More from Nathalie:
In the political strategic realm: we heard from 4 individuals who offered 4 different yet each compelling view points:
Or Heller, a military correspondent for Channel 13 [there are 4 main channels (11 to 14) covering the spectrum of Israeli politics. While Channel 14 is supportive of the Netanyahu government along with Channel 11 to a lesser extent, Channels 12 and 13 offer a more nuanced and critical view]. Or embodies many of the qualities of Israelis. He is charming with a huge EQ conveying humanity while discussing war tactics. He offered a balanced and thoughtful view of the situation with a directness and a blunt delivery that is typically israeli.
Or recounted that at 6:29 AM his boss told him the country was at war and he needed to leave his vacation spot in the Galilee and report to Gaza. Or woke his little children up, packed up the car, drove his wife and kids to his in-laws in Petach Tikvah and then drove south to Gaza and despite all this he arrived before the IDF. I debated whether to share this debacle and risk undermining confidence in the IDF but censorship would be a bad idea. This reality is something the country is tackling and face it we must do we can work on repairing.
We asked questions about the release of hostages as they are omnipresent in our landscape,
Or explained that it is incredibly hard to run successful operations to save the hostages, as they know from Hamas prisoners that terrorists have been given the order to kill the hostages should they hear close fighting. He reported that 15K Hamas were killed out of 30K deaths (a number confirmed by others). He firmly believes that we need to enter Rafah even in a limited capacity to get rid of Hamas but understands that Israel cannot get rid of the idea of Hamas. He also understands that Egypt is an important partner in the region and that Rafah being at the border will make it very hard. Let me add that he believes Israel needs a new government without Netanyahu.
Alon Pinkas, former advisor consul general in The US and a foreign affairs analyst.
Alon was very transparent in where he stood politically, it was clear from the first start that he had no respect for Netanyahu. He spoke about Bibi's work to divide PA and Hamas and then decry the lack of a true peace partner. He spoke about how Israel is traumatized and how the whole country lives and breathes with the fallen soldiers in Gaza while the rest of the world is seeing images of dead Palestinian children every day. He doesn’t believe we can enter Rafah and risk the ire of the US and Egypt, he is worried about the isolation of Israel on the world stage and thinks the war has to end soon. He was supportive of Chuck Schumer’s comments and the effort from the US to put pressure on a change in government. Like Or Heller, he believes that a deal to release the hostages would essentially end the war, as Israel could not resume fighting after a long ceasefire.
Colette Avital, a diplomat and politician who served as a member of the Knesset for the Labor Party and One Israel between 1999 and 2009.
Colette is yet another avid critic of Netanyahu whom she has known for years. Asked if he would be a mensch and let the government fall and accept a hostage deal that would effectively end the war, she said unfortunately he would likely hold on to power for as long as he can. She also confirmed how hard it has been to get any cooperation from the Red Cross to see the hostages and ensure they received medication. She was concerned about the isolation of Israel.
Miri Eisin, a retired colonel from the army and former advisor to the Prime minister on foreign media who also teaches counterterrorism at the Reichman University.
Miri helped make a complex situation a little clearer. She describes Hamas’ war strategy in 3 stages: 1) terrorize and inspire of October 7th; 2) deny that they had committed any crime (October 8th and 9th) even if they filmed said crimes on facebook live (that erases after a few hours) and 3) defensive (ongoing). The longer the war goes on the more it benefits Hamas. As a background Yahya Sinwar was sentenced to multiple life sentences for amongst other crimes personally killing Palestinians that he thought were collaborating with Israel. He was released from Israeli prison in 2011 after serving 22 years of his life sentence as part of a deal to get Gilad Shalit’s corpse back to Israel (1000+ prisoners for 1 corpse). In 2017 he became head of Hamas in Gaza. He was born in Khan Younis and refuses safe passage to Qatar as part of a deal to end the war because we think he would rather die as a martyr in Gaza and be part of the lineage of islamist martyrs. We asked how this war can end. The goal is to destroy Hamas’ capabilities but we cannot eliminate its idea or all Hamas terrorists, and that she says will take most of 2024 and even into 2025. There are other geopolitical forces in the region and a hostage deal does not resolve these. The Houthis in Yemen are blocking an important source of international trade (15% of worldwide trade) and it is impacting the Egyptian economy the most. There is another war raging in the north with Hezbollah with many communities at the border with Lebanon evacuated. She has a husband and 3 sons that are in active duty, she wants the war to end as well. As for the day after plan, she said how can we have a day after if we are focused now on eliminating the threat on 2 fronts, it is hard to predict what will happen over the next 12 months. We also asked about the impact of further isolation if there is no day after plan. She offered a very useful explanation that the gap between israel and countries in the region vs countries in the west is due to the fact that we are using 2 very distinct languages: SECURITY (Israel and countries in the middle east) while war is bad it is a necessary evil and has terrible consequences there is a threat to our security that must be the focus and HUMANITARIAN (the west) who see war as bad no matter what and can never be justified, while they are perceived as having good intentions they are also perceived as understanding the problem at a very high level
Other Headlines and Thoughts
Sundays headlines and other societal topics:
Israel’s defense minister is traveling to the US to meet with Blinken and Loyd Austin as US weapons delivery is delayed. Another sign that there is tension between the US and Israel?
