Matt Gurney: A year into this new war, all the depressing things we've learned
No one has yet explained, and I'm not sure anyone can, how the hell Israel could be so good at fighting Hezbollah but so bad at defending itself from Hamas.
By: Matt Gurney
It's the early afternoon on Oct. 6, 2024. I'm in my home office. And I'm trying to remember what kind of day I was having exactly one year ago.
It was a Friday. I remember that. It was also the Friday at the start of Thanksgiving long weekend. We had put the kids into bed early. My wife had retired early, as well — she was planning on getting up early to do some shopping and cooking. I was tired, and should probably have gone to bed early, too. But there aren't a lot of nights where I get to be without family commitments, so I put on some music, had a few beers and watched some movies in the basement. It was after midnight, though just barely, on Oct. 7, 2023 when I finally got into bed. After reading for a bit, I made a terrible mistake.
I checked Twitter one last time.
I've said often these last few years that I wish I knew less than I know about a lot of things. Knowledge is not always a blessing. I caught the first reports of a massive barrage of rockets from Gaza aimed at southern Israel in real-time. And I knew enough to know that this was something unusual. Like, really unusual. The size of the barrage was just wildly out of what I had come to expect — it sounds horrible to say this, but there really is, or was, a level of "routine" bombardment. This was way bigger than that, and I knew that. If I hadn’t, I might have just shrugged and gone to sleep.
No such luck. I quickly checked out some news sources I trust in the region. I directly messaged some people I know in that area. I booted up some livestreams that I knew covered developments in Israel. And I think I became one of the relatively few North Americans to essentially watch the Oct. 7th attacks happen live. At a safe and comfortable remove, obviously, but as it happened. I can still remember my heart sinking when I saw a few trucks loaded with Hamas fighters rolling through the streets of Sderot. It was caught live on a traffic camera. I knew then that it was going to be a very, very bad day for Israel.
I couldn't have imagined how bad. But over the next few hours, I saw. I saw killings, I saw battles, I saw what looked like a rape in progress (I shut that one off). I saw the first reports of Israelis being dragged back to Gaza, alive.
And then later that day, in the afternoon, having slept not a single moment that night, I saw my first celebration on the streets of Toronto. I was driving down the Gardiner and traffic was suddenly braking hard in front of me. This isn't unusual on the Gardiner, as my Toronto-based readers will know (they will also detect the existential resignation in my understatement). What was happening that day was unusual, though. A small group of young adults — maybe a dozen of them? — had pushed their way through some fencing to get right to the roadside. They were waving Palestinian flags and cheering. Another group was doing the same on top of an overpass.
I felt rage. But I also tried to temper that rage. I knew what I had seen. But I also know, and spend a lot of time worrying about, that one of the weird parts about living in the 2020s is that people live in utterly different information universes. It was possible, I rationalized, that these people got their information from sources so radically different from my own that they might not have understood what they were celebrating. This was the theme of the first column I wrote about what I'd seen, published here on Oct. 10, 2023. Maybe those celebrating just didn't know.
That was about the last time I was able to muster any such hope for those who've spent the last year parading through the streets, waving the flags of terrorist groups. I know better now, and, like I said above, wish I didn't. That knowledge is a special kind of curse.
The above is all a kind of personal reflection. I hope it's not too navel-gazey. But that's where my mind went as I turned it back in time a year, and as large parades wind their way through North American cities, including in my hometown, waving the banners Hezbollah. We have, as a society, put ourselves into one hell of a situation. There are groups of Canadians that are absolutely convinced other groups of Canadians literally wish them dead, and our leaders — judicial, elected and police — have spent the last year looking utterly shellshocked and useless. The damage that has been done to our social fabric is hard to imagine, and it'll be harder to repair. That is if a repair is even possible, and assuming anyone tries. That is not an assumption I take for granted. This might just be the new normal.
On this day, I think, too, of those in Israel, a country I have visited and where I have friends. The events of the last two weeks have been remarkable. But they also make the catastrophe of one year ago all the harder to understand. How the hell can a country that is so good at intelligence operations and warfighting that it so swiftly decapitated Hezbollah, one of the world's most powerful terror groups, ever explain to itself how badly it fucked up on Oct. 7? How can that ever be reckoned with, and justice done for those who died that day and didn't need to?