Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

“Patience is waiting. Not passively waiting. That is laziness, but you keep going when you're going is hard and slow – that is patience. The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.”

– Leo Tolstoy.

“The exercise of imagination is dangerous to those who profit from the way things are because it has the power to show that the way things are is not permanent, not universal, not necessary.”

– Ursula K, Le Guin, American author, change agent, and social critic, 1929 - 2018.

"I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I — I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference."

– Robert Frost

1. Opinion: ‘Action This Day’ – Churchill’s Lessons for the West

2. War Books: The Best Books We Read in 2023 - Modern War Institute

3. Why China is winning the new espionage Cold War

4. Women Bear the Brunt of Asia’s Climate Failures

5. US Navy sinks three Houthi militant boats in the Red Sea

6. NATO, U.S. Consult With Warsaw After Apparent Intrusion Of Russian Missile Into Polish Airspace

7. ANALYSIS-Sweeping Chinese military purge exposes weakness, could widen

8. Why is the Gaza war different?

9. China Confronts a New Political Reality in Taiwan: No Friends

10. Opinion: New York Times Editorial Board Very Wrong

11. How Columbia’s President Has Avoided Fallout Over Israel-Gaza Protests

12. Where Was the Israeli Military?

13. NATO needs Russia "ruined" in Ukraine for future peace: Official

14. Retired Flag Officers and Public Political Criticism by Robert L. Caslen

15. Chinese ex-Navy chief, with South China Sea background, named defence minister

16. ‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7

17. Israel’s ‘Black Sabbath’: Murder, Sexual Violence and Torture on Oct. 7

18. How ‘Antiracism’ Becomes Antisemitism

19. Ukraine, Stalled on the Front, Steps Up Sabotage, Targeting Trains

1. Opinion: ‘Action This Day’ – Churchill’s Lessons for the West

Do we (the royal "we" as in the US and the rest of the like minded democracies) have the will to never give in?

Excerpts:

While we are thinking about Churchill, perhaps it is worth finishing with a quote from a speech he delivered just eight days after that letter from Bletchley was dispatched to his office. He was speaking to pupils at his (and it happens to be my) alma mater, Harrow School.

Within that speech, in Britain’s most perilous days, when the US was yet to enter the war, he had this to say:

“Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never – in nothing, great or small, large or petty – never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy. We stood all alone a year ago, and to many countries it seemed that our account was closed, we were finished…Do not let us speak of darker days: let us speak rather of sterner days. These are not dark days; these are great days – the greatest days our country has ever lived.’

So too in 2024, not just for Ukraine, but for all those countries ready to stand up to dictatorship and defend freedom alongside her. For all those people who will not be cowed, do not speak of drearily carrying on endlessly ‘for as long as it takes’.

Action this day.

Opinion: ‘Action This Day’ – Churchill’s Lessons for the West

The mass missile attack on civilian targets in Ukraine shows us again that “for as long as it takes” is not good enough.

By Charles Cockell

December 31, 2023, 12:35 pm

kyivpost.com · by Charles Cockell

Winston Churchill was not one for feeble leadership and lack of resolve in the face of tyranny. I suspect he would have found the western world’s approach to our current bout of autocratic muscle flexing around the world frustratingly lacking in moral conviction and clarity.

Churchill knew two things. First, he knew that the greatest strength of dictators lies in their knowledge that peaceful people will always pray that if they show enough gentleness and reasonableness, the dictator will eventually come round to those same qualities. And thus, despots thrive off their languid hopes. The West’s lack of firmness in helping Ukraine and the silent expectation that eventually something will give way and let everyone off the hook has been a catastrophic failure.

To counter the brutality of dictators, one must rise to this challenge with equal material and physical strength. This is the only pushback they understand.

When one does this, of course, the result is usually some measure of success. This is because once physical capabilities are matched, then the matter becomes which side carries forward a morally more persuasive vision of humanity and which side carries a conviction of right over wrong. And Churchill knew that whatever the failings of the West, fundamentally it stood for a good world over a brazenly evil regime.

To counter the brutality of dictators, one must rise to this challenge with equal material and physical strength. This is the only pushback they understand.

There is neither moral confusion about what has been unleashed on Ukraine, a sovereign free nation, nor about the horror of what its cities and citizens are enduring.

The second thing that Churchill grasped was that the defense of freedom is no place for those who dither and delay. Over the past two years, US President Joe Biden and other western allies have given a great deal of military and financial support to Ukraine. But the rest is a story of flabby doubt. Russia’s latest attacks on Ukraine are the result of that perceived debility among Ukraine’s allies.

We have seen a dribble of support for Ukraine which has allowed the war to settle into a near-stalemate. Action earlier on would likely have prevented deep defensive lines becoming established like concrete serpents across the Ukrainian countryside. Standing up to the bully would have potentially mitigated much death and destruction.

Churchill had so little time for sloth and indecision that he possessed red labels that he slapped on documents demanding attention – “ACTION THIS DAY.”

The most famed use of this tag was in late 1941, when Bletchley Park, the code-breaking center of the British war effort, directly appealed to the prime minister for more support and staff. They were desperately short of personnel. Testing vital equipment and breaking codes that were pouring in from the Axis powers and the Far East was becoming sluggish and ineffective. People were exhausted. Help was needed.

Four leading crypto analysts, including Alan Turing, wrote to Churchill demanding assistance. The missive went to Downing Street. The letter was a microcosm of Ukraine appealing for help from the West to shore up a relentless war effort and inevitable tiredness.

"Make sure they have all they want on extreme priority and report to me that this has been done" was Churchill’s response, and on it, one of his infamous red stickers.

There is no ambiguity about Action This Day. But what about the new favorite response to Ukraine’s call for help: “We’ll be with you for as long as it takes?”

Prime Minister Winston Churchill Crosses the River Rhine, Germany 1945. Imperial War Museums.

Too little too late

Imagine putting that on the letter from Bletchley Park. What does it mean? “We’ll say nice things about you for as long as this war goes on?” Perhaps it means: “We’ll keep looking to see if we can help you, but we can’t guarantee anything?” Or maybe it means: “We’ll drip feed assistance when we get round to it. But keep going, we think you’re great?”

What the proclamation certainly does contain is a lack of any urgency in ending the problem. “For as long as it takes” is a capitulation to an absence of any possible decisive victory and an abnegation of responsibility for being able to determine when that end will come. In fact, it is an explicit surrender to Russia on the basis that Russia alone will determine that end point which remains mysterious and unknown to the West.

The battle cry of the democratic world, “For as long as it takes,” is about the most fatuous and useless defense of the free world that has ever been heard. Is it possible to dream up a more purposeless promise? Churchill would have been appalled.

The battle cry of the democratic world, “For as long as it takes,” is about the most fatuous and useless defense of the free world that has ever been heard.

Actions needed now

The West needs to get serious. Russia’s unambiguous statements about its attitudes towards its other neighbors, including Finland, make it clear that the war in Ukraine must be fought and concluded as soon as possible. Otherwise, it will spread into Europe and beyond. The cost in lives and money to hold the line will be vastly greater and bloodier. Action this day.

US Republicans need to stop arguing about their border wall, twiddling their thumbs while the free world burns, trying to decide whether they want an incoherent demagogue to run the country again. Get a grip, America. Pick sensible and intelligent presidential candidates. Defend the free world. Action this day.

European countries who remain concerned about providing arms to Ukraine, or whose help has been sporadic and temperamental, need to face the reality of the war. Action this day.

From North Korea to Venezuela and the Middle East, the western world’s febrile response to bellicose threats encourages others to try the same thing. We must step up and provide the world with concrete clarity about our intentions. Action this day.

We must protect Ukraine, including her men, women and above all, her children, from terror, displacement, and brutality. Action this day.

Never give in

While we are thinking about Churchill, perhaps it is worth finishing with a quote from a speech he delivered just eight days after that letter from Bletchley was dispatched to his office. He was speaking to pupils at his (and it happens to be my) alma mater, Harrow School.

Within that speech, in Britain’s most perilous days, when the US was yet to enter the war, he had this to say:

“Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never – in nothing, great or small, large or petty – never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy. We stood all alone a year ago, and to many countries it seemed that our account was closed, we were finished…Do not let us speak of darker days: let us speak rather of sterner days. These are not dark days; these are great days – the greatest days our country has ever lived.’

So too in 2024, not just for Ukraine, but for all those countries ready to stand up to dictatorship and defend freedom alongside her. For all those people who will not be cowed, do not speak of drearily carrying on endlessly ‘for as long as it takes’.

Action this day.

Charles Cockell is Professor of Astrobiology at the University of Edinburgh.

The views expressed are the author’s and not necessarily of Kyiv Post

kyivpost.com · by Charles Cockell

2. War Books: The Best Books We Read in 2023 - Modern War Institute

An excellent and wide ranging book list here. A number of new titles for me that I will have to check out.

War Books: The Best Books We Read in 2023 - Modern War Institute

mwi.westpoint.edu · by MWI Staff · December 29, 2023

Share on LinkedIn

Send email

Editor’s note: Welcome to another installment of our weekly War Books series! The premise is simple and straightforward. We invite a participant to recommend five books and tell us what sets each one apart. War Books is a resource for MWI readers who want to learn more about important subjects related to modern war and are looking for books to add to their reading lists.

This week we have a special year-end edition of War Books. We asked a number of people across the MWI network to share with readers the best books they read in 2023—nonfiction or fiction, quick reads or massive tomes, newly published or rediscovered classics. Here’s what they told us.

John Amble

Defense Will Not Win the War, by W. F. Kernan

Looking backward at history tends to smooth the jagged edges of uncertainty that characterize warfare. It’s easy to see the Allied war effort in Europe during World War II as a strategically wise march toward victory, and even that victory feels, if not inevitable, certainly more likely than it must have appeared to strategists charged with sequencing Allied campaigns to defeat Axis power. In 1942, when this book was written, opinion was divided on how best to pursue a military victory. It advocates for one such approach—eschewing the strategy of defense-first, liability-limiting warfare in favor of an offensive thrust directly at the heart of Europe. It’s value to readers today, though, is in challenging our biases and assumptions as we conceptualize the next big war—and how it will be won.

Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Ukraine, by David Petraeus and Andrew Roberts

Studying a number of wide-ranging conflicts over an extended period of time to correctly identify both through lines that connect them and significant but often subtle departures from existing trends is challenging. Doing so in a narrative manner that presents a comprehensive, detailed, and nuanced picture of warfare’s evolution is even more so. This book fulfills this task better than almost any book that sets out to do so.

Pieter Balcaen

The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World, by General Rupert Smith

This book contributes to an important discussion on how the military instrument can and should be introduced to achieve strategic aims (and the necessity of having clear strategic goals to start with).

SAS: Rogue Heroes, by Ben Macintyre

It is interesting to see the degree of innovation the SAS (Special Air Service) had during World War II, a good reflection when we see the degree of changes taking place in the current Ukrainian-Russian conflict.

Kevin Benson

Confronting Saddam Hussein: George W. Bush and the Invasion of Iraq, by Melvyn P. Leffler

Leap of Faith: Hubris, Negligence, and America’s Greatest Foreign Policy Tragedy, by Michael J. Mazarr Mazarr

Max Brooks

Japan at War: An Oral History, by Haruko Taya Cook and Theodore F. Cook

Like Studs Terkel’s The Good War, but focused on Japan, this is a vast, insightful, humanizing look into an enemy we tried so hard to dehumanize in World War II. In light of current competition with China, it’s more important than ever to study cultures that are so fundamentally different from our (still) largely Eurocentric way of thinking.

Elizabeth Buchanan

Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives, by Siddharth Kara

Energy transitions have not occurred neatly—many sources of renewable and low-emission energy have quite messy origin tales. Take for example, cobalt, largely found in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It’s worth knowing more about just one of the supply chains in our “new era” of energy.

Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Ukraine, by David Petraeus and Andrew Roberts

Our obsession with mapping wars and seeking elements of change or continuity rages on. This book expands our quest with assessments of the ongoing war in Ukraine and leaves me questioning if humans ever really learn from the past war—can we truly evolve in warfare?

On Wars, by Michael Mann

I think we need to hear a lot more from sociologists and anthropologists in matters of conflict and war. Mann delves into the role of individuals in opting to declare war or negotiate for peace.

Red Arctic: Russian Arctic Strategy under Putin, by Elizabeth Buchanan

Red Arctic charts Arctic strategy under Putin—how it is formulated, what drives it, and where it’s going. It’s a great book, although I may be biased. Help me feed my kids.

Mark Cancian

Fighting Power: German and U.S. Army Performance, 1939–1945, by Martin Van Creveld

I had occasion to reread this book this year, and it is still a superb analysis of the effect of personnel systems on military capability, a subject that gets much less attention than equipment or tactics.

Kerry Chávez

This book is a tremendous contribution to literatures on the domestic politics of war and civil-military relations. Positioned at the confluence of domestic and international politics, both require complex and clever analyses. Payne’s book is innovative, important, and researched at an impressive scale. Not only is it compelling, but it’s artfully written and a lovely read.

David Clouse

Defeat Into Victory: Battling Japan in Burma and India, 1942–1945, by Field Marshal Viscount Slim

Science, Strategy and War: The Strategic Theory of John Boyd, by Frans P.B. Osinga

Nicholas Dockery

Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology, by Chris Miller

Miller explores the influential impact of Moore’s Law, which projected the doubling of transistors on a chip every two years and has been a driving force in the rapid advancement of technology, exemplified by the growth from four transistors on a chip to 11.8 billion today. The book delves into the geopolitical and economic significance of semiconductor chips, detailing their role in global power structures and the race for technological supremacy, particularly highlighting the strategic importance of the semiconductor industry in global politics and economics. The narrative spans historical figures and pivotal moments in semiconductor development, including the Cold War’s tech race, Europe’s lag in transistor technology, and the rise of Asian semiconductor powerhouses, while also critiquing the industry’s masculine culture and providing insights into the global implications of chip manufacturing and distribution.

2034: A Novel of the Next World War, by Elliot Ackerman and James Stavridis

Ackerman and Stavridis delve into a futuristic conflict where technology and military strategy collide. The novel’s story, drawing a parallel with the historical hoax of “The Turk” chess machine, reflects on the dangers of overreliance on technology in warfare. Central characters navigate a tense geopolitical landscape involving the United States, China, Russia, Iran, and India, revealing a world where strident nationalism contrasts with global interconnectedness. The novel underscores the pivotal role of human decision-making in warfare, even as it is increasingly dominated by artificial intelligence and cyber capabilities, leading to a conclusion that the key to overcoming technological dominance might lie in eschewing technology altogether.

Zachary Griffiths

Men at Arms, by Evelyn Waugh

I’d like to recommend Evelyn Waugh’s Men at Arms (and the broader Sword of Honor trilogy). I turn to these books most years. As I wrote in a review around Veterans Day this year, “Waugh helps me make sense of my military service.”

Thom Hawkins

The Misbehavior of Markets: A Fractal View of Risk, Ruin and Reward, by Benoit Mandelbrot and Richard L. Hudson

While on its face this is a book about the volatility of financial markets, the ideas apply more broadly to complex systems, including situational awareness and prediction in the tactical environment.

Frank Hoffman

Command: The Politics of Military Operations from Korea to Ukraine, by Lawrence Freedman

Laura Keenan

Brave Men, by Ernie Pyle

This is a valuable firsthand account of World War II that captures the essence of the human experience during wartime. Pyle brings to life the stories of ordinary soldiers, depicting their struggles, camaraderie, and resilience amid the chaos of war. It is a reminder of how universal the emotions of soldiers fighting are, no matter what conflict or time period.

Steve Leonard

Fighting in the Dark: Naval Combat at Night, 1904–1944, edited by Vincent P. O’Hara and Trent Hone

This is a fantastic collection of historical essays that trace the evolution of the naval technological and procedural innovations that fostered the ability to fight at night, something that was rare and deliberately avoided before the twentieth century.

For everyone who complains about the “woke” military this book should be required reading. Generational cultural shifts are nothing new, nor is how older generations react to them.

Theo Lipsky

People in Glass Houses, by Shirley Hazzard

This book, the funniest I read this year, satirizes the bureaucracy of the 1960s United Nations. Yet those serving in the military today will recognize the world Hazzard sketches as theirs, and so get much from it—perhaps above all, catharsis.

Paul Lushenko

Should We Ban Killer Robots? by Deane Baker

I found this book useful to understand how we think about the moral and ethical implications of lethal autonomous weapons systems, and what can shape soldiers’ trust in partnering with them during future wars.

Radical War: Data, Attention, and Control in the Twenty-First Century, by Matthew Ford and Andrew Hoskins

I found this book useful to understand how emerging technologies have not only respatialized war but potentially instituted a new trinity of interdependent mechanisms that shape modern warfare and its outcomes, thus replacing the fabled Clausewitzian model of chance, passion, and politics.

Collin Meisel

Diary of a Madman, and Other Stories, by Lu Xun (translated by Willam A. Lyell)

Written during China’s Republican Era following the fall of the Qing dynasty, Lu Xun’s stories offer a unique and intimate view into the chaos and tragedy that defined much of that period. The book helped me better understand why so many Chinese were drawn to the Chinese Communist Party in the Republican Era and the years that followed, as the promise of order—virtually any order, so long as it did not involve domination by foreign powers—must have been extraordinarily appealing. And it has helped me empathize with—while continuing to strongly disagree with—adherents to other at-times fanatical movements in today’s modern wars.

Walker Mills

White Sun War: The Campaign for Taiwan, by Mick Ryan

Ryan’s book is a thrilling, fictional take on what an invasion of Taiwan and resulting war might look like in the next decade or so. This book will keep you reading all through the night.

Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, by Christopher Browning

Browning’s study of a single unit’s role in the Holocaust is a powerful and chilling portrait of how evil can be done by the eponymous “ordinary men” who made up the battalion, and the effect that it had on them.

Rick Montcalm

As an introvert, I appreciate the candid assessment of the dangers of relying on extroverts as leaders. This book provides a more comprehensive differentiation between introverts and extroverts based on energy management versus simply saying an extrovert is a people person and an introvert is not.

Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don’t Know, by Malcolm Gladwell

I appreciate this book’s case study approach to showing the dangers of inherent bias and preconceived notions. As a member of a security force assistance brigade, this hits home considering how often we find ourselves in some form of negotiations with foreign partners, each of whom operates within a context distinct from ours and other partners with whom we may interact.

Randy Noorman

We Few and Whispers in the Tall Grass, by Nick Brokhausen

These were written by a former member of MACV-SOG (Military Assistance Command, Vietnam–Studies and Observations Group) in the Vietnam War. The reason I liked them both so much was first the immense bravery of these guys fighting at such close distances and second the author’s ability to describe the tactical situations he was in so that at least people with military experience can imagine it the way it actually was.

Elena Pokalova

The Weaponisation of Everything: A Field Guide to the New Way of War, by Mark Galeotti

Hybrid Warriors: Proxies, Freelancers and Moscow’s Struggle for Ukraine, by Anna Arutunyan

Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism, by Anne Applebaum

Alec Rice

Let the Sea Make a Noise . . . A History of the North Pacific from Magellan to MacArthur, by Walter A. McDougall

What is old is new again: a keen reminder of the principle that geopolitics trumps ideology. This book is composed in a bit of a strange style (interludes are scattered throughout consisting of fictional banter between numerous historical figures). Setting that quirk aside the book is extremely readable and full of information. It clearly traces the connections between the activities and motivations of multiple nations regarding the Pacific over the past few hundred years as Russia ventured east into Siberia and North America, the United States forged west across the North American continent, and Japan modernized in response to encroaching European powers in Asia. I believe every US military leader should be required to read this book. Now.

Mick Ryan

The Russo-Ukrainian War: The Return of History, by Serhii Plokhy

Rebecca Segal

This is about why successful crisis and wartime leaders would often be described as mentally less healthy than successful peacetime and garrison leaders, who are typically very mentally healthy.

Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World, by Adam Grant

This one is about making change. It’s less directly war related and more focused on organizational leadership.

White Sun War: The Campaign for Taiwan, by Mick Ryan

This novel paints a great picture of a future fight.

Peter Schrijver

The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy

This book on Ukrainian history from a Ukrainian perspective is essential reading for gaining a deeper understanding of Russia and Ukraine today. From a review of the book: “Plokhy combines scholarly authority with narrative flair.”

Frank Sobchak

This should be on every military reading list. Frankly, it best explains the challenges of counterinsurgency in general and in Afghanistan specifically.

This book seems especially relevant in light of the Israel-Hamas war and was quite revelatory.

John Spencer

Elon Musk, by Walter Isaacson

Among this book’s themes, one that stands out is the degree to which—and the manner in which—social media is influencing the information dimension of politics and war, which we’re seeing today in Israel and Ukraine.

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, by Max Brooks

This is without a doubt the best audiobook ever created. The novel’s plot might be science fiction, but so much of it is actually very real. It is fundamentally about human reactions to catastrophes and a lot can be learned from it.

Kevin Stringer

A highly recommended small book that stimulates integrated thinking on strategy, irregular warfare, and security sector assistance.

Germany 1923: Hyperinflation, Hitler’s Putsch, and Democracy in Crisis, by Volker Ullrich

An examination of Germany and the Weimar Republic one hundred years ago. It offers unique insights and understanding of the post-WWI victor’s peace and its results for Germany.

