State Department whistleblower J. Michael Springmann is a Washington, DC lawyer. The author of Visas for al-Qaeda: CIA Handouts That Rocked the World knows a thing or two about false flags.
So it isn’t easy to win a debate with “J-Mike,” especially on the topic of false flags. But I did my best on this week’s False Flag Weekly News.
J. Michael Springmann argues that the Hamas incursion into Israel looks like a LIHOP (let it happen on purpose) false flag. Somebody on the Israeli side, Springmann says, must have opened the door and let Hamas in. High on the suspects list, he says, is Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu. The purpose: strengthen the Israeli right while uniting the nation and providing PR cover to clobber—if not exterminate—the Palestinians.
What’s the evidence for a LIHOP interpretation of Operation al-Aqsa Storm?
Bibi Ignores Warning
First, as the Times of Israel reported, “Egypt intelligence official says Israel ignored repeated warnings of ‘something big.’” According to the Times, Egypt’s intelligence chief, Gen. Abbas Kamel, contacted Netanyahu directly with an urgent warning: “An Egyptian intelligence official said that Jerusalem had ignored repeated warnings that the Gaza-based terror group was planning ‘something big’ — which included an apparent direct notice from Cairo’s intelligence minister to the prime minister.”
Despite the repeated warnings from Egypt about Gaza, the Netanyahu government was “focused on the West Bank and played down the threat from Gaza. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government is made up of supporters of West Bank settlers who have demanded a security crackdown there in the face of a rising tide of violence over the last 18 months.” (Netanyahu, of course, denies that he was warned at all.)
According to the LIHOP interpretation, Netanyahu deliberately ignored the warnings, and sent security forces away from Gaza into the West Bank, because he knew the Gaza attack was in the works and wanted it to succeed. The alternative explanation, as we’ll see, involves an amalgamation of arrogance and incompetence.
CIA Scribe Hints at LIHOP
Another bit of circumstantial evidence for the false flag interpretation is a peculiar Washington Post article by the CIA’s unofficial scribe, David Ignatius, who compares Israel’s “strange blindness” pre-al-Aqsa-Storm to America’s “strange blindness” pre-9/11. Reading between the lines, we understand that Ignatius knows, but cannot directly state in public, that America’s defenses stood down pre-9/11 to allow that false flag attack to succeed, and is strongly implying that the same thing happened in Israel with respect to al-Aqsa Storm.
Why would Ignatius encode that message in a Washington Post article? To communicate to his faction, the CIA-based anti-neocon realists, the truth of the situation so they can make decisions accordingly? (Such incendiary accusations are best voiced indirectly.)
If Ignatius writes by and for the sane people in the CIA, Israeli author and journalist Ronan Bergman does the same for Mossad. So what does Bergman say about the surprising success of al-Aqsa Storm?
Mossad Scribe Blames SNAFUs
In his New York Times article “How Israel’s Feared Security Services Failed to Stop Hamas’s Attack,” Bergman says Israeli soldiers guarding the border were sent an alert shortly before the incursion, but for still-unclear reasons either didn’t get it or didn’t read it. Next,
“Hamas…sent drones to disable some of the Israeli military’s cellular communications stations and surveillance towers along the border, preventing the duty officers from monitoring the area remotely with video cameras. The drones also destroyed remote-controlled machine guns that Israel had installed on its border fortifications. That made it easier for Hamas assailants to approach and blow up parts of the border fence and bulldoze it in several places with surprising ease, allowing thousands of Palestinians to walk through the gaps.”
Bergman blames arrogance and incompetence:
Two of the officials said that the Israeli border surveillance system was almost entirely reliant on cameras, sensors and machine guns that are operated remotely.
Israeli commanders had grown overly confident in the system’s impregnability. They thought that the combination of remote surveillance and arms, barriers above ground and a subterranean wall to block Hamas from digging tunnels into Israel made mass infiltration unlikely, reducing the need for significant numbers of soldiers to be physically stationed along border line itself.
