Ten Stunning Major-Media Revelations About the Israel-Hamas War You Might Have Missed

In the last 48 hours, our understanding of what’s happening in Israel and Gaza has changed dramatically. But events are moving so fast that many have missed some key updates. Here are the ten biggest.

{Note: You can read the first free Proof report on the ongoing Israel-Hamas War here. Proof uses curatorial journalism to offer the most comprehensive, incisive account of current events.}

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Introduction

The wholly foreseeable—read on, and at the link above, to see why it was foreseeable—Israel-Hamas War arrives just as Elon Musk has completed his utter destruction of the world’s premiere venue for sharing news about major international breaking news.

As a consequence, the information space with respect to what’s happening right now in Israel is a mess. On Twitter, videos that are fake, misleadingly framed, years old, ripped from video games, or part of a disinformation campaign orchestrated by the enemies of the United States abound, even as breaking news headlines have literally been rendered invisible by Musk’s new user interface (UI) and analyses by professional journalists are buried beneath a veritable avalanche of conjecture, snark, and outright propaganda by fake-“verified” trolls, bots, foreign agents, and MAGA insurrectionists.

My hope is that Proof can be a uniquely helpful resource under the circumstances.

Proof was acknowledged last year by the Government of the Netherlands as one of the world’s chief advocates for—and indeed originators of—curatorial journalism, an emerging journalistic subgenre that sometimes goes by the name metajournalism.

According to officials in the Netherlands, this Substack media outlet participates in

“a form of investigative journalism that seems to be on the rise….curated journalism, or metajournalism. Many separate, sometimes short, messages appear on each subject. A metajournalist tries to follow that huge mass of online messages from different titles on a subject and to create a coherent picture based on that. Such authors are involved in a subject for a long time and become aware of many details. This way of working produces new messages that can reveal a bigger story than the individual messages. That larger story can also become news.”

I didn’t become a curatorial journalist just recently. After starting my career in indie journalism at 17, almost thirty years ago, I turned to curatorial journalism in late 2016 specifically as a way to capture the full story of Donald Trump’s malfeasance at a time when mainstream media seemed incapable of doing so using conventional reporting.

The result was three national bestsellers, totaling 2,500 pages, covering the entirety of the Trump presidency. The fourth book in the Proof series was released here at Proof last year, and tells the untold story of events at the Pentagon before and on January 6.

More recently, Proof has turned its attention, and its curatorial journalism, to Musk—detailing his activities as a clear-and-present but idiosyncratic danger to the world.

Now there’s a war ongoing in Israel that threatens to expand and engulf all of us in its miseries. So this media outlet is pivoting to apply curatorial journalism to yet another story so sprawling, so mired in the morass of social media chaos, and so complex in its innumerable contours that it may be impossible to tell it any other way.

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Ten Stunning Major-Media Revelations About the Israel-Hamas War You Might Have Missed

(1) Hamas’s attack was much larger than believed.

Channel 4 (UK) reports that over 1,500 Hamas militants—all of them heavily armed, and many of them heavily armored—stormed into southern Israel on Saturday. Initial estimates had assumed the number of terrorists to be only in the mid-hundreds.

While 1,500 may or may not sound like a lot to some readers here, remember that this force—which equates to somewhere between two and five battalions in Western military parlance (depending on the country involved)—emanated from an area about the size of two Districts of Columbia.

But it’s more than this.

Whereas initial reports from Israeli intelligence said that 2,200 rockets were fired from Gaza as the invasion unfolded, more recent reporting from CBS News now quotes the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) as updating this figure to 4,500—more than twice the number previously acknowledged, and almost exactly in line with claims made by Hamas at the time of its initial attack on the tiny Jewish state to Gaza’s east.

Just so, whereas it was widely reported that Israeli territory had been fully cleared of Hamas terrorists by late Sunday, in fact news reports thereafter emerged of fighting continuing inside Israel as late as today (Wednesday), giving the lie to that apparently too-optimistic assessment.

Equally concerning is that just hours after reports emerged highlighting concerns about Hezbollah military incursions along the Israeli-Lebanon border, new reports arrived revealing that fierce gun battles on that border with unknown militants had already begun. The most recent reporting has Hezbollah firing rockets into Israel and fighting occurring on both sides of the historically hotly contested border.

What all this means is that the invasion of Israel was much larger, much broader in scope, much longer in its duration, much more far-reaching in its geopolitical effect, and much fiercer in its minute-to-minute intensity than any news report we received over the weekend suggested.

Even now, Israel can’t confirm that all Hamas militants have been driven from its soil; rockets continue to emanate from Gaza en masse, despite the devastation that Israeli airstrikes have visited upon it; and fighting in northern Israel is getting worse rather than better.

(2) The death toll of the initial attack was significantly worse than previously thought.

CNN reports over 1,200 Israeli dead in just the first 96 hours of the war, which wildly outstrips the earliest reports out of southern Israel—reports that suggested a total death toll nationwide in the low hundreds.

In fact, major-media reports now confirm that a death toll in the low hundreds was reached solely at the Nova Music Festival near the Be’eri kibbutz (not far from the old Karni border crossing between the Gaza Strip and Israel, which was closed in 2011).