Patrick Sullivan

This book chronicles Winston Churchill’s first year as prime minister, a period that saw the United Kingdom stand alone as the last line of opposition to Nazi Germany’s attempted conquest of Europe. Employing the “novelistic” approach to history that he popularized with Devil in the White City, In the Garden of Beasts, and Dead Wake, Larson deconstructs all the personalities and debates of the various orbits that informed Churchill’s strategic decision-making, from his war cabinet, to his political and military opponents in Nazi Germany, to his noncommittal American ally, and, most importantly, to his family and closest friends. This treatment provides essential insight into the nature and character of Churchill’s well-earned profile in courage, but without exclusive focus on him and removed from the hagiography of other recent popular works (especially in film and television). As such, The Splendid and the Vile is essential scholarship for any student of Churchill, World War II, or strategic leadership. Beyond this, Larson continues to churn out bestsellers for a reason—he’s a damn engrossing writer, and at the risk of sounding gauche, I would read anything by him sight unseen.

Benjamin Van Horrick

“How Is It Possible to Be Loved and Yet to Feel Deeply Lonely?” by Kaitlyn Creasy

Dr. Creasy’s essay treats return and the loneliness that often follows with rare depth, nuance, and warmth. The essay articulates many emotions servicemembers and veterans feel upon reentry. A thankful nation and relieved families welcome home veterans, but for servicemembers, nagging loneliness often persists following their transformative, both negatively and positively, deployment. Reading this generative essay can stoke a meaningful discussion for those returning and those eager to embrace.

“How to Beat Roulette: One Gambler Figured It Out and Won Big,” by Kit Chellel

Risk, luck, and persistence punctuate Kit Chellel’s Bloomberg long-form piece on how one gambler learned how to beat to roulette. Chellel’s detailed reporting and breakneck prose are not just a mediation on beating the odds but how obsession and practice overcame a once insurmountable obstacle. For military planners, the story of beating roulette serves as a template for how to solve a vexing problem. Those operating on the fringes of society to gain an edge offer military practitioners an unconventional yet effective model for approaching nagging problems and emergent threats.

Ali Wyne

With his characteristically erudite and eloquent application of historical lessons, Rehman renders a distressing conclusion: a war between the world’s two most powerful countries could drag on indefinitely, exacting human, military, and economic costs that strain the capacity of imagination. One hopes that his analysis will renew the determination of US and Chinese policymakers to ensure that competition does not culminate in catastrophe.

Image credit: Benjamin White (adapted by MWI)

Share on LinkedIn

Send email

mwi.westpoint.edu · by MWI Staff · December 29, 2023

3. Why China is winning the new espionage Cold War

Excerpts:

“We have seen a sustained campaign on a pretty epic scale,” said Ken McCallum, the head of MI5, during an unprecedented public appearance in October with the intelligence chiefs of the US, Australia, Canada and New Zealand — the Five Eyes alliance. McCallum said that MI5 had seen suspected Chinese agents approach more than 20,000 people in the UK via professional networking sites such as LinkedIn in an effort to obtain sensitive information.

McCallum’s comments came shortly after the revelation that a parliamentary researcher had been arrested on suspicion of spying for China. Through his solicitors he said he was “completely innocent”. China’s increasingly brazen activities were underscored when an alleged spy tried to infiltrate an invitation-only talk in a committee room of the Houses of Parliament given by Hong Kong dissidents. This month it was revealed that the Chinese agents ran a far-right Belgian politician as an intelligence asset for more than three years. Belgian security services are also investigating a Chinese-run trading hub at Liège airport for “possible spying and/or interference activities”.

US intelligence agencies are increasingly concerned that the MSS is rapidly harnessing machine learning and artificial intelligence for analyses, surveillance and disinformation. Perhaps Beijing’s biggest advantage over its rivals lies in the openness of western societies, which are far easier to penetrate and operate in than China’s closed and heavily surveilled system. In Russia, often toxic elite rivalries have provided an opening for western spies. Such rivalries exist in China, but they have proved more difficult to exploit, though endemic corruption has been leveraged in the past. Much is uncertain in intelligence, but it is safe to say that tense rivalries being played out in this shadowy world will reach a new peak in 2024.

Why China is winning the new espionage Cold War

Western spy chiefs are struggling to get human intelligence from Xi’s surveillance state, while China has penetrated every sector of the British economy

Ian Williams

Saturday December 30 2023, 6.00pm GMT, The Sunday Times

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/were-in-a-cold-war-of-espionage-and-chinas-in-command-qm0mpmhs6?utm

The espionage battle between the West and China increasingly resembles spying at the height of the Cold War. But there are two vital differences: China is armed with technology that the Soviet Union never possessed and President Xi’s inner circle is proving more challenging to penetrate than the Kremlin was.

This is the new year warning from America’s spymasters. Despite real concerns over Russian intentions following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year and over the likelihood of Israel’s Gaza war acting as a recruiting agent for Islamist terrorism, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) remains the biggest single focus for the CIA, its director, William Burns, said last week. The agency’s China Mission Centre is its only group focused on a single country and its funding is growing. “We are approaching the PRC as a global priority, more than doubling the budget resources devoted to the China mission over the past three years,” Burns told The Wall Street Journal.

The sense of urgency echoed the words of Sir Richard Moore, the head of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, who has described adapting to a world affected by the rise of China as “the single greatest priority for MI6”.

Spy chiefs are particularly worried about the lack of human intelligence on China, where the ubiquitous cameras of Xi’s surveillance state make running agents increasingly hazardous. The CIA is left to rely heavily on electronic intercepts and open sources, such as commercially available databases, social media and the public statements of China’s leaders.

The gap is in part a legacy of one of the biggest intelligence disasters of recent times. Between 2010 and 2012, Beijing ruthlessly dismantled the CIA’s network of sources in China, imprisoning and killing dozens of people. Little detail has been made publicly available, but China is thought to have cracked the system by which the agency communicated with its agents. The immense challenges of rebuilding this network were underlined in August when China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS), its main intelligence agency, claimed it had arrested two more Chinese citizens spying for the CIA, both recruited outside the country.

Espionage rumours are now swirling around Qin Gang, China’s former foreign minister, who disappeared without explanation in June. There is speculation that he or his mistress, a Cambridge-educated TV presenter, with whom he had a child, was compromised by western intelligence agencies. One recent report suggests Beijing was tipped off by Moscow. Qin vanished soon after a purge at the top of China’s Rocket Force, which oversees the country’s nuclear arsenal.

Recruiting spies able to report on the deliberations of China’s leadership has never been more vital.

As tensions around Taiwan rise year on year, Beijing remains reluctant to engage in the sort of formal military-to-military contacts of the type that existed in the old Cold War with the Soviet Union — communications aimed at preventing miscalculations.

The Pentagon has accused the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) of “coercive and risky operational behaviour”, releasing declassified images of Chinese jet fighters intercepting US aircraft in international air space above the South China Sea. The US military logged 180 incidents over a two-year period, with Chinese jets coming within 10 feet of their American rivals. The US sees better communications with the PLA as a way of putting “guardrails” around the relationship to stop such incidents spinning out of control.

Under Xi, the Chinese Communist Party’s paranoia has soared.

A new anti-espionage law defines spying so broadly that it would seem to cover just about anything the party chooses. The MSS has urged citizens to snoop on friends and neighbours, looking out for suspicious behaviour. “National security is the foundation of national revival, and social stability is the prerequisite for a strong nation,” it said. In July, officials in the southwestern city of Chengdu were told to block Tesla cars from areas that Xi was visiting out of fear that the cars, brimming with sensors and cameras, could be used for espionage or sabotage. Teslas had earlier been barred from military complexes and housing compounds. Elon Musk, Tesla’s owner, insisted his cars complied with China’s data rules and would never be used for spying.

Electric vehicles (EVs) are best seen as computers on wheels, each containing about 2,000 chips, with functions ranging from assisting with parking and monitoring the car’s health and maintenance to providing alerts and adjusting operations, while all the time sending and receiving real-time information. In other words, they are potentially one giant piece of spyware. In theory they could also be disabled remotely, as happened when Russian soldiers looted advanced tractors and harvesters from a John Deere dealership in Melitopol, in southeastern Ukraine, only to discover back in Russia that they had been tracked and shut down. China’s security services seem alive to these threats (and opportunities), which the UK, facing a flood of cheap Chinese EVs, has been slower to grasp.

China’s MSS, also known as the Guoanbu, ranks among the world’s largest intelligence agencies. It is responsible for both espionage abroad and counterintelligence at home and is increasingly aggressive on both fronts. In a report earlier this year, parliament’s security and intelligence committee characterised China’s foreign intelligence gathering as an “all of state approach”, hoovering up technology and related know-how by all and every available means, ranging from academic and business tie-ups to cyber and more conventional spying. The committee said that Chinese spies had penetrated every sector of the British economy.

“We have seen a sustained campaign on a pretty epic scale,” said Ken McCallum, the head of MI5, during an unprecedented public appearance in October with the intelligence chiefs of the US, Australia, Canada and New Zealand — the Five Eyes alliance. McCallum said that MI5 had seen suspected Chinese agents approach more than 20,000 people in the UK via professional networking sites such as LinkedIn in an effort to obtain sensitive information.

McCallum’s comments came shortly after the revelation that a parliamentary researcher had been arrested on suspicion of spying for China. Through his solicitors he said he was “completely innocent”. China’s increasingly brazen activities were underscored when an alleged spy tried to infiltrate an invitation-only talk in a committee room of the Houses of Parliament given by Hong Kong dissidents. This month it was revealed that the Chinese agents ran a far-right Belgian politician as an intelligence asset for more than three years. Belgian security services are also investigating a Chinese-run trading hub at Liège airport for “possible spying and/or interference activities”.

US intelligence agencies are increasingly concerned that the MSS is rapidly harnessing machine learning and artificial intelligence for analyses, surveillance and disinformation. Perhaps Beijing’s biggest advantage over its rivals lies in the openness of western societies, which are far easier to penetrate and operate in than China’s closed and heavily surveilled system. In Russia, often toxic elite rivalries have provided an opening for western spies. Such rivalries exist in China, but they have proved more difficult to exploit, though endemic corruption has been leveraged in the past. Much is uncertain in intelligence, but it is safe to say that tense rivalries being played out in this shadowy world will reach a new peak in 2024.

Ian Williams is author of Fire of the Dragon: China’s New Cold War, which is published by Birlinn

4. Women Bear the Brunt of Asia’s Climate Failures

Excerpts:

Women are already at the forefront of just transitions, given their strong engagement in advocacy, social movements, agriculture and building green economies. Ironically the failure to fully recognize women’s leadership, including at the recent COP28, and their integral role in the agrifood sector, women often face systemic barriers that hinder their full participation in shaping sustainable, inclusive, and gender-just transitions.

To build upon the commitments of the Gender-Responsive Just Transitions & Climate Action Partnership, it is imperative to prioritize and recognize the pivotal role of agricultural women.

Women-led initiatives such as Women-Led Climate Resilient Farming (WCRF) models hold promise to reposition and promote women as farmers, leaders and agents of change to empower the health and well-being, food security, livelihoods and natural resources of farming communities.

There is also the pressing need for gender-responsive, gender-just and transformative policies and programs. Such initiatives could encompass needs-based insurance products designed to mitigate climate-related health impacts, along with cash-based assistance programs that have integrated healthcare deliverables.

These measures could specifically target the health and climate vulnerabilities of girls and women, mitigating the unintended consequences of current farming and agricultural practices.

Women Bear the Brunt of Asia’s Climate Failures

thediplomat.com · by Gabriela Fernando

What does the future hold for the millions of women left to work in Asia’s agriculture sector battling a climate in collapse?

By and Samanthi Gunawardana

December 28, 2023

Credit: Depositphotos

As the world digests the confused legacy of the COP28 summit in the United Arab Emirates, the realities of those on the frontlines of the climate crisis remain muted among the noise of the major polluters and the fossil fuel industry looking to sustain its dominance in global commerce.

Less publicized was the introduction of the Gender-Responsive Just Transitions & Climate Action Partnership as part of the conference’s Gender Equality Day. At the lavish conference hosted at the Dubai Exhibition Center, just 68 states endorsed the intrinsic link between gender equality and just transitions.

This is despite a U.N. Women report released during the conference that predicted that “by 2050, climate change may push up to 158 million more women and girls into poverty and see 236 million more face food insecurity.”

Women disproportionately face the impacts of the climate crisis. A recent UNFPA report cited that the 14 countries most impacted by climate breakdown are also where women and girls are more likely to die in childbirth, marry early, experience gender-based violence or become displaced and homeless by disaster.

The Gender-Responsive Just Transitions & Climate Action Partnership explicitly commits to working to drive gender-responsive just transitions to mitigate and adapt to this reality. Partners have committed to enhancing gender analysis of climate change finance, supporting the collection of sex-disaggregated data, and improving equal employment opportunities.

However, the realization of this vision remains obscured by persisting gender inequalities. According to the UNFAO‘s report on the status of women in agriculture, substantial efforts are yet to be undertaken to prioritize agricultural women’s opportunities, needs, and engagement in agriculture, especially for those in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs).

According to the Global Climate Risk Index 2021, a majority of the world’s most climate-impacted countries are low- and middle-income countries, whose economies are heavily dependent on agriculture and agrifood systems.

Climate change impacts due to extreme weather events and temperature fluctuations have profound impacts on global agricultural practices and crop yields, disrupting traditional growing seasons. Between 2008 and 2018, climate-induced disasters cost $49 billion in Asia alone from a decline in crop and livestock production.

Droughts, floods and heatwaves have become more frequent and intense, directly impeding crop growth, causing soil degradation and jeopardizing agrifood systems, including farming, trading, entrepreneurship, livestock production, water harvesting and irrigation.

Rural populations of South Asia and Southeast Asia, where women dominate the agricultural workforce, have borne the disproportionate impacts of climate shocks.

Climate Crisis, Livelihoods and Gender Disparities

Global agrifood systems play a more important role in the livelihoods of women than men in many agriculture-dependent countries, particularly for young women aged between 15 and 24. For example, in South Asia, 71 percent of women engage in the agrifood sector, compared to 47 percent of men.

In Sri Lanka, elderly women also rely on the agrifood sector when other avenues of income are closed to them. Despite their significant role and contribution, women often confront challenging working conditions and limited economic opportunities due to pervasive gender inequalities.

These inequities fail to recognize women’s roles in both skilled and unskilled labor, issues of land ownership and rights, restricted access to financial resources and the unequal distribution (often unpaid) of domestic care responsibilities.

The impact of climate-induced livelihood loss has also led to men abandoning the land, leaving women behind to grapple with traditional norms and legal frameworks that often discriminate against their access to crucial resources such as land, water, agricultural subsidies, insurance and credit.

These issues are compounded as women continue to face gender-based obstacles to recognition of their leadership, meaningful participation in livelihoods and decision-making processes in formal and informal governance structures, including natural resource management.

In response to the catastrophic climate impacts and ensuing livelihood loss, agricultural households try to cope financially by selling household assets and livestock to generate immediate income or borrow cash at high interest rates from local sources or community networks.

Farmers sometimes turn to multiple high-interest micro-loans for financial relief, resulting in over-indebtedness. Women also engage in unpaid work in exchange for food to feed their families.

Climate, Economic Insecurity and Health

There is a need to understand the gendered impacts of climate change and ensuing economic insecurity on health. Although climate-induced livelihood loss directly impacts everyone’s health, there are important gendered ways in which women’s health is affected.

Given their dependence on outdoor agricultural work, and accounting for physiological differences, heat-related health risks affect women more than men. This has been associated with an increase in pregnancy complications.

As climate impacts increase food scarcity and hunger, and with a lack of government-led food assistance programs, women often prioritize the needs of male family members (viewed as breadwinners), increasing rates of malnutrition and anemia.

Stress-induced livelihood loss also increases mental health issues, including post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and increasing suicide among male and women farmers.

The infrastructure damage, geographical barriers and poor financial assistance also create significant barriers for women to seek timely and essential healthcare services, including sexual and reproductive health. Women may delay or forego healthcare, resulting in pregnancy complications, miscarriages, unsafe abortions, poor contraceptive use, chronic disease mismanagement and domestic violence.

The economic strain exacerbated by climate disasters often compels agriculture-dependent households to resort to traditional practices such as bride prices and dowries. Studies have found that in countries such as Vietnam and India, economic pressure can force young girls into early marriages, resulting in school drop-outs, teenage pregnancies and increased gender-based violence and femicide.

Beyond Crop Failure: the Way Forward

Women are already at the forefront of just transitions, given their strong engagement in advocacy, social movements, agriculture and building green economies. Ironically the failure to fully recognize women’s leadership, including at the recent COP28, and their integral role in the agrifood sector, women often face systemic barriers that hinder their full participation in shaping sustainable, inclusive, and gender-just transitions.

To build upon the commitments of the Gender-Responsive Just Transitions & Climate Action Partnership, it is imperative to prioritize and recognize the pivotal role of agricultural women.

Women-led initiatives such as Women-Led Climate Resilient Farming (WCRF) models hold promise to reposition and promote women as farmers, leaders and agents of change to empower the health and well-being, food security, livelihoods and natural resources of farming communities.

There is also the pressing need for gender-responsive, gender-just and transformative policies and programs. Such initiatives could encompass needs-based insurance products designed to mitigate climate-related health impacts, along with cash-based assistance programs that have integrated healthcare deliverables.

These measures could specifically target the health and climate vulnerabilities of girls and women, mitigating the unintended consequences of current farming and agricultural practices.

Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

Authors

Guest Author

Gabriela Fernando

Dr Gabriela Fernando is an Assistant Professor at Monash University, Indonesia. Her key research interests are in interdisciplinary concepts across global health & policy, health equity, women's health and gender equality, with a particular focus on the South and Southeast Asia region regions

View Profile

Guest Author

Samanthi Gunawardana

Dr Samanthi Gunawardana is a Senior Lecturer in Gender and Development in the Faculty of Arts at Monash University Australia. Her research examines the impact of development policy on employment systems, labour, and livelihoods among rural women in South Asia, particularly emphasising gender, development and labour in Sri Lanka.

View Profile

thediplomat.com · by Gabriela Fernando

5. US Navy sinks three Houthi militant boats in the Red Sea

Perhaps some good news. I wish we could turn our navy loose and "let slip the (sea) dogs of war."

US Navy sinks three Houthi militant boats in the Red Sea

US Navy sinks three Houthi militant boats in the Red Sea after they attacked a Maersk merchant ship with missiles - amid heightened operations to protect vital shipping lane

The Navy destroyed three boats that attempted to board a ship in the Red Sea
The incident, confirmed by CENTCOM Sunday, comes as the US continues its patrol mission to counter threats from Yemen’s Iranian-backed rebel group
The attack was the latest by the rebels in Yemen, who have been targeting vessels in support of the Palestinian group Hamas amid its war with Israel

By ALEX HAMMER FOR DAILYMAIL.COM

PUBLISHED: 07:38 EST, 31 December 2023 | UPDATED: 09:12 EST, 31 December 2023

Daily Mail · by Alex Hammer For Dailymail.Com · December 31, 2023

The US Navy has destroyed several 'small' Houthi boats that attempted to board a container ship in the Red Sea, officials said.

The incident, confirmed by The United States Central Command (CENTCOM), comes as the US continues its patrol mission to counter threats from the Iranian-backed rebel group.

The crew of Singapore-flagged vessel with capacity to carry 14,000 containers was said to be safe, but the number of militants killed, as of 7:30am, remains unknown.

In a statement, military officials described how they deployed helicopters to sink three of the militant boats, while letting a fourth escape.

The attack was the latest by the rebels in Yemen, who have been targeting vessels to show support for the Palestinian group Hamas amid its war with Israel. Maersk, the shipping giant that owns the vessel, has called off operations to assess the threat.

The US Navy has destroyed several 'small' Houthi boats that attempted to board a container ship in the Red Sea. Pictured: A 20mm Phalanx CIWS weapons defense cannon is mounted on the US Navy destroyer USS Gravely, one of the battleships that responded to the Sunday attack

The attack was the latest by militants in Yemen. An armed Yemeni sits on a boat in front of the Galaxy Leader cargo ship, seized by the Houthis offshore of the Al-Salif port on the Red Sea in Hodeidah, Yemen, on December 5

The militants been targeting vessels crossing the crucial shipping lane in support of the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas

Officials said in a statement issued around 4am ET: 'On December 31 at 6:30am (Sanaa time) the container ship Maersk Hangzhou issued a second distress call in less than 24 hours reporting being under attack by four Iranian-backed Houthi small boats.

'The small boats,' the bulletin continued, 'fired crew-served and small-arms weapons at the Maersk Hangzhou, getting to within 20 meters of the vessel.'

The Houthi-controlled boats then attempted 'to board the vessel', officials said, leading a contracted security team that had been aboard the vessel to return fire.

A crew-served weapon refers to a mounted gun operated by two or more individuals, while small-arms refers to weapons operated by a single soldier.

'US helicopters from the USS Eisenhower and Gravely responded to the distress call,' the statement went on to reveal.

'[I]n the process of issuing verbal calls to the small boats, the small boats fired upon the U.S. helicopters with [the] crew-served weapons and small arms.

'The U.S. Navy helicopters returned fire in self-defense, sinking three of the four small boats, and killing the crews.

'The fourth boat fled the area,' officials added, days after the US and its allies launched Operation Prosperity Guardian to protect the crucial shipping strait.

'There was no damage to U.S. personnel or equipment.'

