A couple of weeks ago, the smoldering political landscape of the Middle East suddenly exploded as the Hamas militants of Gaza launched a surprise attack against Israel, unprecedented in its size and success. News reports now place Israeli fatalities at around 1,400, more deaths in a single day than the country had ever suffered in any of its previous wars, and greater losses than in all of those conflicts combined since 1973, while as many as 200 Israelis were captured and taken back to Gaza as prisoners and hostages.

In recent years, Israel had focused upon technological solutions for its border defense, relying upon numerous sensors and remote-control machine-guns to guard the Gaza perimeter, but Hamas used small drones to quickly disable these and the signal-towers that controlled them. Meanwhile, discipline at the nearby IDF garrisons had apparently grown very lax with the sentries asleep or away from their posts, so the bases were easily overrun and the soldiers killed in their beds, by some accounts suffering up to 600 deaths in just a matter of hours, a tremendous military disaster.

The IDF had been widely regarded as one of the world’s most formidable military organizations, while Hamas consisted of lightly-armed Palestinian militants lacking any heavy weaponry, so the very serious losses the former suffered at the hands of the latter constituted an enormous national humiliation.

Indeed, decades of boastful Israeli propaganda had inspired such an exaggerated sense of the invincibility of the IDF and its Mossad intelligence service that there were widespread conspiratorial claims all across the Internet, not least among the columnists and commenters of our own website, that the Israeli government must have deliberately allowed the attack to take place. It has long been known that the Israelis originally promoted Hamas as a means of dividing the Palestinians and weakening the PLO, so some even seized on that fact to argue that the Hamas attack had probably taken place under Israeli orders.

Although such conspiratorial beliefs were most common among sharp critics of Israel, they actually attained far broader acceptance. Charlie Kirk is the leader of a large pro-Israel conservative organization, and in an interview, he set forth exactly those same dark suspicions.

Charlie Kirk speculates on whether the Israeli military was told to STAND DOWN and let Hamas run riot… pic.twitter.com/XkBd3Lhlcl

— Ben Kew