Victor Davis Hanson: The Truth About October 7, Three Years Later

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

Welcome to the Daily Signal Podcast, where we provide intelligence for the intelligent. Now, without further ado, here's today's take.

Victor Davis Hanson (0:08)

Why don't they, the world, condemn these killers, these mutilators, these beheaders? And why do they keep saying that Israel is a genocidal enemy when they waited and waited and waited before going in? Well, Israel is not the Israel of 1950s and 60s, a small poor nation.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for the Daily Signal. This week marks the third anniversary of the October 7th slaughter of Israelis, civilians, some people in the IDF, and foreign residents. When women, men, children, young adults, some of them attending a rock concert, remember the facts. Without warning, over 4,000 terrorists from Hamas stormed in over the fence, I can't call it a wall, it looks to me more like a fence, stormed in and waged a surprise attack against Israel.

They were accompanied by 200 civilians that tagged along on the expectation that the terrorists would be killing, wounding, torturing, taking hostages, and the civilians could rape, mutilate, and steal, and bring loot, and all of that was accomplished. We also forget that there was another 1,000 terrorist who in support of this invasion had launched 4,300 rockets into civilian centers. In fact, that would be the first salvo, which in the next few days would account for a total of 13,000 rockets. Remember, 13,000 rockets all fired at Israeli civilian centers. They attacked 23 different little hamlets.

Almost 1,200 died.

They took 251 hostages. They got in 14 miles, into side 1948 Israel.

So what are the facts about why did they do this? Well, we can ask that question because there had not been an Israeli inside Gaza since 2006 For almost, at the time of the assault, 17, 18 years.

Israel was supplying the majority of the water, fuel, and power for Gaza, even though they had left and turned it over to them. Gaza had staged one election, and the words of the great Muslim scholar Bernard Lewis, one election, one time. They had killed off many of the architects of the opposition. They had thrown Palestinian authorities, activists off buildings. They had eliminated them. They never held another election. They tortured or killed internal dissidents. In this period in which Hamas had complete autonomy over Gaza, they received somewhere between 45 and 50 billion dollars in aid, roughly from 2006 to the present day, 40 to 50 billion. That would have allowed this choice piece of Mediterranean real estate to build luxury hotels, to bring in European and Gulf advisors, and in other words, to create a gutter or an Oman or a Dubai. They didn't want to do that. They diverted about a billion to two billion dollars and built the largest labyrinth of tunnels probably in the world, not subways, but I mean military tunnels, about 500 miles. It cost them 6,000 tons of cement, 2,000 tons of metal. The entries and the exits were placed under schools, mosques, and hospitals, forcing the Israelis to attack those exits and entries and then incur collateral damage.

Remember one other thing. They were prepared to send more terrorists and more soldiers deeper into Israel if the IDF had not responded belatedly, though they did, they did respond and stop them. They confiscated over 10,000 weapons. Where those weapons came from, you can imagine, but most of them were from Iran or China.

I want to leave you with a couple of questions. Number one, would there have been this cry of genocide, this hatred of Israel? It was always there, but would there have been an American action? All of the things about Iran, had they just not attacked on October 7th? What if Hamas had said the following? We have a peace deal with Israel. We're going to create our own nation here. We have 20,000 workers inside Israel at competitive wages worldwide. We're going to use that revenue and that expertise that they're going to gain by working with Israelis to create a successful, autonomous nation. We're going to show the Palestinian Authority on the West Bank that we can be preeminent in the Middle East. They didn't do that. Instead, they wanted to slaughter Jews, men, women, children, mutilate, behead, rape, torture, take hostages. I have another second question.

What was Israel supposed to do after this had happened? Given that they had an overwhelming military that could dominate almost any country, I shouldn't say almost every country in the Middle East, with this enormous military power and this egregious assault on Israel, it was really one of the few assaults ever conducted inside 1948 Israel. What were they supposed to do? Were they supposed to say to the Hamas leadership that was gloating in the global media, would you please turn over the architects who planned this, the 40 or 50 people? They did.