A Yemeni passes a banner depicting the Israeli and US flags on the deck of he Galaxy Leader cargo ship, seized by the Houthis offshore of the Al-Salif port on the Red Sea in the province of Hodeidah, Yemen, on December 5

US helicopters from the USS Eisenhower and Gravely responded to the early morning distress call Sunday 6:30am Yemen time

Yemenis recently militarily trained by the Houthi movement hold their guns and chant slogans as they take part in an armed popular parade held in Al-Sabeen Square to get ready to go and fight Israel in the Gaza Strip, on December 2

An armed Houthi fighter walks through the beach with the Galaxy Leader cargo ship in the background, seized by the Houthis offshore of the Al-Salif port, on December 5. The Houthi, meanwhile, has yet to comment on the incidents, which are only the latest waged by the group

This past Tuesday, the militants launched a barrage of drones and missiles north towards Israel , though the onslaught was blocked by a U.S. Navy destroyer and F/A-18 Super Hornets. Pictured: F/A-18C Hornets assigned to the Wildcats of Strike Fighter Squadron (VFA) 131 fly over the aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower

A little over a week ago, the USS Laboon shot down four unmanned aerial vehicles in the Red Sea, after responding to distress calls after two commercial vessels came under attack

A week before, on December 16, the Navy destroyer Carney (not pictured) took down 14 attack drones in the Red Sea. A Houthi military helicopter flies over the Galaxy Leader cargo ship in the Red Sea last month during the attack on the container vessel

Houthi fighters open the door of the cockpit on the Galaxy Leader ship's deck in the Red Sea in November

The incidents have fueled concerns about the danger of the Israeli offensive sparking a wider conflict and a simultaneous rise in gas prices, as it is also one of the most important routes for oil and liquefied natural gas shipments in the Middle East

As the early morning statement indicated, the failed strike was the second alleged Houthi attack on the Maersk Hangzhou in less than 24 hours.

It occurred in the early morning in the East just as the sun started to rise, but as most in the were heading to bed. Officials have yet to state the number of casualties on the other side.

In the wake of the attacks, Maersk, the global shipping giant that owns the vessel, announced it was suspending its operations in the Red Sea for 48 hours to assess the threat to commercial vessels in the region.

The Houthi, meanwhile, has yet to comment on the incidents, which are only the latest waged by the rebel group in recent months.

This past Tuesday, the militants launched a barrage of drones and missiles north towards Israel, though the onslaught was blocked by a U.S. Navy destroyer and F/A-18 Super Hornets.

U.S. Central Command said that the attack, in that instance, also began at 6:30am and lasted for 10 hours.

A little over a week ago, the USS Laboon shot down four unmanned aerial vehicles in the Red Sea, after responding to distress calls after two commercial vessels came under attack, Navy Times reported.

A week before, on December 16, the Navy destroyer Carney took down 14 attack drones in the Red Sea.

Protesters at Sana'a in Yemen take part in a demonstration on December 15 in solidarity with Palestinians in the Gaza, amid the conflict. The Houthis, who are aligned with Iran, have launched attacks on ships in the Red Sea and have used drones and missiles to target Israel

Houthi troopers stand guard during a demonstration at Sana'a in Yemen on December 15. The Sunday attack shows the group's continued resolve to support Hamas, which Israel recently pledged to continue to try to eradicate.

This handout screen grab captured from a video shows Yemen's Houthi fighters' takeover of the Galaxy Leader Cargo in the Red Sea coast off Hudaydah, on November 20 - one of more than 100 Houthi attacks on commercial ships as it continues to support Hamas

The rise in attacks in recent weeks has led many shipping firms, including Maersk, to divert their vessels away from the Red Sea, instead taking the route around the horn of Africa - an undertaking that tacks on an extra 3,500 nautical miles.

To reach the Suez Canal in Egypt and reach the Mediterranean Sea, ships must pass through the Bab al-Mandab Strait, which sits just a few miles off the coast of Houthi-controlled Yemen.

The tiny strait has thus served as the site of the series of attacks, including the one early Sunday.

The Houthis have sporadically targeted ships in the region, but the attacks have ramped up since the start of the Israel-Hamas war.

In response, the US launched Operation Prosperity Guardian - an international coalition to safeguard the region, with many other countries, including Spain and the UK, taking part.

A reported 1,200 commercial ships have passed through the sea since the operation was launched on December, with none hit by drone or missile strikes until the first phase of the Sunday strike, when militants attacked the Hangzhou with several missiles.

US Navy Vice Admiral Brad Cooper on Friday had already warned that even with the taskforce, the Houthis do not seem set on ending their 'reckless' attacks, after targeting more than 100 ships in the Red Sea since November.

The Sunday attack shows the group's continued resolve to support Hamas, which Israel recently pledged to continue to try to eradicate.

DailyMail.com has reached out to the Navy for comment.

Daily Mail · by Alex Hammer For Dailymail.Com · December 31, 2023

6. NATO, U.S. Consult With Warsaw After Apparent Intrusion Of Russian Missile Into Polish Airspace

I don't think we have seen sufficient reporting on this incident by the mainstream media. This is from Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

NATO, U.S. Consult With Warsaw After Apparent Intrusion Of Russian Missile Into Polish Airspace

rferl.org · December 29, 2023

By RFE/RL

Polish President Andrzej Duda (right) and NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg (file photo)

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said he spoke with Poland’s president about indications that a Russian missile entered Polish airspace on December 29 during a barrage of Russian missiles and drones fired at Ukraine.

Stoltenberg said he consulted with President Andrzej Duda about the “missile incident” and said on X, formerly Twitter, that NATO “is monitoring the situation & we will remain in contact as the facts are established.”

Live Briefing: Russia's Invasion Of Ukraine

RFE/RL's Live Briefing gives you all of the latest developments on Russia's full-scale invasion, Kyiv's counteroffensive, Western military aid, global reaction, and the plight of civilians. For all of RFE/RL's coverage of the war in Ukraine, click here.

Poland’s defense forces said earlier that an unknown object had entered Polish airspace from the direction of Ukraine and then vanished off radar.

“Everything indicates that a Russian missile intruded in Poland’s airspace. It was monitored by us on radars and left the airspace. We have confirmation of this on radars and from allies" in NATO, Poland’s armed forces chief, General Wiesław Kukuła, said.

Poland’s defense forces said the object penetrated about 40 kilometers into its airspace and left after less than three minutes. The defense forces said both its radar and NATO radar confirmed that the object left Polish airspace.

Kukula said steps were being taken to verify those findings and eliminate the possibility of a technical error.

Poland summoned the Russian charge d'affaires and demanded an explanation. Russia's RIA Novosti news agency quoted the Russian charge d'affaires as saying that Poland provided no proof of a border violation.

U.S. national-security adviser Jake Sullivan spoke by phone with the head of Poland's National Security Bureau, Jacek Siewiera, to express the “United States’ solidarity with Poland…as it deals with reports of a missile temporarily entering Polish airspace,” the White House said.

Sullivan expressed U.S. solidarity with Poland and pledged technical assistance as needed and assured Siewiera that President Joe Biden is following the incident closely.

It was not immediately clear where the object disappeared from radar or in which direction it had been going. Troops were mobilized to find it.

Ukrainian officials have said the aerial barrage was the biggest since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

With reporting by Reuters, AP, and AFP

More News

December 31, 2023

7. ANALYSIS-Sweeping Chinese military purge exposes weakness, could widen

I defer to our China hands to assess.

ANALYSIS-Sweeping Chinese military purge exposes weakness, could widen

https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/analysis-sweeping-chinese-military-purge-exposes-weakness-could-widen?utm

Credit: REUTERS/THOMAS PETER

December 30, 2023 — 08:54 am EST

Written by Yew Lun Tian and Laurie Chen for Reuters ->

By Yew Lun Tian and Laurie Chen

BEIJING, Dec 30 (Reuters) - A sweeping purge of Chinese generals has weakened the People's Liberation Army, exposing deep-rooted corruption that could take more time to fix and slow Chinese leader Xi Jinping's military modernization drive amid geopolitical tensions, analysts say.

China's top lawmakers ousted nine senior military officers from the national legislative body on Friday, state media reported, a step that typically precedes further punishment for wayward cadres. Many of these were from the Rocket Force - a key arm of the PLA overseeing tactical and nuclear missiles.

The purges are a setback for Xi who has pumped billions into buying and developing equipment as part of his modernising efforts to build a "world-class" military by 2050, with Beijing's outsized defence budget growing at a faster pace than the economy for some years.

The recent downfall of generals and military equipment suppliers, however, has punctured some of this aura, and raised questions over whether there has been adequate oversight over these massive military investments as China vies with the United States in key areas, including Taiwan and the South China Sea.

Since Xi took power in 2012, he has embarked on a wide-ranging anti-corruption crackdown among Communist Party and government officials, with the PLA being one of its main targets.

The nine PLA generals removed from the legislature hailed from several military divisions; three were former commanders or vice commanders of the PLA Rocket Force; one a former Air Force chief and one a Navy commander responsible for the South China Sea. Four officers were responsible for equipment.

"It is a clear sign that they are being purged," said Andrew Scobell, Distinguished Fellow for China at the United States Institute for Peace.

'MORE HEADS WILL ROLL'

Beijing did not explain why the generals were removed. Some analysts say the evidence points towards corruption over equipment procurement by the PLA Rocket Force.

"More heads will roll. The purge that centred around the Rocket Force is not over," said Alfred Wu, associate professor, Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore.

Wei Fenghe, a former defence minister who used to head the Rocket Force, has also vanished. When asked about his whereabouts, a defence ministry spokesman said in August that the military has zero tolerance for corruption.

His successor, Li Shangfu, was abruptly removed as defence minister in October without explanation after also disappearing for months. He had previously headed the equipment department. One of his then deputies was removed from parliament on Friday.

On the same day, Dong Jun, a Chinese ex-Navy chief, with a South China Sea background, was named Li's replacement as defence minister.

Analysts say that while the Chinese military has long been known for corruption, the extent of the latest crackdown and the involvement of the PLA's Rocket Force is shocking.

"This part of the PLA would have the most rigorous vetting process for senior officers, given the importance of having highly trusted men in charge of China's nuclear weapons," said Dennis Wilder, senior fellow for the Initiative for U.S.-China Dialogue on Global Issues at Georgetown University.

"Moreover, it seems to have involved several senior men rather than one 'bad apple'."

Analysts say the purge of senior military leaders could leave the Rocket Force temporarily weakened until Xi manages to put the house in order.

"The strategic nuclear force is what China relies on as the bottom line of its national security, and the last resort on Taiwan," said Yun Sun, Director of the China Program at the Stimson Center, a Washington D.C.-based thinktank.

"It will take some time for China to clean up the mess and restore confidence in the Rocket Force's competence and trustworthiness. It means for the time being, China is at a weaker spot."

Sun described Xi's campaign to stamp out military corruption as a Sisyphean task "that can never be completed".

FIGHT AND WIN BATTLES?

In the longer run, analysts expect the chronic problem of corruption to persist in the Chinese military because some root causes - including low pay for officers and opacity in military expenditure - have not been addressed.

Chen Daoyin, formerly an associate professor at Shanghai University of Political Science and Law, said that the ongoing crackdown might dissuade Xi from risking serious clashes with other militaries in the next 5-10 years.

"Before realising how rampant corruption was, he drank his Kool-Aid and thought the military can really 'fight and win battles' as expected by him," said Chen, who is now a political commentator based in Chile.

"But how can the generals' hearts be in fighting, if they are just busy lining their own pockets? Xi now knows that their proclamations of loyalty to the party and to the military ring hollow. I imagine this would zap his confidence somewhat."

(Reporting by Yew Lun Tian and Laurie Chen; Editing by James Pomfret and Sharon Singleton)

((LunTian.Yew@thomsonreuters.com;))

The views and opinions expressed herein are the views and opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Nasdaq, Inc.

Why is the Gaza war different?

The closest recent parallel to the current Gaza war is the US-led Coalition’s war against Islamic State in 2014-19.

By Jonathan Spyer | Dec 31, 2023 at 3:06 pm | Topics: Gaza, Hamas

https://www.israeltoday.co.il/read/why-is-the-gaza-war-different/

US Army soldiers, attached to Heavy Company, 3rd Squadron, 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, take cover behind their vehicle as small-arms fire opens up in the distance in Mosul, Iraq, Jan. 17, 2008. Credit: Spc. Kieran Cuddihy/US Army photo.

The current Israeli operation in Gaza has led to an unprecedented wave of fury against the Jewish state in Western capitals. Massive demonstrations have brought hundreds of thousands of people to the streets in Washington, London, Paris and elsewhere. Muslim residents of these cities are clearly over-represented among the demonstrators, but they are not the only participants.

The official slogans of such protests tend to focus on a call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. Many of the banners and slogans on display, however, are unambiguous in their support for Hamas, the Islamist movement that governs Gaza and which carried out the Oct. 7 massacres that precipitated the current war.

The scale and volume of these protests are without precedent. The Gaza war itself, however, and the massacre that preceded it, are neither unique nor without very recent parallel. This raises an interesting question as to the reasons for the particular virulence and fury currently directed against the Israeli war effort.

The closest recent parallel to the current Gaza war, both in terms of the actions that triggered it and regarding the way it is being conducted from a military point of view is the US-led Coalition’s war against Islamic State in the period 2014-19. This war indeed contained a number of episodes of urban combat that directly resemble the current action being undertaken by the Israel Defense Forces in the Gaza Strip.

Mosul and Gaza

I am one of the fairly small group of journalists who covered the ISIS war from close up and who are currently engaged in reporting on the Gaza war. Both the similarities in the wars and the enormous difference in Western perception of them are striking.

Regarding the actions that triggered the conflicts, the similarities are unmistakable. In each case, an Arab movement of Sunni political Islam set out on a campaign of wholesale slaughter against a non-Arab and non-Muslim population in the Levant: Kurdish-speaking Yazidis in the ISIS case, Israeli Jews in that of Hamas.

But can one usefully compare the 21st century, Start-Up Nation, Westernized Israelis with the beleaguered, impoverished non-Arab minorities of northern Syria? The answer is yes. The similarity lies not in the area of their technological development, but rather in the intentions of their enemies towards them.

This became apparent on Oct. 7, 2023. For around 12 hours on that day, the ultra-modern technological defense structures of the State of Israel malfunctioned and ceased to operate. In that mercifully short period, there was little to differentiate between the treatment meted out to the Israeli Jewish communities of the “Gaza envelope,” and that afforded the non-Arab, non-Muslim minorities that faced the onslaught of ISIS on the Nineveh Plains in the summer of 2014.

I was in the Gaza area on Oct. 8, 2023, and in Syria in August 2014. The murderous, indiscriminate slaughter that triggered the ISIS and Hamas wars was of a piece.

When one turns to look at the response, there are also clear parallels. The war to destroy Islamic State required the conquest of an area far larger than that of the Gaza Strip. But in the episodes of urban combat which this included, the similarities are striking.

The current Israeli campaign in Gaza particularly resembles the Coalition’s battle against ISIS in the Iraqi city of Mosul. The latter was the largest urban center that the ISIS jihadis controlled. Getting them out of there took nine months of fighting. The brunt on the ground was borne by units of the Iraqi armed forces, with US air support crucial to their eventual success.

The Mosul fighting—involving the slow enveloping by conventional infantry and armored forces of a well-dug-in jihadi enemy—closely resembled what has been taking place in Gaza since the Israeli ground incursion began on Oct. 27.

The ratio of the dead

Examination of the casualty rates of civilian and military dead in Mosul and currently in Gaza further indicates the similarities. In both cases, the figures must be treated with some skepticism.

Regarding Mosul, estimates vary widely. Figures for the number of ISIS fighters killed range from 7,000 to 25,000. Regarding the number of civilians killed, again, the span is wide. At the lower end, the Associated Press quoted figures suggesting between 9,000 and 11,000 civilians died in the course of the Mosul fighting. The Iraqi Kurdish Asayish intelligence service, meanwhile, estimates that around 40,000 civilians were killed.

In terms of ratio, this means that estimates suggest that there were anywhere between one and four civilians killed in Mosul for each ISIS fighter slain.

Regarding Gaza, the Hamas-controlled Health Ministry in the Strip claims that 20,000 Gazans have been killed so far in the Israeli incursion. The ‘ministry’ records that all those killed are civilians, i.e., it asks observers to believe that not a single Hamas fighter has lost his life in the fighting.

Ron Ben-Yishai, most veteran of Israel’s war correspondents (and very far from an apologist for the current Israeli government), quoted Israeli military sources this week as estimating that somewhere between 7,000 and 9,000 Hamas fighters have been killed in the fighting.

In so far as it can be currently ascertained, the ratio of civilian to military dead in Gaza appears then to broadly resemble that of Mosul.

So similar precipitating events, and comparable military campaigns. Yet the response in the West has been starkly different. No one demonstrated for the civilians killed by coalition bombing during the ISIS war (I personally witnessed enormous mass graves in Raqqa city, rapidly dug by Islamic State to bury the victims of that bombing). There were no furious crowds in Western cities denouncing “genocide.” Most in the West understood, rather, that the deeds of Islamic State and its ideology made it necessary that it be removed from power, in spite of the undoubted ugliness and the deaths of innocents that this would involve.

So what’s the answer? Why this stark contrast? It is difficult not to conclude that the unique place of the Jew in parts of both Islamic and Western political culture and consciousness lies somewhere at the root of the cause. Perhaps some more pleasant explanation can be found. The discrepancy, in any case, is obvious, and enormous.

9. China Confronts a New Political Reality in Taiwan: No Friends

China Confronts a New Political Reality in Taiwan: No Friends

Interviews with top candidates in volatile three-way presidential race point to rising skepticism toward Beijing—whatever the outcome

https://www.wsj.com/world/asia/china-confronts-a-new-political-reality-in-taiwan-no-friends-1e3a356d?st=ftkcosclzlt524k&utm

By Josh Chin

and Joyu Wang

Updated Dec. 29, 2023 12:08 am ET

Presidential candidate Lai Ching-te was once an open supporter of Taiwanese independence. PHOTO: I-HWA CHENG/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

TAIPEI—A drawing of Taiwan at the presidential campaign headquarters of the island’s ruling party shows strikingly little concern for north and south. Instead, the island is shown turned on its side, with China and the Taiwan Strait conspicuously absent.

The drawing reflects the worldview of the Democratic Progressive Party, which over the past eight years has sought to carve out an identity for the self-ruled island that is separate from mainland China. But it also represents a broader change in Taiwan that sits uneasily with Communist Party leaders 1,000 miles to the northwest in Beijing.

With voters set to cast their ballots for a new leader in a volatile three-way election next month, Taiwanese politics has shifted decisively, and perhaps irrevocably, away from China. The change in mood is evident in public-opinion polls—and even in the campaign of the opposition Nationalist Party, or Kuomintang.

Kuomintang presidential candidate Hou Yu-ih is a former head of Taiwan’s national police agency. PHOTO: JOYU WANG / THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Once an aggressive promoter of closer political and economic ties with Beijing, the KMT is striking a markedly different tone these days.

“I’ve never had an unrealistic idea about mainland China’s attitude toward us,” the party’s presidential candidate, Hou Yu-ih, said in an interview, one of three that The Wall Street Journal recently conducted with the leading candidates. “The most important thing is to handle our defense and economy in a way that at least prevents the other side from casually launching a war.”

YOU MAY ALSO LIKE

1:18

Paused

0:06

6:38

TAP FOR SOUND

Air bases along China’s southeastern coast facing Taiwan have undergone significant infrastructure upgrades in recent years. Analysts say these changes are a sign of Beijing’s preparations for a conflict over Taiwan. Photo Illustration: Adam Adada

At the campaign headquarters of the ruling party’s candidate and the current leader in the polls, Vice President Lai Ching-te, the word “China” is nowhere to be seen at all.

Instead, on a recent visit, volunteers from Lai’s Democratic Progressive Party beckoned passersby to witness denim-clad members of a local line-dancing team step, kick and spin to American country music under a green LED sign reading “TEAM TAIWAN.” Further back, a cartoon mural told the story of Lai’s adventures with his pet dog.

Taiwan’s election next month has drawn nervous attention from capitals around the world for its bearing on the most sensitive point of friction between the U.S. and China.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping has made taking control of Taiwan a centerpiece of his quest to restore his country as a great power. It is a task, the 70-year-old Xi has said, that “should not be passed down from generation to generation.” On Tuesday, Xi told senior officials “We will resolutely prevent anyone from making Taiwan secede from China by any means.”

Taiwanese politics has shifted decisively away from China, according to opinion polls. PHOTO: YAN ZHAO/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

During a summit between Xi and President Biden in California last month, the two leaders spent substantial time discussing Taiwan.

In Taipei, Lai paints a picture of a Taiwanese public far less preoccupied with Beijing’s designs than political leaders in the Western world. Despite three years in which China’s military has sent jet fighters—often in the dozens—on nearly daily sorties in the airspace around Taiwan, many on the island have come to greet it all with a shrug.

“Taiwan is relatively calm—the stock market is going up and everyone’s living a normal life,” Lai said in an interview. “People view this situation with calmness and reason.”

Taiwan’s election has drawn nervous attention around the world for its bearing on the most sensitive point of friction between the U.S. and China. PHOTO: ANN WANG/REUTERS

The shifting political winds in Taiwan represent a cold new reality for Communist Party leaders in China. After Beijing crushed dissent in Hong Kong, there is little appetite in Taiwan for an arrangement in which China would peacefully assume political control of the island in exchange for a high degree of autonomy.

