The Big Story
Israel will have to play by America’s rules to ensure continued U.S. support for the IDF’s planned campaign in Gaza—and deterrence against Iran and Hezbollah. That’s not The Scroll speaking, but Amos Harel, columnist for the left-wing Israeli daily Haaretz, reflecting on the U.S. president’s Wednesday trip to Israel. Writes Harel:
Biden arrived with two statements that seem contradictory from the Israeli standpoint, as expressed on a daily basis in television studios. He supports destroying Hamas, but objects to occupying Gaza and stresses that not all Gazans are Hamas members.
Taken literally, of course, there is little to object to in either statement. But the language of diplomacy is rarely literal. During his visit, amid promises of hundreds of millions of dollars in further U.S. defense aid to Israel, Biden announced that the two governments had reached an agreement to open a humanitarian corridor to allow for the delivery of aid to Gaza civilians over the Rafah border crossing—over initial objections from Israel. In his public remarks he stressed Israel’s need to be measured in its response to the Hamas attacks. Harel continues:
By insisting on a humanitarian corridor [to Gaza], Biden dictated new rules of the game to Israel. This stemmed from the situation on the northern front: Israel needs U.S. deterrence, first and foremost the presence of its aircraft carriers, so Iran and Lebanon won’t be tempted to join the fight.
Does Israel need U.S. deterrence to protect itself from Lebanon? Or is Lebanon being protected from Israel, as multiple analysts have suggested? Harel notes that each of Hezbollah’s daily rocket and missile attacks “tests Israel’s patience anew,” even as Iran warns of its willingness to initiate a multifront “siege” of Israel should the IDF continue its strikes against Gaza. Whatever the case, Israel, for now, appears to have judged that it can’t afford to reject Washington’s conditions—namely a narrow campaign against Hamas without the benefits of a full siege and with minimal collateral damage. Oh yeah, and get your war finished on the double. As Harel writes, “While the time [the Americans] allot the IDF may be long, it definitely isn’t unlimited.”
IN THE BACK PAGES: A veteran of the siege of Mosul explains that urban combat can be hell—and still comply with the laws of war.
→About 300 protestors were arrested in the U.S. Capitol yesterday during a demonstration opposing Israel’s war in Gaza and demanding the U.S. government push for a cease-fire. The demonstration, which featured a speech by Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D–MI) repeating the discredited story of an Israeli airstrike killing hundreds of Gazan civilians at the Al-Ahli Hospital, was organized by Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) and If Not Now (INN), described by The New York Times as “Jewish anti-Zionist groups.” While these groups are certainly anti-Zionist, it would be more accurate to call them “generic progressive groups with Jewish branding,” considering who funds them. According to website NGO Monitor, JVP received $340,000 from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund between 2019 and 2023 and $75,000 from the Tides Foundation in 2019. For the much-smaller INN, those numbers were $160,000 and $45,000, respectively. The Rockefeller Brothers Fund is not exactly known for its Jewish philanthropy. As Sean Cooper reported for Tablet in “Bending the Jews,” the fund has limited its donations to groups—such as JVP, INN, and Bend the Arc—that can be relied on to put a “Jewish” gloss on the coalitional priorities of the modern Democratic Party, like opposing voter ID laws and astroturfing protests against Ron DeSantis. The Tides Foundation, meanwhile, is part of the Tides network, a Democratic dark-money group funded by Peter Buffett and other progressive billionaires, on the board of which sit several former Obama officials.
Read more: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/warren-buffett-black-lives-matter
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/bend-the-arc
→Egypt announced on Thursday that it had reached an agreement with the United States to allow the delivery of humanitarian aid to civilians in Gaza over the Rafah border crossing. The aid had become a sticking point in U.S. negotiations with Israel, which opposed the delivery on the grounds that it would undermine the Israeli siege of Gaza and put food and medical supplies in the hands of Hamas, before caving to American pressure. President Biden said that if Hamas attempted to divert or steal the shipments, “as a practical matter it will stop the international community from being able to provide this aid.” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that his government would not “foil” the aid from entering Gaza through Egypt, but that it would not allow delivery of aid from Israel until Hamas released its Israeli hostages. Bring Them Home Now, an Israeli group representing the families of the hostages, criticized Netanyahu for “treating the murderers to baklava and medicine” while the hostages were being “held underground like animals.”
