Israel in the hours before an uncertain dawn.
Home again. Much to report. In the shadows, faint glimpses of what may be light.
Ring the bells that still can ring. Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack, a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in.
- from Leonard Cohen’s Anthem.
It is, whether we want to admit this or not, a world war. It is directed from Tehran and Moscow, its quartermaster is Beijing. For all the unspeakable acts of barbarism committed by Hamas in the October 7 attacks that shocked the civilized world and set the current agonies on their course, this is also true: What Hamas carried off was a sophisticated, meticulously planned military operation.
Those two things are true. These two things are also true:
This thing: After an initial slaughter of nearly 1,200 Israelis in the worst single-day massacre of Jews since the time of the Einsatzgruppen death squads during the Holocaust, at least 15,000 civilians in Gaza can now be reliably counted among the dead. Among the living are roughly two million shellshocked Palestinians on the brink of starvation, many with untended wounds and perhaps most with profound psychological damage, huddled under tarps in the rubble of bomb-cratered streets and alleys.
And this thing: In the military campaign the Israeli Defence Forces have been waging in their determination to smash Hamas, the IDF has taken more measures to guard against civilian casualties than any other urban-warfare military campaign in history. Those measures have included nearly six million telephone calls, four million text messages and 1.5 million pamphlets dropped with instructions on IDF operation areas and routes to corridors leading out of harm’s way.
The upper hand is currently held, arguably, by the Middle Eastern Axis headed by the Khomeinist regime in Tehran - primarily Hamas, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the de facto Houthi government in Yemen and the semi-official Khomeinist militias in Iraq.
That latter grouping, the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, has carried out more than 150 missile and rocket attacks on U.S. interests in the region since October 7, almost all of which you’ve probably never heard about. Its latest action was Sunday’s attack on the U.S. base at Tower 22 in the Great Syrian Desert.
Three Americans were killed - the first Americans to die in the fighting since October 7 - and roughly three dozen Americans were seriously injured.
I’m with Nathan Sales over at the Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative, here: “For months, the United States has stood by while the Iranian regime’s terror proxies have taken shot after shot at US servicemembers in the region, seemingly from a misplaced fear that a decisive response would provoke yet more violence from Tehran. Today, the bill for this failure to establish deterrence tragically came due. It is long past time to stop self-deterring and take the gloves off.”
Tower 22 is right at the northeastern tip of the Kingdom of Jordan, where the Iraqi-Syrian frontier meets Jordanian territory (which means this attack violates Jordanian sovereignty, too). The BBC’s John Ringer reached out to me yesterday, having noticed that I’d been at Tower 22 a few years ago. “Did you happen to take any photos of the base? They’d be very helpful to illustrate the story.”
The only photos I had in my archives weren’t going to be helpful, I told him. I was at Tower 22 before the Americans settled in, back when Syrians were fleeing across the border to the Jordanian outpost there and the Assad regime’s soldiers were gunning them down as they ran.
Here’s a conversation from last night, with my pal the author and Ottawa man-about-town Fred Litwin and David Roytenberg from the Canadian Zionist Forum. Subscribers will remember these lads from a previous Real Story panel, here. I talk a bit about my whirlwind visit to Israel (I was still pretty jetlagged, as may be obvious to viewers). David’s off to Israel tomorrow and Fred’s heading out next month.
I’ll have more about my sojourn in Israel in coming editions of the Real Story newsletter, and it’s going to be all war, all the time for me at the National Post and the Ottawa Citizen for the next several days. Miles to go before I sleep.
I was traveling with the Post’s editor-in-chief Rob Roberts (the editor so nice they named him twice). Here’s a couple of Rob’s dispatches to give you a sense of the scope of our travels and his sense of the state of things, which accords with my own: Destroying Hamas is the only goal that matters to Israelis, whatever the ICJ says and The smell of horror in Israel's kibbutzim is hardest to forget.
The trip was made possible by a group of concerned citizens at Temple Sinai in Toronto. They’d noticed how so few Canadian journalists had actually visited the scene of the Hamas crimes of October 7, so they put temple member Larry Maher to the logistics and Yitzhak Sokoloff’s Keshet Educational Services to the in-country arrangements. The Toronto Sun’s Brian Lilley and Sun editor in chief Adrienne Batra came along as well.
My colleagues had never been to Israel before. I’ve made several visits, and let me tell you, this is a changed country. Israelis are engaged in a people’s war, and just about everyone is mobilized in one way or another, which I’ll be getting into in later newsletters.
For now. . .