidden on the English language internet that my thread summarizing the article is currently the only relevant result if you search Google for “The first hours of Black Saturday ynet.” This means that even knowing the name of the article and the source you still would not find it, if not for Max having posted the link and my having written out a thread. Electronic Intifada released an article by Asa Winstanley with a human translation on 1/20, but the story has not come close to “breaking quarantine,” as they say, and reaching “mainstream” news sources.
It’s easy to see why Israel’s supporters don’t want the world to know about this investigation. While ynet discovered that the response of the Israel Defense Forces was one of shocking panic and incompetence, they also discovered something more nefarious: though the name wasn’t said, some high-level person in Israel’s military establishment issued a “Hannibal Directive,” on the civilians at large. The “Hannibal Directive” was a controversial Israeli military protocol for kidnapping situations which prioritized stopping the kidnappers over saving the life of the hostage. In and of itself that is ethically questionable- and they did not consult legal experts when they came up with it- but it is at least an understandable rule for a soldier who has been instructed on what may happen if he is captured by the enemy. Beyond what ynet discovered in its investigation, there is a separate accusation of the IDF shelling a house it knew contained hostages with a tank, and a third accusation that attack helicopters shot attendants at the Nova Music Festival. Taken together, these accusations- all from Israeli mainstream media- imply that Israel caused mass casualties among Israeli citizens with its wild response to the October 7th attacks.
On January 17th, Haaretz, Israel’s “newspaper of record” published an article in English about an interview with Asa Kasher, a Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Tel Aviv University, titled “'Unlawful, Unethical, Horrifying': IDF Ethics Code Author on Alleged Use of 'Hannibal Directive' During Hamas Attack.” Kasher is the lead author of the “Code of Ethics” of the Israel Defense Forces, which is to say he is the country’s leading ethicist regarding IDF behavior [it is, then, fair to assume much of his job in that role is justifying unethical behavior, as is common of anyone who specializes in ethics.] Kasher said of reports that Israel had applied a version of the Hannibal Directive to civilian captives on October 7th, “In both the original order and the current version, there is absolutely nothing that would allow for someone to kill an Israeli citizen, whether he is in uniform or not.” By this he means that the Hannibal Directive only ever allowed for stopping terrorists from escaping with hostages even if it might cause an Israeli to die, not, for example, shelling a house full of Israelis- be they civilians or soldiers. Instead, the direct text of the order allows actions such as using “single-shot” sniper fire at the driver of an escape car knowing there is a high risk of hitting the captive. Kasher further says of the house shelled on October 7th, “On the surface, this sounds totally unacceptable from every aspect. Against orders. Against procedure. Against values. Against ethics. And possibly against the law.” He wants an immediate investigation, unlike the IDF who say they will look into this at some undefined time after the war. It is not a small matter for accusations like this to float around the citizenry of a society, all the moreso when made by leading public figures and published by top news sources which are widely considered credible.
It’s hard to come to a different conclusion from all this information than that Israel made a conscious- if panicked- decision to not show concern for minimizing casualties among its own citizens on October 7th. It also means that the journalists and others who said Israel knowingly killed many civilians on October 7th were correct about what happened that day, and those attacking them as conspiracy theorists and anti-semites were wrong. These claims do much to explain Israel’s erratic and ineffective communications strategy from as soon as the attack occurred. I had realized some time ago that they must have caused unacceptable civilian casualties or else they would not be demanding you believe insane atrocity propaganda and would instead focus on things Hamas really did, but I did not imagine how bad it was. I myself denied that they could have issued a Hannibal Directive, and it appears I was wrong. This will all have enormous repercussions for Israel as a whole, since their social contract is broken, and they most likely need public indictments of top figures for their state to survive.
A state knowingly mass-killing its own citizens in an attempt to repel an attack is not the sort of thing people easily move past, especially when the state is one of the most militarized in the world and has defined its entire survival strategy around security.
