Israel’s psychological warfare attack, excellent start!
It was a brilliant psychological attack that soiled each of those murderers in a way that no fire can ever cleanse. Nothing can erase the fact that those words and that star were on their bodies. It is a burden that will grow heavier with time, and gnaw at their hearts forever.
My latest Op-ed in Arutz 7 Israel National News, lightly edited.
Operation Badr, the Egyptian opening attack of the Yom Kippur War, was possibly more devastating than the attack on October 7, in that its effects were all devastating, leaving Jew fighting Jew, intensifying to this very day, with Israelis coming close to tearing their own country apart.
The October 7 attack, on Simchat Torah, on the 50th anniversary of that fateful Yom Kippur, was also a brilliant psychological attack, but it had an up-side: it woke up the Jews. The genius of the Yom Kippur psychological attack was that the Muslims gained an exact measure of the value of psychological warfare against the Jews. In short, they seemed helpless against it.
Once commemorative days, especially religious days, have been opened as a new front in a psychological war, the attacker, of course, expects that the victim of the first such attack will be alerted to the new tactics. Not so the Israelis, for to this day, most of the population, as well as their leaders, remain unaware that on Yom Kippur 1973, the principle attack was not military, but psychological. Instead of the country after that going on high alert in the run-up to and during the High Holidays, well, we all have the example of what transpired on the night of 6-7 October 2023. There is a whole other learning that still needs to take place.
During the current war, there have been Israeli initiatives that would have had the effect of psychologically damaging the enemy, but this was not necessarily their specific aim, such as photographing a streetful of near-naked Hamas terrorist prisoners sitting on the ground guarded by armed female IDF soldiers. As it turned out, the US blocked it, because it would be humiliating, which is, of course, precisely the point. Study Arab psychological actions against Israel and try to find a single one of which the aim was not humiliation or trauma.
Just how far Israelis are from engaging their enemy in its psychological war on the Jewish people was sadly in evidence this weekend, when the killers that Israel released from her prisons on Saturday emerged each wearing a prison-issue t-shirt bearing a blue Star of David over the words, in Arabic, “We will not forget or forgive.” It was a brilliant psychological attack that soiled each of those murderers in a way that no fire can ever cleanse. Of course they flung the garments in a furious bonfire at the first opportunity, but nothing can erase the fact that those words and that star were on their bodies, and that will gnaw at their hearts forever. They bear a stain that can never be erased. It is a burden that will grow heavier with time, and increasingly unbalance whatever counts as normal in they accursed lives. Mazel tov!
But you would be forgiven if you learnt nothing of the sort from the Israeli media and Left wing opinion-makers, who lost their minds in a frenzy of condemnations, the continuing outcome of the Yom Kippur War. The t-shirts are the start of the nation’s long overdue answer, and a very modest one indeed, to Operation Badr on 6 October 1973. May this be the harbinger of many great psychological warfare escapades to come. Israel owes her Prison Service a debt of gratitude.
Picture credits:
Oren Rozen - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11435689
Israeli Prison Service
IDF