The New York Times (NYT) cited a secret document code-named “Jericho’s Wall” to report on Thursday that “Israel Knew Hamas’s Attack Plan More Than a Year Ago”. According to their findings, the self-professed Jewish State knew almost every detail of Hamas’ sneak attack that far in advance, yet incorrectly assessed that the group lacked the capabilities and intent to carry it out. Although it’s unclear whether Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu was informed of this, he might go down as a result.
After all, he’s Israel’s longest-serving leader and built his political career on being a hardliner against Hamas, but now it turns out that his third government knew exactly what Hamas was planning but failed to take any action to stop it or improve their country’s defenses around Gaza. This report is the latest in a spree of similarly damning ones from the Washington Post (WaPo) and the Associated Press (AP) about Bibi’s years-long Faustian bargain with Hamas and the US’ decade-long Qatari-facilitated ties with them.
All three were published in the span of less than a single week, which strongly suggests that a coordinated information operation is underway to completely reshape the public’s perceptions about the latest Israeli-Hamas war and the larger Israeli-Palestinian conflict within which it’s being fought. The abovementioned hyperlinked analysis connected to the Associated Press’ report argued that American policymakers have concluded that the ongoing hostilities will be a game-changer for the region.
This explains why these three leading Mainstream Media (MSM) outlets, which are all aligned with the US’ ruling Democrats, began coordinating their narrative revolution that finally began to unfold over the past week. WaPo’s piece discredited Bibi’s reputation as a hardliner against Hamas, the AP’s preconditioned the public into accepting the possibility of the US mediating a resolution to the larger Israeli-Palestinian conflict, while the NYT’s potentially just dealt a deathblow to Bib’s political career.
With these observations in mind, it’s possible to speculate on the US’ envisaged end game with a greater degree of confidence than just a week ago. It appears that America is serious about removing Bibi throughout the course of Israel’s planned inquiry into Hamas’ sneak attack, hence WaPo’s and the NYT’s latest pieces, which would thus remove the greatest domestic political obstacle to a two-state solution. Whoever replaces him would then be pressured by the US to immediately resume relevant negotiations.
The Biden Administration already made it clear that a two-state solution is the only acceptable long-term one, and this isn’t high-sounding rhetoric like skeptics might suspect, but is a sincere declaration of intent after America correctly assessed that Russia has a chance of replacing its role in this process. That country’s truly neutral approach towards this conflict perfectly positions it to break the US’ monopoly that hitherto impeded that same solution and then gain global applause for successfully mediating it.
In that event, American influence in West Asia would forever be shattered, and that would accelerate the global systemic transition to multipolarity that the US is so desperate to offset or at least decelerate. It’s therefore with a view towards preemptively averting this worst-case systemic scenario that AP was tasked with preconditioning the public to accept the US’ envisaged mediation role. This first requires normalizing its decade-long shadowy ties with Hamas via Qatar, ergo their “controlled exposé”.
To be sure, everything that American strategists are planning is premised on Bibi being removed and then his replacement immediately resuming negotiations on a two-state solution, during which time the US would leverage its monopoly over that process to finally implement it and preempt Russia from doing so. This sequence can’t be taken for granted since a lot can still happen to derail it, but the purpose of this piece was to raise awareness of this and break the taboo in talking about how Biden betrayed Bibi.
