October 7th Really Was Israel's 9/11

There is disturbing evidence of official foreknowledge in both events

“Respected US political commentator” is one of those phrases that should evoke the mental image of someone wearing a football helmet to school and making airplane noises while they walk. Thus it is no surprise that even before the conclusion of the October 7th attacks respected US political commentators were rushing to Twitter to describe what they were watching as “Israel’s 9/11.” 

These types of analogies play to the lowest common denominator of American thought. In this discourse the boundless and resplendent tapestry of world history is flanderized into how much worse than Hitler various world leaders are, the Munich appeasement factor of talking to them, and the number of 9/11s assigned to any act of violence not committed by a US ally. To juxtapose the two events with any nuance would mean noting that 9/11 was not launched in response to an illegal occupation that has persisted since 1967 or to the blockade and imprisonment of 2.1 million people since 2007. Clearly the label “Israel’s 9/11” was being circulated to make barely veiled suggestion that this was just another case where savage Muslims who hate freedom did terrorism. 

The capstone of this kindergarten brained discussion, the moment of highest disgrace and national shame, occurred when President Biden stated that October 7th was equivalent to “fifteen 9/11s.” This is odd math that suggests one Israeli life is worth that of fifteen Americans. Sure that is official US policy but they shouldn’t be saying it out loud.

And yet as more information has come to light in the months since I have realized the error of my ways. For once the chattering class got it right. October 7th really was Israel’s 9/11. In fact there is a near one to one comparison between the two events. 

You see in the lead up to both September 11th, 2001 and October 7th, 2023 conspirators who knew the plot was coming engaged in large scale insider trading based on that knowledge. The governments of both the US and Israel respectively received detailed and specific warnings which they ignored until it was too late. And the militaries of both countries operated under de facto stand down orders while the attacks were taking place.

I have done research on this and I am willing to go on CNN any time to talk about how October 7th was Israel's 9/11.

I understand if you’re skeptical of what I’m alleging here. I’ve made three claims: there was insider trading, there were warnings ignored, and there was a military stand down. Let’s evaluate them in order for October 7th (I’ve written elsewhere about September 11th for those curious). 

Insider Trading:

With regards to there being insider trading before the Hamas attack that is not actually my claim, it is the claim of former Commissioner of the Securities and Exchange Commission Robert Jackson Jr and Columbia Law Professor Robert Mitts in a paper published in the Social Science Research Network. Unfortunately, I have actually read their paper. There is a Saturday afternoon I will never get back that I could have spent vaping unknown smokeshop chemicals and playing Cyperpunk 2077 where I was instead rubbing my temples and staring at econometric charts.

So what does the paper argue? 

The authors use publicly disclosed data from the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) to point out that shortly before October 7th some unknown persons made a massive bet that the Israeli economy was about to tank. Specifically they look at New York Stock Exchange activity in an Exchange Traded Fund which tracks the Israeli economy called EIS. What they found is as follows:

On October 2, 2023 “nearly 100% of the trading volume in EIS…consisted of short selling” (bets that the share price was about to fall). The volume of short transactions on that day was 227,820 units as compared with an average of just 1,581 per day throughout September 2023. This massive spike in short selling was driven by just two purchases: “two dark pool transactions reported to FINRA at 2:46:43pm and 3:21:11pm, for 50,733 and 174,869 shares respectively…On these two transactions alone, the trader made several million dollars in profit” when “[o]n October 9, 2023, the price of EIS declined -7.11%. It subsequently declined even further, reaching a decline of -17.45% by October 27, 2023 .”

Yep, this looks normal

Some critics have dismissed the paper by observing that the massive short spike on October 2nd, 2023 coincides with the start of the fiscal quarter and thus could have other explanations. However as The Economist counters “no [comparable] surge has occurred at the start of any other quarter since 2009.” 

The authors also examined the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange (TASE) and found a significant increase in bets made against Israeli companies there. In the table below you can see some of the Israeli companies which had a notable spike in short interest against them from September 14, 2023 to October 5th, 2023. These bets resulted in large profits after the attack. The Israel Securities Authority claims to have investigated these obvious abnormalities and to have found “no significant trading abnormalities.” 

As Jackson and Mitts had to rely on public data to make these findings they note “that both FINRA and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) have access to nonpublic data that could be helpful for investigators interested in understanding why, and how, financial markets may have anticipated the events of October 7.” Time for us to start holding our breath.

Warnings Ignored:

But how could anybody have seen October 7th coming? Well that one is easy. In fact we have so many reports on people seeing this coming that I’ll have to leave some out.

Gaza shares a border with both Israel and Egypt, so the Egyptian General Intelligence Service (GIS) maintains a keen interest in all that happens there. Egyptian intelligence officials passed “repeated warnings” to the highest levels of Israel’s government both ten days and three days before the attack.

“In one of the said warnings, Egypt’s Intelligence Minister General Abbas Kamel personally called Netanyahu only 10 days before the massive attack that Gazans were likely to do “something unusual, a terrible operation,” according to the Ynet news site.