The Nova death toll is already “over 260”, and given that more than a hundred concert-goers are still missing could reach over 360. While some of these hundred civilians may have been kidnapped, there has by now been enough video of—and telephonic contact with—some of the abductees that there’s good reason to fear that among the unaccounted-for hundred innocent noncombatants are some who were killed by Hamas in, as noted, a surprise attack more vicious by exponents than initially known.

It’s always dangerous to try to extrapolate or metaphorize the scope of a tragedy using mathematics; Israel isn’t America, and vice versa. Nevertheless, one can’t ignore that Israel is a nation with a population of under 9.4 million people—thus, approximately the same size, population-wise, as New Jersey. If 1,200 New Jersey residents died from a terrorist attack tomorrow, we’d immediately account it another September 11th, and the truth of the matter is that by all appearances the death toll Israel is now reporting will soon rise substantially. When we add to this fact that Israel is not, of course, New Jersey—the analogy fails unless we imagine New Jersey as the entirety of America—it can be understood that the toll from Hamas’s terroristic invasion of the only democracy in the Middle East is so great that it will be etched in Israelis’ memories for generations.

(3) The initial Israeli response to the attack was considerably more feeble than realized.

As the New York Times now reports, Israel’s border fence—use of which as a defense mechanism has been touted not just by Benjamin Netanyahu but his friend and leading American ally Donald Trump—turned out to be useless. Even meaningless.

With no difficulty at all, Hamas militants (a) used basic drones to take out the fence’s machine-gun emplacements and the cell towers controlling them; (b) bulldozed the fence to allow invaders to traverse it en masse; (c) used low-tech hang-gliders to sail over it with ease; (d) cut holes in certain sections of the fence, and even (e) used at least one motorboat to simply go around it. As the Times summarizes, “the barrier turned out to be easier to break through than Israeli officials had expected.” This discovery gives the lie to Trumpist and Likud Party claims that border fences, even remotely monitored ones, are a significant defense against foreign incursions. In fact, initial Israeli intelligence reviews suggest that the presence of a border fence bred overconfidence, complacency, and poor organization and discipline in Israeli forces.

It turns out that the closing of entryways into the Gaza Strip—that is, the elongation of the border fence to offer fewer points of entry for people and/or goods traveling between Israel and Gaza—may paradoxically have reduced Israeli national security.

As the Times and other major-media outlets have now reported, with only one (of an original nine) border crossings still open for human traffic between Israel and Gaza, the IDF began concentrating all of its forces in a single location at the border. The result was that Hamas was able to take out almost the entirety of Israel’s command-and-control structure at the border simply by killing almost everyone in a single IDF outpost. In one fell swoop, there were virtually no IDF commanders left to organize a resistance to Hamas’s initial incursion.

Just so, the cutting off of surveillance facilities at a single location made it possible for 1,500 militants to get up to 15 miles inside Israel without anyone in the IDF knowing where they were or even from which points of border-fence breach they had emanated.

(4) Iran may not have been involved in Hamas’s invasion of Israel. But it now looks like Russia was.

Not only have Republican Party politicians across America accused Iran of funding, orchestrating, and overseeing Hamas terrorists’ cold-blooded murder of hundreds or even thousands of Israelis over the weekend, they’ve gone so far as to assure American voters that the money Iran used to do so came from $6 billion in “taxpayer” funds given to Iran by the Biden administration.

All of this is false. Worse, it’s disinformation spread by Republican officials who well know the truth: the $6 billion in question is frozen funds from completed Iranian oil sales; in return for significant value for U.S. foreign policy, the Biden administration agreed to transfer these funds to a Qatari bank, where they are now overseen by U.S. officials in such a way that they can only be used to purchase food, medicine, or other humanitarian essentials for the Iranian people. In other words, not only can this old money never be used to fund a terrorist enterprise, but the Iranian government has no access to the funds at all. Moreover, Israeli intelligence apprehended from the start of the Hamas invasion that it had to have been in the works for months and months (see much more on this below), making it impossible for it to have had anything to do with an Administration money transfer. The invasion plot significantly predates the transfer.

But somehow this all gets much, much worse than Republican politicians deliberately spreading disinformation that weakens American national security during a war in the Middle East that America has already tacitly been drawn into by virtue of Israel being one of our biggest allies. While the work of Republican disinformation brokers would already have bordered on open treachery against the United States in a time of war, we know that in fact Iran may not even have been involved in any of this at all.

As CNN now reports, “Initial U.S. intelligence suggests Iran was surprised by the Hamas attack on Israel.” This report is based on “multiple” sources and “specific” intelligence received by the USIC (United States Intelligence Community). The USIC now expresses its significant “doubt…that Iran was directly involved in the planning, resourcing, or approving of the [Hamas] operation [in Israel].” Worse still, there now seems to be every possibility that some of the Republican officials who falsely blamed the United States—and “taxpayer” dollars—for Hamas’s atrocities actually had seen or heard of the intel before renewing their credentials in the Blame America First crowd.

In a shocking update to this ongoing reporting late Wednesday, CNN revealed that (emphasis supplied) “A senior Hamas official based in Lebanon said militants had been preparing for the attack on Israel for two years”—meaning since October 2021, just eight months into the Biden administration, four months before Russia invaded Ukraine for the second time (but, critically, during the period of time MAGA allies in Moscow had begun plotting a followup ground offensive in the European nation they first invaded in 2014), and a stunning 23 months before the one-off deal with Iran that MAGA Republicans now falsely insist made the Hamas invasion of Israel possible.