Read more here: https://www.jns.org/egypt-to-open-rafah-crossing-for-humanitarian-aid/
→Israeli tanks will be equipped with “anti-drone cages” for their looming invasion of the Gaza Strip, a significant tactical precaution against the Islamist terror group’s expected deployment of battlefield drones. Hamas has already proved its skill in retrofitting cheap commercial drones for military purposes, using them to disable IDF communications installations during its Oct. 7 raid into southern Israel. Tanks are expected to play a major role in Israel’s ground operation in Gaza, but they have proven vulnerable to drone attacks in recent wars between Ukraine and Russia, and Armenia and Azerbaijan. The anti-drone cages, also known as top-slat armor or “cope cages,” were initially improvised by the Russian military after it saw devastating Ukrainian drone attacks against Russian armor, and they’ve since been adopted by both armies in that conflict.
Read more here: https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/defense-news/article-769081
→A U.S. military base and an oil facility housing U.S. troops were attacked in Syria on Thursday, following two similar attacks by Iran-backed Shiite militias in Iraq on Tuesday. It was not immediately clear who was responsible for the attacks in Syria, at al-Tanf garrison and at the Conoco gas field near Deir Ezzor, while the attacks in Iraq, at Harir Airbase in Erbil and Ain Al Asad Airbase in Anbar, were claimed by Tashkil al-Waritheen and the “Islamic Resistance in Iraq.” The latter is a generic term for the country’s network of Iranian proxy militias, which includes the Popular Mobilization Forces, the state-backed paramilitary that has long benefited from U.S. arms sales nominally intended for the Iraqi Army. As Iran’s proxies hit American targets, Iranian state television issued a warning that “Islamic Resistance” groups in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen will hit Israel from “all sides” if the IDF does not cease its bombing campaign in Gaza. Shortly before The Scroll’s publication on Thursday, U.S. officials announced that an American warship had intercepted multiple missiles off the coast of Yemen, bound for Israel.
Read more: https://www.ynetnews.com/article/hjwlhca11a
→Another day, another synagogue attack in Europe. This one came in Melilla, an autonomous Spanish city on the north coast of Africa, where a crowd of protestors gathered outside of a synagogue full of worshippers and shouted “Murderous Israel” until being dispersed by Spanish police. The incident comes one day after a synagogue was firebombed in Berlin and three days after two Jewish primary schools were vandalized in London.
Read more here: https://www.algemeiner.com/2023/10/18/mob-attacks-synagogue-in-spain-reports/
TODAY IN TABLET:
The AFL-CIO Needs to Wake Up, by Louis Nayman
A timid and sorry response to Hamas butchery
The Terrorist Who Mistook His Life for a Movie, by Marco Roth
'Carlos' is the most complex and exhaustive film about a phenomenon that has defined the politics of the past half-century
SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.
The Hell of Urban Warfare Is Not Unique to Gaza
During the campaign against ISIS in Mosul, the U.S. flattened a large city with far less provocation—while observing all the rules of modern war
By Bradley Brincka
In the coming days, Israel may launch a ground invasion of the Gaza Strip in response to the shocking pogrom carried out against Israelis on Oct. 7. The looming operation has led many to search for precedents in military history. There is one recent urban conflagration with great relevance to the impending assault on Gaza that, though unlikely to provide comfort to anyone, may offer some historical grounding. That is the U.S.-backed Iraqi campaign to liberate Mosul from the Islamic State in 2016-17.
I was a minor participant in this titanic affair, serving as a volunteer ambulance driver with the Free Burma Rangers, a humanitarian medical group then embedded with the Iraqi Army. From January to June 2017, I accompanied Iraq’s 9th Armored Division as it slowly encircled Mosul from the west before finally throwing all of its American- and Soviet-made tanks into the dense concrete jungle along the Tigris river at the battle’s climax that spring. It was a formative experience as a younger man, and one that taught me the brutal nature of urban combat first hand.