The Report: A Most Serious Public Accusation
Before the ynet report “The First Hours of Black Saturday” was released [which the URL refers to as “A Time of Darkness” and Electronic Intifada’s translation refers to as “The Dark Time.” though I see neither on the auto-translated page] there were already the reports of serious incidents of the IDF firing on Israeli civilians on October 7th. Most notably, the helicopters at the music festival and the shelling of the house at the Kibbutz. In the first instance, this can easily be written off as a mistake, and some friendly fire is inevitable when countering an attack of the size of 10/7 in populated areas. The shelling of the house, though admitted to be deliberate by a commander involved, is still an individual on the ground making a difficult decision. Israel has also had more problems of this nature in the time since 10/7, not just an unknown number of hostages killed by airstrikes [Hamas claimed it was 60 in November,] but also three escaping hostages gunned down by the IDF [which is currently being investigated] as well as a woman who claims the IDF killed her son with gas “like at Auschwitz” and who is causing big problems for the government. However, all of these are individual instances that can be dealt with- or ignored- as mistakes on the ground or bad calls by relatively low-level commanders who can be disciplined without it shaking the foundations of the state. What the ynet article describes is of an entirely different degree. Though they don’t imply who it may have come from, what ynet reports clearly indicates that a service-wide order went out to the IDF for a mass Hannibal Directive to stop the return of hostages to Gaza. In my opinion, such an order could only be given by the Chief of the General Staff [Commander-in-Chief] of the IDF Herzi Halevi and would only be given with the approval of Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
I will be limiting my summary of the article here as I have already written a summary thread, the Electronic Intifada article is out now, and you really should read an auto-translated version yourself [because EF is a partisan source, though comparing it to computer translation it seems clear that they translated in good faith.] However, I still want to describe some key points. The majority of the ynet report shows an amazing degree of panic and incompetence. Through hubris, the Israelis did not believe such a breach could happen, and only had plans for the fence being broken at one or two points. They were primarily defending against small abduction missions through tunnels. Hours after the attack began they still had no idea the scale of what they were facing. Most of their high tech monitoring equipment broke down after being targeted by Hamas, and in Israel’s main military command center, known as “the Pit” they were getting information from television news and Telegram channels, both Israeli and Gazan. As things unfolded, commanders were deploying after receiving personal phone calls from friends outside of the chain of command. Planes flew in the air for 45 minutes without knowing what was going on, ultimately bombing pre-selected targets in Gaza that were on a contingency plan. Israeli soldiers logged on to Kibbutz’ WhatsApp channels while drone operators called friends and family to get help targeting- in one instance almost accidentally killing 5 IDF soldiers.
This level of failure is particularly incredible for a state like Israel which has grown up surrounded by hostility and has universal military service. Still, there is little public good in punishing soldiers on the ground for errors made in this state of panic. Since it is a system-wide failure there are few who could be prosecuted for these mistakes as it would rarely be the case one individual’s liability reached a level of criminality. However, an op-ed in Haaretz titled, “A Series of Failures Proves that Israel’s Security Concept is Obsolete” does make a strong argument that the lesson here is that peace and cooperation within the region is the only way Israel can secure itself in the modern era of violence from non-state actors, so perhaps the whole political class should be punished and replaced with people who will pursue such a policy. That, however, is an electoral matter, not a criminal justice matter.
There is a second key point which also needs to be emphasized. In their timeline, this is reported from 8:32 AM:
“After the shooting, the Apache pilots straighten a bow toward the west-and they see a startling sight: a huge human swarm of people streaming through the loopholes toward the southern settlements. In retrospect, it will turn out that this is the second wave of the raiders - the first was composed mostly of Noah'ba terrorists and Palestinian jihad - which also includes armed civilians and tens of thousands of looters.”
[From the Yandex auto-translation. Noah’ba is an elite Hamas unit.]