The proportion of people in Taiwan who identify primarily as Chinese has plummeted to below 3%, prompting even the party that had most ardently pursued peaceful political union with Beijing to do everything it can to shed its “pro-Beijing” label.

“Young people in Taiwan neither feel they are Chinese, nor do they have affection for anything Chinese—quite the contrary,” said Andrew Hsia, deputy head of the KMT.

While past Taiwan elections have turned on the question of whether to move toward or away from eventual unification with China, the candidates in January’s contest all agree that Taiwan’s only choice with China now is to play for time. The debate is over how.

In an interview in the southern city of Kaohsiung, home to Taiwan’s largest naval base, the KMT’s Hou accused the DPP of underplaying the deterioration of cross-strait ties and the risk of war.

“It wasn’t until the war in Ukraine and the war in Gaza that people started paying attention,” he said. “Taiwan needs to prepare—quickly.”

Younger voters have gravitated toward third-party candidate Ko Wen-je. PHOTO: RITCHIE B TONGO/SHUTTERSTOCK

Hou, a charismatic former head of Taiwan’s national police agency, leans on his police experience in describing how he would use the party’s credibility with Beijing to buy time for Taiwan to build up its military deterrence.

“Facing an opponent, on the one hand, you have to be able to negotiate, while on the other hand, you need the power to fight,” he said.

KMT officials concede that the party is seen as old-fashioned by Taiwanese youth, who turned away from the party in 2014. That is when the last KMT president in office put his support behind a trade agreement with China that would have bound the two sides even more closely together—to a degree that turned off many younger voters.

Now, a new generation of younger voters has gravitated toward a third-party candidate, Ko Wen-je, whose views on China fall somewhere in the middle.

Ko, a doctor and former mayor of Taipei, has capitalized on disillusionment with the two traditional parties by positioning himself as a pragmatic politician focused on bread-and-butter issues such as high home prices and low wages. He described the KMT as “too submissive to China,” but, like Hou, he said that he thinks most Taiwanese underestimate the risks of war.

Even with hundreds of thousands of Taiwanese working in China—a legacy of last decade’s era of cross-strait engagement—official communication between Beijing and Taipei is virtually nonexistent, Ko said, adding: “This is really weird.”

Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen, center, isn’t running for office again because of term limits. PHOTO: RITCHIE B TONGO/SHUTTERSTOCK

Strong support from young people gives Ko some heft, but he has lost ground since an incipient deal to team up with Hou fell apart last month. In a Dec. 22-26 survey conducted by Formosa, a DPP-leaning pollster, 38.7% of respondents said they would vote for the DPP’s Lai, versus 29.7% saying they prefer the KMT’s Hou and an additional 16.6% backing Ko.

Lai was once an open supporter of Taiwanese independence—a history that makes leaders in both Beijing and Washington nervous—but has said he would stick to the status quo established over the past eight years under his boss, President Tsai Ing-wen, which rests on cultivating closer economic and military ties with the U.S. and other “like-minded countries” as a form of deterrence. Like Tsai, who can’t run again because of term limits, Lai holds open the possibility of communication with Beijing, though with caveats.

“In the interest of global peace and the mutual benefits of all countries in the world, Taiwan is willing to engage with China,” Lai told the Journal, as long as that dialogue is carried “under the premise of equal dignity and through the procedure of democracy.”

Under Tsai, the DPP has tried to calibrate its warnings about the threat from China to avoid scaring away international investors and otherwise undermining the Taiwanese economy. Some critics have said that the strategy contributes to a sense of complacency among Taiwanese people about the threat from China, which Lai denies.

None of Taiwan’s presidential candidates said how long they thought the island might need to hold out for the Chinese threat of forceful unification to dissipate.

Peace ultimately requires commitment from both sides, Lai said. “It’s not just Taiwan. China is also responsible.”

Write to Josh Chin at Josh.Chin@wsj.com and Joyu Wang at joyu.wang@wsj.com

Appeared in the December 30, 2023, print edition as 'Beijing Faces New Reality in Taiwan'.

10. Opinion: New York Times Editorial Board Very Wrong

The "U.S.-Ukraine Foundation" <info@usukraine.org> provided this Opinion piece in its email and included these comments:

You may not have seen the recent New York Times op-ed “Ukraine Doesn’t Need All Its Territory to Defeat Putin” by Serge Schmemann.

The ghost of Walter Duranty appears to haunt the Times, leading to its embarrassing dissemination of outrageous opinions.

Below, I share Friends of Ukraine Network member Anders Aslund’s destruction of Schmemann’s pathetic opinions and serious questioning of the Times’ views on the war. The newspaper, which clings to Duranty’s undeserved Pulitzer Prize despite the overwhelming evidence of his lying and the intentional publishing of disinformation and belittling of genuine contemporaneous journalism deserves all the criticism and more.

Opinion: New York Times Editorial Board Very Wrong

kyivpost.com · by Anders Aslund

Absurd, incomprehensive and downright wrong – recent opinion in The New York Times would have Ukrainians give up swathes of their homeland and give Putin the benefit of the doubt.

December 30, 2023, 3:29 pm |

This photograph taken on November 17, 2022, shows Ukrainian flags set at Independence Square in Kyiv, symbolizing the deaths of Ukrainian soldiers in the conflict, covered with snow after the first snow falls of the season. Sergei SUPINSKY / AFP

Little has enraged the pro-Ukrainian community more than The New York Times (NYT) with its Dec. 27 article "Ukraine Doesn’t Need All Its Territory to Defeat Putin." It was written by the hereditary Russian nobleman Serge Schmemann, a member of its editorial board.

Let me take it apart.

The issue is not "territory," as President Volodymyr Zelensky persistently emphasizes, but PEOPLE. Ukrainians in territories occupied by ruthless Russian soldiers are being killed, tortured and deported. Even a great Russian imperialist such as Schmemann must have heard about it.

Schmemann starts with caveats (presumably imposed by other NYT editors): Putin "is not trustworthy" and "he may be stalling in the hope that Donald Trump... will return to the White House and stiff Ukraine." The fact is that there is no reason to talk to Putin since he violates all agreements that he or his predecessors have concluded.

Even so, Schmemann makes the opposite point on no basis whatsoever and it permeates the rest of his article: "But if Mr. Putin turns out to be serious, Ukraine should not pass up an opportunity to end the bloodshed. Recovered territory is not the only measure of victory in this war."

As a great Russian imperialist, Schmemann disregards people – just like Putin – and thinks only about territory. Millions of Ukrainians live on occupied territory, and unlike other Ukrainian citizens, they suffer under Putin's ruthless repression. But then why would Schmemann and the NYT care about people?

'Next Year Will Be a Time of Global Decisions,' – President Zelensky's Address on 30th December

"We are working with our partners on solutions needed by every Ukrainian soldier, our entire nation, our state. And these decisions will be strong."

Schmemann's next point is equally absurd, referring to "draining Ukrainian resources and lives without much prospect for change in the foreseeable future." We don't know, but presumably Russia has lost three times as many soldiers. Shouldn't Putin think of that? No, says our imperialist narrator.

"But regaining territory is the wrong way to imagine the best outcome. True victory for Ukraine is to rise from the hell of the war as a strong, independent, prosperous and secure state, firmly planted in the West." Schmemann gets this half right, but again he forgets the people, because he never thinks of them.

Next Schmemann turns suitably incomprehensible: "Those people who are resisting continued aid to Ukraine, whether some Republicans in Congress or Viktor Orban in Hungary, must not be allowed to abandon the Ukrainians now." Why? Are you challenging their position? Presumably, your editors complained.

"If Mr. Putin is seriously looking for a cease-fire, he is doing so on the presumption that the alternative is a continued slaughter of his soldiers..." Now Schmemann turns really dumb. As a true Russian imperialist, he knows that neither he nor Putin care about the Russian people, only about the Russian empire.

Schmemann proceeds to confirm his stupidity: "And stopping the fight is not to grant Mr. Putin a victory... Ukraine and much of the world will not accept his annexation of any Ukrainian territory." Wasn't that the essence of his argument?

As you would expect from Schmemann, he proceeds with another apparent lie: "In the European Union, Mr. Orban, the Hungarian prime minister and an admirer of Mr. Putin and Mr. Trump, has tied up approval of another 50 billion euros for Ukraine." Don’t we all know that is not true? Why does anybody write things that are obviously untrue? Doesn’t the NYT have any standards of truth?

After having got all the facts and all the arguments wrong, you would trust Schmemann to get the conclusion wrong, and he surely does: "But the only way to find out if Mr. Putin is serious about a cease-fire, and whether one can be worked out, is to give it a try." Trust Putin! Not the West! That’s evidently the conclusion.

Unprofessionalism

Serge Schmemann has worked for the NYT since 1980. I have probably known him for three decades. He has always been a Russian aristocratic imperialist, apparently acceptable to the NYT editorial board, which celebrated their Stalinist Moscow bureau chief Walter Duranty in the 1930s. Admittedly, Schmemann is not celebrating the Holodomor like Duranty, but is he on the right side of history? No.

The unprofessionalism of the NYT is revealed in its correction: "A correction was made on Dec. 27, 2023: An earlier version of this essay misstated on which border Russia is opposed to having a full NATO member. It is on its western border, not eastern." How bad can you get?

Thinking more broadly about this awful article by Schmemann, the main positive surprise is probably that he as a Russian imperialist – unlike Putin – seems to recognize that Ukraine is a country and a nation, although he does not state that very clearly.

The ultimate question remains: Why does the NYT, which is apparently still considered a serious newspaper, allow such Russian imperialist views to be expressed on its opinion page by a member of its editorial board? Why doesn't it retire the 78-year-old Schmemann?

If Schmemann had been serious about peace (which he as a Russian imperialist is not), he would have called on Putin to withdraw from Ukraine, thus reestablishing peace. Putin has in no way offered any reasonable peace contrary to what the substandard NYT has reported.

The question remains, why is the NYT opposed to peace in Ukraine?

Anders Åslund is the author of “Russia’s Crony Capitalism: The Path from Market Economy to Kleptocracy.”

The views expressed are the author’s and not necessarily of Kyiv Post.

To suggest a correction or clarification, write to us here

You can also highlight the text and press Ctrl + Enter

Please leave your suggestions or corrections here

Anders Aslund

Anders Åslund is a senior fellow at the Stockholm Free World Forum and Adjunct Professor Georgetown University. A leading specialist on the East European economies, he has authored 15 books, most recently Russia’s Crony Capitalism: The Path from Market Economy to Kleptocracy. He has advised the Russian and Ukrainian governments and earned his D.Phil. from Oxford University.

kyivpost.com · by Anders Aslund

11. How Columbia’s President Has Avoided Fallout Over Israel-Gaza Protests

I look forward to hearing from my friends who are graduate students at Columbia now and hear what they have to say about the situation.

Excerpts:

When Congress invited her to a congressional hearing on antisemitism on Dec. 5 with her peers from Harvard, Penn and M.I.T., Dr. Shafik said she could not go. She told representatives that she had already planned to attend the COP28 climate conference in Dubai, where she introduced a panel about women leaders.

The Congressional hearing did not go well. The University of Pennsylvania president lost her job and the Harvard president became mired in weeks of controversy.

But instead of fighting for her job, Dr. Shafik was announcing a new initiative, called Values in Action, in which she called for informed debate, not “taunts and cruelty.”

Still, she is walking a precarious path.

Her call for compassion and respect, some students said, does not reflect what they say has been a repressive effort to rein in pro-Palestinian protesters that has gone farther than at other Ivy League universities: In November, Columbia’s administration made the extraordinary decision to suspend temporarily two pro-Palestinian student groups, Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace.

“I just think the university is not identifying the proper threat,” said Deen Haleem, a third-year law student and a leader of Law Students for Palestine. “The current threat right now are the universities that are shutting down pro-Palestine speech.”

How Columbia’s President Has Avoided Fallout Over Israel-Gaza Protests

By Sharon Otterman

Published Dec. 28, 2023

Updated Dec. 29, 2023

The New York Times · by Sharon Otterman · December 29, 2023

Protests over the Israel-Hamas war roiled Columbia’s campus for weeks. Then, the campus and its president receded from attention — for now.

Columbia’s campus was the site of high-profile protests over the Israel-Hamas war.Credit...Jeenah Moon/Reuters

Published Dec. 28, 2023Updated Dec. 29, 2023

In the weeks after Oct. 7, Columbia University was the scene of rising tensions over the Israel-Hamas war on American college campuses.

A Jewish student said he was assaulted after putting up posters of hostages. Pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian students accused one another of support for genocide in a series of heated protests and counter-protests.

But as the fall semester ended, Columbia faded from the spotlight even as its peer schools, Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania in particular, were scrutinized over their responses to the war and claims of antisemitism on campus.

Supporters of Columbia’s president, Nemat Shafik, credit her diplomatic skills in avoiding a similar public relations crisis. But detractors said she has bent too far to the demands of Israel supporters, angering students and some faculty members but keeping powerful donors and trustees mostly happy.

She might also have benefited from a bit of luck.

When Congress invited her to a congressional hearing on antisemitism on Dec. 5 with her peers from Harvard, Penn and M.I.T., Dr. Shafik said she could not go. She told representatives that she had already planned to attend the COP28 climate conference in Dubai, where she introduced a panel about women leaders.

The Congressional hearing did not go well. The University of Pennsylvania president lost her job and the Harvard president became mired in weeks of controversy.

But instead of fighting for her job, Dr. Shafik was announcing a new initiative, called Values in Action, in which she called for informed debate, not “taunts and cruelty.”

Still, she is walking a precarious path.

Her call for compassion and respect, some students said, does not reflect what they say has been a repressive effort to rein in pro-Palestinian protesters that has gone farther than at other Ivy League universities: In November, Columbia’s administration made the extraordinary decision to suspend temporarily two pro-Palestinian student groups, Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace.

“I just think the university is not identifying the proper threat,” said Deen Haleem, a third-year law student and a leader of Law Students for Palestine. “The current threat right now are the universities that are shutting down pro-Palestine speech.”

Through a spokeswoman, Dr. Shafik, who also goes by Minouche, declined to be interviewed. Her supporters say she has taken a practical approach to the crisis and has done well in addressing different constituencies that are often in conflict.

Nemat Shafik, the president of Columbia University, has extensive international experience. She is also known for being diplomatic.Credit...Reuters/Suzanne Plunkett

Board members, including pro-Israel voices, say they are pleased at how the president has maneuvered.

“I think it’s very difficult, but I think she did as well as anyone could have done,” said Victor Mendelson, a Columbia trustee who supports Israel and Dr. Shafik. “She’s been responsive. She’s been out and about on campus and she’s been very careful to try to make everyone feel welcome. I mean, everyone who is following the rules, obviously.”

Like several of her Ivy League presidential peers, Dr. Shafik was appointed to her role only recently — in her case, in July. An economist born in Egypt, she has deep experience in handling complex international situations. She is a former deputy governor of the Bank of England and a former deputy managing director for the International Monetary Fund. Most recently, she was president of the London School of Economics.

While she is known for her support of diversity initiatives, Dr. Shafik’s views on politics — and the way her personal experiences may have influenced them — can be hard to decipher. Mr. Mendelson said that as Columbia scrutinized her before she became president, the search committee was impressed that she had been “meticulously nonpartisan” in her previous job.

“One couldn’t figure out her personal views because she wanted that evenness on campus,” he said. “That’s one of the key reasons I was supportive of her candidacy for president.”

Two days after the Hamas attacks on Oct. 7, Dr. Shafik issued a statement saying she was “devastated by the horrific attack on Israel,” adding that “we must reject forces that seek to pull us apart.” But in the days that followed, protests became so tense that the university closed its campus to outsiders and postponed a major fund-raising drive.

Then, on Nov. 10, it suspended the two pro-Palestinian student groups. According to a statement from Gerald Rosberg, the chair of the school’s Special Committee on Campus Safety, the action was justified because the two groups had repeatedly violated university policies requiring them to get permission and give 10 business days’ notice before holding an event.

Student groups criticized the 10-day rule, saying it violated free speech protections. Jaxon Williams-Bellamy, a law student and delegate to the University Senate, said it was “too onerous and creates a chilling effect.”

Columbia administrators said the rule had been in place for years, though it was not always enforced, and that the school was working with the Senate to amend the policy.

Mr. Rosberg’s statement also cited “threatening rhetoric” during one of the groups’ demonstrations, but students said they were never informed of what that rhetoric was. One student on the outskirts of a Nov. 9 protest had shouted antisemitic curses, but he was not affiliated with any of the student groups, and was shouted down by the pro-Palestinian protesters, several students said.

The university administration later said that the rhetoric was not the cause of the suspension.

Dr. Shafik’s other actions have included creating an antisemitism task force along with a “Doxing Resource Group” to help student protesters who face harassment after their identities are revealed online, a tactic that has targeted pro-Palestinian students in particular. She has also gone to interfaith meetings, Hillel events and a Muslim Student Association meeting, and has met with students affected by the war, her office said.

She has not, however, met with leaders of the suspended Palestinian groups, student leaders said.

The new civility initiative is meant to calm the campus through a series of listening forums and training sessions, among other things. The school’s 18 deans released a joint letter in support of the program, calling on pro-Palestinian protesters to stop chanting phrases, such as calls for “an intifada,” because they are experienced by many “as antisemitic and deeply hurtful.”

While some pro-Israel supporters have praised Dr. Shafik’s response to protests, many students said she has been too heavy-handed and has hindered free speech.Credit...Jeenah Moon/Reuters

Rashid Khalidi, the influential Palestinian historian at Columbia, released a scathing statement in response: “This statement amounts to a new norm that prohibits using or learning about these terms and their histories, in favor of the privileging of a politics of feeling. While perhaps appropriate to a kindergarten, it is hard to imagine an approach more contrary to the most basic idea of a university.”

The letter from the deans also asks students to acknowledge the anguish of pro-Palestinian students mourning the loss of life in Gaza.

Ester R. Fuchs, one of the co-chairs of the new antisemitism task force, credited Dr. Shafik with “lowering the temperature” on campus.

“Over 300 kids gathered for a Hanukkah candle lighting on campus recently, for example, and you don’t hear about it,” she said. “There was no incident.” Claire Shipman, the co-chair of the university’s board of trustees, praised the president’s calm approach toward crisis management.

“We have to focus as a university — and this is where Minouche is so good — on moving to a place where people are listening and engaging in conversation, not only protesting,” Ms. Shipman said.

But student organizers see her differently. The request to self-police protest chants feels like a trap and not free speech, said Mohsen Mahdawi, a co-founder of Dar, the school’s Palestinian student union.

“I am all for compassion and tolerance,” he said. “But there should be no double standards. People have to be treated equally with dignity.”

Some students predicted that Dr. Shafik’s efforts to contain the conflict on campus would only lead to more of it in the coming semester. Columbia’s student governing board voted to declare noncooperation with the event policy, the Columbia Spectator reported. Pro-Palestinian groups reorganized and are planning protests under the name Columbia University Apartheid Divest.

Yoni Kurtz, 21, is a junior studying history and the Hillel student president. He said that while some Jewish students didn’t feel comfortable with the tenor of some pro-Palestinian demonstrations, suspending the groups wasn’t the right decision.

“There’s a real distrust from basically almost any student you talk to of almost anything the administration does or will do, basically no matter their political beliefs,” he said. “Most students really just don’t believe the administration has their best interest in mind.”

Sharon Otterman is a Times reporter covering higher education, public health and other issues facing New York City. More about Sharon Otterman

A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 13 of the New York edition with the headline: How Columbia’s President Has Navigated Campus Strife Over War

618

The New York Times · by Sharon Otterman · December 29, 2023

12. Where Was the Israeli Military?

First person/POV video at the link: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/30/world/middleeast/israeli-military-hamas-failures.html?referringSource=articleShare&smid=nytcore-ios-share&utm

Where Was the Israeli Military?

A Times investigation found that troops were disorganized, out of position and relied on social media to choose targets. Behind the failure: Israel had no battle plan for a massive Hamas invasion.

By Adam Goldman, Ronen Bergman, Mark Mazzetti, Natan Odenheimer, Alexander Cardia, Ainara Tiefenthäler and Sheera Frenkel

The journalists reported from Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and towns and kibbutzim in southern Israel.

Dec. 30, 2023

The New York Times · by Sheera Frenkel · December 30, 2023

On Oct. 7, Hamas terrorists made attacking Israel look easy.

Warning: This article has videos containing graphic imagery and violence.

A Times investigation found that troops were disorganized, out of position and relied on social media to choose targets. Behind the failure: Israel had no battle plan for a massive Hamas invasion.

By Natan Odenheimer, Ainara Tiefenthäler and

The journalists reported from Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and towns and kibbutzim in southern Israel.

Dec. 30, 2023

Far beneath the Israeli military headquarters in Tel Aviv, in a bunker known as The Pit, commanders were trying to make sense of reports of Hamas rocket fire in southern Israel early on the morning of Oct. 7, when the call came in.

It was a commander from the division that oversees military operations along the border with Gaza. Their base was under attack. The commander could not describe the scope of the attack or provide more details, according to a military official with knowledge of the call. But he asked that all available reinforcements be sent.

