Jonathan Pollard: Israeli Military Forces Told To Stand Down While Hamas Killed, Tortured Israelis

Story at Vox Day who relates what Pollard said and discusses another example of "green flag" attacks. In case you are wondering who is Jonathan Pollard, he is a traitor to the United States and spy for Israel who, as Wikipedia describes it, "sold numerous closely guarded state secrets, including the National Security Agency's ten-volume manual on how the U.S. gathers its signal intelligence, and disclosed the names of thousands of people who had cooperated with U.S. intelligence agencies" to Israel. Sentenced to life in prison in 1987, he was released from prison in 2015 after several efforts by Israel to have him released. In 2020, after his parole restrictions ended, he moved to Israel where he was given a hero's welcome. Again, from the Wikipedia article (footnotes omitted):

    ... Pollard and his wife, Esther, finally arrived in Israel on December 30, 2020, on a private jet owned by US billionaire Sheldon Adelson. They were greeted on arrival by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who handed Pollard his Israeli documentation. Israeli Intelligence Minister Eli Cohen said that Pollard would be granted a government stipend equivalent to the pensions granted to former Mossad and Shin Bet agents. ...

    Pollard was honored by Mayor of Jerusalem Moshe Lion at a Jerusalem Day gala in 2021. Pollard gave the keynote address to the gala, in which he accused the U.S. government of anti-Semitism, called the U.S State Department and the United Nations enemies of Israel, and referred to the Biden administration as "Amalek." In Jewish tradition, the 613 commandments mandates that Amalekites must be killed.

 More:

• "Free in Israel, convicted spy Jonathan Pollard calls for more Americans to betray their country"--Middle East Monitor. This article ironically refers to Pollard as anti-Semitic because Pollard agreed that most Jews have greater loyalty to Israel than the Western countries into which they were born. 
• "Convicted spy Jonathan Pollard gets hero’s welcome in Israel"--New York Post. 

So, with his bona-fides established as an ardent Israeli nationalist, what did Pollard say about a "green flag" order?

“…It took six hours for any reaction to occur, when the army and air force bases were within earshot of what was going on. I have friends who were helicopter pilots, attack pilots, who were sitting in their cockpits ready to take off, fully loaded, ready to stop them at the fence. They didn’t get their orders for six hours. They could hear it. They could hear the fighting! They were called by friends in the border kibbutzim and moshavim that were being overrun and slaughtered, saying ‘Help us! Please! They’re killing our children!’ They weren’t given permission to take off. That will haunt my friend for the rest of his life. He feels personally responsible for many deaths because of that – wrongly.”

 I've been wondering about whether these attacks were permitted from the beginning not just because it seemed so implausible that Israeli intelligence would miss it (and, in fact, we later learned that Hamas had been openly practicing its attacks with the paragliders only a mile from the border) but because almost immediately after the attacks, I started seeing articles about how these attacks were going to bring down Benjamin Netanyahu. For instance, on October 10, The Atlantic published "The Reckoning" by Yossi Klein Halevi, in which he intoned:

    No less horrifying to Israelis was the unbearable ease with which the murderers went from house to house, kidnapping and slaughtering. Over and over, we ask one another the questions that have no answers: Why did it take the IDF a full day to reach those communities? Where were the police? Why did the desperate calls for help go unanswered?

    The massacre carried out by Hamas has been compared to 9/11, but like most analogies applied to Israel’s situation, it fails to describe the reality. No American seriously thought that the very existence of the United States was endangered by the fall of the Twin Towers. But the defeat inflicted by Israel’s least formidable opponents has profound strategic implications, emboldening other enemies on its borders. In Israel, no strategic depth separates the home front from genocidal threats.

    Scarcely less frightening than the IDF’s failure to protect Israeli citizens at their most dire moment is that our leadership has effectively collapsed. Addressing the nation on Monday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered little more than bluster and clichés, without inspiration. No Israeli cabinet minister has visited the wounded in hospitals, although that is standard procedure during times of crisis. The desperate families of the missing have pleaded with the government to meet with them, so far to no avail.

    Clearly our leaders are afraid to face an outraged public. A cartoon in the newspaper Haaretz showed the members of the cabinet cowering under a table.

    Israel’s most divisive government is presiding over one of the most sensitive moments in our history, when we desperately need leaders we can trust. But not only is this government the most politically extreme in our history; it is also the least qualified to decide matters of life and death. Collectively, the heads of the coalition have less military experience by far than the leaders of any previous government. Much of the country had lost faith in the government’s competence long before this week’s catastrophe. Now that judgment has been frighteningly confirmed.

And, he concludes:

    Israel’s second reckoning, which must await the end of the war, will be with Benjamin Netanyahu. Following the Yom Kippur War, a lone reservist named Motti Ashkenazi began a hunger strike outside the office of Prime Minister Golda Meir, demanding that she take responsibility for the joint Egyptian-Syrian surprise attack and resign. The Agranat Commission, a government-appointed inquiry headed by Israeli Supreme Court Chief Justice Shimon Agranat, focused on the failures of the military leadership and avoided blaming the politicians. But an enraged public rallied around Ashkenazi and, six months after the war, the prime minister resigned.

    If anything, the rage many Israelis feel today toward Netanyahu is far greater. By tearing apart the country in his attempt to weaken the courts, he knowingly undermined Israeli deterrence. He was repeatedly warned by the IDF of the likely consequences of his judicial revolution, in terms of both the IDF’s readiness for war and the willingness of Israel’s enemies to test its weakness. Netanyahu ignored the warnings, even refusing at one point to meet with the IDF chief, Herzi Halevi.

    Halevi will need to answer hard questions, including about the IDF’s stunning intelligence failures and its initially disastrous performance in dealing with the terrorist invasion. Perhaps the most crucial of those questions is who gave the order to transfer the division on the Gaza border to the West Bank, to protect settlers against terror attacks—a decision that the army must own but that certainly originated with the government.

    Netanyahu will stay true to form and try to deflect the blame onto others, beginning with the army but also including the anti-government demonstrators who thwarted his antidemocratic revolution. This time, though, his evasive tactics won’t work. Netanyahu has presided over the most devastating day in Israeli history, the inevitable culmination of the disaster he has inflicted over the past year on his own people. 

 Since then I've seen a string of similar articles:

• "Worst Failure in Israeli History: Netanyahu Abandoned the Very Heart of Israel" by Gitit Ginat, The Daily Beast (Oct. 14).
• "The End of Netanyahu" by Yair Rosenberg, The Atlantic (Oct. 22).
• "‘Netanyahu Got All the Warnings,’ Says Former Head of Israeli Military Intelligence" by Ben Birnbaum, Politico (Oct. 24).

And others similar articles as well. Prior to the attacks, Netanyahu had been urging reforms on Israel's judicial systems that his enemies hated. Israeli intelligence and military were in open revolt, with many reservists refusing to report to duty. There were public demonstrations. Yet the reforms were apparently popular enough that he couldn't be removed as Prime Minister. Now, he undoubtedly will be.