The article goes on to say that shortly after noon they still believed they were dealing with around 200 terrorists, but almost “tenfold” that amount had entered. I find it difficult to believe that “tens of thousands” of looters really entered from Gaza, but so did Israel, and their failure to believe this caused them a lot of problems. Regardless, a massive wave of raiders, at the very least 10 per “professional” militant, according to ynet, entered southern Israel. In short, after the initial attack the imprisoned Gazan population, in general, broke out into Israel. This would have included the most irresponsible and dangerous people in Gaza’s society, from kids who wanted to go outside of the wall for the first time to opportunistic criminals and anyone in between who got caught up in a mob mentality. Though the media has commonly called October 7th a “Hamas-led attack” and did make it clear that there were general looters, this huge disparity in numbers gives a different understanding of what happened that day.
The most important part of the story, however, is regarding the issuance of a Hannibal Directive. The auto-translation I got from Yandex has some problems in this section, but this is how the key part was translated by a Dena Shunra at Electronic Intifada. At 11:59 AM,
This was the moment at which the IDF decided to return to a version of the Hannibal Directive…
The 7 Days investigation shows that at midday of October 7th, the IDF instructed all its fighting units to perform the Hannibal Directive in practice, although it did so without stating that name explicitly. The instruction was to stop “at any cost” any attempt by Hamas terrorists to return to Gaza, using language very similar to that of the original Hannibal Directive, despite repeated promises by the defense apparatus that the directive had been canceled…
According to several testimonies, the Air Force operated during those hours under an instruction to prevent movement from Gaza into Israel and return from Israel into Gaza. Estimates say that in the area between the Gaza Envelope settlements and the Gaza Strip, some one thousand terrorists and infiltrators were killed. It is not clear at this stage how many of the captives were killed due to the operation of this order on October 7th. During the week after Black Sabbath and at the initiative of Southern Command, soldiers from elite units examined some 70 vehicles that had remained in the area between the Gaza Envelope settlements and the Gaza Strip. These were vehicles that did not reach Gaza because on their way they had been hit by fire from a helicopter gunship, a UAV or a tank, and at least in some of the cases, everyone in the vehicle was killed.
This is an enormous accusation, perhaps the greatest I’ve ever seen a major newspaper in an industrialized state make against the government it operates under. For all of that, more than a week after its release, I’m still yet to see it mentioned in English language media outside of the one Electronic Intifada article, and I’ve seen no reaction from within Israel, but one way or another, a reaction will be coming.
Our Journey Here: Cries in the Wilderness
I distinctly remember, and perhaps will never forget, when the October 7th attacks started. I was on my computer, working on an article about the US immigration crisis, which of course no one was interested in when it was released because the whole world’s eyes were on southern Israel. I was on Twitter and looked in horror at the images coming out. I’m not a partisan in this conflict, but don’t want anyone to get hurt and it was obvious it would be bad for everyone, and would further poison US domestic politics. In retrospect, the most incredible thing is that from Twitter I must have known nearly as much as Israel’s command center, if ynet is to be believed. America is a very Zionist country, so they didn’t need to do much to get most of the public on Israel’s side once Israel was under attack. It is contentious to speak against Israel here, as we’ve all learned all too well.
As I’ve said before, this conflict broke up the “teams” in the United States, where people had fallen on the same side of the last several “current things,” and a vaccine in a man’s Twitter handle was generally an indication of his view on transgenderism and Ukraine. In the wake of the attacks we learned that the Ron DeSantis supporters in fact liked his awful foreign policy, and were not just tolerating it because of his views on covid and “wokeness.” Really, as I keep saying, “Israel is just pronouns for conservatives” and their belief in “free speech” goes right out the window as soon something is said about Israel which hurts their feelings. They don’t care at all that supporting Israel is bad for America’s national security. Alternately, a fair amount of “wokesters” are Jewish liberal Zionists, and though they may hate Netanyahu, immoderate language from the left drove them away quickly. The point is, regardless of which side a man was on, at least some of his political fellow travelers turned out to be on a different side about Israel- commonly because of religious or ethnic prejudices but also for a variety of other reasons- and it became quite uncomfortable for many. The discourse was heated and often did not stay friendly.
