Al-Aqsa Storm Was Not a False Flag

(Kevin Barrett) My False Flag Weekly News colleague Cat McGuire emailed me:

“So many people are still claiming Israel was ultimately behind the Hamas attack so they could pulverize Gaza…Kevin, can you please write the definitive article to disabuse people of the idea Israel was running October 7? Sort out the facts. That good What Really Happened article does not debunk the false flag narrative. I think these are the three main hindrances for people to believe it was not a false flag:

*It’s clear Israel had foreknowledge.

*Israel’s vaunted security capabilities.

*Mossad created Hamas.

Before addressing those three points, all of which rest on exaggerations of Israel’s capabilities, I’ll explain why the false flag scenario makes intuitive sense to so many people.

Having spent much of the past 20 years explaining that 9/11 and other events have been false flags, I am well aware that whenever Western media blame an “Islamic terror group” for the latest bloody atrocity, skepticism is warranted. To people who’ve studied 9/11, it’s natural to be suspicious when a massacre attributed to “radical Muslims” is predictably followed by a vastly bigger massacre of Muslims—as happened when the deaths of around 3,000 people on 9/11 triggered the invasions, occupations, and pillaging of Muslim countries and the murder of millions of Muslims around the world.

Prior to 9/11, Bibi Netanyahu and his neoconservative-Zionist friends were looking for a way to trick the United States into staging a multi-nation genocidal massacre in the Middle East. Their aim was to completely change the strategic situation in the region by destroying “seven countries in five years” which all happened to be enemies of Israel. They announced their plan in the 1996 Clean Break document, and again in the 2000 call for a “New Pearl Harbor.” Then on 9/11 t hey blew up the World Trade Center in broad daylight, and used their media power to get away with it.

Superficially, al-Aqsa Storm looks similar. As Richard Medhurst observes:

A few weeks ago, right before this war in Gaza ignites, Netanyahu goes to the United Nations General Assembly and he holds up a map and declares his plan for a new Middle East: an economic corridor that stretches all the way from India to the United Arab Emirates, into Saudi Arabia, into Jordan, Israel, and then finally to the entire European continent…This is a rival to the New Silk Road…Israel all of a sudden propose themselves as a solution to the European Union’s gas shortages…

In 2010, they conducted a geological survey and found this monstrous giant gas field in the Middle East. It’s called the Leviathan, and it’s in the Mediterranean Sea, on the Levantine basin. That means it’s right off the coast of Palestine, Lebanon, Syria….And so when Netanyahu shows up at the UN with his brilliant plan, you know, the Israelis thought, oh, it’s a done deal, they’ll just get Saudi Arabia to normalize ties and thereby extinguish the Palestinian issue once and for all.

So prior to both 9/11 and Al-Aqsa Storm, Netanyahu vaunted plans to radically remake the Middle East. But there’s one huge difference. 9/11 helped him realize his Clean Break plan, while Al-Aqsa Storm destroyed his New Middle East plan. The Emiratis and Saudis and Jordanians are now out—permanently. No pipeline to Israel now! And Israel’s plan to exploit Mediterranean gas is not going to bear fruit any time soon since the region is in chaos.

Some Americans with only superficial knowledge of the Muslim East say that Bibi set up the 10/7 false flag so he could clear the Palestinians out of Gaza in order to exploit gas fields off the Gaza coast. Small problem: He didn’t need to clear them out! Israel’s navy faces no significant threat from Gaza. (It might have to worry about Lebanon, Syria, or even Turkey, but not Gaza.)

In short, Al-Aqsa Flood has totally destroyed Israel’s (and Bibi’s) plan to bypass the Palestinian issue and remake the region. As Medhurst observes, the post-10/7 paradigm favors the Russia-China-Iran-Turkey-Syria “New Silk Road” project, and has destroyed the US-backed Zionists’ preferred alternative. It has put the Palestinian cause on the front burner and is leading most of the world to rally behind it. This is obviously not the outcome Netanyahu, or anyone in Israel (or the US for that matter) wanted.

So now let’s look at Cat McGuire’s three points.

*It’s clear Israel had foreknowledge.

Israel did get warnings—from Egypt and even Hamas itself—that something was coming. But there’s no evidence they understood Hamas was about to pull off such a huge and successful operation. They were more worried about the West Bank, where Muslims are angry at the Zionists’ escalating desecrations of the al-Aqsa Mosque, and their northern border with Lebanon and Syria. The Zionists have always considered Hezbollah, backed by Iran and Syria, to be their most serious threat. Hamas was considered a non-factor. So the Israeli military was focused on the West Bank and the Northern Border, not on Gaza, which was assumed to be under control.