At 7:43 a.m., more than an hour after the rocket assault began and thousands of Hamas fighters stormed into Israel, The Pit issued its first deployment instructions of the day. It ordered all emergency forces to head south, along with all available units that could do so quickly.

But the nation’s military leaders did not yet recognize that an invasion of Israel was already well underway.

Hours later, desperate Israeli citizens were still fending for themselves and calling for help. Roughly 1,200 people died as the Middle East’s most advanced military failed in its essential mission: protecting Israeli lives.

Civilians killed by Palestinian militants lay covered in Sderot, Israel, on Oct. 7.Credit...Ohad Zwigenberg/Associated Press

The full reasons behind the military’s slow response may take months to understand. The government has promised an inquiry. But a New York Times investigation found that Israel’s military was undermanned, out of position and so poorly organized that soldiers communicated in impromptu WhatsApp groups and relied on social media posts for targeting information. Commandos rushed into battle armed only for brief combat. Helicopter pilots were ordered to look to news reports and Telegram channels to choose targets.

And perhaps most damning: The Israel Defense Forces did not even have a plan to respond to a large-scale Hamas attack on Israeli soil, according to current and former soldiers and officers. If such a plan existed on a shelf somewhere, the soldiers said, no one had trained on it and nobody followed it. The soldiers that day made it up as they went along.

“In practice, there wasn’t the right defensive preparation, no practice, and no equipping and building strength for such an operation,” said Yom Tov Samia, a major general in the Israeli reserves and former head of the military’s Southern Command.

“There was no defense plan for a surprise attack such as the kind we have seen on Oct. 7,” said Amir Avivi, a brigadier general in the reserves and a former deputy commander of the Gaza Division, which is responsible for protecting the region.

That lack of preparation is at odds with a founding principle of Israeli military doctrine. From the days of David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister and defense minister, the goal was to always be on the offensive — to anticipate attacks and fight battles in enemy territory.

In response to a series of questions from The Times, including why soldiers and officers alike said there had been no plan, the Israel Defense Forces replied: “The I.D.F. is currently focused on eliminating the threat from the terrorist organization Hamas. Questions of this kind will be looked into at a later stage.”

Israeli soldiers in Sderot on Oct. 7.Credit...Tsafrir Abayov/Associated Press

The Times investigation is based on internal Israeli government documents and a review of the military’s cache of materials, known as Pandora, that contains tens of thousands of videos, including footage from body cameras worn by terrorists and closed-circuit surveillance cameras. The Times interviewed dozens of officers, enlisted troops and eyewitnesses, some of whom spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about military operations.

The documents and interviews revealed new details about the attack, including military assessments and orders like the one given by The Pit early that morning. Taken together, they show that much of the military failure was due to the lack of a plan, coupled with a series of intelligence missteps in the months and years before the attack.

Israeli security and military agencies produced repeated assessments that Hamas was neither interested in nor capable of launching a massive invasion. The authorities clung to that optimistic view even when Israel obtained Hamas battle plans that revealed an invasion was precisely what Hamas was planning.

The decisions, in retrospect, are tinged with hubris. The notion that Hamas could execute an ambitious attack was seen as so unlikely that Israeli intelligence officials even reduced eavesdropping on Hamas radio traffic, concluding that it was a waste of time.

None of the officers interviewed, including those stationed along the border, could recall discussions or training based on a plan to repel such an assault.

“As far as I recall, there was no such plan,” said Yaakov Amidror, a retired Israeli general and a former national security adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “The army does not prepare itself for things it thinks are impossible.”

Hamas teams breached the Israel-Gaza border fence in dozens of locations.Credit...Mohammed Fayq Abu Mostafa/Reuters

The Israeli government had determined that the loosely organized civilian guard, known as Kitat Konnenut, would serve as the first line of defense in the towns and villages near the border. But the guardsmen had different standards of training depending on who was in charge. For years, they warned that some of their units were poorly trained and underequipped, according to two Israeli military officials with direct knowledge of the volunteer teams.

Additionally, the Israeli military reservists were not prepared to quickly mobilize and deploy. Some described heading south on their own initiative.

Davidi Ben Zion, 38, a major in the reserves, said reservists never trained to respond at a moment’s notice to an invasion. The training assumed that Israeli intelligence would learn of a looming invasion in advance, giving reservists time to prepare to deploy.

“The procedure states that we have the battalion ready for combat in 24 hours,” he said. “There’s a checklist to authorize the distribution of everything. We practiced this for many years.”

Hamas capitalized on these errors in ways that further delayed the Israeli response. Terrorists blocked key highway intersections, leaving soldiers bogged down in firefights as they tried to enter besieged towns. And the Hamas siege on the military base in southern Israel crippled the regional command post, paralyzing the military response.

Much remains unknown about that day, including what orders were given inside Israel’s senior military leadership in Tel Aviv, and when. The Times investigation builds on and adds new details to aggressive coverage in the Israeli media of the military response.

Officers and reservists who headed south that morning, whether under orders or on their own, soon learned of the chaos that they were entering.

Gen. Barak Hiram, who was scheduled to soon take over command of a division along the Gaza border, drove south to see firsthand how the soldiers there responded to what seemed like a routine Hamas attack.

In an interview, he recalled the text messages he received from soldiers he knew in the region.

“Come save us.”

“Send the army, quickly, they are killing us.”

“Sorry we’re turning to you, we’re already out of weapons.”

Unprepared for Battle

Commando units were among the first to mobilize that morning. Some said they rushed into the fight after receiving messages pleading for help or learning about the infiltrations from social media.

Other units were on standby and received formal activation orders.

The small size of the teams suggested that commanders fundamentally misunderstood the threat. Troops rolled out with pistols and assault rifles, enough to face a band of hostage-taking terrorists, but not to go into full-scale battle.

Previously undisclosed documents reviewed by The Times show just how drastically the military misread the situation. Records from early in the day show that, even during the attack, the military still assessed that Hamas, at best, would be able to breach Israel’s border fence in just a few places. A separate intelligence document, prepared weeks later, shows that Hamas teams actually breached the fence in more than 30 locations and quickly moved deep into southern Israel.

Hamas fighters poured into Israel with heavy machine guns, rocket-propelled grenade launchers, land mines and more. They were prepared to fight for days. Israeli commandos apparently believed they would be fighting for just hours; one said he set out that morning without his night-vision goggles.

“The terrorists had a distinct tactical advantage in firepower,” said Yair Ansbacher, 40, a reservist in a counterterrorism unit who fought on Oct. 7. He and his colleagues mainly used pistols, assault rifles and sometimes sniper rifles, he said.

The situation was so dire that at 9 a.m., the head of Shin Bet, Israel's domestic security agency, issued a rare order. He told all combat-trained, weapons-carrying employees to go south. Shin Bet does not normally activate with the military. Ten Shin Bet operatives were killed that day.

Making matters worse, the military has acknowledged that it moved two commando companies — more than 100 soldiers — to the West Bank just two days before the attack, a reflection of Israel’s mistaken belief that a Hamas attack was not an imminent threat.

That left three infantry battalions and one tank battalion along Gaza’s border. But Oct. 7 was the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah, and the Sabbath. One senior military officer estimated that about half the 1,500 soldiers in the area were away. He said that another infantry battalion had been reassigned years earlier after Israel finished building a security wall around Gaza.

Whether Hamas knew that the military was understaffed is unclear, but it had fatal consequences. When the attacks began, many soldiers were fighting for their lives instead of protecting residents nearby. Hamas stormed one base, Nahal Oz, forcing soldiers to abandon it and leave behind dead friends.

And just as the civilian volunteers had warned, the first line of defense inside Israel was quickly overwhelmed. Some units barely had enough weapons for an hourslong battle, officials said.

Hamas also worked strategically to weaken Israel’s advantage in firepower. Terrorists targeted Israeli tanks, hitting several of them, said Brig. Gen. Hisham Ibrahim, the commander of the armored corps. Tanks ran out of ammunition, leaving crews to fight with ground soldiers.

In another instance widely covered in the Israeli media, Hamas fired on an Israeli helicopter, forcing it down near Gaza. The paratroopers escaped injury before the helicopter burst into flames.

All of this should have been a clear sign that Israel was under broad attack, facing a dire situation.

But Hamas made another strategic strike that morning that all but blinded Israel’s military at a critical moment.

‘What a Mistake’

The assault on the Re’im military base left soldiers there fighting for their lives rather than coordinating a response to the invasion.

Re’im is home to the Gaza Division, which oversees all military operations in the region. It is also home to two brigades, northern and southern, dedicated to protecting about 40 miles of the border.

Like other bases, Re’im was understaffed because of the holiday. A brigade commander and key staff were away from the base, according to a senior military officer. They were summoned back before dawn, officials said, as Israeli intelligence officials tried to make sense of unusual Hamas activity just over the border in Gaza.

Many soldiers, though, were allowed to keep sleeping. One told The Times that some did not know they were under attack until Hamas was in their sleeping quarters. Several were killed in their bunks. Others barricaded themselves in safe rooms.

The scope of the catastrophe, if not the attack itself, was preventable, according to records and interviews.

“After they built the fence, they put the headquarters in the middle of the sector,” said General Samia, the former head of the Southern Command. He said the three commanders of the brigades and division never should have been housed together so close to Gaza’s border.

Gen. Yom Tov Samia in 2000.Credit...Havakuk Levison/Reuters

“In the same camp, you all had three of them — in the same location,” he said. “What a mistake. What a mistake.”

The Israeli authorities also knew, years in advance, that Hamas planned to take out Re’im as part of its invasion, documents previously obtained by The Times showed. They dismissed that plan, like the prospect of overall invasion, as implausible.

Even in May, when intelligence analysts raised alarms about Hamas training exercises, Israeli officials did not increase troop levels in the South.

The assault on Re’im led to a near blackout of communication inside the unit that coordinates troop movements across southern Israel, according to one soldier who was based there on Oct. 7.

The division that was supposed to be directing the battle was trying not to get overrun.

Even at noon, according to another Southern Command official, officers there did not understand what was happening. They assessed that Hamas had sent about 200 gunmen into Israel. They were off by a factor of 10.

It took the military most of the day to retake control of the Re’im base.

“When your division is under fire, you’re focused on clearing it from terrorists,” said General Ibrahim, the commander of the armored corps, which is based in southern Israel. “It distracts from management of the fighting more broadly.” General Ibrahim defended the military’s response, saying there are few modern armies that could have recaptured the region as quickly as Israel did.

But nobody had trained to repel an invasion.

‘Slowing Our Advance’

Hamas understood how to use Israel’s geography against its military.

Despite the siege of Re’im, reinforcements were not far away. Thousands of soldiers were less than 40 minutes from the towns that were under attack. But as terrified citizens waited in bunkers or hid from gunmen, Israeli soldiers were hung up on the highway, unable to reach them.

A central highway connects military bases in the center and south of the country to the communities near Gaza. Pockets of Hamas gunmen set up ambushes along the route, videos from Pandora show. Israeli commanders were hesitant to send soldiers into those traps, according to two Israeli military officers who took part in conversations that morning.

“Hamas is all over the roads,” one Israeli soldier reported in a conversation recounted by a participant. “They own the street, not us.”

One of the deadliest junctions was Sha’ar HaNegev, the intersection of two main arteries leading to the besieged towns and communities known as kibbutzim. Hamas seized the junction by killing motorists, setting fire to their cars and blocking roads, according to military officials and videos.

“Every encounter at the intersections resulted in the killing of the terrorists and slowing our advance,” said Mr. Ansbacher, the counterterrorism reservist, recounting the team’s frustrating progress.

“As we go along, we understand that we are really delayed. In the kibbutzim, they need us and people are getting killed.”

Fog of War

The elite Maglan commando unit operates out of a base about 25 minutes from Gaza.

Its deputy commander activated the unit at about 6:30 a.m. on Oct. 7, according to one officer familiar with the operations that day. But the team received little guidance from top Israeli generals or the Gaza Division headquarters, which, they did not realize, was itself under attack.

Maglan’s commandos specialized in operating behind enemy lines, where Israel always expected the fighting to occur. None of them had trained to respond to an invasion, the officer said.

The officer said there were no “concrete missions.” Soldiers were told to “just take a gun” and “save people.”

With communication out of Re’im disrupted and military leaders in Tel Aviv struggling to understand the scope of the attack, Maglan turned to an unlikely source for information: Refael Hayun, a 40-year-old who lived with his parents in Netivot, about five miles from Gaza.

Refael Hayun in his bedroom in Netivot, Israel, last week.Credit...via Refael Hayun

Mr. Hayun watched Hamas videos of the attack in real time on social media and relayed information to Maglan’s officers. He began fielding WhatsApp messages from people trying to save their children, friends and themselves.

“Hi Refael, we’re stuck in a trash container near the party location,” one message read. “Please come rescue us. We’re 16 people.”

Mr. Hayun relayed those locations to the commandos, but they did not grasp the enormity of the fight. One Maglan team killed several terrorists near a base in Zikim, just north of Gaza, but they didn’t realize until 11 a.m. that Hamas fighters had stormed Kfar Aza, where some of the worst fighting took place.

Soldiers crowdsourced information. One team commander told soldiers aboard a helicopter to check Telegram channels and news reports to pick targets.

One general, a reservist who fought that day, said there were many heroes on Oct. 7. But an army only needs heroes, he said, when things have gone wrong.

Soldiers are among those asking how things went so wrong.

Major Ben Zion, the reservist, said that his paratrooper unit left its base in central Israel, not far from Tel Aviv, in a convoy at about 1:30 p.m. They mobilized on their own, without a formal call-up order. To save time, they left without night-vision equipment or adequate body armor.

He expected to see the roads packed with soldiers and equipment and armored vehicles heading south.

“The roads were empty!” he recalled in an interview. Roughly seven hours into the fighting, he turned to the reservist next to him and asked: “Where’s the I.D.F.?”

Reporting was contributed by Gal Koplewitz, Adam Sella, Aaron Boxerman, Dmitriy Khavin, Riley Mellen and Angela Rath. Produced by Alice Fang.

Adam Goldman writes about the F.B.I. and national security. He has been a journalist for more than two decades. More about Adam Goldman

Ronen Bergman is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, based in Tel Aviv. His latest book is “Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations,” published by Random House. More about Ronen Bergman

Mark Mazzetti is an investigative reporter based in Washington, D.C., focusing on national security, intelligence, and foreign affairs. He has written a book about the C.I.A. More about Mark Mazzetti

Alexander Cardia is a designer, animator and graphics editor with the Visual Investigations team at The Times. He was among the recipients of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for coverage of Russian atrocities in Bucha, Ukraine. More about Alexander Cardia

Ainara Tiefenthäler is a video journalist with the Visual Investigations team. She was among the recipients of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for The Times's coverage of the vast civilian toll of U.S.-led airstrikes. More about Ainara Tiefenthäler

Sheera Frenkel is a reporter based in the San Francisco Bay Area, covering the ways technology impacts everyday lives with a focus on social media companies, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, Telegram and WhatsApp. More about Sheera Frenkel

A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: On All Fronts, Israeli Military Failed on Oct. 7

678

The New York Times · by Sheera Frenkel · December 30, 2023

13. NATO needs Russia "ruined" in Ukraine for future peace: Official

NATO needs Russia "ruined" in Ukraine for future peace: Official

By David Brennan

Diplomatic Correspondent

Newsweek · by David Brennan · December 29, 2023

Only a "ruined" Russia can ensure peace on NATO's eastern flank in the near future, a senior European defense official has said, as Kyiv's Western allies look to recalibrate their wartime strategy after a disappointing 2023.

"Russia needs to walk away with the understanding that they lost, that they will lose the next war," Kusti Salm—the permanent secretary at the Estonian Defense Ministry—told Newsweek in an exclusive interview from Tallinn.

Russian President Vladimir Putin appears set on trying to stare down and outlast his Western enemies, an approach successful for the Kremlin in Ukraine in 2014, in its intervention in Syria, and in its invasion of Georgia in 2008.

The Russian leader, Salm said, must end his gamble in Ukraine knowing "that economically they are ruined, we outlasted them, we kept our industry on a better footing, we have the technological advantage, we have better training, better morale; that they don't stand a chance."

American soldiers are pictured during the Combined Resolve 19 training exercise at the Hohenfels trainings area, southern Germany, on October 24, 2023. NATO is struggling to meet the challenge of a full-scale modern war in eastern Europe. CHRISTOF STACHE/AFP via Getty Images

"They need to walk away with the understanding that international law and the rule-based world functions and that you cannot bend it as you wish."

"This is the only way to draw a line there, so that this wouldn't happen again. If one of those elements is not fulfilled, then in a few years we will face another crisis, and not only from Russia, because everyone is learning."

Newsweek has contacted the Russian Foreign Ministry by email to request comment.

Moscow has been forced to pull units from all over the country to fill the manpower black hole developing in Ukraine. Among them are the airborne and Spetsnaz units traditionally deploying along Estonian borders, intended as the vanguard in any future Russian invasion of NATO.

Their mauling in Ukraine—where subunits of formations like the 76th Guards Air Assault Division have suffered up to 40 percent casualties—has given NATO's frontier nations breathing room. But Salm and others have repeatedly warned that Russia's border weakness will not least.

"We think that it's three years before they will have the opportunity," Salm said of Russia's military recovery timelines. "Others go for five years, we have also heard seven or eight years. But the consensus is that they will regenerate, and they will come back. There is no one in intelligence, no one in defense circles who would dispute that."

"For Europe, for NATO, it's very simple," Salm added. "If Ukraine fails, NATO will be next...Deterring needs a lot more effort, a lot more investment, a lot more shifts in public opinion. It's actually a very high return on investment to keep on supporting Ukraine."

Support for Ukraine has been resilient among Western publics, despite growing concerns about "Ukraine fatigue" among allied political elites. With the 2024 election looming in the U.S., there is now a fresh push for renewed peace talks by ceasefire advocates—as well as by long-time Kremlin sympathizers.

In Ukraine, too, the majority still back Kyiv's goal of retaking all occupied territory per its internationally recognized 1991 borders, plus subsequent admission into NATO and the European Union. But that majority is shrinking, with a growing minority now leaning towards negotiations and potential concessions to end the fighting.

Ukraine's underwhelming battlefield performance in 2023 has deepened concerns that full territorial liberation is overly ambitious. And as winter sets in, Russian forces in the eastern Donetsk region are building momentum, having taken the city of Marinka and pushing to seize the fortress city of Avdiivka despite severe casualties.

Putin and his top officials have shown no willingness to soften their maximalist demands, repeatedly urging Kyiv to accept the "new territorial realities" of its occupation of swathes of the south and east of the country. Opponents of peace talks in Kyiv and abroad have warned that any deal would serve as no more than a ceasefire, allowing Moscow to refit and refocus for another future campaign.

NATO nations have been sluggish in meeting the demands of a modern, high intensity war in which they are not even direct combatants. Advanced weapons have arrived in Ukraine slowly, the mountains of required munitions remain undelivered, and the majority of alliance nations are yet to reach NATO's 2 percent of GDP military spending target.

Estonia has long been at the hawkish edge of the 74-year-old alliance. The ex-Soviet republic shares a 210-mile border with its former imperial master. Estonia would be on the front line of any future Russia-NATO conflict, which leaders in Tallinn have repeatedly warned would be devastating for Estonia and its 1.3 million people.

Prime Minister Kaja Kallas told Newsweek in May that NATO's 2 percent target is insufficient given the danger posed by Putin's expansionist kleptocracy, adding she was both "worried" and "surprised" at allied failures to raise spending.

The 2 percent figure should be a floor, not a ceiling, Kallas said, adding: "I have the feeling that some maybe think that this will just go away. But it's not. I think it's the new reality. And we have to be prepared for this, to actually, really execute our defense investment pledge that we have given."

Kusti Salm, the permanent secretary of the Estonian Defense Ministry, speaks to members of the media in Washington, D.C., on January 25, 2023. Salm told Newsweek that strategic defeat for Russia in Ukraine is the best way to ensure peace on NATO's eastern edge. STEFANI REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images

Kallas and other NATO leaders are pushing for a higher spending target alongside new packages of aid for Kyiv. EU officials are also mulling the idea of new "defense bonds" to help fund support for Ukraine and bolster collective European defense. Salm said Europe should have its sights set on such ambitious and historic projects.

"120 billion [euros, $133 billion] a year would be something that would do the trick; 0.25 percent of GDP," the permanent secretary said. "It's not a lot, it's not a strategic topic, it's not something that we cannot afford."

"With that money you also ramp up your own industry, most of the money will remain in your own economies. It would be a stimulus package at a time of an incoming recession."

Such a stimulus, Salm acknowledged, is some way off. "Europe hasn't found a way to package this," he said.

Newsweek · by David Brennan · December 29, 2023

14. Retired Flag Officers and Public Political Criticism by Robert L. Caslen

The PDF of this entire article can downloaded herre: https://thesimonscenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/IAJ-13-2-Fall2023-pg50-56.pdf?utm

Retired Flag Officers and Public Political Criticism

by Robert L. Caslen

Lock her up! Lock her up!” So screams a retired Army lieutenant general at a presidential nominees’ party convention. This chant certainly received a lot of attention from the American people, and not necessarily from what the opposing candidate did, but simply because America was not used to seeing senior military leaders, whether active or retired, so publicly supporting—or condemning—a political person or a political issue. But this public appearance, I would argue, met the presidential nominee’s intent to secure military votes and to show the public that he was a pro-military nominee. Not to mention that it also certainly gained the chanting retired general officer a key position in the president’s inner circle as the president’s National Security Advisor.