Three years earlier, the Islamic State had exploded onto the world stage after routing the same Iraqi Army in Mosul, conquering the country’s second-largest city with ease over the course of five days, as the American trained Iraqi Army largely collapsed or fled. On June 29, 2014, the group’s secretive leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, proclaimed his caliphate. A short time later, his legions invaded the neighboring district of Sinjar, subjecting its Yazidi inhabitants to a genocide, exterminating whole villages, impressing over 6,000 women and children into sexual concubinage, and boasting of the reimposition of chattel slavery in their glossy English-language magazine. In the months that followed, a notorious troop of British national ISIS members who came to be known as “The Beatles” beheaded Western hostages and threatened future attacks. These viral videos, combined with images of Yazidi women carried off to the caliphate’s slave markets, had the effect of decisively galvanizing American public opinion in favor of military intervention.
Rather than sending its own troops back into Iraq, the war-weary U.S. would seek to win “by, with, and through” its local proxies while “leading from behind.” In practice this meant funding, equipping, and providing U.S. air support to Iranian-backed Shia militia groups—the same groups that had previously carried out attacks on U.S. soldiers—which formed the backbone of Iraq’s new Popular Mobilization Forces. At the same time, small groups of U.S. special operations soldiers began training elite Iraqi commando units in anticipation of an eventual push to drive ISIS out of Mosul. The approach meant that Iraqi and Kurdish forces would do all the fighting and dying while the U.S. provided logistical, intelligence, and—most crucially—air support. It was a strategy that would prove to be devastatingly effective.
For the next five years, the American-led coalition pursued a nearly continuous bombing campaign in conjunction with partner ground operations. Spanning two administrations, the campaign resulted in the leveling of multiple major cities across Iraq and Syria, killing tens of thousands, and displacing hundreds of thousands more. At no point during that time was the efficacy or morality of this policy meaningfully discussed within the body politic. If anything, candidates for public office vied to outdo one another regarding who would be tougher against the terror group, with presidential candidate Donald Trump suggesting, “You have to take out their families when you get these terrorists. They care about their lives, don’t kid yourself.”
Meanwhile, the Islamic State, while pushed back in other parts of Iraq, had time to fortify defenses in the urban strongholds under its control. The caliphate’s eschatological ambitions collided with the coalition’s determination to uproot it as the two raced toward an inescapable trajectory: the annihilation of cities like Manbij, Mosul, and Raqqa.
Before its sacking in 2014, the great riverine metropolis of Mosul boasted an estimated 2 million residents. By 2016, as many as 12,000 hardened ISIS defenders confronted a patchwork of 100,000 Iraqi soldiers, police, and the elite Counter-Terrorism Service (CTS). The Iraqis were better armed, better trained, and better led than before, and they were now backed by stupefying American air power. The battle commenced on Oct. 16, 2016. What had taken the Islamic State less than a week to achieve in 2014 would take 252 days of savage fighting to undo.
Owing to the character of urban combat, the Iraqi soldiers tasked with ridding Mosul of ISIS faced all manner of harrowing tactical and moral dilemmas. They confronted an entrenched opponent with two years to prepare for a siege shielded by noncombatants (Hamas by comparison has ruled Gaza since 2007). Drones—rudimentary novelties on the battlefield then, years before their proliferation in Eastern Europe—appeared from nowhere in liberated areas, instilling panic among soldiers and civilians alike because of the lethal ordnance they frequently dropped. Heavily armored "suicide vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices" (SVBIEDs) drove out of garages and detonated behind passing Iraqi columns. An invisible dimension of subterranean tunnels—Gaza has its own cement reinforced tunnel system built by Hamas—enabled Islamic State fighters to spring from the earth and cause mayhem. Mechanized Iraqi soldiers, in keeping with the cavalryman’s maxim of "Death Before Dismount," demurred from chasing ghosts into these labyrinths, preferring instead to collapse the tunnels and entomb their foes.