And if you really think Al-Aqsa Storm played out the way Bibi wanted, how do you explain the 200 Israeli prisoners? Al-Aqsa storm’s symbolic purpose was to retaliate for Zionist desecrations of al-Aqsa, but its operational purpose was to take Israeli prisoners to swap for Palestinian ones. And anyone who thinks Israel is ever going to stand down and let its people be taken hostage is crazy. Israel recognizes the strategic value of hostages and does everything possible to make sure no Israeli is ever taken hostage. On October 7, that included using tank shells, rocket bombs, and heavy artillery to kill hundreds of Israeli civilians and their dozens of would-be hostage takers, in accordance with the Hannibal Directive. Indeed the vast majority of the Israeli civilians killed that day were probably killed by their own military, either in “fog of war” crossfire or to stop them from being taken hostage.

*Israel’s vaunted security capabilities.

We have seen claims that not even an insect could approach the Gaza Concentration Camp wall without Israel knowing about it. That may have been true when surveillance and communication signals were flowing. But Hamas knocked out Israel’s cell towers with drones, blinding the Zionist defenders and enabling the concentration camp breakout. (Drones are ushering in the next age of warfare and giving underdogs a huge advantage.)

People who don’t think Hamas could be so competent, and Israel so incompetent, have been misled by Zionist propaganda. Israel tries to discourage people from opposing it by pretending to be omnipotent and omniscient. In fact, my US intelligence sources with inside knowledge say Israeli intelligence is good but not that good. Their biggest asset is billionaire sayanim in the US and Europe. People like Arnon Milchan and Larry Silverstein and Les Wexner and his protégé Jeffrey Epstein (and before them Meyer Lansky) are great for stealing American nuclear weapons, blowing up the Twin Towers, and gathering dirt on American leaders. And the Jewish-Zionist billionaires who own Hollywood and dominate the media can make sure their crimes get covered up and their propaganda trumpeted. But none of that helps them keep a handle on Hamas.

*Mossad created Hamas.

It sometimes seems that Israelis always lie about everything, but that isn’t entirely true. Ronan Bergman’s Rise and Kill First may be censored by the IDF, but its accounts of the origins of Hamas and Hezbollah are credible. Sheikh Yassin, fresh out of Israeli prison, created Hamas way back in 1987, and did indeed obtain modest funding from his former captors, at least initially. The Israelis hoped that Hamas would divide the Palestinians and weaken the PLO. But the Islamic resistance group quickly escaped control, and Israel has spent most of the past 30 years regretting that they ever let Sheikh Yassin out of prison. They wound up killing him, as well as a long list of other Hamas leaders.

But doesn’t Israel infiltrate Hamas? Sure, they try to, with mixed success—just like Hamas infiltrates Israel, and everybody infiltrates everybody. Compared to the US, Israel is quite good at infiltrating Arab groups. Half of Israel’s “Jews” are actually Arabs, i.e. native speakers of Arabic and indistinguishable from non-Jewish Arabs. The US for its part, has fewer native speaker operatives to choose from, and doesn’t trust the ones it has. But though Mossad’s fake Arabs beat the CIA’s, and may have had great success long ago infiltrating the PLO and other secular Palestinian groups, they have had more problems infiltrating religiously-based groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, as Bergman stresses in Rise and Kill First.

Additionally, there is no reason to think that Hamas is especially bad at operational secrecy, and Al-Aqsa Flood was a highly compartmentalized operation. It was carried out by small teams, each of which knew its own orders, but not the scope of the attack. Only a few trusted individuals would have been privy to the big picture.

Only Superficially Plausible

So despite its superficial plausibility, the notion that Netanyahu orchestrated or deliberately enabled Al-Aqsa Flood rests on misleading comparisons, vague impressions, and, above all, boastful Zionist propaganda whose purpose is to exaggerate Israel’s prowess and intimidate opponents. And now that propaganda bubble has been punctured. Just as Hezbollah’s victory in 2006 demoralized Israel and inspired the Palestinian Resistance, al-Aqsa Flood has had the same effect, despite—and even to some extent because of—the horrific war crimes that Israel is committing almost by the minute. (Those war crimes are likely to prove counterproductive in the long term, since they have alienated most of the world and are creating ever-increasing fervency on the pro-Palestine anti-Zionist side.)

But what about Netanyahu’s personal political situation? Won’t this crisis save him? The answer: almost certainly not. Here I defer to Ron Unz, who recently published two excellent analyses that touch on the false flag question. Below are the relevant extracts.

-KB

Ron Unz on Why the False Flag Scenario Is Implausible

“American Pravda: Israel, Gaza, and Broader Issues” Oct. 23

For many months, the Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had been facing enormous public demonstrations by his bitter political opponents, representing a historic division in his own society that was even verging on civil war. So according to this theory, Netanyahu had deliberately allowed that attack to take place, hoping to use it as his “Pearl Harbor” or “9/11” to solidify his own political position, perhaps even providing him an excuse to expel the Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank, thereby achieving the political goal of the more extreme members of his coalition by expanding Israel’s frontiers while permanently solving the festering “Palestinian problem.”