Not to be outdone, the opposing party’s presidential nominee gathered about 20 or so retired generals and admirals to stand alongside her during her nominating convention. And sure enough, there were plenty of flag officers I personally served with who were publicly choosing sides in the upcoming presidential political election. One of them, a retired 4-star general who had previously commanded all forces in Afghanistan, was on the convention’s final night’s agenda, addressing the convention attendees, as well as a national audience on TV. And again, the American people were wondering what this new norm of public political support from retired flag officers was all about.

America was comfortable with a nonpartisan, apolitical military leadership that was constitutionally bound to provide military advice that was not laced with political influence. But now that many retired flag officers are coming public in support or criticism of a serving politician, what does something like this mean to the American people, and what message is America really hearing?

When we officers take the military oath of service upon entering the Army or any of the other services, we swear an oath of allegiance to the Constitution, and through this oath we are joining the profession of arms. What is key about a profession—any profession for that matter—is that those in the profession provide a unique service their clients need, and this service is unique in that only those in this profession can provide it. Think of the profession of administering physical and mental health by a doctor, psychologist, or dentist. They provide the unique act of providing health services, and by doing so, they earn the trust of their patients.

So, in the profession of arms, who is our client? And what is the “unique service” we provide to our clients? Quite simply, our client is the American people, and the unique service we provide is the use of lethal force in an ethical way to protect them. And what is particularly unique is that we are willing to give our lives for their protection. First responders have a similar unique service, but their client is limited to the community they serve. The United States military’s client includes all of America, to include all ethnicities, races, faiths or no faith, genders, and all political affiliations.

Continued in the PDF at this link: https://thesimonscenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/IAJ-13-2-Fall2023-pg50-56.pdf?utm

Lieutenant General (Ret.) Robert L. Caslen served in the U.S. Army for 43 years. His military career culminated in 2018 as the 59th superintendent of the United States Military Academy at West Point. Caslen served as the chief of the Office of Security Cooperation in Iraq and was the Commandant of the Army’s Command and General Staff College and commanded the Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Caslen holds an MBA from Long Island University and a master’s in industrial engineering from Kansas State University.

15. Chinese ex-Navy chief, with South China Sea background, named defence minister

The Reuters article is pasted below. Here are the LinkedIn comments from Wen-Ti Sung.

Chinese ex-Navy chief, with South China Sea background, named defence minister

Wen-Ti Sung

• 2nd

Political scientist at the ANU, working on US-China-Taiwan relations

2d •

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/wentisung_i-gave-comments-to-reuters-and-bloomberg-activity-7146507172057657344-mGqL/?utm

2d •

I gave comments to Reuters and Bloomberg on China's latest personnel appointment -- China finally has a new Defense Minister as of Friday December 29 at 6:40pm -- He is Navy Admiral Dong Jun, 62.

Quick thoughts on possible significance for China's strategic focus, personnel tradition, and military's anti-corruption reshuffling.

This is in line with expectation from two new personnel promotions earlier this week -- elevation of Wang Wenquan (王文全) and Hu Zhongming (胡中明) to General on Christmas Day.

Wang is political commissar for PLA's Southern Theater Command, and Hu is PLA Navy commander.

So new Defense Minister Dong Jun's appointment, plus the elevation of this new crop of top military officers with Navy and South China Sea experience is a sign of China seeing South China Sea as a new priority area of geopolitical contestation between China and the US.

Recall U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan's quote: "intense competition requires intense diplomacy".

Well, China just promoted 2 new generals who can intensely compete for naval supremacy in SCS, & named a new DefMin from Navy to pursue intense military diplomacy.

Domestically, on personnel tradition, choosing Dong Jun as new Defense Minister also follows existing tradition of appointing non-Army generals to lead China's military diplomacy.

China has a tradition of appointing generals from non-Army backgrounds to the Defense Minister-ship (to deal with foreigners). Heads of relatively technical agencies such as the PLA Rocket Forces and the General Armament Dept (that does procurement) are the usual favorites.

The fact that China forgoes these two pools and appoints someone from Navy instead, may be a sign that there are ongoing purges or investigations at the RF and General Armament Dept (purges that make elevating someone from those portfolios more politically problematic).

p.s. A bit more on Dong Jun: Defense Ministers usually have 3 jobs,

- Central Military Commission member

- State Councilor

- Def Min

Dong Jun only gets 1 so far, that's Defense Minister, making him relatively lighter-weight DefMin for now. Though the distinction of becoming the first ever Defense Minister from Navy is not lost.

https://lnkd.in/gkn-XFs4

https://lnkd.in/gRWnXUJ5

Chinese ex-Navy chief, with South China Sea background, named defence minister

By Yew Lun Tian and Laurie Chen

December 29, 20234:35 PM ESTUpdated 2 days ago

BEIJING, Dec 29 (Reuters) - China named former Navy chief Dong Jun as its new defence minister on Friday to replace the last minister who disappeared from public view four months ago.

The appointment by Chinese lawmakers comes as President Xi Jinping upgrades the military as part of his push to make China a dominant world power, a goal that has alarmed many neighbours, especially its assertiveness towards self-ruled Taiwan and in the disputed South China Sea.

The role of China's defence minister is to be the public face of the People's Liberation Army in its engagement with the media and with other armed forces.

A crucial element of his job is to engage with the United States military to lower the risk of conflict over Taiwan and the South China Sea, two flashpoints to which Dong, 62, is no stranger.

Before becoming the People's Liberation Army Navy chief and made a full general in 2021, he was vice commander of the East Sea Fleet, the backbone of what is now the Eastern Theatre Command - the main force responsible for fighting over Taiwan, a self-ruled island China considers its own.

He also served as vice commander of the Southern Theatre Command which operates in the South China Sea, most of which is claimed by China.

"Dong would be familiar with managing near-encounters between Chinese and U.S. military. This is useful when he has to manage crises between both militaries," said Li Mingjiang, international relations scholar at the Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore.

Wen-Ti Sung, political scientist and non-resident fellow at the Atlantic Council's Global China Hub, said the selection of Dong could be a sign that purges are ongoing in the Rocket Force and Equipment Development Department.

The two preceding defence ministers, who came from these two forces, have since disappeared from public view.

Dong replaces Li Shangfu, who had headed the department in charge of equipment procurement and research before taking up the defence post in March. Li has not been seen in public since Aug. 25.

Reuters cited sources to report that Li was under investigation for corruption related to equipment procurement and development.

WIDER PURGE

In a possible sign of a wider purge, nine senior military officials were removed from China's top legislative body, Xinhua reported, citing a separate Friday announcement from the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress.

These include former PLA Rocket Force chief Li Yuchao who was abruptly replaced in July, his predecessor Zhou Yaning, two other Rocket Force officials, two officials from the PLA Equipment Development Department, deputy chief of the Joint Staff Department Zhang Zhenzhong and ex-Air Force Commander Ding Laihang.

Zhou headed the Rocket Force between 2017 and 2022. Zhang was deputy commander of the PLA Rocket Force between 2016 and March 2022, where he overlapped with Li Yuchao. He previously held commander or deputy commander roles at two satellite launch sites and a space launch site.

Three executives at state-owned missile defence firms were also stripped of their membership of a ceremonial political advisory body on Wednesday.

China's defence ministry vowed to "crack down on every corrupt official" in August when asked about the whereabouts of Li's predecessor, Wei Fenghe - its first reference to corruption probes among top military leaders following a major shake-up of the armed force overseeing China's nuclear and conventional missile arsenal.

Beijing has not explained Li's disappearance but stripped him of his title as defence minister and state councillor in October.

During his brief tenure as minister, Li did not meet his U.S. counterpart - Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. The ministry explained that Washington would have to first remove the sanctions it placed on Li on 2018 over his role in purchasing Russian aircraft and equipment.

Dong would face no such constraint, as he is not known to be under U.S. sanctions.

When President Joe Biden and Xi met in San Francisco last month, both leaders agreed to resume senior military talks that were suspended following then-House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan in August 2022.

The U.S. Department of Defense has been in touch with China at the working level about a sequence of upcoming engagements, Pentagon spokesperson John Supple said on Friday, adding the two sides are working to implement what Biden and Xi announced in November.

"These kinds of engagements take time to schedule and prepare for on both sides so that defense and military leaders from our two countries – including at the senior-most levels – can have substantive conversations with their appropriate counterparts," Supple said.

Defense Policy Coordination Talks in January and Military Maritime Consultative Agreement talks in early 2024 are in the planning stages, he added.

Reporting by Yew Lun Tian and Laurie Chen; Additional reporting by Daphne Psaledakis in Washington; Editing by James Pomfret, Alex Richardson, Nick Macfie and Daniel Wallis

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

16. ‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7

This story and the atrocities must be told and told again. We must not allow the brutality of Hamas to fade from the narrative or be downed out by the false narratives of Hamas and its supporters.

‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7

The New York Times · by Adam Sella · December 28, 2023

By Jeffrey Gettleman, Anat Schwartz and Adam SellaPhotographs by Avishag Shaar-Yashuv

Jeffrey Gettleman, Anat Schwartz and Adam Sella reported from across Israel and interviewed more than 150 people.

Dec. 28, 2023

Gal Abdush’s parents, center, and her sisters. The photograph on the wall shows Gal and her husband, Nagi. The couple had been together since they were teenagers.

A Times investigation uncovered new details showing a pattern of rape, mutilation and extreme brutality against women in the attacks on Israel.

Gal Abdush’s parents, center, and her sisters. The photograph on the wall shows Gal and her husband, Nagi. The couple had been together since they were teenagers.Credit...

By Anat Schwartz and

Photographs by Avishag Shaar-Yashuv

Jeffrey Gettleman, Anat Schwartz and Adam Sella reported from across Israel and interviewed more than 150 people.

Dec. 28, 2023

At first, she was known simply as “the woman in the black dress.”

In a grainy video, you can see her, lying on her back, dress torn, legs spread, vagina exposed. Her face is burned beyond recognition and her right hand covers her eyes.

The video was shot in the early hours of Oct. 8 by a woman searching for a missing friend at the site of the rave in southern Israel where, the day before, Hamas terrorists massacred hundreds of young Israelis.

The video went viral, with thousands of people responding, desperate to know if the woman in the black dress was their missing friend, sister or daughter.

One family knew exactly who she was — Gal Abdush, mother of two from a working-class town in central Israel, who disappeared from the rave that night with her husband.

As the terrorists closed in on her, trapped on a highway in a line of cars of people trying to flee the party, she sent one final WhatsApp message to her family: “You don’t understand.”

Based largely on the video evidence — which was verified by The New York Times — Israeli police officials said they believed that Ms. Abdush was raped, and she has become a symbol of the horrors visited upon Israeli women and girls during the Oct. 7 attacks.

Israeli officials say that everywhere Hamas terrorists struck — the rave, the military bases along the Gaza border and the kibbutzim — they brutalized women.

A two-month investigation by The Times uncovered painful new details, establishing that the attacks against women were not isolated events but part of a broader pattern of gender-based violence on Oct. 7.

Relying on video footage, photographs, GPS data from mobile phones and interviews with more than 150 people, including witnesses, medical personnel, soldiers and rape counselors, The Times identified at least seven locations where Israeli women and girls appear to have been sexually assaulted or mutilated.

By The New York Times

Four witnesses described in graphic detail seeing women raped and killed at two different places along Route 232, the same highway where Ms. Abdush’s half-naked body was found sprawled on the road at a third location.

And The Times interviewed several soldiers and volunteer medics who together described finding more than 30 bodies of women and girls in and around the rave site and in two kibbutzim in a similar state as Ms. Abdush’s — legs spread, clothes torn off, signs of abuse in their genital areas.

A camp area on Oct. 11 at the rave site in southern Israel.Credit...Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times

Many of the accounts are difficult to bear, and the visual evidence is disturbing to see.

The Times viewed photographs of one woman’s corpse that emergency responders discovered in the rubble of a besieged kibbutz with dozens of nails driven into her thighs and groin.

The Times also viewed a video, provided by the Israeli military, showing two dead Israeli soldiers at a base near Gaza who appeared to have been shot directly in their vaginas.

Hamas has denied Israel’s accusations of sexual violence. Israeli activists have been outraged that the United Nations Secretary General, António Guterres, and the agency U.N. Women did not acknowledge the many accusations until weeks after the attacks.

Investigators with Israel’s top national police unit, Lahav 433, have been steadily gathering evidence but they have not put a number on how many women were raped, saying that most are dead — and buried — and that they will never know. No survivors have spoken publicly.

The Israeli police have acknowledged that, during the shock and confusion of Oct. 7, the deadliest day in Israeli history, they were not focused on collecting semen samples from women’s bodies, requesting autopsies or closely examining crime scenes. At that moment, the authorities said, they were intent on repelling Hamas and identifying the dead.

Ms. Abdush’s sister showing one of the last messages Ms. Abdush sent on Oct. 7.

A combination of chaos, enormous grief and Jewish religious duties meant that many bodies were buried as quickly as possible. Most were never examined, and in some cases, like at the rave scene, where more than 360 people were slaughtered in a few hours, the bodies were hauled away by the truckload.

That has left the Israeli authorities at a loss to fully explain to families what happened to their loved ones in their final moments. Ms. Abdush’s relatives, for instance, never received a death certificate. They are still searching for answers.

In cases of widespread sexual violence during a war, it is not unusual to have limited forensic evidence, experts said.

“Armed conflict is so chaotic,” said Adil Haque, a Rutgers law professor and war crimes expert. “People are more focused on their safety than on building a criminal case down the road.”

Very often, he said, sex crime cases will be prosecuted years later on the basis of testimony from victims and witnesses.

“The eyewitness might not even know the name of the victim,” he added. “But if they can testify as, ‘I saw a woman being raped by this armed group,’ that can be enough.”

‘Screams without words’

Sapir, a 24-year-old accountant, has become one of the Israeli police’s key witnesses. She does not want to be fully identified, saying she would be hounded for the rest of her life if her last name were revealed.

She attended the rave with several friends and provided investigators with graphic testimony. She also spoke to The Times. In a two-hour interview outside a cafe in southern Israel, she recounted seeing groups of heavily armed gunmen rape and kill at least five women.

She said that at 8 a.m. on Oct. 7, she was hiding under the low branches of a bushy tamarisk tree, just off Route 232, about four miles southwest of the party. She had been shot in the back. She felt faint. She covered herself in dry grass and lay as still as she could.

Volunteers with an emergency response team at the Kfar Aza kibbutz this month. The kibbutz was among the places attacked on Oct. 7.

About 15 meters from her hiding place, she said, she saw motorcycles, cars and trucks pulling up. She said that she saw “about 100 men,” most of them dressed in military fatigues and combat boots, a few in dark sweatsuits, getting in and out of the vehicles. She said the men congregated along the road and passed between them assault rifles, grenades, small missiles — and badly wounded women.

“It was like an assembly point,” she said.

The first victim she said she saw was a young woman with copper-color hair, blood running down her back, pants pushed down to her knees. One man pulled her by the hair and made her bend over. Another penetrated her, Sapir said, and every time she flinched, he plunged a knife into her back.

She said she then watched another woman “shredded into pieces.” While one terrorist raped her, she said, another pulled out a box cutter and sliced off her breast.

“One continues to rape her, and the other throws her breast to someone else, and they play with it, throw it, and it falls on the road,” Sapir said.

She said the men sliced her face and then the woman fell out of view. Around the same time, she said, she saw three other women raped and terrorists carrying the severed heads of three more women.

Sapir provided photographs of her hiding place and her wounds, and police officials have stood by her testimony and released a video of her, with her face blurred, recounting some of what she saw.

Yura Karol, a 22-year-old security consultant, said he was hiding in the same spot, and he can be seen in one of Sapir’s photos. He and Sapir were part of a group of friends who had met up at the party. In an interview, Mr. Karol said he barely lifted his head to look at the road but he also described seeing a woman raped and killed.

Since that day, Sapir said, she has struggled with a painful rash that spread across her torso, and she can barely sleep, waking up at night, heart pounding, covered in sweat.

“That day, I became an animal,” she said. “I was emotionally detached, sharp, just the adrenaline of survival. I looked at all this as if I was photographing them with my eyes, not forgetting any detail. I told myself: I should remember everything.”

That same morning, along Route 232 but in a different location about a mile southwest of the party area, Raz Cohen — a young Israeli who had also attended the rave and had worked recently in the Democratic Republic of Congo training Congolese soldiers — said that he was hiding in a dried-up streambed. It provided some cover from the assailants combing the area and shooting anyone they found, he said in an hour-and-a-half interview in a Tel Aviv restaurant.

Raz Cohen, a security consultant, survived the Oct. 7 attacks by hiding in a dried-up streambed.

Maybe 40 yards in front of him, he recalled, a white van pulled up and its doors flew open.

He said he then saw five men, wearing civilian clothes, all carrying knives and one carrying a hammer, dragging a woman across the ground. She was young, naked and screaming.

“They all gather around her,” Mr. Cohen said. “She’s standing up. They start raping her. I saw the men standing in a half circle around her. One penetrates her. She screams. I still remember her voice, screams without words.”

“Then one of them raises a knife,” he said, “and they just slaughtered her.”

Shoam Gueta, one of Mr. Cohen’s friends and a fashion designer, said the two were hiding together in the streambed. He said he saw at least four men step out of the van and attack the woman, who ended up “between their legs.” He said that they were “talking, giggling and shouting,” and that one of them stabbed her with a knife repeatedly, “literally butchering her.”

Hours later, the first wave of volunteer emergency medical technicians arrived at the rave site. In interviews, four of them said that they discovered bodies of dead women with their legs spread and underwear missing — some with their hands tied by rope and zipties — in the party area, along the road, in the parking area and in the open fields around the rave site.

Jamal Waraki, a volunteer medic with the nonprofit ZAKA emergency response team, said he could not get out of his head a young woman in a rawhide vest found between the main stage and the bar.

“Her hands were tied behind her back,” he said. “She was bent over, half naked, her underwear rolled down below her knees.”

Yinon Rivlin, a member of the rave’s production team who lost two brothers in the attacks, said that after hiding from the killers, he emerged from a ditch and made his way to the parking area, east of the party, along Route 232, looking for survivors.

Near the highway, he said, he found the body of a young woman, on her stomach, no pants or underwear, legs spread apart. He said her vagina area appeared to have been sliced open, “as if someone tore her apart.”

Similar discoveries were made in two kibbutzim, Be’eri and Kfar Aza. Eight volunteer medics and two Israeli soldiers told The Times that in at least six different houses, they had come across a total of at least 24 bodies of women and girls naked or half naked, some mutilated, others tied up, and often alone.

A paramedic in an Israeli commando unit said that he had found the bodies of two teenage girls in a room in Be’eri.

One was lying on her side, he said, boxer shorts ripped, bruises by her groin. The other was sprawled on the floor face down, he said, pajama pants pulled to her knees, bottom exposed, semen smeared on her back.

Because his job was to look for survivors, he said, he kept moving and did not document the scene. Neighbors of the two girls killed — who were sisters, 13 and 16 — said their bodies had been found alone, separated from the rest of their family.

The Israeli military allowed the paramedic to speak with reporters on the condition that he not be identified because he serves in an elite unit.

Many of the dead were brought to the Shura military base, in central Israel, for identification. Here, too, witnesses said they saw signs of sexual violence.

Shari Mendes, an architect called up as a reserve soldier to help prepare the bodies of female soldiers for burial, said she had seen four with signs of sexual violence, including some with “a lot of blood in their pelvic areas.”

Shari Mendes, an architect who was called up as a reserve soldier to help handle the bodies of female troops, in a container used to hold bodies before their removal to a morgue at the Shura military base in central Israel.

A dentist, Captain Maayan, who worked at the same identification center, said that she had seen at least 10 bodies of female soldiers from Gaza observation posts with signs of sexual violence.

Captain Maayan asked to be identified only by her rank and surname because of the sensitivity of the subject. She said she had seen several bodies with cuts in their vaginas and underwear soaked in blood and one whose fingernails had been pulled out.

The investigation

The Israeli authorities have no shortage of video evidence from the Oct. 7 attacks. They have gathered hours of footage from Hamas body cameras, dashcams, security cameras and mobile phones showing Hamas terrorists killing civilians and many images of mutilated bodies.

But Moshe Fintzy, a deputy superintendent and senior spokesman of Israel’s national police, said, “We have zero autopsies, zero,” making an O with his right hand.

In the aftermath of the attack, police officials said, forensic examiners were dispatched to the Shura military base to help identify the hundreds of bodies — Israeli officials say around 1,200 people were killed that day.

The examiners worked quickly to give the agonized families of the missing a sense of closure and to determine, by a process of elimination, who was dead and who was being held hostage in Gaza.

According to Jewish tradition, funerals are held promptly. The result was that many bodies with signs of sexual abuse were put to rest without medical examinations, meaning that potential evidence now lies buried in the ground. International forensic experts said that it would be possible to recover some evidence from the corpses, but that it would be difficult.

Mr. Fintzy said Israeli security forces were still finding imagery that shows women were brutalized. Sitting at his desk at an imposing police building in Jerusalem, he swiped open his phone, tapped and produced the video of the two soldiers shot in the vagina, which he said was recorded by Hamas gunmen and recently recovered by Israeli soldiers.

A colleague sitting next to him, Mirit Ben Mayor, a police chief superintendent, said she believed that the brutality against women was a combination of two ferocious forces, “the hatred for Jews and the hatred for women.”