But it gets worse.

According to the senior Hamas official quoted by CNN, Ali Baraka, from October 2021 to just before the Hamas invasion the Islamist terrorists were “manufacturing [Kalashnikov] bullets with permission from the Russians” (emphasis supplied). The same Russians whose military-industrial complex the MAGA “movement” has since opted to support over America’s European allies in Ukraine and NATO? Yes, the very same.

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Moreover, Baraka confirms that Iran was not involved in the planning of the attack.

According to Baraka, “None of our factions, even our allies did not know about the ‘zero hour’ [of the invasion]…[in order to] preserve the secrecy of the battle [plan].”

He adds that thirty minutes post-invasion, “the Palestinian resistance factions [in the West Bank and Gaza unaffiliated with Hamas] were contacted, in addition to our allies Hezbollah and Iran [and Turkey].” While Baraka acknowledges what has long been known—that Iran generally speaking supplies Hamas with most of its “money and weapons”—CNN reports that he “made no mention of any outside involvement in the planning of the attack.”

But what about outside involvement in the invasion as it occurred? Here, we find new evidence of Kremlin involvement—the same Kremlin the Republican Party base has, increasingly, vocally backed instead of NATO, the Pentagon, or the European Union.

As CNN explains (emphasis supplied):

Russia inquired about the attack [on Israel] after[ ] [the initial attack], Baraka said. “They were updated about our situation and the goals of the battle”, he said.

He also said Moscow was happy for the United States to be distracted by the Israel-Hamas conflict instead of the war in Ukraine.

“Even Russia sympathizes with us. Even the Russians sent us messages Saturday morning [immediately after the attack began]. There is sympathy. [Russia] is happy for America to be embroiled in Palestine. It lessens the pressure on it in Ukraine. One battle eases the other battle. So therefore we are not alone in the battlefield.”

For a senior Hamas official to say that Hamas is “not alone in the battlefield” because it has the unambiguous backchannel support of Republican Party allies in Moscow—which party is at this moment trying to convince American voters that it’s Democratic politicians who’ve provided aid and comfort to Hamas and its closest allies—should be major breaking news across the United States. Indeed, it situates Hamas’s invasion of Israel as a hand-in-glove operation with Russian operations in Ukraine that are broadly supported by the Republicans’ voting base. Proof notes, as well, that the only nation Baraka makes clear knew of its preparations for war in both 2021 and 2022 was Russia. Given that Baraka now acknowledges that the Kremlin sees Hamas’s invasion as a mutually beneficial strategy to help it win in Ukraine, we must ask the following: Wouldn’t Putin have believed the very same thing when he was giving “permission” for Hamas to generate Russian ammunition using Russian molds? Must we now deem the invasion of Israel a new front in the Russo-Ukrainian War the Republican Party sides with the Russians in? Does that mean the GOP is formally allied with Hamas?

These are questions working journalists must begin to ask, given this new reporting.

{Note: None of this changes the fact that Iran is the primary sponsor, funder, and supplier of Hamas—and may well have green-lit an operation it did not in the first instance orchestrate or oversee. Certain Republican members of Congress are dismissing this new CNN report on Iran’s lack of awareness of the Hamas invasion by mischaracterizing it, suggesting that it says Iran had zero knowledge whatsoever of the attack—which is beyond improbable. What in fact the extant intelligence, and this new reporting, suggests is that even if Iran had knowledge of a coming attack it apparently did not know the timing of it. It will be important for Americans to stay on top of this developing subnarrative, particularly as the Netanyahu administration is now insisting that Iran was intimately involved in the invasion, and may in the future parlay that apparently unwarranted insistence into military action against Iran. Such military action could lead to a U.S.-Iran war on the order of the one Trump came within minutes of lying the United States into following his assassination of popular Iranian general Qasam Soliemani.}

(5) Israel is taking steps—wise or not, justified or not, necessary or not—that are likely to create the biggest humanitarian crisis since World War II.

Per this Haaretz report (see also here and below), Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant has now told the 300,000 Israel troops massing at the Gaza border that the Netanyahu administration has officially “released all restraints” on their conduct in Gaza. This opens the door—by definition—to the commission of war crimes by the IDF upon its mass incursion on a land area the size of just two District of Columbias.

And we must remember, here, that almost 50% of the local population in Gaza is mere children. (As of this writing, Insider reports that 260 children have already been killed by the Israelis without even a single IDF member entering Gaza on foot.)

According to the Associated Press, the IDF has already directly bombed one United Nations shelter in Gaza and has damaged five others—making clear to innocent Gazans, whether or not there was any premeditation behind these Israeli airstrikes, that nowhere in Gaza is safe. Reports from scores of NGOs and media outlets confirm that UN shelters in Gaza are at or over capacity. Israel has also repeatedly bombed the Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Israel to ensure that no Gazans can escape, though in a sense this hardly matters: Egypt is refusing to take Palestinian refugees.

All water and electricity into Gaza have been stopped, and the Strip is now officially out of power. Water shortages are so severe that mass civilian deaths from insufficient water intake, including the deaths of children and the elderly, are likely to begin in a matter of hours rather than days.