For all of that, there was a moderate amount of “tolerance” for “respectfully” phrased views critical of Israel, such as “I condemn the atrocities of Hamas but think peace will only come from an equitable treatment of Palestinians” or “I condemn Hamas but their crimes shouldn’t give Israel a free hand to destroy Gaza.” However, what about those of us who questioned what would turn out to be lies, such as the “forty beheaded babies” which was not at all real or stories of mass rape when Israel cannot locate a single victim? We were called every kind of monsters for questioning these stories. Of course, very few if any of the people who told or repeated lies, including Joe Biden, have apologized. No doubt some young children were killed and some women were raped if there was widespread combat and 20,000 looters entered Israel, but the story was that those crimes were planned by Hamas and committed systematically, which does not appear to be at all true.
It was quite isolating questioning these narratives, and many of those doing so were not responsible people trying to find the truth so much as political weirdos who happen to support Palestine. Still, I can take great pride in being an early person to expose the lack of credibility of some atrocity claims, with my extensive investigation in the Zaka Rescue Organization, which I published on October 18th. It certainly isn’t popular to attack a first responder organization after a mass casualty incident. However, it got little notice until 6 weeks later when Haaretz finally reported that Zaka volunteers had spread misinformation and then two days after that when Max Blumenthal used it as a source for his own reporting on Zaka.
"If You Say Anything to Anyone, a Zaka Van Will Run You Over"
“When we come across one or two instances of misleading information in a book, and then find that they are actually deliberate lies, clearly we can no longer trust or believe any information given by this author.” - Polybius [12.252]
As skeptical as I was of the atrocity stories about Hamas, I was also skeptical about the premise that the IDF knowingly, on orders, killed any large number of Israeli citizens. In fighting at the Nova Music Festival surely there were crossfire casualties. Some artillery shells or drone strikes will land where you don’t want them to in the heat of combat. I did get to thinking though, after a while, assuming the “tied up and burned alive” stories weren’t made up whole cloth, that there is only one sequence of events where that makes sense. Of course we’re meant to believe Hamas was acting with sheer sadism, but it’s not like they carry torches, and modern houses are reasonably fire-resistant. Burning an Israeli house isn’t like torching a traditional tribal village. If Hamas wanted the civilians dead they would shoot them in the head or slit their throats, or simply fire upon the house with an RPG without entering. Just in terms of sequence of events, not anyone’s morals or motives, being tied up and burned alive only makes sense if they were captured by Hamas and then their house was shelled by the IDF. Still, even so, my instinct towards caution seems to have led me to be wrong about what now appears to be a very notable feature of 10/7:
While I was stuck in the weeds of saying that perhaps there were unacceptable friendly fire casualties but it wouldn’t be the result of an order or a major source of deaths, others were much closer to what now seems to be the truth: a substantial portion of the carnage of October 7th was a result of Israel’s indiscriminate response which did not prioritize protecting its own civilians. Most notable among those exposing this were Max Blumenthal and his team at The Grayzone, Sharmine Narwani and her team at The Cradle, and Philip Weiss and his team at MondoWeiss. Others such as Dan Cohen, Caitlin Johnstone, and many more who oppose Israel braved public wrath speaking out about the IDF killing Israeli civilians on October 7th. However, therein lies another problem: these were all explicitly anti-Zionist sources. They seemed to be extrapolating a lot from a few brief passages from Israeli media, especially Hebrew language media that was more difficult for English speakers to access. I couldn’t help but wonder if they weren’t being insufficiently cautious. Perhaps they were too incautious, but to me that is generally forgiven if you turn out to be right. Further, “mainstream” media was flooded with lurid, unsubstantiated claims, and there wasn’t a good choice but to forge ahead and try to break the narrative before it was too late. Israeli media did a good job at exposing some facts and debunking some false stories, but in almost every instance they devoted more space to pontificating about how they were concerned telling the truth would empower skeptics and “deniers.” One of the most important Haaretz articles debunking atrocity propaganda is titled, “Hamas Committed Documented Atrocities. But a Few False Stories Feed the Deniers.” Clearly, it is framed in a very specific way.