Some emergency medical workers now wish they had documented more of what they saw. In interviews, they said they had moved bodies, cut off zip ties and cleaned up scenes of carnage. Trying to be respectful to the dead, they inadvertently destroyed evidence.

Many volunteers working for ZAKA, the emergency response team, are religious Jews and operate under strict rules that command deep respect for the dead.

“I did not take pictures because we are not allowed to take pictures,” said Yossi Landau, a ZAKA volunteer. “In retrospect, I regret it.”

There are at least three women and one man who were sexually assaulted and survived, according to Gil Horev, a spokesman for Israel’s Ministry of Welfare and Social Affairs. “None of them has been willing to come physically for treatment,” he said. Two therapists said they were working with a woman who was gang raped at the rave and was in no condition to talk to investigators or reporters.

Yossi Landau, a volunteer with the nonprofit ZAKA emergency response team, said he had not taken pictures of the bodies because it was not allowed. “In retrospect, I regret it,” he added.

The trauma from sexual assault can be so heavy that sometimes survivors do not speak about it for years, several rape counselors said.

“Many people are looking for the golden evidence, of a woman who will testify about what happened to her. But don’t look for that, don’t put this pressure on this woman,” said Orit Sulitzeanu, executive director of the Association of Rape Crisis Centers in Israel. “The corpses tell the story.”

The woman in the black dress

One of the last images of Ms. Abdush alive — captured by a security camera mounted on her front door — shows her leaving home with her husband, Nagi, at 2:30 a.m. on Oct. 7 for the rave.

He was wearing jeans and a black T-shirt. She was dressed in a short black dress, a black shawl tied around her waist and combat boots. As she struts out, she takes a swig from a glass (her brother-in-law remembers it was Red Bull and vodka) and laughs.

You’ve got to live life like it’s your last moments. That was her motto, her sisters said.

At daybreak, hundreds of terrorists closed in on the party from several directions, blocking the highways leading out. The couple jumped into their Audi, dashing off a string of messages as they moved.

“We’re on the border,” Ms. Abdush wrote to her family. “We’re leaving.”

“Explosions.”

Her husband made his own calls to his family, leaving a final audio message for his brother, Nissim, at 7:44 a.m. “Take care of the kids,” he said. “I love you.”

Gunshots rang out, and the message stopped.

That night, Eden Wessely, a car mechanic, drove to the rave site with three friends and found Ms. Abdush sprawled half naked on the road next to her burned car, about nine miles north of the site. She did not see the body of Mr. Abdush.

Eden Wessely, a car mechanic, drove to the rave site looking for a missing friend but instead found Ms. Abdush sprawled half naked on the road next to her burned car.

She saw other burned cars and other bodies, and shot videos of several — hoping that they would help people to identify missing relatives. When she posted the video of the woman in the black dress on her Instagram story, she was deluged with messages.

“Hi, based on your description of the woman in the black dress, did she have blonde hair?” one message read.

“Eden, the woman you described with the black dress, do you remember the color of her eyes?” another said.

Some members of the Abdush family saw that video and another version of it filmed by one of Ms. Wessely’s friends. They immediately suspected that the body was Ms. Abdush, and based on the way her body was found, they feared that she might have been raped.

But they kept alive a flicker of hope that somehow, it wasn’t true.

The videos caught the eye of Israeli officials as well — very quickly after Oct. 7 they began gathering evidence of atrocities. They included footage of Ms. Abdush’s body in a presentation made to foreign governments and media organizations, using Ms. Abdush as a representation of violence committed against women that day.

A screenshot from a video showing Ms. Abdush’s body.Credit...Eden Wessely

A week after her body was found, three government social workers appeared at the gate of the family’s home in Kiryat Ekron, a small town in central Israel. They broke the news that Ms. Abdush, 34, had been found dead.

But the only document the family received was a one-page form letter from Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, expressing his condolences and sending a hug. The body of Mr. Abdush, 35, was identified two days after his wife’s. It was badly burned and investigators determined who he was based on a DNA sample and his wedding ring.

The couple had been together since they were teenagers. To the family, it seems only yesterday that Mr. Abdush was heading off to work to fix water heaters, a bag of tools slung over his shoulder, and Ms. Abdush was cooking up mashed potatoes and schnitzel for their two sons, Eliav, 10, and Refael, 7.

The boys are now orphans. They were sleeping over at an aunt’s the night their parents were killed. Ms. Abdush’s mother and father have applied for permanent custody, and everyone is chipping in to help.

Night after night, Ms. Abdush’s mother, Eti Bracha, lies in bed with the boys until they drift off. A few weeks ago, she said she tried to quietly leave their bedroom when the younger boy stopped her.

“Grandma,” he said, “I want to ask you a question.”

“Honey,” she said, “you can ask anything.”

“Grandma, how did mom die?”

Ms. Abdush’s parents, Eti Bracha, 56, and her husband, Eli, 60.

Jeffrey Gettleman is an international correspondent and a winner of the Pulitzer Prize. He is the author of “Love, Africa,” a memoir. More about Jeffrey Gettleman

A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: ‘Screams Without Words’: Sexual Violence on Oct. 7

855

The New York Times · by Adam Sella · December 28, 2023

17. Israel’s ‘Black Sabbath’: Murder, Sexual Violence and Torture on Oct. 7

I am sorry. But as I said, this story must be told and told again. We cannot allow it to be ignored and we cannot allow the false Hamas narratives to dominate.

Israel’s ‘Black Sabbath’: Murder, Sexual Violence and Torture on Oct. 7

Investigators build legal case documenting ‘systematic and unprecedented cruelty’ with echoes of Adolf Eichmann trial

https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/israel-hamas-oct-7-murder-sexual-violence-torture-45aab439?mod=hp_lead_pos7

By Anat Peled and Rory JonesFollow

Dec. 31, 2023 12:01 am ET

NIR OZ, Israel—Eitan Cunio heard the militants enter his house and watched as gasoline seeped under the door of the safe room where he sheltered with his wife and two children.

His 1-year-old daughter was crying as the family’s home in Kibbutz Nir Oz was set alight and smoke began entering the room. Cunio put wet sheets at the bottom of the door and told his family they would stay inside rather than be killed or kidnapped. If we die, we die together at home, he said.

Before passing out, Cunio sent a tearful voice note to a friend in his community: “Brother, it’s horrible. We are going to die.”

Months have passed since the October day Israelis call Black Sabbath, when Hamas-led militants rampaged into Israel from Gaza, an attack that officials say killed some 1,200 people and included acts of torture, mutilation and sexual violence. Israeli investigators are now using some 200,000 photographs and videos and 2,000 witness testimonies to reconstruct what happened, with an eye toward building a legal case against those responsible that would meet international standards and provide a definitive historical accounting of the Oct. 7 attack.

Reporters from The Wall Street Journal examined some of that evidence, supplemented with interviews of first responders, survivors, families of victims and forensic scientists, to document an attack that Israeli Police Commissioner Kobi Shabtai described as “systematic and unprecedented in its cruelty.”

Forensic evidence shared with the Journal by Israeli officials shows some victims were burned alive after militants used accelerants to set fire to their homes. Photos viewed by the Journal taken by first responders on the scene show bodies were mutilated including the sex organs of both men and women. The bodies of women and girls showed various signs of sexual assault, and recently, at least three female survivors have come forward to say they experienced sexual violence on Oct. 7.

Hamas officials have denied their fighters killed children and raped women.

A burned bedroom in the home of the Cunio family in Nir Oz. PHOTO: TANYA HABJOUQA/NOOR FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Israel’s investigation is expected to yield a trial that would be the country’s most significant since the early 1960s, when Israel captured, tried and hanged former Nazi official Adolf Eichmann for his central role in the Holocaust.

“The state of Israel has never before dealt with crimes and an investigation on this scale,” said Roi Sheindorf, former deputy to the attorney general. “This will be one of the most important trials to take place in Israel.”

The Israeli police are examining testimonies from captured militants, footage from cameras obtained from them, social media, and vehicle dashboards and security cameras throughout southern Israel, as well as materials seized in Gaza.

One challenge for the investigation, legal analysts say, is that the collection of forensic evidence was limited in the aftermath of Oct. 7, while the Israeli military was engaged in combat in the area for days after the attack.

More than 21,000 Palestinians have since died in airstrikes and fighting between the Israeli military and Hamas, most of them women and children, according to Palestinian health authorities. The number doesn’t distinguish between civilians and combatants.

An accompanying goal of Israel’s investigation could also be preserving history, much like the Eichmann trial laid out Nazi Germany’s Final Solution to the world and began a process for witnesses to come forward en masse to speak of the horrors they experienced.

Israel has identified about 800 dead civilians from Oct. 7, including 37 minors under the age of 17, six of whom were under 5. Some 25 people over the age of 80 were killed, including a 94-year-old woman, according to the prime minister’s office.

Hamas militants and others kidnapped roughly 250 people on Oct. 7, according to Israeli authorities.

At Israel's National Center of Forensic Medicine, a small team begins the laborious work of trying to link the remains with a name.

PHOTOS: TANYA HABJOUQA/NOOR FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Dead bodies were taken to an Israeli military base where they were processed and those that were unidentifiable sent to the National Center of Forensic Medicine, which took fingerprints, conducted X-rays and CT scans and removed tissue samples for DNA extraction.

Scans revealed signs of torture and execution, according to Dr. Chen Kugel, head of the forensics center. In some cases, the center found soot in the trachea, indicating people were burned alive as they inhaled smoke before bodies charred, he said. Others were burned after they were already dead.

One scan of blackened remains viewed by the Journal revealed two spines and two rib cages belonging to a child and an adult who were bound together with metal wire and burned alive, Kugel said. He added that more than 20 bodies were found with hands bound with zip ties or electric cords, indicating execution.

Militants posted videos of some of the killings and kidnappings on victims’ social media pages, where friends and family watched. When militants forced their way into Noam Elyakim’s home, they shot him in the leg, then took his wife’s phone and livestreamed the family being taken hostage on Facebook. In another instance, Shay Shimoni saw a video posted by militants of her 75-year-old mother dead in a pool of blood. The Journal viewed both videos, which are no longer online.

New details about sexual violence also are emerging. Investigators initially found no rape survivors, but at least three women have since come forward to the Ministry of Welfare saying they experienced sexual violence, said Ayelet Razin Bet Or, a former government official helping with the investigation.

One witness saw militants gang rape a woman and then cut off her breast, according to police testimony viewed by the Journal. First responders said they saw signs of sexual violence, including women found naked or with their underwear pulled down or tops removed.

The Journal saw images taken by a first responder of a naked woman with a knife and three nails in the crotch area, women whose clothing was partially or entirely removed and women with blood from the crotch area. In another image provided by the first responder, a woman’s breast was almost entirely sliced off. Her shirt was ripped away and she had a knife wound in the neck. In two other photos a naked man was found gagged and shot and one photo showed a man’s eyeball had been removed.

Shari Mendes, 62, a reservist in the Israeli army who helped identify bodies after Oct. 7, said people were shot in the head so many times they were disfigured.

First victims

Three miles east from the Gaza border in Kfar Aza, a community of 950, militants on paragliders landed in a sports field where later that day residents planned an annual kite-flying festival.

Aviv Kutz, his wife, Livnat, and their three teenage children organized an annual kite festival as a peace gesture to neighboring Gaza. They were among the first to die on Oct. 7.

PHOTOS: KUTZ FAMILY

The festival, which over the years became a peace gesture to Gazans, was organized by Aviv Kutz, 53, his wife Livnat, 49, and their three teenage children. They hoped that Gazans would see the kites and fly their own in return, according to Aviv’s father, Benny Kutz.

The family had eaten dinner together the night before, a rare luxury as the children lived away from home. Rotem, 18, was serving in the army and Yonatan, 16, and Yiftach, 14, were at boarding school.

The family was one of the first to die on Oct. 7. Before 6.30 a.m., militants entered their home and shot all five members of the family as Aviv hugged everyone, trying to shield them, according to a body-collection volunteer and Benny Kutz.

Around the same time in Netiv HaAsara, another Israeli community on the Gaza border, Sabine Taasa said she heard sirens announcing rocket fire and scrambled into her home’s safe room with one of her four sons, Zohar, 15.

She closed the windows, turned off the electricity and locked the door. Her youngest sons, Koren, 12, and Shay, 8, were staying with their father, Gil Taasa, around 100 yards away. Another son, 17-year-old Or, had gotten up early and gone to the beach for fishing and surfing about 10 minutes away, she said.

Sabine and Gil Taasa, shown in an old photo. Gil and their son Or were killed.

PHOTOS: SABINE TAASA

Sabine phoned Or, who told her he’d found a small shelter at the beach and was waiting inside with a group of young people. She tried calling her former partner, Gil Taasa, to whom she was still married, but received no answer.

Around 7 a.m., Gil Taasa and his two sons ran from his house to a bomb shelter yards from the front door, according to a video camera capturing their movements, which has since been added to a video compilation shown by Israel to world leaders and journalists.

Seconds later, a militant threw a grenade inside.

Taasa told his sons not to be scared and jumped on top of the grenade to shield them. He died, his limp body slumping out of the entrance to the shelter, according to the video.

Koren and Shay ran back into the house, where a militant entered the kitchen.

“Daddy!” said one of the boys in disbelief.

“Daddy’s dead, Shay,” Koren said, according to a video from inside the kitchen.

“I know I saw,” Shay said.

“I think we are going to die,” his brother appears to reply, according to video footage inside their father’s home which was included in the video that Israel created.

Shay was badly injured during the grenade explosion and couldn’t see out of one eye. Koren attempted to care for his brother’s wounds with a wet towel and used Google Translate to try to communicate with two militants.

He pleaded for them to kill him instead of his brother. The militants decided to leave, telling the boys to stay put, adding: “If you move, we will kill you.”

About 20 miles away, dozens of militants were descending on a music festival in an open field near the border of Gaza.

At 7:15 a.m., Romi Gonen, 23, woke up her father in northern Israel with a panicked phone call. “They are shooting at me,” she said.

Romi Gonen shown with her father, Eitan Gonen, and on a trip to South America.

PHOTOS: EITAN GONEN

She’d gone to the party with her best friend. By the time Gonen called her father, he said the two girls were frantic, running between bushes trying to hide from fighters as they approached.

They were relieved to stumble upon armed police for protection, only to have to flee again when the officers were shot dead by militants, according to Eitan Gonen.

At 10:05, Romi Gonen called her father to say one of her friends had found her and he was evacuating her out of the festival area in a car.

“A weight was lifted from my chest,” said Eitan Gonen.

‘I’m Here, Sweetie’: Festivalgoer Taken Hostage During Call With Her Mom

YOU MAY ALSO LIKE

‘I’m Here, Sweetie’: Festivalgoer Taken Hostage During Call With Her Mom

Play video: ‘I’m Here, Sweetie’: Festivalgoer Taken Hostage During Call With Her Mom

Romi Gonen was on the phone with her mother while hiding in a car from Hamas militants as they attacked a music festival she attended on Oct. 7. Gunfire and a man shouting commands can be heard in the background before the call goes dead. Photos: Gonen Family, Ronen Fadida

The elation was short-lived. Moments later, Romi Gonen was on the phone to her mother, Meirav Leshem Gonen, when the car was attacked. She was shot in the arm and her friends killed.

Leshem Gonen was still on the phone with her daughter when she heard voices and shouting in Arabic before the call went dead. She is being held hostage in Gaza, according to Israeli authorities.

Sexual assault

At the festival, Hamas militants began to sexually assault women, witnesses told the police. Fighters took women back to Gaza with them, and in one example, paraded the half-naked body of a female festival goer in the back of a pickup, according to a widely shared video on Telegram.

In a recording of a phone call that morning, militants driving in Israel cheered as one of them talked about raping a woman.

“I am going to f— her, I am going to f— her,” he told another person on the line, according to an unverified recording shared with the Journal by Israeli officials.

‘We Are Going to Die’: Israeli Pleads for Help as House Burns

YOU MAY ALSO LIKE

‘We Are Going to Die’: Israeli Pleads for Help as House Burns

Play video: ‘We Are Going to Die’: Israeli Pleads for Help as House Burns

Eitan Cunio exchanged voice notes with a friend as he sheltered with his wife and two children after Hamas militants set fire to their house. The friend later came to the family’s rescue. Photos: Tanya Habjouqa

At Eitan Cunio’s community Nir Oz, the heat and smoke in his shelter had become so intense, he and his wife began to say goodbye to their two daughters, Ofri, 4 and Stav, a year and nine months. They all passed out.

At about 1 p.m., Eitan Cunio regained consciousness as a friend phoned to say he was coming to get them.

With the help of a neighbor, the friend broke into the Cunio’s safe room, and pulled the family out of the charred wreckage of their home. Eitan and one of his daughters began to throw up black vomit on the grass outside.

Eitan was relieved to be alive, but he was then confronted with the news that eight members of his family, including his twin brother David had been kidnapped and taken to Gaza. He later learned that his neighbor’s family was killed—the parents by gunfire and three small children by smoke inhalation.

Eran Smilansky, shown with his friend Eitan Cunio, saved the Cunio family from a burning house on Oct. 7. A baby portrait was found in the ruins of the destroyed home.

PHOTOS: TANYA HABJOUQA/NOOR FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Five members of Eitan Cunio’s family were released in last month’s exchange for Palestinian prisoners, but his twin brother and his younger brother and girlfriend are still being held, according to Israeli authorities.

‘Open up’

In Netiv HaAsara, Sabine Taasa heard a knock on her door: “Open up, it’s me, Koren.”

Standing at the door were her youngest sons covered in blood and shrapnel wounds. They had run from their father’s house and were on the verge of collapse, according to a video Sabine later took inside her shelter. Her youngest son’s eye was full of blood and he had a large wound on the back of his leg.

At least three members of the community’s emergency-response team of volunteers soon arrived. Before evacuating, she ran to Gil Taasa’s house where she found his body in a pool of blood. Flies rested on his face.

She cried and hugged him, before collapsing herself and being carried away.

Two days later, Sabine Taasa was told her eldest son, Or, was killed by militants in the bathroom on the beach.

Authorities couldn’t identify Or’s body for 15 days, and only did so after his mother provided the military with descriptions of features including his feet and a birthmark. She wasn’t permitted to see his body.

Sabine Taasa and her two youngest children 8-year-old Shay, left, and Koren, 12, are staying in a donated apartment in Netanya. PHOTO: TANYA HABJOUQA/NOOR FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Sabine Taasa provided testimony to the police investigation and now wants justice. Four attackers were captured at Netiv HaAsara, and she is hopeful she will be able to confront Gil Taasa’s killers.

“I want to stand in front of them and identify them with my son,” she said. “That is Koren’s wish.”

Write to Rory Jones at Rory.Jones@wsj.com

18. How ‘Antiracism’ Becomes Antisemitism

We all must reflect on this conclusion:

Before Oct. 7, if you had predicted this sudden explosion of Jew-hatred in elite American institutions, you would likely have been called a crank. But you could have made a cogent case for your prediction by noting the many ways in which the nation’s progressive cognoscenti, over the course of the past 50 years, have steadily embraced more preposterous and menacing ideas to explain their failure in the one area they believed themselves both competent and righteous: the creation of racial equality and harmony. Those ideas no doubt appeared edgy and romantic because their target was white people, and what’s the harm in white people condemning themselves? But like amateur wizards playing with incantations, the magic got away from them and produced devilry.

How ‘Antiracism’ Becomes Antisemitism

Demonizing people in racial terms because they’re successful turns out to have consequences.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-antiracism-becomes-antisemitism-american-politics-9f611501?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

By Barton Swaim

Dec. 29, 2023 12:53 pm ET

Members of Jewish Voice for Peace and their supporters protest in Royal Oak, Mich., May 3. PHOTO: JIM WEST/ZUMA PRESS

For decades America’s credentialed liberal elite thought of itself as uniquely immune to the appeal of racial bigotry. The rest of the country—the right-leaning suburbs, the rural places, the Archie Bunkers—were constantly prone, in the minds of America’s intellectuals and enlightened academics, to indulge in racial grievances. But not the university-educated, well-heeled elite. Not the exponents of mainstream-press conventional wisdom. Not the readers of the New Yorker and the Washington Post.

Yet here we are. Over the past 2½ months, Jew-hatred has rocked elite college campuses. Tony neighborhoods in blue cities have witnessed marches calling for the elimination of the Jewish state and protests outside Jewish-owned businesses—this in response not to the accidental killing of a Palestinian by an Israeli soldier, but to the systematic butchering and kidnapping of Israeli Jews by terrorists.

To these expressions of bigotry, high-ranking public officials and university administrators have issued bland disavowals of “violence” and “hatred in all its forms.” The heads of three top universities, testifying before a congressional committee, couldn’t explain why their institutions prosecute every perceived offense against other minorities but can’t condemn calls for genocide against Jews. The Biden administration itself, though so far pursuing a broadly pro-Israel policy in the Middle East, responded to the rash of antisemitic marches and assaults on Jews by announcing a “National Strategy to Counter Islamophobia.”

Past eruptions of antisemitism usually arose from the need to blame someone—anyone—for the cataclysmic failures of a ruling political class. In Russia in the 1880s and ’90s, malcontents equated Jews with Marxists and communists and blamed them for political instability. “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” the 1903 forgery purporting to reveal a Jewish conspiracy to rule the globe, was a gift to any people wishing to account for its ruin without self-criticism. Germans after World War I sought a reason for their military humiliation and economic immiseration.

