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October
11
2023

Hamas’ Attack on Israel Is Puzzling
Paul Craig Roberts

I am being asked about the Israeli-Palestine conflict, which seems to be taking attention away from the Ukraine-Russia conflict.  People, by which I mean people who pay attention, are wondering why the Palestinians would attack Israel like this as it provides Netanyahu with an excuse to grab the remaining bits of Palestine and destroy the Gaza strip, thus disposing of  the two-state solution by conquest.  Who can blame Israel after Palestinians killed Israelis and took hostages?

I have heard the official explanation of Palestinian perfidy, but I don’t have an explanation for the attack. It seems it would have to be more than perfidy.  I do agree with readers that it seems a curious thing for Hamas to do as it plays into Israel’s hands.  I also agree that there is something else strange about the attack. How did drones and so many rockets, allegedly from Iran, and some say Ukraine, get into the Gaza strip, and how did the Hamas attackers get into Israel?

The Hamas attack has something of  9/11’s flavor.  Just as every aspect of the US National Security State failed simultaneously on September 11, 2001, Israel’s security system, including the Iron Dome the US constructed for Israel, simultaneously failed.  Mysteriously, the Hamas fighters entered Israel on the ground and through the air and on the sea without being detected.  Mysteriously, large quantities of weapons entered Palestine through Israel without being detected. This is too much convenient failure to be believable. It will be interesting to see if anyone in Israel is held accountable for the total security failure.  In the US no one was held accountable for the security failures on September 11, which should have  told us a lot.

Not knowing, we can but speculate.  We have a motive. Israel can now steal the rest of Palestine.  Another motive might be that Israel can expand the conflict into a wider war and succeed this time in grabbing the water resources of southern Lebanon.  It could even get nastier with Israeli moves against Syria and Iran.  Oil prices could go sky high causing world disruption.  A victorious war and the end of the Palestinian problem would free Netanyahu from his legal and political problems. There is a lot to think about. 

But let’s move on to the security failure that made the attack possible. Why would Netanyahu enable Hamas to attack Israel by standing down Israel security?  It seems a nonsensical suggestion, but isn’t as it creates the conditions in which Israel can absorb all that remains of Palestine, just as 9/11 created the conditions for the neoconservatives to launch the wars they had planned in the Middle East.

The difficult question is why would the Palestinians bring on their own destruction by attacking Israel when Hamas has no prospect of defeating Israel?  Again, we can only speculate.  It could be an Israeli operation from start to finish.  Israel infiltrates Hamas, just as the FBI infiltrates Trump supporters and patriotic groups now called domestic terrorists.  The Israeli agents play up Israel’s abuse of the Palestinians. Netanyahu helps them along by blowing up the sacred Mosque. The agents come up with an attack plan made possible with weapons from Iran and devices from Iran to jam Israeli security.  They go about this carefully, relying on the decades of anger and hurt and the prospect of release from impotence to crowd out Hamas’ reason.

I don’t say these speculations suffice as the explanation.  But I would not be surprised if these speculations, if investigated, would prove to be closer to the truth than whatever official narrative emerges.

Hon. Paul Craig Roberts is the John M. Olin Fellow at the Institute for Political Economy, Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and Research Fellow at the Independent Institute. A former editor and columnist for The Wall Street Journal and columnist for Business Week and the Scripps Howard News Service, he is a nationally syndicated columnist for Creators Syndicate in Los Angeles and a columnist for Investor's Business Daily. In 1992 he received the Warren Brookes Award for Excellence in Journalism. In 1993 the Forbes Media Guide ranked him as one of the top seven journalists.

He was Distinguished Fellow at the Cato Institute from 1993 to 1996. From 1982 through 1993, he held the William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. During 1981-82 he served as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy. President Reagan and Treasury Secretary Regan credited him with a major role in the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981, and he was awarded the Treasury Department's Meritorious Service Award for "his outstanding contributions to the formulation of United States economic policy." From 1975 to 1978, Dr. Roberts served on the congressional staff where he drafted the Kemp-Roth bill and played a leading role in developing bipartisan support for a supply-side economic policy.

In 1987 the French government recognized him as "the artisan of a renewal in economic science and policy after half a century of state interventionism" and inducted him into the Legion of Honor.

Dr. Roberts' latest books are The Tyranny of Good Intentions, co-authored with IPE Fellow Lawrence Stratton, and published by Prima Publishing in May 2000, and Chile: Two Visions - The Allende-Pinochet Era, co-authored with IPE Fellow Karen Araujo, and published in Spanish by Universidad Nacional Andres Bello in Santiago, Chile, in November 2000. The Capitalist Revolution in Latin America, co-authored with IPE Fellow Karen LaFollette Araujo, was published by Oxford University Press in 1997. A Spanish language edition was published by Oxford in 1999. The New Colorline: How Quotas and Privilege Destroy Democracy, co-authored with Lawrence Stratton, was published by Regnery in 1995. A paperback edition was published in 1997. Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy, co-authored with Karen LaFollette, was published by the Cato Institute in 1990. Harvard University Press published his book, The Supply-Side Revolution, in 1984. Widely reviewed and favorably received, the book was praised by Forbes as "a timely masterpiece that will have real impact on economic thinking in the years ahead." Dr. Roberts is the author of Alienation and the Soviet Economy, published in 1971 and republished in 1990. He is the author of Marx's Theory of Exchange, Alienation and Crisis, published in 1973 and republished in 1983. A Spanish language edition was published in 1974.

Dr. Roberts has held numerous academic appointments. He has contributed chapters to numerous books and has published many articles in journals of scholarship, including the Journal of Political Economy, Oxford Economic Papers, Journal of Law and Economics, Studies in Banking and Finance, Journal of Monetary Economics, Public Finance Quarterly, Public Choice, Classica et Mediaevalia, Ethics, Slavic Review, Soviet Studies, Rivista de Political Economica, and Zeitschrift fur Wirtschafspolitik. He has entries in the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Economics and the New Palgrave Dictionary of Money and Finance. He has contributed to Commentary, The Public Interest, The National Interest, Harper's, the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Fortune, London Times, The Financial Times, TLS, The Spectator, Il Sole 24 Ore, Le Figaro, Liberation, and the Nihon Keizai Shimbun. He has testified before committees of Congress on 30 occasions.

Dr. Roberts was educated at the Georgia Institute of Technology (B.S.), the University of Virginia (Ph.D.), the University of California at Berkeley and Oxford University where he was a member of Merton College.

He is listed in Who's Who in America, Who's Who in the World, The Dictionary of International Biography, Outstanding People of the Twentieth Century, and 1000 Leaders of World Influence. His latest book, HOW THE ECONOMY WAS LOST, has just been published by CounterPunch/AK Press. He can be reached at: [email protected]

 

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