Recently, the IDF chief of staff ordered commanders to begin investigating the lead-up to the October 7 massacre.
The investigations should deal with the period between what Hamas called the "great marches of return" in 2018 and October 10.
One must wonder about the time frame set for the investigation. Herzi Halevi apparently believes that the roots of the disaster can be identified in those "marches of return" and Israel's response to the riots. On the one hand, this is a logical choice of where to start: an "operational investigation" is supposed to deal with the event and not its historical roots. However, this is a very narrow view of what occurred.
That is because if we are already dealing with history, it would be appropriate to also discuss the crimes of the Oslo Accords and the 2005 Disengagement as events that caused and enabled the development of a terrorist state in Gaza. The leaders who established the Palestinian Authority and removed the IDF from Gaza are the same ones who enabled the establishment of the terrorist monstrosity in the Strip. The ones who uprooted the Jewish settlements from Gaza and retreated beyond the fence sealed the bitter fate of those Gaza border residents on October 7.
So why start in 2018?
Dozens of "rounds" of clashes between Israel and Gazan terrorist groups have taken place since the Disengagement, in which Hamas was able to understand the patterns of Israel's behavior regarding Gaza successfully: During every "round," Israel would display a "contained" response that wouldn't even try to eliminate Hamas, but always ends with boastful propaganda along the lines of "Hamas has been badly beaten and is now deterred."
An operational investigation must occur as close to the events as possible before human memory or deliberate manipulation distorts the truth. One can understand why the investigations were not carried out when most of the IDF's ground forces were fighting in the Gaza Strip. However, the ground campaign in Gaza only started on October 26. Before then, it was possible to interrogate some of the units that operated in the field during Simchat Torah.
In any case, the IDF investigations have begun. The media, for its part, has been investigating for months. Dozens of important investigations have been published. I have read most of them, and even if I read a hundred more, together with all the IDF investigations and all the thousands of pages of the State Commission of Inquiry when it is published, I will probably never understand how this could happen to us.
After all, man's most basic instinct, the will to exist, requires at least a half-open eye, a blink, and not a deep slumber on the part of the IDF and intelligence forces. Even if they explain it to me a hundred more times, I won't understand. But recently, I realized that it is not a single concept that paralyzed us on the morning of Simchat Torah, that blinded our eyes in the days, months, and years leading up to the massacre, but a whole complex of worldviews, woven and intermixed, of which the well-known "concept of deterrence" is only the local symptom, not the fundamental disease.
And the fundamental disease is the axiom that, in the end, our enemies are also human, and they want exactly what we want. And since our leaders in recent generations have been pragmatic leaders, when they stopped being driven by ideology (socialist or national) and became "societal managers" aiming for stability, they projected the change that took place in their own mentality onto their enemies. They refuse to recognize that the war between us and the Palestinians is a religious war, an ideological conflict. And from the moment they denied the ideological engine of our enemies, they condemned us the false conception that, in the end, the enemy is just like us: afraid, deterred, wanting peace, a good life, livelihood, and respect. Instead, we face an enemy whose number one goal is the destruction of the State of Israel.
Denying this is how the former head of the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency), Nadav Argman, could come to the National Security Research Institute conference and declare that "the Palestinian Authority is not a body that encourages terrorism." I hope the head of the Shin Bet is not stupid, and he knows that starting in October, the Palestinian Authority, under the guidance of Mahmoud Abbas, has been paying over $2.5 million to the families of the slain or captured October 7 terrorists, who committed some of the worst crimes in our history.
How should one define who pays huge salaries to these murderers?
Does this encourage terrorism? And all the billions that the Palestinian Authority paid over the years to terrorists in prison, the jobs it arranged for murderers who were released, the lifetime allowances for the family members of the "martyrs," didn't all of this encourage terrorism? After all, the Shin Bet has proven many times that these considerations were also taken into account by suicide bombers.
So how is it possible that Argman can lie to the public like this?
Only because he himself, like his predecessors and those who came after him, and the prime ministers of Israel for generations since the Oslo Accords, are complicit in the crime of covering up the Palestinian Authority's support for terrorism. And anyone who transferred money to the Palestinian Authority – according to what was stipulated in the Oslo Accords – violated the legal prohibition against financing terrorism. There is not a single one of all these leaders, they and their ministers and CEOs and commanders of Israel's security services, who was not a participant, by act or omission, in this crime.
The two-state solution is also part of those disastrous concepts. Over 80% of West Bank Palestinians support the actions of Hamas on October 7. If elections were held today in the Palestinian Authority, Hamas would win by a huge majority. Therefore, anyone who supports the establishment of a Palestinian state condemns us to a Hamas state in the heart of the country. And no one really believes in the washed-up lie called "improved Palestinian Authority." Because those who believe in such a fiction surely want it to be democratic, but if elections were ever to be held in such a state, the result would be Hamas.
All those who support the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel are captives of a concept. The same conception of self-delusion that in the end, even the enemies want peace and prosperity, and not the destruction of Israel. And when you ignore this and share in the stupid global concept that "the era of great wars is over," you also give up military independence and make Israel completely dependent on the US in every war.
Added to this is the "deterred Hezbollah" concept: The proof is that they did not join Hamas on October 7 and did not launch rockets at Tel Aviv. Supposed "Lebanon experts" recite this nonsense without blinking. Yet, did it not occur to them that these are the orders Hezbollah received from Iran because Iran is saving Hezbollah for a more important occasion?
And one last concept in this parade of folly: To achieve peace on the Temple Mount during Ramadan, all of Israel's Arabs and a selection of West Bank Palestinians are allowed to go up to the Temple Mount. Otherwise, they will go on a rampage, setting fire to the entire Muslim world, which is what Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar wants. But it is clear that even if only a thousand haters of Israel from among those visitors coming to the Temple Mount will barricade themselves in the mosque and start going wild, and the police will have to break in, there will be a massive explosion if we don't allow them free reign.
Anyone who believes that our enemy only wants peace, prosperity, equal rights, and freedom of worship on the Temple Mount lives on the eve of Simchat Torah. If we continue to cling to false, outdated ideologies, we will all continue to pay the price.