The heroism of the Iraqi soldiers who fought in Mosul cannot obscure the startling cost of liberation: some 8,200 dead Iraqi servicemen (a whopping 60% casualty rate among the elite CTS), an estimated 10,000 civilians killed (though likely much higher) of which 3,200 are thought to have perished in coalition airstrikes, and the destruction of 40,000 homes in west Mosul alone. Notwithstanding the occasional media criticisms of especially deadly strikes, there were no popular protests in Western or Arab capitals to speak of and certainly nothing akin to the tens of thousands marching in the streets the past week over Gaza. Back then, the climactic showdown between Iraq and the Islamic State was just another quarrel in a faraway country, between people of whom most were content to know nothing.
The apocalyptic destruction visited on Mosul might lead some to conclude the coalition pursued an indiscriminate bombing campaign to rid the city of its occupiers, but that was not the case at all. U.S. targeting procedures are heavily regimented and bureaucratized with lawyers involved at every step. The banal process of determining whether a building and its occupants are to be vaporized more closely resembles a quarterly HOA board meeting than the ravings of Dr. Strangelove.
It is a point worth emphasizing: Even the most “humane” application of force in full accordance with the Law of Armed Conflict in a densely populated city results in shocking death and destruction far in excess of what most would consider “proportionate.” To innocents on the business end of such strikes, this jargon would appear as mere ritualistic ablutions or voodoo; the obfuscation of an enterprise which—when stripped to its essence—is the imprecise incineration of one’s foes by means of mechanical dragons. Abstractions like “surgical precision” and “harm reduction” are cold comfort to one whose home has been flattened or family line eliminated.
That said, neither Iraq nor the coalition ever seriously countenanced the idea of leaving Mosul in the hands of the Islamic State. The threat was perceived as existential and the preceding years’ outrages and sadism had to be avenged. Mosul’s fate was decided long before Iraqi troops approached its outskirts in 2016. The brutal logic of destroying the city to save it had long since been internalized. The prospect of human sacrifice appeared less horrifying only when compared with the implications of forgoing the sacrifice. To not administer the purging fire would be for the slave markets to continue humming, for the captives to languish, for millions of souls to remain under the boot of a death-worshiping cult, and for the caliphate’s hordes to flood out of the desert once more. To the extent there was any choice, it was not between the high and the low but between the terrible and the unthinkable. Such is the dilemma of confronting a foe ensconced in a city among a population.
This brings the discussion at last to Gaza. The horrors inflicted on southern Israel by Hamas last week represent a casus belli of a magnitude that dwarfs the comparably trivial one that spurred Americans to shrug at killing a new state in its infancy and leveling whole metropolises on the other side of the world. The knifing of Jewish mothers and the unborn, the slaughter, the pyres of children, and outrages against women carried off as war booty to the attackers’ lairs, are hauntingly evocative of the genocidal campaign against the Yazidis in 2014.
I write with no glee or triumphalism that the momentum of events points toward an ominous and seemingly inexorable trajectory: that Gaza is doomed, that the city will be destroyed, and that its population will soon share the people of Mosul’s fate. Human nature being what it is, any Israeli government unwilling or too squeamish to carry this out would almost certainly be replaced by one with no such compunctions, or find itself vanquished by other means. No technological sorcery will enable Israel to extirpate Hamas in a way that would leave civilians unscathed or satisfy those for whom the horrors of urban warfare and siege are problems ameliorable through ever more effective technocratic management.
Alas, Mosul still stands today, but it is no longer the city it once was nor shall it ever be again. Its shattered visage lies half-sunk in the sands of northern Iraq. It is Ozymandias-like, a colossal wreck, boundless and bare. It is a testament to the wages of madness, hubris, and human sacrifice, and a harbinger of what is to come.
I have a problem when you quote from Ha'aretz. I have been keeping an eye on it since Oct 8 to see how they would report on the massacre of their countrymen. There was already an undercurrent of self-hate. Be careful because Ha'aretz does not represent mainstream Israeli thinking at all. According to daily circulation figures (print + online) Israel HaYom 400,000, Ynet (Ideot) 400,000, Ha'aretz between 20,000-30,000. So it's clear you should be reading other sources in Israel.
--- J U S T S T O P !! G O A W A Y NOW .... O’HITLER !!!!!!