Orde Wingate was a ‘bible-believing’ Christian and a dyed-in-the-wool Zionist who was deeply committed to the cause. He was also a brilliant military strategist, so it’s no wonder he impressed Yigal Allon and others. John Bierman’s Wingate biography ‘Fire In the Night’ is worth reading if you want to learn more about him.
One thing that is hardly discussed is how there is never going to be a Palestinian state. However much these people may want to kill each other; they are stuck with each other. Israel may try to squeeze the toothpaste tube of Gaza into the Sinai Desert but it will harder to cleanse the West Bank. If Israel wants demographic control it will have to keep Palestinians in a perpetual state of subjugation forever.
Commenting on this late as I hadn't seen it, but I think it's perfectly possible that the poor performance of Israeli security and intelligence caused Hamas' predictions to be wildly off. If you'd described the planned Hamas operation to someone on October 6, you'd assume that the Israelis would be expecting them, most groups wouldn't even get through the fence, so only a minority would meet their objectives. You'd assume they'd be lucky to get into even one actual military base, and maybe penetrate into a couple kibbutzim where they'd have a short amount of time to take hostages.
An operation of this scale might be what they thought it would take to get 10-20 hostages. One of their leaders mentioned expecting a much smaller number of fighters to come back. I'm not at all surprised that different factions in Hamas don't know what other ones are doing, but I think it's genuinely plausible that the Gaza military leadership did not anticipate this much 'success', and therefore this much of a response.
Orde Wingate was a ‘bible-believing’ Christian and a dyed-in-the-wool Zionist who was deeply committed to the cause. He was also a brilliant military strategist, so it’s no wonder he impressed Yigal Allon and others. John Bierman’s Wingate biography ‘Fire In the Night’ is worth reading if you want to learn more about him.
Yeah I know who Orde Wingate was
Here's some Palestinian and Israeli folks working to create an alternative https://www.standing-together.org/en
One thing that is hardly discussed is how there is never going to be a Palestinian state. However much these people may want to kill each other; they are stuck with each other. Israel may try to squeeze the toothpaste tube of Gaza into the Sinai Desert but it will harder to cleanse the West Bank. If Israel wants demographic control it will have to keep Palestinians in a perpetual state of subjugation forever.
Commenting on this late as I hadn't seen it, but I think it's perfectly possible that the poor performance of Israeli security and intelligence caused Hamas' predictions to be wildly off. If you'd described the planned Hamas operation to someone on October 6, you'd assume that the Israelis would be expecting them, most groups wouldn't even get through the fence, so only a minority would meet their objectives. You'd assume they'd be lucky to get into even one actual military base, and maybe penetrate into a couple kibbutzim where they'd have a short amount of time to take hostages.
An operation of this scale might be what they thought it would take to get 10-20 hostages. One of their leaders mentioned expecting a much smaller number of fighters to come back. I'm not at all surprised that different factions in Hamas don't know what other ones are doing, but I think it's genuinely plausible that the Gaza military leadership did not anticipate this much 'success', and therefore this much of a response.