SEYMOUR HERSH !
Substack Paywall Subscriber
November 22, 2024
FOLLOW-UP ON YESTERDAYS ARTICLE:
‘I WOULD HAVE DROPPED THREE NUCLEAR BOMBS’
Talking to Israelis about the war in Gaza
SEYMOUR HERSH
NOV 22, 2024
∙ PAID
How to explain why Israel does what it does? How to explain the bombing, maiming, and starving of women, children, the elderly, and the infirm in Gaza as if all were active members of Hamas and plotting the next attack? There is history, of course—we all know what history—and it is always present.
I have an Israeli friend who came to me at a Washington cocktail party thrown in the mid-1980s by the late Milton Viorst, whose New Yorker reports on the Middle East were required reading. My new friend—call him Sammy—told me with a small smile, no wink, that he was a consultant now at work in Washington. We talked about the Arab world—his English was fluent if heavily accented—and I overheard him talking in French and Arabic at the party. Some consultant, I thought.
Always the reporter, I had a few lunches with him and talked a lot about US and Israeli foreign policy. At some point, I invited him to lunch at a wonderful German restaurant near the National Press Building in downtown Washington where I had an office. He was there when I arrived and the German waiter told us the specials. My friend then began a conversation with him in what seemed to be fluent German.
When the waiter left I said, with some annoyance: “German, too. You speak German?” He shrugged: “Do you really think Eichmann was the first?” He was referring to the famed 1960 Israeli apprehension in Argentina of Adolf Eichmann, one of the main organizers of the Holocaust during World War II. He went on: “I know every side street and back alley of Damascus.” The Syrian capital was long believed to be a major escape destination for senior Nazi officials after the war.
That genocide is always present in Israel. Should it be? is not a question that is asked, especially today, by the Israeli leadership. The past is enough for Israeli prime ministers to justify foreign assassinations and sabotage.
It was no surprise that President-elect Donald Trump would nominate a secretary of state and an ambassador to Israel who are totally committed to the Israeli cause after the Hamas surprise attack on October 7 last year in Israel. Trump made his view clear in his debate in June with an addled President Biden when he said of Israel’s war with Hamas that America should let Israel “finish the job.”
I have two friends in Israel who share the history of constant turbulence, amid open war—provoked in many cases by Israeli land grabs—with neighbors since Ben-Gurion declared Israel to be a state in 1948 and the US and the United Nations recognized it the same day. They have fought and suffered grievous wounds for their country. They also despise Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for his corruption and deceit and believe he should be out of office and in prison for his crimes. Both are educated and readers of history. Both are grandparents of children who have been on and off at war, as reserve members of the Israel Defense Forces, since last fall.
So I asked both recently to tell me what they thought of the horrid endgame—targeted at civilians with the world watching—now going on in Gaza.
I admit that I did not like and could not fully understand their answers.
“I do feel sorry for the children, Seymour,” said one of my war-hardened friends, “but not for any of the parents. They know how many kibbutzniks helped them go to Israeli hospitals, employed them for a regular salary eight times higher than in Gaza, with US Jewish entrepreneurs providing them with greenhouses, cutting-edge solar energy, free electricity to all, water. Every adult in Gaza knew that. The plan was to double the number of daily [Gazan] workers from 17,000. This was well known to all. Lists were already provided.
“Then rape, mutilation, beheading, burning alive of whole families . . . not to mention mass looting and destruction. Why?
“Because almost all Gazans and most Palestinians are vile people. Potential happy butchers. In the 1936-39 Arab revolt they killed mainly each other: children, women, the elderly. Three times as many as died at the hands of the British army. Maybe all western Arabs are the same. In March 1991 [Iraqi President] Saddam [Hussein] murdered around 200,000 Shi’as over eight months. Between 2011 and today [Syrian President Bashar] al-Assad murdered more than 500,000 Syrians.
“We live in another universe, Seymour. I am glad I am not Israel’s prime minister because had I been that, on October 7, I would have dropped three nuclear bombs on Gaza and turned it into a Hiroshima-Nagasaki black hole. And the Japanese didn’t even do to you one percent of what Hamas did to us.