The entire process reminds me of a quote from the economist Thomas Sowell which has become something of a contemporary American proverb, “People will forgive you for being wrong, but they will never forgive you for being right—especially if events prove you right while proving them wrong.” I, at least, thank all of those who did the unpopular work of trying to bring this to light, grasping in the darkness for months before being vindicated by ynet [and indeed, I experienced this covering Zaka.] However, I think they would all hold to a maxim recently expressed by my friend Kit Klarenberg:
As it stands, I am yet to see any Israel supporters even acknowledge claims in both Haaretz and ynet that a Hannibal Directive was issued. We can be sure the journalists who were correct have only generated more hatred towards themselves. But with their cries in the wilderness they were able to “make straight in the desert a highway” [Isaiah 40:3] for the rest of us to follow, to quote a text which is said influential in Israel.
The Messaging: Now We Know Why Israel Must Lie
If we’ve learned anything from this conflict, it is that Israel was never actually good at propaganda but that the Western press covered for them to an extraordinary degree. Even so, one of the hardest things to square has been their awful messaging. Many people have seen the stream of ludicrous claims and wild statements from Israel’s leadership and its supporters in the media and wondered, “Isn’t what Hamas did bad enough?” It wouldn’t seem that hard to sell the general public on Israel being the victim, at least on 10/7 itself. Compare Israel’s public relations to the Rapid Support Forces in Sudan, who are basically marauding camel herders, yet are perfectly on message about peace, justice, and equality. True, the RSF has the advantage that they don’t seem to care if anyone believes them, whereas Israel clearly cares a great deal, but there is a lot more going on.
Despite what you may hear, Israel still has enormous support from the American public, though it’s somewhat gone down due to the brutality of their campaign in Gaza and surely also their complete incompetence at public relations. Demented statements such as Netanyahu’s infamous “Amalek” reference, which could only possibly be interpreted as genocidal, are not the focus here. The focus is how they became bogged down struggling to convince people Hamas was guilty at all, a problem they responded to by throwing out new and ever crazier accusations, each time backed by evidence that was couldn’t get past the well-merited skepticism many had of their truthfulness. It is clear now that the reason they got stuck on proving that Hamas committed atrocities is that in many specific instances they knew it wasn’t true. Some of the crimes they themselves had committed, while others were simply made up. This all only makes sense if Israel always had a mountain of proof of their own guilt and much less proof of Hamas killing non-military targets. If they weren’t promoting a lie when they knew the truth would come out, it would have been enough to say less and stay on message. Instead they had to try to find ways to make those who questioned their stories ghouls who support child beheading. Of course, a further issue here is the question of “proportionality.” Israel needs Hamas to be ISIS that all is justified in destroying them, even causing mass civilian deaths with their airstrikes.
A few days ago, Max Blumenthal was on Antiwar Radio with Scott Horton discussing these matters, most of all the Hannibal Directive and Israel’s use of atrocity propaganda. You can listen to it here, though if you’ve read this article to this point, you will be familiar with much of what is presented:
[Amusingly, for me at least, Youtube showed a Zaka advertisement before this video. Suffice to say I will not be donating.]