Palestinian Arabs themselves were carrying out vicious pogroms long before the founding of the Jewish state in 1948—see for example the attack on Hebron in 1929, in which more than 67 Jews, many of them women and children, were murdered. And why? Because the Jews were an easy group to blame: few in number, racially and culturally distinct, highly industrious and successful, and apparently committed to an unsanctioned God. An easy and obvious target.

So far there have been no pogroms in the U.S., only venomous semiviolent protests, individual assaults, libelous social-media onslaughts and willfully misleading news coverage. But the motivation driving today’s Jew-hatred bears some resemblance to those earlier episodes of antisemitic violence. Elite American society has failed in the one aim that gave it definition for more than a half-century: the realization of racial equality.

The trouble started in the mid-1970s, when the reality became clear that the liberal answer to racial inequality—the modern welfare state inaugurated by the Great Society—wasn’t working. With each passing decade since, black economic improvement has stalled. As Stephen and Abigail Thernstrom make clear in their book “America in Black and White” (1997), the black poverty rate declined dramatically from 1940 to 1960, less dramatically but still significantly from 1960 to 1970, and hardly at all after 1970. Yet decade after decade, the prescription from right-thinking liberals—elected Democrats, social-welfare agency heads, academic experts in urban studies, liberal intellectuals, entertainment-industry glitterati—remains the same: Double down on ’60s-style social-welfare policy, liberalize crime laws, and vilify whites other than themselves.

The electorate intermittently challenged this orthodoxy. In the 1990s New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani rejected liberal policy prescriptions and brought order to a city long thought ungovernable. Ignoring warnings of apocalypse by the liberal political class, Bill Clinton signed the 1994 crime bill and the 1996 welfare-reform act; both crime and welfare dependency receded. But the orthodoxy always reasserted itself, as it did when Barack Obama expanded Medicaid in 2010 and his allies in the media and intelligentsia demonized governors who resisted that expansion as racists.

You could chart this cyclical process of doubling down on liberal race orthodoxy by noting a series of abstract words and phrases invented by liberals to excuse the failure of liberal policy on race. “Disparate impact,” a legal doctrine first given expression by the Supreme Court in 1971, holds that nearly any standard applied equally to all Americans—in education, in employment, in housing—adversely punishes some racial minorities. In the 1980s, universities took the high court’s 1978 Bakke decision to mean they could discriminate against whites and Asians. Thus was born the project of fostering “diversity.”

In the 2000s, as black economic prospects improved little, the terms became more absurd—and more openly racialist. Liberals complained of “colorblind racism,” the idea that disregarding race exacerbated race relations and was, in effect, racist. The terms “unconscious bias” and “microaggression” are premised on the idea that well-meaning people can spread racial animus by using seemingly innocuous words and phrases. In the 2010s, “equity” and “inclusion” joined “diversity” to form an entire industry of consultants and corporate officers whose stated purpose is to foster equality in the workplace but who go about encouraging everyone to think constantly about racial identity.

All these coinages can fairly be understood as attempts by American liberals to explain to themselves why the beliefs on race they had presupposed for decades remained unimpeachable. At each stage, the effort to avoid rethinking the problem and to cast the blame for continuing racial inequality on somebody else—anybody but themselves—began to look and sound like another version of racism. Terms like “white privilege” and “white settler guilt” carried undertones of resentment and loathing. Writers for the

New York Times and other organs of, as it’s now termed, progressive opinion began using the words “white” and “whiteness” as though they signified a disease.

In the 2010s an assemblage of radical writers—Ta-Nehisi Coates, Robin DiAngelo, Nikole Hannah-Jones and Ibram X. Kendi prominent among them—became celebrities by alleging that American society had been a racist project from its earliest days. Theirs were more elaborate versions of claims by ’60s radicals that “Amerikkka” had been a source of oppression since its founding; the difference was these weren’t hippie outcasts but tenured professors and award-winning writers, fawned on by journalists too dim to realize the radicals were calling them racist monsters. In a 2014 essay for the Atlantic, Mr. Coates made the case for racial reparations—a policy premised on the idea of punishing people for sins they hadn’t committed. He reproached whites for thinking that “if you stab a black person 10 times, the bleeding stops and the healing begins the moment the assailant drops the knife.” Well-intended, deliberately nonracist white Americans, in Mr. Coates’s analogy, are at once murderers and idiots.Then, in May 2020, the consequences of these twisted ideas spilled into the open. The death of George Floyd under the knee of a white police officer, recorded in a harrowing nine-minute video, shoved American liberals’ failure on race into their faces. But progressives, having by that point sequestered themselves in their homes in a terrified and ultimately vain effort to escape Covid-19, were in no mood for self-criticism. There would be no rethinking the premises of the Great Society. Otherwise-sane people burst into the streets proclaiming the truism that “black lives matter” and denouncing the evils of “systemic racism.”

With this latter term, the effort to double down on the logic of the Great Society reached its ludicrous conclusion. Racism, if it’s systemic, infects everything. You can deplore it, but if you’re part of the system, you’re perpetuating it. Everything is racist. The term was, in many ways, logically congruous with the loose accusation of “racism” to which Americans have long been familiar. To earn the “ist” suffix, you must at some level cultivate, or at least be conscious of, the thing named as an “ism.” You can’t be a royalist if you dislike the monarchy, or a nationalist if you’re indifferent to the nation. A communist cares about the commune or community and has a long list of reasons for rejecting individualism. A Buddhist cares about the Buddha, and an atheist can’t love God. But in the modern progressive worldview, you can be a racist while abominating racism. You may think a person’s race says nothing about his character or competence, and still be a racist.

So everybody’s a racist. Or everybody other than the people spreading resentment by the “systemic racism” lie.

The only thing to do is destroy the entire “racist” system. Of course, America’s progressive VIPs were never going to tear down the system that had given them status, privilege and income. What the George Floyd protests mainly accomplished was to make the protesters a little more comfortable with hatred of Bad People. In 2020 it was the cops, especially white cops. But hatreds can expand.

At each stage of this ugly evolution, some substantial minority of left-wing commentators and politicians became more comfortable with what looked and sounded like straight-up racial bigotry. That the target of their hatred was white people made their rhetoric and behavior appear harmless. But it wasn’t harmless, as anybody might have foreseen.

For several years a variety of academics and writers had argued that Jews are “white” or “functionally white” or “white passing.” “White,” in this usage, has nothing to do with national or religious identity or genetic characteristics. It signifies allegedly unjust privilege and legacies of oppression. Calling Jews “white” was a way of depriving them of any cover as a racial minority and classifying them with persecutors and exploiters.

As Liel Leibovitz writes in a 2021 essay for Commentary magazine: “The creative genius of Jew-hatred has always been its ability to imagine the Jew as the embodiment of whatever it is that polite society finds repulsive. That’s why Jews were condemned as both nefarious bankers controlling all the world’s money and shifty revolutionaries imperiling all capital; as both sexless creeps and oversexed lechers coming for the women and the girls; as both pathetically powerless and occultly powerful. . . . And if you decide that there’s such a thing as ‘whites’ and that they are uniquely responsible for all evils perpetrated on the innocent and downtrodden, well, the Jews must be not only of them but nestled comfortably at the top of the white-supremacist pyramid.”

In 2021, when Mr. Leibovitz wrote these words, few detected the Jew-hatred smoldering beneath the surface of progressive thought. The perverse refusal to rethink obviously failed policies on race and crime, or to reconsider shopworn assumptions about why African-Americans had not achieved economic parity with whites, had created the need for scapegoats. To blame whites qua whites worked well enough for a time. But exhibitionist self-hatred is plainly disingenuous and emotionally unsatisfying. The left needed real scapegoats.

What about the Jews? Successful, capitalist, hated by much of the Arab and Muslim world, the Jews—especially Israeli Jews but Jews generally—met the need for a blameworthy Bad People. It was as though the phrase “Never Again,” enunciated endlessly to proclaim the West’s rejection of all the sentiments and ideas that had led to the Final Solution, had become so ingrained in liberal thought that liberals felt they were incapable of embracing the oldest hatred. Never Again . . . but maybe just this once.

The American left, shameful exceptions aside like members of “The Squad” in Congress, has mostly abstained from openly siding with Hamas in the way its counterparts abroad have. But progressives in this country appear paralyzed, unable to condemn the Oct. 7 attack without also condemning “all forms of hatred” and the like. Assaults on Jews go almost without comment in most of the mainstream press. For weeks after Hamas took hundreds of hostages, including Americans, the U.S. news media showed minimal interest in their whereabouts; it was only when Hamas offered to return some of them in exchange for a cease-fire that reports on their plight began to circulate—almost as though the hostages’ usefulness lay exclusively in stopping Israel from just retribution.

Threats against Jews on elite campuses meet with tepid condemnations and little or no action. Democratic Party leaders can’t bring themselves to criticize colleagues who accuse Israel of war crimes in its response to the Hamas attacks.

Before Oct. 7, if you had predicted this sudden explosion of Jew-hatred in elite American institutions, you would likely have been called a crank. But you could have made a cogent case for your prediction by noting the many ways in which the nation’s progressive cognoscenti, over the course of the past 50 years, have steadily embraced more preposterous and menacing ideas to explain their failure in the one area they believed themselves both competent and righteous: the creation of racial equality and harmony. Those ideas no doubt appeared edgy and romantic because their target was white people, and what’s the harm in white people condemning themselves? But like amateur wizards playing with incantations, the magic got away from them and produced devilry.

Mr. Swaim is a Journal editorial page writer.

YOU MAY ALSO LIKE

1:59

Paused

0:13

6:19

TAP FOR SOUND

Journal Editorial Report: But school choice gained in state after state. Images: AP/Zuma Press Composite: Mark Kelly

Appeared in the December 30, 2023, print edition as 'How ‘Antiracism’ Becomes Antisemitism'.

19. Ukraine, Stalled on the Front, Steps Up Sabotage, Targeting Trains

SOF support to large scale combat operations.

Ukraine, Stalled on the Front, Steps Up Sabotage, Targeting Trains

By Marc Santora

Reporting from Kyiv, Ukraine

Dec. 31, 2023

Updated 12:24 p.m. ET

The New York Times · by Marc Santora · December 31, 2023

As conventional forces struggle to break through defensive lines, both sides are increasingly turning to guerrilla tactics.

A photo Russia released last month purporting to show the site of a derailed train in the Ryazan region, Russia. Russian authorities said the derailment was caused by an improvised explosive device.Credit...Investigative Committee of Russia, via Associated Press

Dec. 31, 2023, 3:00 a.m. ET

The saboteurs managed to place four explosives on a Russian freight train carrying diesel and jet fuel, roughly 3,000 miles from the Ukrainian border. But more important than the destruction of the train, Ukrainian intelligence officials said, was the timing of the blast.

They needed it to blow up as the 50 rail cars were traveling through the nine-mile-long tunnel through the Severomuysky mountains, the longest train tunnel in Russia.

The Ukrainians were hoping to compromise a vital conduit for weapons being shipped to Russia from North Korea, at a moment when Ukrainian forces on the front are struggling to stave off relentless Russian assaults. Trains can be replaced and tracks quickly repaired. But serious damage to this tunnel, which took decades to build, might not be so easy to fix.

Russia and Ukraine continue to battle on a large scale, both on the ground and with aerial strikes. Russian officials accused Ukraine of attacking a Russian city, Belgorod, on Saturday, killing at least 20 people and injuring more than 100 others, in apparent response to a huge Russian missile barrage on several Ukrainian cities the day before.

But guerrilla tactics — including sabotage, commando raids, targeted assassinations and attempts to blow up ammunition depots, oil pipelines and railways — have taken on added importance as the two sides fail to make substantial advances at the front.

So at 5:20 p.m. on Nov. 29, a fire ripped through the tunnel, Russian Railways reported. Russian media broadcast footage of flames around the tunnel entrance, and officials said the explosion was caused by “the detonation of an unidentified explosive device.”

The extent of the damage is unclear. Each side gave diverging assessments of the explosion’s impact. But a second explosion on an alternate train route nearby followed within 48 hours. Combined with other acts of sabotage in Russia and behind Russian lines in occupied Ukraine, the explosions signaled Kyiv’s increasing reliance on irregular tactics to assist conventional forces desperately defending against intensifying Russian assaults.

“The war in Ukraine is changing right now, as Ukraine increases the number of guerrilla operations against Russian forces and decreases conventional operations,” said Seth G. Jones, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies who previously served as an adviser to the commanding general of the U.S. Special Operations Forces in Afghanistan. “The goal is to deliver death by a thousand cuts.”

Russia, with three times the population of Ukraine and a far larger military industrial complex, currently has the advantage in conventional warfare, especially with sustained Western military assistance for Ukraine in doubt. But military analysts point out that an occupying power is historically more vulnerable to attacks by saboteurs working for, or sympathetic to, the country under invasion. And the Kremlin’s scorched-earth campaign in Ukraine continues to fuel resistance in occupied territories.

The destroyed village of Kamyanka, Ukraine. The Kremlin’s scorched-earth campaign continues to fuel resistance in occupied territories.Credit...Nicole Tung for The New York Times

With attacks on Russian occupation officials continuing, the Ukrainian National Resistance Center, which was created by Ukraine’s military to train and coordinate partisan networks in occupied territories, said this month that Russia is dedicating an increasing number of elite forces to rooting out the underground groups.

Despite the heightened vigilance, Ukrainian partisans said they managed to blow up a freight train on Dec. 15 as it was transporting ammunition and fuel from Russian-occupied Crimea to Melitopol, in southern Ukraine.

The earlier attacks on rail lines beyond the Ural Mountains — a natural barrier that has long kept much of the nation’s vital military infrastructure safe from enemy attack — offers a window into the shadowy world of guerrilla tactics and how they can have outsize effects.

While Ukrainian officials often say little about operations inside Russia, this time they wanted the Kremlin to have little doubt about who was behind the attacks.

“Russian special services should get used to the fact that our people are everywhere,” a senior official with the Ukrainian intelligence service, known as the SBU, said after the second rail attack, offering details of the operation on the condition of anonymity for security reasons. The details of the attacks were confirmed by the official and two other senior Ukrainian officials familiar with the operation, and corresponded with details released by the Russia authorities, videos from the scenes and reporting by Russian media outlets.

The Russian security services, known as the FSB, said soon afterward that they had detained two people suspected of organizing several arson attacks on behalf of Kyiv, including one man they said installed magnetic mines on the train that exploded in the tunnel.

Russian Railways claimed that 120 workers cleared the tunnel in a matter of days and said that train traffic had resumed. Ukrainian intelligence officials said it could take months to properly restore the mountain pass to full working order. It is impossible to verify either account.

Ukraine is not alone in using guerrilla tactics. Russia is also employing spies, saboteurs and collaborators, and it targets trains, as well. Polish authorities convicted 14 people on Dec. 19 on charges of undertaking sabotage and propaganda activities under the direction of Russian intelligence, Poland’s Interior Ministry said in a statement. Their main targets, the ministry said, were “trains transporting military and humanitarian aid to Ukraine and preparing for train derailments.”

Trains are vital to both sides, as they were designed to be the backbone of the Soviet supply system. But the bold attack on the tunnel in Russia’s Far East is likely to be of particular concern to the Kremlin, said Emily Ferris, a research fellow specializing in Russia at the Royal United Services Institute in Britain.

“This is something that has bothered Russia for over a century — how to secure these really long and vulnerable rail lines,” she said.

Russian armored vehicles loaded onto railway platforms near the Russia-Ukraine border. How to secure vulnerable train lines has been a problem for the Kremlin for over a century.Credit...Associated Press

There are only two rail lines that cover the vast expanse of Russia: the trans-Siberian, which stretches 5,772 miles from Vladivostok to Moscow, and the newer Baikal-Amur Mainline, or BAM, which runs from near the Pacific Ocean for some 2,600 miles before linking up with the trans-Siberian line.

They are the only lines that link Russia to China and, amid a surge in trade with Beijing, the lines are more vital than ever, economically and militarily, for the Kremlin. But they are a challenge to guard because they traverse the Siberian plains, dense forests and the open steppes.

Russia and Belarus’s interlinked railway systems facilitated the swift movement of troops and equipment between the two countries, allowing Belarus to act as the launchpad for Moscow’s assault on Kyiv from the north in February 2022.

Strikes on that rail network added to the logistical struggles of the Russians in the early days of the war and contributed to the Kremlin’s failure to seize Kyiv, Ms. Ferris said.

Since then, attacks inside Russia have continued, by agents working for Ukraine, but also including loosely affiliated groups of self-described Russian anarchist groups, she said.

In November, the British military intelligence agency reported, “Seventeen months after the first incidents were reported, sabotage of Russian railways by antiwar activists continues to represent a significant challenge for the Russian authorities.”

Research by the independent Russian media outlet Mediazona found that, as of October, 76 cases of probable railway sabotage had been filed with the courts in Russia since the invasion. At least 137 people, the vast majority of them under 24, had been prosecuted, the agency reported.

Ukraine’s military intelligence agency said in late November that its agents were targeting rail infrastructure across Russia, claiming responsibility for a spate of fires that had destroyed structures used to house sensitive equipment that performs a wide range of operations, including platform control, train monitoring and signaling.

Ukrainian sabotage efforts go beyond trains. Ukrainian intelligence officials said partisans killed the Russian-appointed deputy head of the occupied Luhansk region, Oleg Popov, in a car bombing; other agents operating in Moscow shot and killed a former Ukrainian lawmaker who defected to Russia, Illya Kyva.

A train derailed by what Moscow called “a deliberate act.” Guerrilla tactics have been part of the war since it began. But as both sides fail to make significant advances, they have taken on added importance.

At the same time, Russia, which has long used irregular tactics to achieve political goals, continues to send sabotage and reconnaissance groups to infiltrate Ukraine.

Ukrainian officials said they believed Russia was behind the poisoning of the wife of Ukraine’s military intelligence chief last month, part of a campaign targeting Ukraine’s senior leadership. (Asked about the poisoning, the Kremlin’s spokesman said “Ukraine blames Russia for everything,” and called it “habitual accusation.”)

Ms. Ferris said it was impossible to judge the lasting effect of Ukraine’s attack on the BAM line, she said, but “the Russians would be ill advised to ignore it.”

Marc Santora has been reporting from Ukraine since the beginning of the war with Russia. He was previously based in London as an international news editor focused on breaking news events and earlier the bureau chief for East and Central Europe, based in Warsaw. He has also reported extensively from Iraq and Africa. More about Marc Santora

A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Stuck at Front, Ukraine Turns To Saboteurs

The New York Times · by Marc Santora · December 31, 2023

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

If you do not read anything else in the 2017 National Security Strategy read this on page 14:

"A democracy is only as resilient as its people. An informed and engaged citizenry is the fundamental requirement for a free and resilient nation. For generations, our society has protected free press, free speech, and free thought. Today, actors such as Russia are using information tools in an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of democracies. Adversaries target media, political processes, financial networks, and personal data. The American public and private sectors must recognize this and work together to defend our way of life. No external threat can be allowed to shake our shared commitment to our values, undermine our system of government, or divide our Nation."

Access NSS HERE

Company Name | Website

Opinion: ‘Action This Day’ – Churchill’s Lessons for the West

War Books: The Best Books We Read in 2023 - Modern War Institute

Why China is winning the new espionage Cold War

Women Bear the Brunt of Asia’s Climate Failures

US Navy sinks three Houthi militant boats in the Red Sea

US Navy sinks three Houthi militant boats in the Red Sea after they attacked a Maersk merchant ship with missiles - amid heightened operations to protect vital shipping lane

NATO, U.S. Consult With Warsaw After​ Apparent Intrusion Of Russian Missile Into Polish Airspace

Live Briefing: Russia's Invasion Of Ukraine

ANALYSIS-Sweeping Chinese military purge exposes weakness, could widen

'MORE HEADS WILL ROLL'

FIGHT AND WIN BATTLES?

Tags

Why is the Gaza war different?

Mosul and Gaza

The ratio of the dead

China Confronts a New Political Reality in Taiwan: No Friends

Interviews with top candidates in volatile three-way presidential race point to rising skepticism toward Beijing—whatever the outcome

Opinion: New York Times Editorial Board Very Wrong

'Next Year Will Be a Time of Global Decisions,' – President Zelensky's Address on 30th December

How Columbia’s President Has Avoided Fallout Over Israel-Gaza Protests

Where Was the Israeli Military?

Unprepared for Battle

‘What a Mistake’

‘Slowing Our Advance’

Fog of War

NATO needs Russia "ruined" in Ukraine for future peace: Official

Chinese ex-Navy chief, with South China Sea background, named defence minister

WIDER PURGE

‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7

‘Screams without words’

The investigation

The woman in the black dress

Israel’s ‘Black Sabbath’: Murder, Sexual Violence and Torture on Oct. 7

Investigators build legal case documenting ‘systematic and unprecedented cruelty’ with echoes of Adolf Eichmann trial

First victims

Sexual assault

‘Open up’

How ‘Antiracism’ Becomes Antisemitism

Demonizing people in racial terms because they’re successful turns out to have consequences.

Ukraine, Stalled on the Front, Steps Up Sabotage, Targeting Trains

NATO, U.S. Consult With Warsaw After Apparent Intrusion Of Russian Missile Into Polish Airspace