According to Bergman, the key to the attack’s success was Hamas’s brilliant use of drones to disable Israeli command-and-communications:
But the remote-control system had a vulnerability: It could also be destroyed remotely.
Hamas took advantage of that weakness by sending aerial drones to attack the cellular towers that transmitted signals to and from the surveillance system, according to the officials and also drone footage circulated by Hamas on Saturday and analyzed by The New York Times.
Without cellular signals, the system was useless. Soldiers stationed in control rooms behind the front lines did not receive alarms that the fence separating Gaza and Israel had been breached, and could not watch video showing them where the Hamas attackers were bulldozing the barricades. In addition, the barrier turned out to be easier to break through than Israeli officials had expected.
Israeli Inside Job or Hamas Intelligence Triumph?
One more bit of evidence for an “inside job” interpretation is Hamas’s statement that it infiltrated the IDF and got inside help. This has been borne out, according to US MSM reports, of headcam footage from a slain Palestinian fighter showing that his squad had insider knowledge of where to go and what to do as it attacked an Israeli border command post.
But was Hamas handed that insider knowledge on a silver platter by Bibi Netanyahu himself? Not likely. According to Press TV reports based on Hamas sources, Palestinians have used traditional spycraft to “turn” IDF personnel and collect intelligence. If we choose to frame that as “Palestinians being double-crossed by Israelis who give the Palestinians accurate intelligence to be used in a successful attack that Israel actually wants,” we had better be sure that Israel could be confident that it would ultimately benefit from a successful Hamas attack. Did Israel really have grounds for such confidence?
A 9/11-Style Provocation to Justify Finishing Off the Palestinians?
The narrative “Israel wanted its own 9/11 so it could finish the Nakba” has superficial plausibility. For years, some of the world’s leading experts on Occupied Palestine, including former BBC Mideast correspondent Alan Hart, have warned us that such a scenario was in the works:
What will Zionism's in-Israel leaders do when they conclude that with bombs and bullets and repressive measure of all kinds they cannot break the will of the occupied and oppressed Palestinians to continue their struggle? My guess is that they will create a pretext to drive the Palestinians off the West Bank and into Jordan or wherever. If that happens, the West Bank will be soaked in blood, mostly Palestinian blood, and honest reporters will describe it as a Zionist holocaust. (source)
That Zionist holocaust (Nakba Part 2) has already begun—but centered on Gaza, not the West Bank. As I write this on October 15, already over 2,330 Palestinians have been killed and over 6,500 injured since the beginning of al-Aqsa Storm. And the Israelis have not even entered Gaza yet.
Could Israel Expect a False-Flag Driven Holocaust to Succeed?
But to believe that Israel stood down and deliberately allowed al-Aqsa Storm to succeed requires us to believe that the Israeli leadership felt confident that it would emerge from the slaughter in a substantially better position than it had been in prior to the outbreak of hostilities. Would that have been a reasonable expectation?
I don’t think so. First, while Israel may have concluded that it “cannot break the will of the occupied and oppressed Palestinians,” it isn’t obvious why it needed to break their will any time soon. Prior to October 7, Israel was on track to normalize with Saudi Arabia, which in turn was making peace with Iran under Chinese tutelage. A relatively calm and peaceful region, in which the unhappy Palestinians were largely forgotten, would have allowed Israel to continue its vicious but gradual encroachments on Palestine without significant pushback.
By breaking that logjam, al-Aqsa Storm benefits Palestine, not Israel. Overnight, the MENA region has gone from acquiescing to Israel’s crimes to resisting them. Millions of Muslims are hitting the streets.