The IDF has dropped its years-long commitment to using phone calls or pre-strike “roof knocks” to warn civilians to evacuate a building that is about to be bombed, thus ensuring mass civilian casualties with almost every strike it makes (and there have already been hundreds, one of which hit a marketplace and killed dozens of innocents).

While Israel’s determination to permanently destroy Hamas is understandable and just, the foreseeability of a humanitarian crisis that kills hundreds of thousands of additional infants, children, and elderly; individuals who are disabled, bedridden, dependent on medication, or terminally ill; or noncombatants who don’t support (or even have actively opposed) Hamas cannot be doubted. The world will now see mass death within Gaza from thirst, starvation, immolation, explosion, the mass collapse of buildings and outbuildings, heat stroke, insufficiency (or lack of access to) medication and medical treatment, and countless other causes. Remember, again, as you read this, that almost half of the two million people in Gaza are children who cannot, whatever one’s view of the morass in Israel, be held responsible for the actions of Gaza’s adults.

The video below gives some indication of what is happening inside Gaza right now.

As if the above weren’t enough, journalists are not being allowed inside the Gaza Strip by the IDF, which raises significantly the likelihood of isolated or mass war crimes therein that won’t be objectively documented. Yet there’ll be no plausible deniability for either the Israeli government or the American government once this humanitarian crisis bursts into full view of the world; both governments will be rightly accused of having done little to avoid human collateral damage on a scale the world hasn’t seen for decades. One CNN analyst recently estimated that “hundreds of thousands” of innocent civilians could die in Gaza as so-called “collateral damage”, a tragedy of a magnitude our species hasn’t seen in years and certainly not in such a short duration.

Proof has been directing those who want to donate funds to help Gazan refugees to Doctors Without Borders (see here) or any of the agencies identified by CNN (a list that also includes Doctors Without Borders). Doctors Without Borders—often called MSF, due to its name in French—has written about what it is seeing in Gaza here.

(6) Joe Biden is the President of the United States America needs at this pivotal moment.

As President Biden’s likely 2024 GOP opponent, Donald Trump—the man who both infamously and even heretically declared himself “King of Israel” not so long after divulging highly classified Israeli intelligence to Iran’s Russian allies in the Oval Office—rails on Truth Social about his ability to permanently end hostilities between Israel and the Palestinians despite failing to do so as president (and indeed exhibiting no interest in doing so), the current president is working to establish a humanitarian corridor between Gaza and Egypt and has already coordinated a condemnation of Hamas’s invasion of Israel by the Quint—the five Western allies with nuclear arms.

Biden has also called Netanyahu to urge him to do all within his power to minimize civilian casualties in Israel. While this may sound esoteric, there can be little doubt that during his call with Netanyahu Biden made clear that Israel’s presently righteous cause would lose support in America generally and the White House specifically if it results in Israel killing Palestinian indiscriminately. That’s simply not a consequence the Israelis can afford.

Meanwhile, what can be said about a career criminal, confirmed rapist, and bigoted twice-impeached one-term former president who insists, on his soon-to-be-bankrupt propaganda site, and in all capital letters like an underclassman hallucinating on PCP, that no one else in the world intends to keep Israel safe, no one else in the world has the ability to do so, and no one else in the world is even familiar with the key parties in the region?

But Trump’s bloviating isn’t the major concern here, nor is the fact that—as a man who illegally conspired with Netanyahu’s office to try to steal the 2016 presidential election—he must be seen as beholden to the embattled, under-indictment Netanyahu (who could at any time reveal Trump’s past crimes regarding election interference) rather than someone in a position to direct or channel his Israeli ally’s (mis)conduct.

No—the real concern here is that Donald Trump has infamously spoken out in favor of war crimes, particularly the killing of innocent relatives of militant extremists. That isn’t just an international war crime, but is punishable by death within the United States.

And Trump has acted on his penchant for war-criming, for instance by pardoning a Navy Seal war criminal whose own comrades called him “freaking evil” and who the military apparatus of the United States urged the then-president not to consort with, apologize for, or forgive. Instead, he did all three.

All of which gives us a good sense of what Trump would be telling Netanyahu now.

So why does this matter, beyond the obvious moral component? Because the question of whether or not the Israel-Hamas War balloons into World War III is dependent on how many civilians Netanyahu’s administration kills in Gaza and how unambiguously he’s seen as trying to minimize such deaths. Were Trump president now, his infamous bloodlust would do as much to provoke a world war as anything Netanyahu or the IDF is doing.

Instead, we have a president who, according to the latest reporting from CNN, is now shepherding talks that not only involve Egypt but also—critically—Israel regarding the above-referenced “humanitarian corridor” (quoting Secretary of State Anthony Blinken):

(7) Republicans’ only interest right now is in scoring political points—and this is true to a degree beyond what even the cynics among us expected.

Yesterday, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI)—America’s first two Muslim women in Congress—trended on Twitter due to calls from many far-right MAGAs for them to be summarily “expelled” from Congress (a call that arrived online with such force and ubiquity that the word “expelled” even briefly trended on Twitter).

Had either woman engaged in any sort of misconduct? Are they, for instance, facing 23 federal felonies, like Rep. George Santos (R-NY), who MAGAs want to remain in the House?

No.