Unnamed Egyptian officials told the site they were shocked by Netanyahu’s indifference to the news and said the premier told the minister the military was “submerged” in troubles in the West Bank”

Head of the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee Michael McCaul (R-TX) confirmed to reporters that Egypt had also delivered a warning to Israel three days prior to the attacks.

"We know that Egypt has warned the Israelis three days prior that an event like this could happen," Mr McCaul told reporters following a closed-door intelligence briefing on Wednesday for lawmakers about the Middle East crisis, according to AFP news agency.

The New York Times gained access to a 40 page report produced by Israeli intelligence more than a year before the operation code named “Jericho Wall.” It outlines almost exactly the battle plan that Hamas would follow on October 7th. 

“Hamas followed the blueprint with shocking precision. The document called for a barrage of rockets at the outset of the attack, drones to knock out the security cameras and automated machine guns along the border, and gunmen to pour into Israel en masse in paragliders, on motorcycles and on foot—all of which happened on Oct. 7.”

Furthermore the Times claims that Israeli intelligence knew Hamas carried out a day-long training mission to practice the plan three months before October 7th. This comes in addition to multiple reports that Israeli border units observed suspicious activity in Gaza in the months and weeks beforehand which they tried to pass up the IDF chain of command. They were ignored, ridiculed, or in at least one case threatened with court-martial if they wouldn’t cease making such warnings.

A Non-Commissioned Officer from Israel’s 8200 Signals intelligence Unit observed another Hamas practice run just one month prior to the operation. Her reports were dismissed as a “fantasy.” Most ominously the head of security at the Nova Music Festival, Elkana Federman, has now turned whistleblower. He’s told the press he received a detailed warning one week before the attack which he passed along only to be ignored by the Israeli Army.

“I had a guard at the festival who had served in the Re’im Division [near Gaza border], and a week before the festival he sent me a voice message … basically warning me, saying, ‘Elkana, something is going to happen over Sukkot (Jewish holiday). I just wanted to let you know, there are a lot of warnings,’”

[…]

After 7 October, Federman was in the hospital and called the man who had given him the warning. 

“I told him 'I wanted to talk to you about that recording you sent me a week before the festival; you were speaking in codes. Tell me exactly what they said to you. He told me, 'Elkana, they told me there was going to be an invasion, and that they were planning to take over towns. I just wasn't allowed to tell you that,'”

And what did Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu do in response to this cascade of warnings? Well according to journalist Seymour Hersh just days before the attack he moved 2/3rds of the Gaza border soldiers to the West Bank 

“local Israeli military authorities, with the approval of Netanyahu, ordered two of the three Army battalions, each with about 800 soldiers, that protected the border with Gaza to shift their focus to the Sukkot festival [in the West Bank]”

The New York Times further revealed:

The [Israeli] military has acknowledged that it moved two commando companies – more than 100 soldiers – to the West Bank just two days before the attack

Even if the threats and warnings had not been specific, and I think they were specific, you would generally want to keep as many soldiers as possible on the border with Gaza if your goal was to prevent an attack from Gaza. I would offer that was not the Prime Minister’s goal.

Military Stand Down:

My last claim is probably the most contentious: on October 7th Israeli police and military units were made to remain in place for several hours and let as many of their own civilians get killed as possible before they moved in to kill more of their own civilians. The reason why is simple enough, more dead civilians means more propaganda for the subsequent assault on Gaza. 

Many skeptics of this claim wouldn’t doubt Israelis are evil enough to do this, they would just doubt the Israelis are evil geniuses enough. Anti-conspiracists are fond of quoting Hanlon’s razor, “never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” They’re right that with Israelis stupidity explains most of what we observe. I mean we’re talking about a nation of people with upset stomachs and Crohn's disease who believe they’re the master-race on earth.

It is not in dispute that the armed forces of Israel had an extremely lethargic response to the October 7th attacks. But is this because it’s an army of arrogant, incompetent EDM DJs and ecstasy dealers or were there de facto “stand down” orders? I’ll acknowledge it could be one or the other or it could be both. We don’t know yet.

In its December investigation into the Israeli response the New York Times admits as much.

“Much remains unknown about that day, including what orders were given inside Israel’s senior military leadership in Tel Aviv, and when.”

So without knowing exactly what they were doing in Tel Aviv I’ll offer some of the evidence that leads me to believe that what they were doing was buying time for Hamas.

To begin with something you should know is that the entire country of Israel is only slightly bigger than the state of New Jersey. You could drive east to west across the whole thing in an hour and a half, north to south in four and a half hours. If you were to have access to an F-16 or an Apache helicopter the trip would be quite a bit shorter. 

More than 20 different sites were attacked on October 7th including towns, kibbutzim, military bases and a music festival. The time it took for Israeli forces to arrive to rescue the survivors ranged from eight to more than twenty hours.

