When faced with a tragedy on the scale of Saturday morning’s attack by Hamas terrorists on Israeli communities near Gaza, it’s natural to look to history for comparisons. Many did that over this week. The event that was mentioned most often was Israel’s previous intelligence failure at the start of the Yom -Kippur War, exactly 50 years ago. Other military debacles that came up were Pearl Harbor, 9/11 and the 1968 Tet Offensive in Vietnam.
Israel has tried for so many years to pretend that the Gazans don’t actually live right alongside it
All had many points in common that are worth considering, but there is one major difference between those historic episodes and what happened on the Israel/Gaza border. Unlike Tet, where an American army had travelled halfway around the world, as had the Imperial Japanese Navy in Pearl Harbor and the 9/11 suicide–attackers, on Gaza’s borders, the attackers and victims were all living close by.
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