Housekeeping: in my last post I referred to a hostage situation in Central Africa. My bad, it was Ethiopia. There’s no excuse for mistaking the two, I know the difference quite well—my only excuse is senescence. I read the article in 1977. This is from the NY Times archives. All links below.
I happened to read this on a Telegram channel this morning:
From the start, I’ve been against propagandizing about women in combat:
Maybe there was/is a Captain Yuval, maybe she did engage some of the terrorists. Good for her. But so what? You have a gun (which every competent adult in the area should have had) you engage the enemy: this is not really combat, it’s elemental self-defense. I still doubt the story.
Written on October 14. It’s now December 6, and there’s a war in Gaza that shows no sign of abating. No further comment.
AI and Google have a lot of stuff about this all-female tank crew.
Yes, I know that this tank crew exists. Its purpose was twofold: publicity, and to guard a very quiet border (referred to as “sleepy” in the best of the linked articles, which explains the PR campaign behind the “historic battle.”)
In the middle of a complete breakdown of command they raced from the Egypt border to the heart of battle and hunted down insurgents? Really?
The stench of propaganda is ripe here. No further comment.
I’ve been reading Martin Van Creveld for years. My problem with him is that he’s an old-fashioned genuine article misogynist. I can put up with this but others can’t. It hurts his messaging.
The difference between him and Winston Churchill is that Churchill warned of the Nazi menace out of love for his people. Van Creveld’s warnings arise from bitterness and hatred. But you have to take the bad with the good. Read him and make up your own minds.
He’s worth reading because he doesn’t give you propaganda. He gives you the bitter, unvarnished truth. So I tune out the bad stuff and focus on the substance.
Van Creveld was stunned by the October 7 attack, he’s getting on, and it took him a few weeks to get back into his groove but he’s getting there.
According to him, Israel is going batshit with the fighting women propaganda, and he doesn’t like it one bit.
This is dangerous. There’s propaganda and there’s propaganda. Some is harmless but some is not: it’s a clue that people aren’t facing facts. Wartime should be a time of honesty. It breeds dysfunction to dive deeper into your delusions at any time, but during wartime, it’s suicidal.
Van Creveld has been warning that the feminization of Israel’s military has been bad for its morale and readiness. Yitzhak Brik has warned about morale and readiness for years, without identifying this particular issue but I suspect that he’d agree with Van Creveld.
Finally, I question the success of Israel’s venture into Gaza. Winning territory doesn’t mean holding it:
Is the IDF proceeding unstoppably toward the conquest of all major Hamas strongholds, including Khan Younis in the south, where much of the Hamas leadership and many of the hostages are thought by some in the defense establishment to be located?
Or is it fleetingly establishing a hold on these areas while Hamas’s gunmen have melted away, ready to emerge when the IDF reduces its presence or withdraws?
I think the question answers itself.
I heard a million times as a kid that we won every “battle” in Vietnam. Constantly. That’s all you heard.
We learned at bitter cost that none of these battles meant anything.
Actual, real, Vietnam vets told us the score. This was our winning. You’d be on a patrol. The VC would initiate a firefight. They’d take a few casualties (willingly, they expected it), inflict casualties on us, they’d melt away… hey, we won the battle! Then they come back. Later, or the next day, or whenever they chose. They always come back. Because it was their country, not yours, and they were willing to sacrifice for it, while you just wanted to go home in one piece.
That’s not winning. When the other guy sets the agenda, initiates, forcing you to respond, that’s being jerked around. That’s losing.
You could object: this is Israel’s fight, Gaza isn’t Vietnam, and morale is high. Fair enough. We’ll see if this holds up. I just don’t know.
I do know that I hate propaganda, and Van Creveld is right about women in the military:
Poor girls; serving as outlooks, insufficiently trained in the use of the infantry weapons with which they had been issued, unsupported either on the ground or from the air, they were in no position either to escape or to fight off Hamas’ surprise attack. Expiring as Odysseus’ maids did (Odyssey XXII 468-73):
[Like birds], with nooses around their necks
that they might die most piteously.
And they writhed a little while with their feet
but not for long.
Shame on you, IDF, for allowing such things to happen. And shame on you, penis-envy driven feminist fiends, for misleading your credulous women followers and pushing them in that direction! The much lower number killed since then suggests that, whatever female soldiers may have been doing from 8 October on, they hardly took part in any serious fighting. Case closed.
LINKS
Twitter: Butt-Kicking Babe Propaganda
“Sleepy Southern Border”: ‘My Insta blew up’: Feminism and tank warfare in Israel: This is an excellent article detailing the PR campaign behind this “historic engagement,” confirming my suspicions that it’s completely exaggerated. This is the only article I’ve come across that shows any skepticism towards the story. “Their story is more than a military curiosity. It is an example of a highly organised public-relations campaign designed to win support for Israel from the Western world.” The writer doesn’t question the basic facts but his tone is highly skeptical.
Van Creveld: Military Women Are Not The Cure, They Are The Disease
Van Creveld: Not For The IDF Alone
Hamas aims to make us not want to live in Israel. ‘Victory’ is when that threat is defeated