This when, again according to the New York Times:

Thousands of soldiers were less than 40 minutes from the towns that were under attack. 

So what happened at some of those different sites? At Kibbutz Be’eri, video from a police helicopter shows that by 4:30 pm there were more than 500 Israeli soldiers along with a convoy of vehicles idling outside the entrance in the midst of the fighting. They remained there for hours without engaging Hamas. Two different survivors recounted that at 6:10 PM and at 6:30 PM they were still standing there. Rescue for residents would have to wait until 11 PM.

At the Nova Music Festival, Haaretz gives us the following report about what unfolded:

“At 7 A.M., the party organizers...called Lt. Col. Elad Zandani,...the man tasked with...approving the festival-and told him that terrorists were shooting the partygoers. [H]e suggested that they fend for themselves. The first IDF forces only arrived at the party scene at 3 P.M.”

This is an eight hour response time. The LAPD responds to 911 calls in Compton faster. It should be noted that the location of the festival was moved two days beforehand. Knowing that the new location was approved by the IDF after the IDF had received a deluge of warnings about an upcoming attack feels especially sinister.

Johnathan Pollard, the Israeli-American ex-NSA employee who served 30 years in federal prison for passing classified information to Israel, spoke on a podcast about his belief that there was a military stand down. I have excerpted his remarks below: 

“I have friends who were helicopter pilots…sitting in their cockpits ready to take off. Fully loaded. Ready to stop them [Hamas] at the fence.They didn’t get their orders for 6 hours…They could hear the fighting…They weren’t given permission to take off.”

Unlike most people who talk out of their ass on podcasts, your humble author included, Pollard is not a random crank. After his release from prison he moved to Israel where he is treated as a national hero and enjoys high level connections within the government. His words should be treated with caution, he’s a spy and spies lie professionally. However if he’s lying here then what exactly took the attack helicopters so long that day? 

The Hamas fighters that crossed from Gaza were equipped with small arms and would have stood little or no chance against airborne cavalry. We know that Israel was already bombing targets within Gaza not later than four hours after the Hamas assault began. So if Tel Aviv could issue orders to start an offensive bombing campaign within four hours, why did it take them more than six hours to mobilize helicopters to halt the ongoing attack within Israel?

To review the timeline, the Hamas attack begins at 6:30 AM. By 7 AM the Nova Festival and other sites have reported to authorities that they are under terrorist attack. At 7:40 AM the official IDF Twitter account issues an alert that “terrorists have infiltrated Israel from Gaza” and that residents should “stay in their homes.” At 10:06 AM Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant announces that Israel is at war. At 10:46 AM the Israeli military announced it was already bombing targets within Gaza. And then another four or more hours pass before any significant body of soldiers, tanks, or helicopters show up at any border site to help anybody. Again it takes 90 minutes to drive across this fucking country. Whatever decisions were being made in Tel Aviv I do not believe minimizing casualties was their priority.  

Ben Zion, the reservist, said his paratrooper unit left its base in central Israel, not far from Tel Aviv, in a convoy at about 1.30pm They mobilized on their own, without a formal call-up order…

He expected to see the roads packed with soldiers and equipment and armored vehicles heading south. “The roads were empty!” he recalled in an interview. Roughly seven hours into the fighting, he turned to the reservist next to him and asked: “Where’s the IDF?” (NYT)

Conclusion:

Unfortunately we’ve reached the point where most “conspiracy theory” debates come to loggerheads. If isolated and taken individually any one of the claims I’ve made here could be dismissed by a reasonable person as merely a coincidence. They could cite Occam’s razor and talk about the simplest explanation being the best one. The trouble is that when you stack one coincidence on top of another coincidence on top of another coincidence on top of another coincidence and all the coincidences work out to the benefit of a particular actor with ample motive, I’m no longer sure the simplest explanation is that this actor made a mistake. 

What am I alleging? That Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu along with elements of the Israeli military and intelligence community to some degree allowed October 7th to happen and helped ensure it was particularly bloody when it did happen. This is in no way meant to say that they are omnipotent or even particularly clever, only that they saw an opportunity and took it. They climbed to the top echelons of Israeli political and military hierarchy because they value power more than they value the lives of their fellow citizens. It is naive to believe otherwise. 

The motives are clear enough. As of this writing Benjamin Netanyahu remains Prime Minister of Israel rather than an inmate of its Prison Service. Without October 7th Israel could not have launched its final solution of the Gaza question. In fact October 7th is so central to their genocide that the Knesset passed a law punishing those who deny the government narrative of that day with up to five years in prison. The Israelis spread deliberate falsehoods and propaganda about what had happened and now they’re making it illegal to acknowledge that.

What is currently being done in Gaza is one of the most horrific crimes of the 21st century. Those who publicly object to it are met with justifications based around the events of October 7th. It is not a matter of idle speculation what role elements of the Israeli state played in those events. It is an urgent question with many lives depending upon us finding an answer. 

H/t to

Nuts & Boltzmann

for collating much of this research.