Attention to the Unseen

Jamie Dettmer and Christian Oliver write: Hamas’ brutal assault against Israel came on Vladimir Putin’s birthday. Such a catastrophic security shock in the Middle East was probably a welcome surprise for a Russian president whose strategic priority is to divert Western support and attention away from Ukraine. A massive conflagration in Israel risks doing exactly that. The big question is how much credit to give the Kremlin for the perfect storm of mounting crises — in Israel, Kosovo, the Caucasus…

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Rolling Stone reports: Donald Trump has been absolutely furious with Benjamin Netanyahu since the Israeli prime minister declined to publicly back his conspiracy-fueled effort to overturn the 2020 election. The Israel-Hamas war that erupted over the weekend has only stoked the former president’s animus toward Netanyahu, and he’s now trying to use the unfolding horror to get even. In recent days, Trump has had phone calls with various pro-Israel GOP allies and donors who want to know how Trump would…

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The Jerusalem Post reports: Four out of five Jewish Israelis believe the government and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are to blame for the mass infiltration of Hamas terrorists into Israel and the massacre that followed, a new Dialog Center poll released on Thursday found. An overwhelming majority – 86% of respondents, including 79% of coalition supporters, said the surprise attack from Gaza is a failure of the country’s leadership, while a staggering 92% said the war is causing anxiety. Furthermore,…

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Zack Beauchamp writes: In southern Israel, Hamas terrorists broke into a room where a family of five was hiding and slaughtered every one of them. In Gaza, a father wrapped in gauze held his child, butchered in an Israeli strike, for the last time. These scenes pose a very simple moral test: Do you believe that it is wrong for innocent people to suffer in this way? That mass death should be deplored, not defended, regardless of who its victims…

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Michelle Goldberg writes: On Tuesday evening, I was drinking on the porch of my friend and neighbor Misha Shulman, the Israel-born rabbi of a progressive New York synagogue called the New Shul. All day, he’d been on the phone with congregants deeply distraught over the massacres and mass kidnappings in Israel. Of all the people he spoke to, he said, those most devastated were either people who had lost close friends or family, or young Jews “completely shattered by the…

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Reuters reports: Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman discussed the Palestinian-Israeli conflict on Wednesday, in the first telephone call between the two leaders since a China-brokered deal between Tehran and Riyadh to resume ties. The two leaders’ call came as Israel carried out air strikes in the Gaza Strip in retaliation for a deadly attack by Palestinian Hamas militants in Israel. Raisi and the Saudi crown prince discussed the “need to end war crimes against…

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Gidi Weitz writes: It’s impossible to close your eyes to the reality. There’s a clear connection between the corruption trial [of Benjamin Netanyahu], the government’s judicial overhaul, and the greatest failure since the Yom Kippur War of 1973, perhaps even since the establishment of the state. Admittedly, the intelligence agencies failed inconceivably at foreseeing the actual attack. But they warned Netanyahu time and again in recent months that Israel’s enemies had identified a historic weakness, making the likelihood of war…

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The Forward reports: Israeli cabinet ministers faced the wrath of anguished citizens and doctors during visits to local hospitals on Thursday. Israel is in mourning after a surprise attack by Hamas on Saturday, which has resulted in the deaths of more than 1,200 people. But the country, before the attacks, had been convulsed for months over a judicial reform package pushed by the right-wing government, which has led hundreds of thousands of Israelis to protest in the streets. “You’ve ruined…

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Kenneth Roth writes: Hamas’s appalling attack on Israeli civilians has been widely described as the country’s “9/11 moment”. It is an appropriate description of such wanton cruelty. But the analogy carries a cautionary note as well. The US government lost the world’s sympathy, and the moral high ground, when its response to 9/11 degenerated into a highly abusive war in Iraq, systematic torture, and endless detention without trial in Guantánamo. The Israeli government should be careful not to replicate this…

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CNN reports: The United States has collected specific intelligence that suggests senior Iranian government officials were caught by surprise by Saturday’s bloody attack on Israel by Hamas, according to multiple sources familiar with the intelligence. The existence of the intelligence has cast doubt on the idea that Iran was directly involved in the planning, resourcing or approving of the operation, sources said. The sources stressed that the US intelligence community is not ready to reach a full conclusion about whether…

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