What struck me during this interview- which is a great way to present this story to someone who might not want to read one of my enormous articles- is how they discuss the concept of “the big lie.” Though that is practically trademarked by Democrats to refer to Trump saying the 2020 election was stolen, what Scott means is a story so extreme that you don’t imagine anyone would make it up. Israel’s partisans wanted us to believe Hamas systematically beheaded 40 babies, which no one claimed in the first place. This need to sell a big lie must be what gave us the crazy claims from Zaka’s Yossi Landau that caused me to research them in the first place. Landau claimed, among other things, to have found two dead children tied to each other on a table in front of tied up parents who had been tortured to death. There are seemingly countless examples, but this strategy culminated with The New York Times’ “Screams Without Words” story from late December which alleged “weaponized” sexual violence. They included bizarre tales, such as how a woman’s breast was cut off with a box cutter and then the Hamas militants played with it. The problem with these stories was that to me, at least, they didn’t sound “too crazy to make up,” they instead sounded like the craziest thing a person could make up. For my part, I stopped reading when they cited Zaka volunteers, including Yossi Landau, knowing that their October 7th testimony had already been exposed as not credible in Haaretz and that there is no way the investigation was published without people who worked on it at every level seeing that story. If they would quote Zaka volunteers, I could be sure that they didn’t show proper discretion selecting other sources. While the Bari Weisses of the world shrieked about how we are monsters for not acknowledging the alleged sexual violence, The New York Times had not been able to directly speak to a single victim of sexual violence. Haaretz had reported that no such victims could be found and the Israeli police were requesting victims to come forward. It was left again to Max Blumenthal, this time with Aaron Mate, to tear apart these obvious fabrications at The Grayzone. To many, though, the New York Times story remains definite proof of widespread sexual violence, despite that it contains no proof at all.
Beyond those killed by the IDF and things which were just made up, there remains the problem of proving any real crimes committed by Palestinians on 10/7 were perpetrated by Hamas. According to ynet, looters outnumbered Hamas and Palestinian Jihad by around 10 to 1. Knowing that, take for example one of the worst videos, which showed the beheading of a Thai worker: there is no indication that the attackers were associated with Hamas. This isn’t to say that Hamas didn’t commit atrocities, but for another example, in “Screams Without Words” it specifically says, “He said he then saw five men, wearing civilian clothes, all carrying knives and one carrying a hammer, dragging a woman across the ground. She was young, naked and screaming.” They don’t even try to claim it had anything to do with Hamas and the men have neither uniforms nor military weapons, but it is still supposed to be implied that it was Hamas. The militant wing of Hamas, Al Qassam Brigades, are generally uniformed military, as one could easily find by searching Google:
This is not to say that Hamas soldiers would not dress in civilian clothes if they had a reason to- of course they would- but given the report that looters outnumbered them by an order of magnitude, in the absence of other evidence, it should be assumed that anyone on 10/7 in civilian clothes doing things with absolutely no military utility was not Hamas. It’s fair for Israel to be concerned that so many of the people of Gaza would want to do a pogrom against them, but the need to contain all the settlers in the West Bank who want to do pogroms against Palestinians was the reason why Israel wasn’t properly guarding its border in the first place, so this degree of violent hatred among their publics is clearly a mutual problem.
In all of this, we have a clear reason behind Israel’s incomprehensible public relations strategy. They can only think one day at a time to stop people from noticing the truth: they indiscriminately killed civilians but have little evidence that Hamas did the same on any large scale. As is said in the Tacitus quote I used as an epigraph, only the innocent can afford long term plans, whereas flagrant guilt requires audacity. Israel does, at least, have many accomplices in its crimes and lies.
Holding to Account: Israel’s Social Contract in Ruins
The noted covid skeptic Alex Berenson- who normally does not have a good mind for foreign policy and further is a partisan on this issue- shared something shortly after 10/7 which stuck with me. He tells of speaking to an Israeli woman he knows in New York who said, “I’m so angry,” he then explains,
“She didn’t mean at Hamas. Every Israeli - even liberal, secular ones, like this woman - now understands Hamas is evil and dangerous and must be defeated.
But this woman didn’t see Hamas as worthy of her anger. Hamas is merely the scorpion, more interested in spreading its poison than surviving. No, she’s angry at the frog - at the Israeli government and Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu, its right-wing prime minister. And she is right to be.
Because Hamas didn’t fail last week. It succeeded, in the worst possible way.
Israel - and more specifically Netanyahu - failed.”