Rather, each representative had given a statement to the press on the Israel-Hamas War that the new version of the Republican Party deemed politically incorrect and therefore grounds for overturning the democratic election of these two women by their constituents.

Omar’s statement—which is difficult to find, even in any major-media report decrying it or describing other people decrying it (nor is it on her website, which causes one to wonder how those now decrying it could possibly have read it)—begins by calling for all Americans to “honor the humanity of the hundreds of innocent Israeli civilians and nine Americans who were killed this weekend.”

Yet according to thousands of Trumpists on Twitter, Omar must now be removed from office because she also (emphasis supplied) said that we all must “honor the humanity of the innocent Palestinian civilians who have been killed”—a sentiment Proof endorses and that frankly no person of conscience could gainsay. Omar also advised the U.S. not to give “unconditional” aid to Israel, a position that’s strategic and smart given the leverage we currently have in trying to prevent needless civilian deaths there. Few would expect Biden not to seek at least some informal concessions from Netanyahu in light of the possibility of mass civilian casualties and the extent of America’s present influence on Israeli public policy.

As for Rep. Tlaib, her speech-crime, in view of MAGA and Elongelical “free-speech absolutists”, was to say that she “grieve[s] the…Israeli lives lost yesterday, today, and every day.” The “problem”: she went on to say that she also grieves for “Palestinian lives lost”, though candidly this is something all of us should do so long as we are not speaking of Hamas militants. (At the time of Rep. Tlaib’s statement, the death toll among innocent Palestinian civilians was approaching 1,000 in just over 72 hours.)

So was Tlaib speaking of militants? Likely not, though her language, which made reference to the inevitability of “resistance” to “apartheid” and the “heartbreaking cycle of violence” apartheid inevitably causes, certainly led some to view Tlaib as being sympathetic to dead Palestinian militants. The problem with this reading, of course, is that Tlaib is Palestinian-American—which understandably makes it difficult to issue explicit condemnation of a terrorist group that, regrettably, also happens to be the primary distributor of humanitarian aid in the location where Tlaib’s friends, acquaintances, and relatives (as well as the friends, acquaintances, and relatives of many of her constituents) live. Condemning Hamas is a significantly more fraught proposition for Tlaib than it is for the rest of us, and not because she supports murder.

In fact, we have ample evidence that Tlaib opposes violence in all its forms. While she has significant questions—as do many—about the contours of U.S.-Israeli policy and the past conduct of the War on Terror, every September 11 the Democratic Michigan representative publicly reaffirms her commitment to peace on Earth.

In 2023, she wrote that all of us must “push[ ] for a more peaceful world every day.”

In 2022, she wrote that everyone around the world must “[ ]commit to a creating a world and society that is safe for every single person.”

In 2021, she called on Americans to “take action in honor” of the innocent victims of both September 11 and the now universally-acknowledged-as-flawed (cf. Iraqi WMDs) War on Terror, specifically focusing her urging of “action” on providing additional healthcare assistance to the first responders on September 11 who “are still suffering adverse health effects” from the violence of that day.

In 2020 she urged every American to “reject[ ]…the hate and terror” of the Muslim extremist attacks of September 11 and encouraged “solidarity….in the face of hate.”

So while I and many other American Jews may strongly disagree with Rep. Tlaib on many matters concerning Israel, the notion that she is “pro-terrorism” based on her statements as an elected official is preposterous.

Just so, it’s worth noting that on June 7, 2021, Rep. Omar took to Twitter to write about the “unthinkable atrocities” committed by—among others—Hamas.

So claims that Omar refuses to condemn that organization are preposterous, however problematic her past statements on Israel may have been (most of which she has since apologized for; tellingly, Omar’s is one of many prospective “wokeist” cancellations that the supposedly anti-“cancel culture” MAGA camp wants to see made permanent).

Many MAGA Republicans in fact appeared to call for Tlaib’s expulsion from Congress exclusively for her refusal to talk to a Fox News reporter who confronted her with then-unconfirmed reports of mass decapitations of infants by Hamas. The other allegations made by the Fox News journalist, namely that Israeli kids had been burned alive and that Israeli women are being raped in the streets, appear to lack any substantiation.

Notice the Fox News tagline, above: “Rashida Tlaib refuses to answer for Palestine support.” There is, of course, nothing wrong with a Muslim politician supporting a “two-state solution”, or any politician supporting a two-state solution, and in fact this is the explicit ambition of the whole Democratic Party and most Western diplomats.

So what are these women to be thrown out of Congress for, in the view of MAGAs?

Being Muslim, it seems.

By the same token, we might ask now why the MAGAs are calling President Biden a “national security risk” over his unfreezing of $6 billion in Iranian oil revenue when those funds are held in Qatar under American supervision and can only be used for humanitarian purposes (and only entered Qatar, as already noted, long after Hamas’s operation had secured its funding). The answer seems clear enough: because Biden is a Democrat, and because the MAGAs are comfortable calling for an end to (and willy-nilly rejecting) democratic election results they dislike ever since January 6 of 2021.

Who else rejects democracy? Well, Hamas—the very entity MAGAs claim to oppose.

As ABC News reports, Hamas “seized” power in Gaza during a period of time it was in “violent conflict with the competing Fatah political group”, making its “election wins” definitionally suspect. ABC News further notes that Hamas has enjoyed only “variable levels of support” in Gaza, despite the fact that it’s now ruled the Gaza Strip with an iron fist for over seventeen years.