The Saudis and Iranians are still on the same page, only now it’s “defend al-Aqsa, stop the genocide of Palestine.” Lebanon and Syria are ready to open a second front if necessary. Iraq stands firmly with the Palestinians. Jordanians and Lebanese are climbing the border walls to join the fight. Turkey is contemplating ice-cold revenge for the Marmi Marmara massacre in the form of breaking the Gaza blockade to stop the genocide. And Russia, disgusted by Israel’s embrace of Ukro-Nazis, has moved firmly into the pro-Palestine camp…where China has always been.
As Lucas Leiroz wrote at SouthFront: “Unrestricted support for Israel appears to remain solely with the US and its proxies. This makes the Palestinian conflict yet another center of tension in the current process of geopolitical transition to a multipolar world.” The uncertainties associated with that transition should have undermined any confidence Israeli decision-makers might have had that they could incite a big war, successfully accelerate their ethnic cleansing, and emerge in a better strategic position than they would have been without major hostilities.
Thanks to al-Aqsa Storm, Israel finds itself—more than ever before—on the wrong side of history. The last settler-colonial domino after British Kenya, French Algeria, Rhodesia, and South Africa, apartheid Israel has only survived due to US global hegemony and the Lobby’s dominance of the US government, media, and financial sector. The demise of US hegemony means the likely end of Israel. In recent years the US has been handed an escalating series of losses: Iraq, Afghanistan, and (as was more or less admitted under cover of al-Aqsa Storm) Ukraine. Israel’s wagon is hitched to a caravan that’s sinking into quicksand.
But What About the Blanket of 9/11-Style Hate Propaganda?
Those who see al-Aqsa Storm as an Israeli false flag are misled by Western media, which portray Hamas’s incursion into Israel as a terrorist rampage. Inundated by dubious stories of baby-beheadings, music festival massacres, lovely young women assaulted and kidnapped, and on and on, it seems obvious to the false-flag-savvy that such an atrocity exhibition is a PR triumph for Israel, and a PR disaster for Palestine. Since Israel benefits from the PR fallout, they conclude, Israel must have orchestrated or allowed al-Aqsa Flood.
This analysis fails to distinguish between what actually happened (a Palestinian attack on Israeli military facilities with a secondary mission of taking prisoners who could serve as hostages to get Palestinian prisoners released) and the false and distorted Western media portrayal (baby beheadings, etc.) So yes, the whole thing was orchestrated by Israel…if what you mean by “the whole thing” is the Zionist propaganda you have been witnessing on your screens.
Take Ben Shapiro…please. That repulsive little Zionist turd posted a picture of what looked like an oversized turd in a diaper and claimed it was a dead Israeli baby burned to a crisp by Hamas.
As it turned out, I was wrong. Shapiro created the image not by crapping his diaper, but by using AI to insert a turd in place of a puppy:
I don’t really understand why Shapiro replaced the puppy with a gigantic turd. Maybe his psychoanalyst knows. Anyway, if he were a more competent Zio-propagandist-for-genocide, he could have used that cute little puppy much more effectively, to wit:
Or better yet, “If you don’t give Israel money, Ben Shapiro will keep churning out this excruciating stuff.”
Anyway…
If you accept Zionist propaganda at face value, by believing what you see in the [[[Western media]]], you may say: “Oh my God, these horrible Hamas atrocities, like killing and roasting that poor little Jewish baby, are so AWFUL that…” [A: BLUE-PILLED MORON] “We must stand with Israel and give it everything it needs to drop white phosphorous on Palestinian babies” [OR: B: PINK-PILLED SEMILITERATE] “Hamas must be an evil and quite possibly Israeli-supported group, and the whole thing smells like a false flag.”
The reality—that Hamas and the rest of the Palestinian Resistance are heroes who have the blessings of international law in their just war against Israeli soldiers and settlers—is obvious to everyone who lives outside of the Western media bubble. And the near-universal non-Western perception that they scored a huge victory, and may even have saved their cause, with the brilliantly organized and executed al-Aqsa Storm, is the best explanation of what transpired.
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Debating J. Michael Springmann on Whether Hamas Attack Was a False Flag