From the start, much of the Israeli public was furious at the government for allowing 10/7 to happen. This is in great contrast to 9/11, where Bush, inexplicably to me, had enormous approval following a drastic security failure. The difference is that the American public in no way expected a massive terrorist attack, whereas Israel’s entire state is centered around security and the knowledge that Hamas would try to kill them. People keep justifying brutal anti-civilian airstrikes on Gaza by saying, “Israel has a right to defend itself,” to which I can only respond, “sure, it would have been nice if they bothered to do so in the first place.”
What a state has the “right” to do [whatever that means] is a lot different from what it is wise for a state to do. For a state, or a person, who has suffered a loss, it is usually unwise to forsake the living in pursuit of revenge for the dead. Stupid commentary saying “Hamas could give the hostages back at any time” notwithstanding, taking hostages is an age-old practice and everyone knows how it works. On top of which, anyone who thinks families of hostages killed would only blame Hamas and not the Israeli government has no idea how humans function. Hamas had Israel by the balls, especially with many hostages being citizens of other countries. It was clear, to me, that if Netanyahu was a different, better, person, the best thing he could have done for Israel was make whatever unpopular deal was necessary to get every hostages back alive and then retire, leaving it to other men to move Israel forward. He of course did not follow that path.
On October 21st, a man named Nitzan Rothem, who is the “military and security community head” of the Israeli Sociological Society wrote an op-ed for Haaretz titled, “Forsaking the Hostages Will Destroy the Final Bond Holding Israeli Society Together.” In the midst of explaining other issues Israel is facing as a highly divided society, he speaks of the centrality of their military as an institution which holds their society together. Rothem writes, “Israeli families always agreed to send their children to the army, confident that the state would pay any price to protect them. The abandonment of 200 hostages in Gaza will turn that picture upside-down.” The alternate side of this is the children themselves agreed to serve in the IDF to protect their families and other loved ones, believing that for Israeli’s problems, they could at least expect that much. Their social contract is indeed badly frayed by the Israeli government’s focus on vengeance. One can’t help but suspect they have been scared of what hostages would say when returned, given that many of them may have been bombed by Israel when being transported back to Gaza.
If the accusations published in Haaretz, ynet, and elsewhere in Israeli media are true, this is not just a failure to defend Israel and to show proper concern for the hostages, but that the IDF itself caused much of the damage. A state would be lucky to survive accusations like this moving through the public if they are not properly handled. I can consider my own life situation as an example of the position the Israeli public is in. I have a four year old daughter and my wife is currently pregnant. If we were a normal Israeli family, my wife and I would have both served in the IDF. In 15 years, our daughter would be doing her IDF service, while our as of yet unborn child would be 14. Imagine an attack like this happens, and my daughter was guarding Israel’s northern border at the time. As the information comes out, she finds that not only did the IDF not protect her family, they were in fact the ones who killed them, showing brazen disregard for the people they are meant to protect. Now imagine the state did nothing to hold leaders accountable for these actions. Why should anyone recognizing these circumstances put themselves in danger for the Israeli state? Is not the better option to leave the country as soon as possible, which some reports, mostly amplified by Israel’s Muslim neighbors, say around 500,000 Israelis have done since 10/7.
It is clear that Israel needs to have public investigations to determine the facts of these accusations in court. Machiavelli writes of the importance of such trials,
“Those who are set up in a city as the guarding of its liberty cannot receive a more useful and necessary authority than the power to indict citizens before the people or some magistrate or council when they commit any kind of offence against free government.” - Machiavelli [Discourses I.7]
Israel did not have a great lawgiver design its system, and in fact lacks a formal constitution. As I have explained before, there is nothing inherently wrong with this, and it creates some flexibility. Israel’s court is in many way overpowered and too separated from the political process, but having survived the “judicial coup” its independence is a real strength when it comes to sorting out these accusations. Machiavelli further writes,
“Men are publicly indicted before the magistrates, the people, and the councils; they are falsely accused in the public squares and under the porticoes. False accusations are most often employed where there are fewer public indictments and wherever cities are less well organized to receive them…false accusations irritate but do not punish citizens, and those who are irritated think about proving their worth by hating rather than fearing the things that are said against them.