There used to be a maxim in U.S. politics that “politics ends at the water’s edge”, but ever since the GOP took a hard turn toward Trumpist Christofascism, it has honored the prefix of its political ideology (“Christo-”) by demanding that all non-Christians be expelled from government—this would include Jews, by the way, not just the two Muslim women MAGAs are now pretextually targeting—and its suffix (“-fascism”) by spreading disinformation originating from a fascist regime (that of Vladimir Putin) to encourage the removal of a democratically elected American president.

In short, while many American Jews are upset about what’s happening in Israel to the point that they are falling for MAGAs’ misdirection with respect to Reps. Omar and Tlaib, the fact remains that no Democrats—including Reps. Omar and Tlaib—support the killing of civilians by Hamas, while the MAGA “movement” chillingly mirrors Islamofascism with intimate fidelity. The primary difference is that MAGAs replace Islam with a far-right interpretation of Christianity that most Americans don’t share (including the two-thirds of us who want Christian churches out of American politics).

(8a) The danger in covering this war is greater than many expected.

CNN reports that seven journalists have already been killed in Israel and Gaza just since Saturday.

Horrified CNN viewers also watched in real time as the cable news outlet’s chief international correspondent, Clarissa Ward, was forced to dive into a ditch with her camera crew while filming a live hit.

ABOVE: CNN Chief International Correspondent Clarissa Ward (foreground).

By way of comparison to the seven journalists killed in the last 96 hours, over the last 22 years the IDF is held to have killed—in only one case intentionally—20 journalists.

(8b) The effect of Hamas’s invasion of Israel on American politics will be much greater than anyone could have imagined.

Proof supports the Black Lives Matter movement and understands that it’s a diffuse movement—in some respects a first principle as much as a movement—with no single spokesperson or central office. BLM factions around America, some large and some so small they may comprise just a handful of people, run social media accounts that are in many instances run by a person operating without any oversight by others even in their own chapter, let alone any notional national BLM organization.

For this reason, social media posts by accounts claiming to represent a local BLM chapter can’t, under any circumstances, be treated as representative of, let alone be seen as speaking for, the Black Lives Matter “movement”—whose focus, justly so, is on police brutality in the United States and not American foreign policy writ large.

But American politics being what it is, and social media being what it is, and Twitter now being a platform dedicated to the advancement of neo-Nazism, any postings by BLM chapters will be treated not merely as a national declaration by some notional, formally constituted BLM entity, but even as illustrative of how all Black Americans see events unfolding in the United States and around the world.

As a result, the following three social media posts from BLM chapters in California, Illinois, and Indiana are causing chaos within the American political sphere.

On Wednesday, the first of these posts was retracted and apologized for. The second post was, of course, not a post but a repost—yet was inarguably odious for seeming to refer to what was going on in Israel at the time as “heroic…resistance” (though even so, in being a post about the “right” of Palestinians to heroically resist “occupation”, one could argue it was a general statement of principle and not a specific commentary on Hamas; indeed, the reposted image reads “I Stand With Palestine”, not “I Stand with Hamas”—thereby seemingly resolving the chief problem with the BLM Chicago post, which explicitly made visual reference to Hamas’s hang-glider-heavy invasion).

Just so, the BLM Los Angeles Instagram post above self-identifies as a statement of “solidarity with the Palestinian people”, not Hamas, and begins by declaring that “we all desire and pray for a world of peace.” It has come under understandable rhetorical fire, however, for seeming to conflate peaceful or simply nonlethal popular Palestinian resistance to the IDF with the murder of noncombatants by a terrorist organization. The following vague phrasing is particularly troubling: “their resistance must not be condemned, but understood as a desperate act of self-defense.”

Nothing in the slaughter of unarmed civilians establishes any case for self-defense, either in the United States or any other system of law utilized worldwide. So this statement—the worst of the three, if we take into account the first’s retraction—is certainly shameful in its back-breaking attempt to focus only on those moments in Hamas’s invasion when it faced the IDF (moments that aren’t morally unconscionable because, whatever one’s view of the situation in Israel, we must recognize that armed conflict between openly declared combatants in the region is by now an inevitability).

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But these nuances mean nothing in the face of a Christofascist MAGA “movement” that, in addition to its obsession with uniparty rule and pristine Christian supremacy, has white-supremacist commitments that cause it to seek the demolition of the most successful Black-led social justice movement in America of the last half-century.

In other words, as part of their dedication to the idea that every foreign crisis must be used as a weapon to brutalize fellow Americans, the MAGAs are now using a war they enabled by supporting Putin’s war-crime-filled adventurism in Europe as a means to take out what they perceive as a domestic enemy. Indeed, MAGAs’ calls for BLM to be designated a “domestic terror organization” due to just three social media posts have been more the focus of Twitter these last 96 hours than the possibility of thousands of innocent Palestinian children being blown apart by bombs over the next 24 hours.

Perhaps this white supremacist, Christofascist bid for an anti-police-brutality push to be quashed by the FBI in the same way the FBI tried to destroy Martin Luther King Jr. sixty years ago would have died a quiet death if only Israelis, Germans, Brits, and Nepalese had died in the initial Hamas attack. But in fact, early whispers that some Americans may have been caught in the crossfire have now blossomed into confirmed reports that there are 22 American dead and 17 Americans missing—some or most of the latter now presumed to be deceased (as John F. Kirby, a Pentagon spokesman, says “less than a handful” of Americans remain in the kidnappers’ clutches as of tonight).