Despite its apparent popularity, the likelihood of this scenario disintegrates upon any careful consideration. Israel probably suffered the worst one-day defeat in its national history, a strategic disaster. Even aside from the huge loss of life in such a small population, the tremendous Hamas success punctured the powerful myth of Israeli military strength, which for three generations has been the cornerstone of the country’s national security strategy. Such heavy losses suggested that the IDF had become a paper-tiger, greatly amplifying the lesson of its 2006 military setbacks at the hands of Hezbollah in Lebanon. If poorly-armed Hamas militants could achieve such a serious blow, all of Israel’s regional adversaries were surely emboldened, and this would have been obvious to any Israeli national security officials who might have considered such a gambit.

We should also remember that Israel had been on the very verge of achieving normalized relations with Saudi Arabia, the wealthiest and most influential Arab state, a prospect that has now completely vanished. Israeli leaders had been pursuing that particular objective for decades and it seems very unlikely that Israel’s government would have sacrificed that opportunity by deliberately enabling a large Hamas attack.

But suppose that Netanyahu had actually been so politically desperate and so irrational that he had decided to allow a successful Hamas assault by standing down his own security defenses. How could he have possibly done so?

Aside from its regular army, Israel has three separate intelligence services, Mossad, Shin Bet, and Unit 8200, all of which tend to be rivals. So as former CIA Analyst Larry Johnson noted, Netanyahu would have needed to enlist the leadership of all three of those organizations in his treacherous plan to facilitate a successful Hamas attack, while making sure that none of the relevant rank-and-file officers disagreed and leaked the ultra-explosive story to the fiercely anti-Netanyahu media. This seems an impossibility.

Moreover, as already mentioned, Israeli society has recently been extremely divided, with the bulk of the nation’s elites lined up against Netanyahu and trying to drive him from office. According to media reports, the leadership of Mossad was squarely in the anti-Netanyahu camp with claims that Mossad agents were even helping to orchestrate the huge public demonstrations demanding his resignation. Surely if they had gotten the slightest hint the Netanyahu was deliberately opening the country to a huge Hamas attack, they would have used that fact to destroy him.

Also, Netanyahu is running a coalition government, with many of his top ministers hating him and eager to undermine his reputation. Even his own lieutenants might welcome his fall so that they could replace him and rise to power and it’s difficult to believe that so deadly a secret could have been kept in such a political snake-pit. And now that so many hundreds of Israeli civilians have been killed, a single outraged leaker could have Netanyahu and his fellow conspirators put on trial or even lynched. According to Seymour Hersh’s Israeli sources, Netanyahu’s long political career cannot possibly survive the aftermath of the military disaster his country has now suffered.

Reports that an Egyptian warning of a planned Hamas attack were ignored may or may not be a sign of negligence; perhaps numerous previous warnings along similar lines had always turned out to be false alarms. More serious are reports that Netanyahu had recently redeployed two of the three Israeli battalions based on the Gaza border to the West Bank in order to support Jewish settlers in their aggressive actions against the local Palestinians. But that seems more a sign of complacency and incompetence than treasonous plotting.

Pro-Israel Propaganda-Lies vs. Reality (Oct. 30)

…I think that subsequent political developments have almost eliminated that possibility (of a false flag). A few days ago, the New York Times described the political situation in Israel:

Mr. Netanyahu has appeared unusually isolated since the Hamas attack, amid cratering poll numbers and accusations that his chaotic leadership over the past year had set the stage for the catastrophic security failure on Oct 7.

Few members of his government have given him their unqualified backing since the day, with many simply saying that scrutiny of the government’s mistakes should wait until the war ends.

“I’m saying in the clearest way possible: It is clear to me that Netanyahu and the entire government of Israel and everyone on whose watch this happened bears responsibility for what happened,” one government minister from Mr. Netanyahu’s party, Miki Zohar, told a radio station on Thursday. “That is also clear to Netanyahu. That he also bears responsibility.”

Given such public criticism of Netanyahu by his own cabinet minister, there would be a gigantic political incentive for any whistle-blower to come forward and reveal that the government had deliberately allowed the Hamas attack to proceed. In this atmosphere, it would be totally impossible to keep secret that sort of explosive revelation.

Meanwhile, if Netanyahu had the slightest reason to suspect that his many political enemies in the security services had deliberately facilitated the Hamas attack in order to embarrass him, he would be moving heaven and earth to uncover those facts and salvage his career.

Yet nothing like this has happened. Israel’s raucous parliament is notorious for its wild accusations and heated rhetoric, yet I haven’t heard a single member of the Knesset make any such incendiary claims.

A commenter on our website made a very similar point regarding reactions in the Arab world:

There are currently 465 million Arabs on the planet, who speak the same language as Hamas, who have their own media, channels and journalists, some very deeply committed to Palestine, and some kowtowing to the Zionists. There is not a single Arab media, journalist, or even random citizen interviewed in the street expressing the lunatic opinion that the 7 October Al Quds Flood was a false flag.

Arabs and Israelis obviously possess the best understanding of the local situation and they are often highly “conspiratorial” in their beliefs. So if virtually none of them anywhere suggest this possibility, it seems rather foolish for ignorant outsiders to do so.