“I am not mad, Seymour. I’m a professional, and I am a liberal. I still think a Palestinian state or an autonomy-called-state is unavoidable, but the security arrangements must be air-tight.”
This obviously well-educated man, and the one to follow, openly share an intense contempt for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his administration.
My second friend, like all able-bodied men in Israel, served again and again in Israel’s wars and in highly classified special attack units. Now it is his grandchildren who are at war.
He responded to my request for an evaluation of the war against Hamas by saying that “the major ‘achievement’ of Hamas brought on the Palestinian population their worst tragedy in their short history since the end of the 19th century.” He said that the story of October 7 “is not a simple one. It is a story that flashes out the real colors and motives of Israeli society seventy-five years after creating an independent Jewish state. And it shows the real motive of Hamas: jihad, destruction of all not Muslim and especially Israel. Hamas does not seek a Palestinian state or entity. It seeks the annihilation of all Kafirs, the nonbelievers in Muhammed and the Quran.”
My friend had friends on the scene within a day of the Hamas slaughter of those at the all-night dance festival that became a main target for Hamas and citizen latecomers from Gaza intent on murder and sexual assault. He did not tell me everything that his friends saw, except to say that he knew of one young IDF soldier, ordered early on October 8 to the festival scene to help collect victims, who has not been the same since that day. “The Hamas terrorists,” he said, “did not differentiate between Jews, Bedouin, Israeli Arabs . . . children, babies, or pets. All were butchered.
“A Bedouin regiment stationed nearby and local Israeli Arabs were attacked too . . . they fought bravely against Hamas terrorists and many got killed while fighting. When the convoys of Hamas returned to Gaza and other towns with live hostages, dead Israeli bodies, they were welcomed as heroes and the mob was beating, cutting, singing, and dancing.
“These are the tactical facts. Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran really believed they could destroy Israel, the IDF, Mossad, and Shin Bet. We thought: we are better. We know better and no primitive group of Arabs from Gaza or Lebanon will threaten us. . . . We will buy tranquility and succeed in removing the Palestinian issue from every screen or agenda.
“We were totally wrong . . . in thinking that with bribes—which work well in Israel—that we could buy tranquility. To some extent this happened as the IDF top echelons were penetrated by religious messianic officers convinced that with Jehovah we are sure to win . . . in short we joined Hamas’s brigade. We fight for God and our holy religion.
“So, to end a confused and mixed report, it is a mess. The Palestinians brought the tragedy on themselves . . . we brought the tragedy on ourselves because we ignorantly refused to see clearly what our enemies were preparing because we refused to see clearly what our enemies were doing.”
Another element in Israel’s inability to see what was coming on October 7, my friend said, was the leadership of Netanyahu who, he said, well before the current court cases facing the prime minister, “was partially paralyzed” during the October 7 crisis and for days after because he “was trying to fix” his personal and office telephone logs and operational diaries.
“What are we doing there [in Gaza]? We finished fighting around the time we killed [Yahya] Sinwar, the Hamas leader. Sitting like ducks in a shooting range losing daily one or two soldiers, and preparing for a long stay whereas the settlers might return to Gaza” from the West Bank. Netanyahu, he said, “does not want to pull out of Gaza as he wants Hamas to disappear and be replaced by an international or international force. . . . This is totally unaccepted at this moment by all Arab states. His other reason for continuing the ‘fight’ in Gaza is to postpone his testimony in the criminal trial” that has been on hold since 2022, though Netanyahu is scheduled to testify in December.
“We were arrogant—claiming to be the best and a regional mini-super power. BS!”
My friend closed our chat by stating Israel “was doomed” under the leadership of Netanyahu until the newly elected Donald Trump “kicks him out.”
A column here yesterday reported on the view of the war from inside Gaza.
Photo: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the Netzarim Corridor in the Gaza Strip on November 19. / Photo by Maayan Toaf/Israel Government Press Office.
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