On Saturday night, Kan 11 journalist and program host Kalman Liebskind wrote in Maariv that when his daughter had asked him about Minister of Settlements and National Missions Orit Strook (Religious Zionism), he recommended, “As a rule, don’t believe any report about her. Ninety percent of the reports about her are based on lies, manipulations, and quotes out of context; and since you won’t be able to identify the remaining ten percent, take it for granted that they’re lying to you all the time.”
Words to live by. As rank-and-file Israelis are splitting into their personalized echo chambers where they are exposed to the news as they wish it to be, reality be damned, the much larger mainstream media echo chamber can’t stop vilifying Strook.
In a cabinet meeting last Thursday, Likud Minister Miri Regev asked Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi if the rules of engagement around the new Gaza border buffer zone had been changed. On paper, the rules say that anyone who comes close to the fence is shot on the spot, no warnings, no nothing. But many reports from the soldiers manning the posts along the border suggest they are not allowed to carry this out. Instead, Gazan Arabs approach the fence unharmed and get to go home and tell their friends.
IDF Chief Halevi denied those reports and asked Regev if she wanted him to read out the rules of engagement for her benefit.
National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir asked if the soldiers misunderstood the situation, and Halevi denied it again.
In the next cabinet meeting, the same pesky right-wing ministers drilled Southern Command Commander Eliezer Toledano about the rules of engagement, he said they were “good and appropriate.”
Strook cut him off, interjecting, “We didn’t ask how they were and we didn’t ask you to give us grades, but to explain what they say.”
Clearly, under the watchful eyes of the Hague court and the Biden administration, the last thing the IDF brass and the defense minister need are bullet-riddled Arabs who dared to go near the fence. So they’re keeping two sets of books: one on paper, ordering the soldiers to shoot on sight, another ordering the same soldiers to report any such walk-on and wait for permission to shoot which, as soldiers are reporting, never comes.
GENERALS AND STRONG WOMEN, DON’T GET ME STARTED
Some of the hostility against Strook and Miri Regev has to do with the fact that they are strong women who don’t cower before bigger and brawnier men, including army generals. (The Left Hates Orit Strook, the Woman Who’s Been Attacking the Conceptzia Since the Expulsion)
Unlike Regev, who serviced the Gush Katif expulsion in her job as IDF Spokesperson, Strook has been raising the tough questions since that prehistoric epoch in the early 21st century when Israel’s powerful mainstream politics and its army of lackie reporters turned on the Jewish families of Gush Katif in the Gaza Strip, blaming them for the conflict with Arab terrorists, and forcing their expulsion.
Almost twenty years later, thousands of Israelis paid and continue to the price for that insanity, as the IDF belatedly re-interjects itself into the watchful posts it abandoned back in 2005. The nightmare of the left in Israel is that the Gush Katif disaster be tied with October 7 as cause-and-effect, and that nightmare includes Benny Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot, the two IDF chiefs of staff who navigated an insane security policy since the army’s withdrawal from Gaza, containing Hamas with the occasional counter-attack, under the protection of the Iron Dome system that made the prospect of Israeli civilians being hit with thousands of rockets palatable.
Orit Strook, Itamar Ben Gvir, Bezalel Smotrich, and rightwing pundits and panelists on right-wing radio and Channel 14 tirelessly repeat this message these days, marking themselves as the enemy of both the political and military conceptzia barons.
ON WOLVES AND CRYING
On January 4, the brewing tension between the people who’ve been warning about the wolf since 2005 and the people who fed the wolf this whole time came to its first explosion. A meeting of the political-security cabinet ended in a blowout after right-wing ministers attacked the Chief of Staff, General Herzi Halevi, and Minister Benny Gantz for setting up a team to investigate the events of October 7 that included some of the granddaddies of the conceptzia which led to the massacre, most notably the expulsion defense minister, Shaul Mofaz. As a result, the security apparatus has temporarily scrapped Mofaz from the committee.
In hindsight, Orit Strook was right and awake all along, and the IDF and the entire security apparatus were wrong and asleep. On September 5, 2023, one month before the October 7 attack, Strook sent Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi, and NSA Head Tzachi Hanegbi an alert:
A. In January 2023 it was permitted to bring into the Strip boat motors.
B. On May 2023 it was permitted to bring in motorcycle parts.
As you may recall, a month and two days later, Hamas murderers inflicted catastrophic injuries on Israeli civilians using motorcycles and boats. Rest assured, when Israel Hayom published Strook’s warning letter to the three men in charge of Israel’s security, they were not amused.
The attacks on her, which had never quieted down in the past, became just what Liebskind described: a vicious campaign to cut Strook down, never mind facts or details. She could not remain standing when the committee of inquiry started looking for the folks who fell asleep on their watch while the barbarians broke through the gates.
Between April and September 2023, Strook warned 15 different times against the criminal negligence of allowing the imports of dual-purpose goods into Gaza, goods Hamas was utilizing in preparation for its attack. However, the negligence began under the Bennett-Lapid-Gantz government which permitted cement imports, steel sheets, and fiberglass.
Vladimir Ilich Lenin prophesied that “The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.” Yahya Sinwar’s version was, “The Zionists will let us import the knives with which we’ll slit their throat.”
At least Lenin was going to pay for the rope.
