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The allowed in theory does not make sense to me. Bibi has not benefited politically. The Israelies were caught napping on one of their big holidays combined with the complacency that "technology" on the wall would keep them safe.

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Look, I have no facts. It's remarkable that it happened the way it did. I'll look for the Lyons piece.

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The question I have is not only how did it happen in the first place, it's how did it take NINE HOURS for the Israeli military to arrive? My understanding is they have attack helicopters that could have made it there in 30 minutes. Yes it was the Sabbath and a holiday, but Israel is not a geographically large country. I find it really hard to fathom how they took most of the day to show up.

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I donтАЩt know. But your question is telling.

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I read the Lyons piece, and it looks like Hamas took the comms down with some cheap-ass drones. The idea is that it took awhile for central command to form a picture of what exactly was happening over there.

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Yep. I read it, also. It's a solid piece, a worthwhile perspective, and if accurate could account for the delay.

I've heard that Egypt had intelligence an attack was coming and warned Israel, and it's hard to believe Israel's own Mossad and other intelligence networks of Western nations had no information.

Also, given their own history, it's not as if Israeli officials couldn't foresee an attack might occur on a Jewish holiday. As fas as I'm concerned, "a failure of imagination" of this scale seems a bit implausible.

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It does make sense to me that the fence produced a sense of hubris: that they thought it was invulnerable, a technological marvel, and didn't imagine that it could be so easily breached. Seems like a plausible mistake that modern people would make, given how we fetishize our machines.

That said, I don't put it past any state to just completely betray its own people. I'm open to the possibility that it was like 9/11, where the authorities sort of knew something was going on, but not quite the specifics, and they had incentives to not do their best to stop it. I'm also open to the possibility that it was even worse than that.

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I'm basically aligned with your view here, though I will go a step further and say my thinking re 9/11 has shifted in the past couple years from assuming betrayal at that level is too implausible, to thinkingтАФgiven evidence I've become aware ofтАФit's more likely than not. One thing I will never forget, watching on TV as those towers fell, was my clear thought: "How did they set those charges??!!" My gut that day told me I was witnessing a deliberate implosion, but for twenty years I denied my lying eyes and went with the official story of "pancaking layers" that elides (hides?) the significant forensic evidence of explosives. With the facts I'm aware of now, it's just the "who dunnit" in my mind that has changed.

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I guess that I'm somewhat noncommittal about it because I already expect the worst from them: even if they didn't do it, I fully believe that they're capable of having done it. So in that sense, the truth wouldn't change how I see them.

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Their complacency, Bush Hermit, may well have been compounded by Jake Sullivan's characteristic hubris and ignorance just 2 weeks earlier, when he boasted that the Middle East hadn't known such peace in 20 years...

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