For this reason, BLM statements from three social media feeds that may represent the opinion of just three people have now left the appearance—in the eyes of Republicans, many independents, and perhaps even some Jewish Democrats—of BLM supporting a foreign terrorist attack that killed a significant number of Americans. This is a different matter altogether, especially since September 11 of 2001.

So as noted above, what we are now seeing on Twitter are calls—or rather refreshed calls, as MAGAs have in fact been making such calls since Summer 2020—for BLM to be designated a domestic terror organization and hunted down by the FBI at a time MAGAs also say their top political issue is the weaponization of the FBI on partisan grounds. While obviously BLM isn’t going to be designated a terror operation, and while it’s monstrous to even suggest the possibility, the fact remains that should more BLM chapters come out in support of a terrorist attack that killed up to 40 Americans it will put American progressives well behind the eight ball in trying to defend BLM against persistent far-right allegations of it having endemic terroristic sympathies.

For this reason, the Israel-Hamas War—apart from the fact that America is already involved in it because of our movement of a carrier closer to the fighting and our shipment of military equipment to the Israelis; or, less cynically, our involvement in efforts to open a humanitarian corridor between Gaza City and Egypt and our effort to bring European allies into public opposition to the Hamas invasion—should be seen as a potential sea change in U.S. politics in the midst of the 2024 election cycle.

Open white supremacists like Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Tucker Carlson, and other MAGA leaders will now have significantly more rhetorical ammunition for their fetid claims that at least some BLM members in public-facing positions support the murder of fellow Americans. This could have a significant influence on the course of the 2024 presidential race, a harrowing thought in light of the fact that the Republican Party is planning to nominate a career criminal, rapist, active insurrectionist and traitor to his country—a man who aims to destroy our democracy and erect in its place a tyrannical autocracy with him at its head.

We can only hope that, in light of the news that American casualties in Israel may be far more significant than originally thought, BLM chapters around the country will make clear that they and their members oppose the killing of civilians in all instances and have no difficulty denouncing the murder of American, Israeli, and other foreign non-combatants in Israel.

(9) American involvement in this war will be much more direct than anticipated.

Putting aside carrier groups and arms shipments, diplomatic cables and three-party humanitarian negotiations, the fact that Hamas is currently holding many, many more hostages than originally believed—and is threatening to execute them in a way that would shortly be seen by people around the world—makes this something much more than a war like the one in Ukraine. While Russia has at times jailed U.S. nationals, it hasn’t snatched them as non-combatants on Ukrainian soil and then threatened to televise their gruesome executions. We can imagine what would be happening right now, and how additionally tense U.S.-Russian relations would be, were this happening.

Initial reports suggested that Hamas had abducted perhaps thirty Israelis and foreign nationals, but that number has since quintupled to 150. Worse still, because some of the abductees came from kibbutzim near the Israel-Gaza border that were emptied out during the invasion—by the murder, flight, or kidnapping of their residents—it’s hard for the IDF to determine how many are actually still missing from those locations.

This means that the 150-abductee figure we’re looking at now is almost certainly low.

The U.S. State Department saying that seventeen Americans are unaccounted for—a notice that State would only issue if it had reason to believe someone who should be accounted for has not been, suggesting death or abduction—means that even as it stands now, somewhere between 10% and 20% of Hamas’s hostages are U.S. citizens.

Should we discover that more Americans are missing than was previously thought, or simply that many more abductees are in tunnels below Gaza than anyone suspects—which could turn an ancillary narrative in the current war into a central one—the possibility that this situation in Israel echoes the 1980 Hostage Crisis that most historians agree cost Democratic president Jimmy Carter a second term will move to the forefront of Americans’ collective consciousness. What happens to President Biden’s already unfairly, even unaccountably low approval ratings if actions outside his control—i.e., decisions made by top Trump ally Benjamin Netanyahu—cause the already deeply painful American death toll in Israel and Gaza to double or even triple?

Separate from this, what if Hamas carries out its current threat and begins executing Americans on videos disseminated internationally? Though it is the Republican Party that is backing Hamas’s new sponsors at the Kremlin, and the Republican Party that has sought armed conflict with Iran and its proxies for years now—to the point that the United States Armed Forces were almost certain Mr. Trump was going to launch a pretextual war with Tehran in December 2020—it could, perversely, be a Democratic president who gets blame for a sequence of events he couldn’t have had less to do with.

(10) Putin has now publicly blamed Trump for the Hamas invasion—and it matters.

For years, Vladimir Putin has been simultaneously cultivating close ties with two purported “friends,” Trump and Netanyahu. It is a partnership that made possible the seven-nation “grand bargain” to foment illegal election interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election (see, generally, Proof of Conspiracy, Macmillan, 2019). But now, the New York Times reports,

amid the worst attack on Israel in fifty years, the high regard that Putin has shown for Israel in the past appears remarkably absent. More than three days after the start of the incursion by Hamas, there has been no message of condolence from the Kremlin, even though Putin previously published such notes of sympathy in the wake of terrorist attacks in Israel. And he has not yet called Netanyahu, even though he spoke with Israeli leaders at least eleven times in 2022 and developed a close relationship with Netanyahu over more than a decade of meetings and phone calls.