Law to draft the haredim (ultra-orthodox) under the same rule that governs everyone has the potential to bring down the government. 66K of draftable haredim are exempt each year. Secular Israelis have risked their lives and are paying the majority of the taxes while a group is exempt from the army. There is an insufficient number of soldiers leading to current soldiers to stay for longer periods of time, causing a major disruption in their private lives, in their livelihoods and in the larger economy. We are approaching a breaking point. There is also talk about increasing the age of those who must serve. What is needed is at least a 10K army. By this week they gave a decision making headline to July otherwise they will be drafting. Of note there are 44K women fighting today in the army and the time for women and men serving has equalized to about 2.9 years.
50 missiles were launched from Lebanon onto the Golan (a near daily occurrence), the iron dome stopped 4 and the rest fell in open fields.
Negotiations on hostage release are going slowly, access to Sinwar is very slow (IL, US, Qatar, Hamas, Sinwar then back again). 40 hostages (civilians taken from their bedroom) for 800 Hamas fellons including 100 murders and a 45-day ceasefire. Of course both groups have a different outlook on the value of life and from a moral perspective it’s hard to see such a deal as fair but any hostage dead or alive is of utmost importance for the Israeli psyche and Hamas sees that as our weakness. Gabi Eisencrot (Beny Gantz’ advisor) is part of the war cabinet and is largely thought to have the most flexible position on the hostages (his son and nephew have died in combat). He is for real and not governed by politics. If he resigns we will know that the process has been politicized. The war cannot end before the hostage situation is resolved so this is a key issue.
Jeremy our guide jokes that the national bird of Israel is the crane since there is so much construction. Most of the construction is done by Palestinian farmers who get paid 10 times more than they would in Gaza or the West Bank. The flow from the territories is minimal. A new wave of immigrants from India, Bangladesh, Africa and Sri Lanka is being brought to the country.
Meeting with Brothers in Arms
Over the past 5 months, an army of volunteers has met at 8AM every day for the past 5 months operating 26 desks in all.
DAY 1: On October 7th she set up the MISSING WAR ROOM after realizing that the public administration could offer only a resounding silence when asked how to start identifying the missing. By Sunday morning Karine had made 2 good decisions. 1) she would get a list from the Nova festival attendees to have a starting point; 2) she would give the information she collects to the government only. The government has structured information but the civilians have people on the ground. Hundreds came to volunteer within hours of the war breaking out.
DAY 2:. By Sunday 9AM she had created a website to start transferring the information from the public since young people were filming the war and posting. By 12PM Sunday there had a list of 10,000 missing (family could not locate them). The best brains of Israel from twitter, FB, IG, engineers, lawyers, archeologists, data scientists, AI experts were in the room to help. A VP of google came and said this volunteer invented facial recognition, this one I have been trying to recruit for months. 3 meals a day were provided, equipment was donated, they were ready to contribute.
Archeologists were asked to map all the pits on the ground outside the music festival then people from the army and volunteers drove down south to evacuate those hiding in the pits running against the clock and in some cases in areas where they were still terrorists.
A call to the public was made via social media to send in any pictures, videos, texts. 200K videos were uploaded. Now the question became, how to ID those in the videos since you can’t share any info with the public to avoid hysteria. 5 technology desks were created and in 110 hours new algorithms were developed (it takes on average two year to build a startup) Hamas channels were harvested (gaza now and gaza online) from small groups who had posted horrific videos. Hamas quickly understood that these were being analyzed and deleted the videos but only after they had been downloaded by the WAR ROOM. The hard job of sifting through the information to understand who was killed, wounded or taken. This was a grueling task as Karine put it, at 8AM you come and kill your soul 1,000 times, we were the protective gear for the public.There was no chance for error (not type A or B error) you can’t tell a parent their child is alive when he is dead and vice versa.
DAY 3: the Shabak (Israeli FBI) called to say they needed info and units were created to liaise with the WAR ROOM. In exchange, 2 terabytes of footage from the cameras in the kibbutzim and from the GO-PRO of the terrorists was given to tye WAR ROOM. The issue of how to transfer 2 terabytes was the next issue to solve.
Avi Gabai head of orange sent trucks
CEO of amazon sent airplane with experts to help with the transfer
There was a desk of 35 people whose job it was to sift through the videos frame by frame. The horror was unprecedented. Very quickly, it was decided to only keep those who were in their 50s or 60s so the younger volunteers would not be subjected to the sights. There were over 30 psychologists available.
1st FRIDAY: they did kiddush together for shabbat and the emotion came pouring in, they were sent home to spend Shabbat with the family.
After 1 month the MISSING WAR ROOM was closed. A new war room could be recreated within 2 hours if it happened again. The information was turned in to the government but not before sending it to the public library for archiving and classifying so the information could be made available to journalists and the public.
When asked about gathering evidence for the rapes through the videos, she answered that culturally Muslims film every atrocity but stop short of filming the sexual acts (they never filmed the raping of the Yazidis); regardless in the initial days the mindset was on identifying victims not documenting the rapes. In fact the first responders who buried the bodies (Zaka) covered the genital areas to give dignity to the women who were either burned or badly disfigured. Over 1,000 bodies were buried in the first 2-3 days. In the overwhelming majority the women who were raped were then killed. In retrospect there’s a regret with deleting some videos once people were identified, the scenes were so horrific they didn’t think it would benefit anyone to see these, after 3 days they stopped deleting the videos. There are hours of footage of women being exposed to humiliation and we have many eye witness accounts of rapes that were provided to the police.
Karine, is an incredible woman who dedicated her life to a higher calling and a week ago she announced that she will return to the streets to fight for Zionism once again through non-violent protests. Her parting message was that it is time for us to elect a new government and it’s time for Israel to rest and to rebuild.