If a state has accusations and does not properly deal with them it can be destroyed, such as once happened to Florence,
“As a consequence of this hatred arose on every side, which led to deep disagreements, from deep disagreements to sects, and from sects to ruin.” [Discourses, I.8]
Israel is already struggling, but they need to get to the bottom of this and punish the appropriate people, be it high-level political figures or people in the IDF spreading false accusations for some nefarious purpose. I personally believe the accusations put forward by ynet, and I have a good eye for this sort of thing, but I’m also a neutral party with absolutely no loyalty to the Israeli state. Whether or not to believe these accusations is a much more difficult question for Israelis. Many are angry at the state, and those who are defending the state will be mad at others for disloyalty. For one final Machiavelli quote,
“How useful and necessary it is for republics to provide through their laws a means of venting the anger the multitude feels towards an individual citizen, because when such legal means are not available, they will resort to illegal ones, and without any doubt the latter produces much worse effects than the former.” [Discourses, I.7]
The current government is not going a good job of managing the rage of its citizens, and it is only going to get worse if things go on like this. The fact that Netanyahu has been facing corruption charges for years- that is to say, is already under public indictment- makes getting accountability now all the more important to hold the state together. It was one thing when people just believed Netanyahu stole, now he may have approved an order that led to the killing of many Israeli citizens by the IDF.
Conclusion: Can Israel Handle the Truth?
The events of October 7th shocked Israel and the world. It was believed by most that Israel was impervious to ground invasion and was basically a fortress state. Really, it was supposed to be. To others, it was only a matter of time before, in one way or another, the Gazans broke out en masse. Though there was obviously an enormous amount of violence, the way it was discussed and reported became strange very quickly. Israel and its supporters were always trying to prove something, and for some time it was not clear why. They should have had such a straightforward narrative: Hamas butchered their citizens. It still seems clear that Hamas did cause some completely unjustified civilian casualties, but to those willing to see it, that Israel was lying was obvious from the start.
Things look much different now that more of the story has come out. I don’t know how the ynet investigation has stayed out of other Israeli and Western media, but I have noticed that for now they seem to be done making new claims about atrocities. People are still fighting about Israel’s bombing and the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, but there seems is a pause in arguing about the origin of the conflict and which crimes were committed by Hamas on October 7th. Israel and its supporters clearly want these accusations to blow over, but they won’t. Either they erupt, or at best remain an enormous seed of doubt in the minds of Israelis from all walks of life. It’s important the truth be known. The truth and accuracy in media are their own abstract goods, but on a practical level the world also doesn’t need domestic acrimony making Israel even more of a madhouse. It is best that they should get their affairs in order.
Everyone keeps saying this conflict is existential for Israel, and perhaps they are right, but it may also be existential to Israel to find out if a sort of Hannibal Directive was ordered on October 7th. The first step is for the military, courts, or Knesset, or some combination of the three, to open investigations into this matter. The first targets of those investigations must be IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. No one else in the country could be in a position to issue a service-wide Hannibal Directive against the citizenry. If what ynet published is even partially true, it must be determined who issued the order and that man must go to prison, or at least into exile. Such crimes against the citizenry cannot be allowed to stand within a republic.
The accusations have been made in the public square. It is time for the people of Israel to demand the next step:
Thank you for reading! The Wayward Rabbler is written by Brad Pearce. If you enjoyed this content please subscribe and share. My main articles will always be free but paid subscriptions help me a huge amount. I have a tip jar at Ko-Fi where generous patrons can donate in $5 increments. I am now writing regularly for The Libertarian Institute. Join my Telegram channel The Wayward Rabbler. My Facebook page is The Wayward Rabbler. You can see my shitposting and serious commentary on Twitter @WaywardRabbler.
Excellent article, a great overview of the situation (and a shocking read), I will be sharing it a lot.
I still don't get why they had to invent such absurd atrocities.