But that’s not all. While Putin may now be freezing out Netanyahu, he has a lot to say about his other would-be ally, Trump—though he has avoided naming him directly.

As the Times reports,

In his first brief comments on the [Hamas] attack, Putin took a swipe at the United States, without expressing any sympathy for Israeli suffering.

“This is a clear example of the failure of United States policy in the Middle East”, he said on Tuesday in a televised meeting at the Kremlin with Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, the Iraqi prime minister.

Rather than find a compromise amenable to both sides, Putin went on, Washington acted “each time without taking into account the fundamental interests of the Palestinian people.”

While this statement may be brief, its implications are long, as Putin is unmistakably referencing here the Abraham Accords negotiated by Trump and his corrupt son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Kushner, who stood to gain (and did gain) literally billions from the Saudis and Emiratis if he helped them cut a deal with Israel that gave them new cutting-edge surveillance technology—and who saw no commensurate benefit at all in aiding the impoverished Palestinians—helped negotiate a deal that infamously left the Gaza Strip and West Bank to fend for themselves as it enriched and politically benefited Netanyahu and two other men with whom the Trump family’s fortunes (in literal terms) are entwined: Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed of the United Arab Emirates (MBZ) and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia (MBS), both barbarous autocrats with the blood of thousands of dissidents on their hands.

They also happen to have, in their hands, the power to aid or destroy Donald Trump’s several existing and planned golf courses in those two countries.

So with all this in mind, what game is Vladimir Putin playing here, exactly?

Certainly, he is sending a message to Trump that he can be his enemy as easily as he can be his ally, and that if he wishes to he can start hammering away at how Trump may be more responsible for the violence in Israel than anyone this side of Netanyahu—which would, ironically, be one of the first honest things Putin has said about U.S. politics in years. Or, the implication goes, Putin could instead do what Trump and the GOP are presently expecting him to do, apparently, which is attempt to interfere in a presidential election to aid Trump for the third presidential election cycle in a row.

The simple fact is that the Republican Party is somehow on the wrong side of the Israel-Hamas War in four distinct ways: (i) unlike the Democratic Party, it supports the man who even his far-right countrymen now admit is likely to be blamed for this war, Netanyahu; (ii) unlike the Democratic Party, it supports the war criminals in Russia who may well be found to have had advance knowledge of this invasion (and certainly now seek to use it to help them destroy NATO, the EU, Ukraine, and even American power and authority abroad); (iii) unlike the Democratic Party, the GOP has repeatedly taken steps that risk a globe-spanning hot war with Iran, now considered the most devastatingly undesirable outcome of the situation in Israel; and (iv) unlike the Democratic Party, the Republican Party’s leader engaged in vile self-dealing in the Middle East that nearly every expert around the world told Trump and his son-in-law would provoke a massive conflagration there.

So perhaps it is no wonder that MAGAs want to talk about three tweets, two Muslim politicians, and one prisoner swap that have nothing to do with anything happening right now.

Seen clearly, this current disaster is first and foremost the fault of the killers who executed it—Hamas—but secondarily all the men who were featured on the front cover of the second and third books of the Proof trilogy: Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu, Mohammed bin Salman, Mohammed bin Zayed, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (the Turkish president, who was alerted by Hamas in mid-invasion and responded with a suspiciously quick move to commit additional war crimes in Syria, as though he, like Putin, was prepared to capitalize politically and militarily on events he only pretended to be surprised by).

We could add to this list, of course, all those who sought to engage in clandestine “diplomacy” on Trump’s behalf over the last six years, from Kushner to Rudy Giuliani (who is also on the cover of Proof of Corruption), from Erik Prince to the grab-bag of petty crooks whose names littered the many government reports that followed hard upon the Trump-Ukraine scandal, Trump-Russia scandal, and Khashoggi Scandal.

Conclusion

In the fog of war, truth is always the first casualty. Misinformation and disinformation have been so rampant on Twitter that the EU is considering leveling a fine on Elon Musk that could bankrupt his company if—as anticipated—its finances are far worse than he’s publicly admitted. The Republican Party is not a “loyal opposition”; it is an active national security threat whose sole interest at the moment is weakening the United States. As of this writing, the GOP can’t even agree on a Speaker of the House, making it impossible for any funds to be released to either Israel or Ukraine. As many Americans display antisemitism with pride—celebrating Hamas’s genocidal invasion as though history tells them oppressed peoples definitionally decapitate babies to secure their rights—Israelis are living in fear and so, too, albeit in a very different way and for different reasons, are American Jews. Few doubt that Donald Trump, possibly the most dangerous figure in American politics since Jefferson Davis, will soon suss out exactly what Vladimir Putin and his other autocratic allies want to see him do stateside to ensure their illicit support for his seemingly ill-fated 2024 candidacy.

And through it all, many Americans believe that what is happening in Israel actually has little impact on their lives: it is a tragedy, to be sure, but a distant and hazy one with little consequence to their own daily struggles. But all the evidence underscores that this is untrue, and affirms that what’s happening in Israel now—and what seems sure to continue happening in Israel for some time—is already at America’s doorstep.