Monday, August 26, 2019

Trump. New Jewish Leadership?


Trump is intelligent but I readily acknowledge he says some stupid things and acts in an unorthodox manner.

Having said that, he also gets a raw deal from the mass media and the Democrats go out of their way to be critical and wind up making fools of themselves in the process.

Both delight in misquoting and/or mis-interpreting what he says. A recent example was that 'certain Jews were disloyal for backing Bibi's rejection of letting Tlaib and Omar visit Israel on their terms. The anti-Trumpers jumped all over him for raising the double standard argument that Jews who support Israel cannot be loyal to America. Their argument is false and was not what Trump meant. I was not offended at all. In fact, maybe it is time we Jews had new Jewish leadership. (See 1 below and https://worldisraelnews.com/palestinian-village-where-tlaibs-grandmother-lives-is-rolling-in-dough/  and
https://m-jpost-com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/m.jpost.com/Opinion/Right-From-Wrong-What-Trump-doesn't-
understand-about-Jews-599425/amp?amp_js_v=0.1&usqp=mq331AQEKAF)

If one goes back to when Trump was elected there were those who said he would already have us in a nuclear war.  Has not happened and in fact he has done everything in his power to try and rectify policies that have disadvantaged our nation but has been exceedingly frank and rational in his approach.

Just Monday he candidly responded to a reporter that his style of negotiating has served him well, saw no reason to change and basically said I am who I am.  Trump has been one of the frankest presidents I have experienced and one of the most accessible as well.

To his credit, he said he wanted to make America Great Again and he has set about touching third rails that previous presidents ignored for fear they would fail and/or hurt their political standings.  Trump puts America first and apparently believes voters are smart enough to separate reality from  the overboard criticism.

The agreement reached with Japan is a prime example that his approach can work. (See 1a below.)

Everyone knows China has ripped us off when it comes to their trading policies and have stolen our
proprietary technology and intellectual property.  Trump, to his credit, decided it was time to call their hand.  No preceding president had the guts to stand up to China and call their bluff.  He is willing to allow some near term pain for long term benefits and if Americans cannot take the heat they have themselves to blame not Trump.source.  https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/08/trumps_coming_agreement_with_china_will_amaze_everyone.html

The Democrat candidates are a bizarre lot and it seems the list of 20 plus is narrowing with Sanders, Biden and Warren leading the pack.  Their collective proposals can be found among the following (See 1b and 1c below.).

Trump certainly has his rough edges and is one of the most unorthodox men to sit in The Oval Office. He is New York boorish yet his policies are basically sound, his methods unique but compared to what the opposition offers the 2020 election would be a cakewalk if Trump only reduced his "tweeting" and  was a bit more restrained.
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Iran may believe it would inure to their benefit if they cause more trouble for Israel. If they do they will regret it but hate is a powerful blinding force. (See 2 below.)
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Dick
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1)

It’s Time For New Jewish Leadership


By Bruce Abramson, JEWISH PRESS

Cartoon by: Asher Schwartz
The past few weeks have seen a number of stories about “Jewish protesters” at ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) facilities. That phrasing is important. These were not protests that some Jews happened to join. These were explicitly Jewish protests, organized in the name of American Jewry, claiming fidelity to the Biblical command of “loving the stranger.”
Meanwhile, last week the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations expressed “reservations” over Israel’s decision to cancel Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib’s visit to “Palestine,” which was organized by a PLO-affiliated, pro-BDS organization. Apparently, fighting American immigration law is a core Jewish value while fighting anti-Semitic agitation against Israel is not.
How did we arrive at this point? The answer is illuminating – and critical.
The anti-ICE story begins with Momentum, “a training institute and movement incubator” founded in 2014 to “give progressive organizers the tools and frameworks to build massive, decentralized social movements.” Momentum has incubated at least three organizations: Movimiento Cosecha (which fights America’s immigration laws), the Sunrise Movement (which fights fossil fuels), and IfNotNow (which fights Israel in the name of Jewish values).
These groups “share an ongoing movement framework and a relationship of reciprocity, and are in deep personal relationships with one another.” The “Jewish” anti-ICE protests began with a social media call from a Cosecha activist who happened to be Jewish. IfNotNow quickly lent a hand, finding a Biblical verse to use for the cause – and bingo! A nationwide Jewish movement to abolish ICE in the name of Jewish values was born.
Welcome to the future. The beautiful organizational infrastructure that America’s assimilated and Judaically-ignorant “Jewish establishment” built in the 20thcentury has delivered a 21st in which American Judaism means anything – and hence nothing.
* Thanks to AIPAC, anyone who claims to be pro-Israel is pro-Israel. Pro-Israel Corey Booker and Kirsten Gillibrand support the Iran Deal without losing AIPAC’s support. Pro-Israel Chuck Schumer, Jerry Nadler, Steny Hoyer, and AIPAC itself side with Omar and Tlaib over Israel.
* Thanks to the ADL, anti-Semitism is entering the American mainstream. While the ADL is quick to condemn every inaudible anti-Semitic dog whistle it claims to hear emanating from the political right, it ignores and whitewashes blatant progressive anti-Semitism when it can; when it can’t, the ADL excuses it as misguided and attempts to change the subject. When Black Lives Matter, the Women’s March, “The Squad,” or anyone else on the left unleashes virulent anti-Semitic attacks, the ADL meekly requests an apology and encourages continued collaboration on shared principles and values.
* Thanks to the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism and JCRCs, Jewish voters consistently prioritize non-Jewish issues over Jewish survival. Their proud, hard left, “unified voice” makes itself heard on the environment, LGBT issues, immigration, and abortion. On issues critical to Jewish survival – Israel, anti-Semitism, freedom of religion, and education – they distance themselves and preen for having risen above parochialism.
* Thanks to newspapers like the Forward and Haaretz, anti-Semites find ready affirmation for their darkest theories about Jews. When identifiably Jewish sources slander Israel, Orthodoxy, and Republicans, who needs Neo-Nazis?
* Thanks to the many groups promoting “tikkun olam,” social justice now embodies the essence of Judaism for many. No Jewish progressive need ever experience a conflict between political preference and religious tradition.
American Jewish communal leadership has stripped all meaning from American Jewry. Our leaders have created a community in which every Jew is free to adopt a personal definition of Judaism, broadcast that definition “as a Jew,” and condemn those who behave differently.
A meaningless Jewish community is an unsustainable Jewish community. Our leadership, and the leading organizations that brought us here, have failed us on a massive scale. They have eviscerated the community we trusted them to lead. They have rendered themselves worse than worthless. They are counterproductive deadweight, holding our community back while coasting on brand value and selling a bill of goods to donors who see no viable alternatives.
America’s Jewish community has reached a critical juncture. Our leadership has failed us. A new leadership will arise. Will we rally to support new organizations willing to inject true meaning into American Jewry, draw red lines, and oppose those who oppose us notwithstanding potential agreement on unrelated issues?
Or will we let random activists with Jewish surnames, demonstrating ignorance of Judaism but mastery of social media, attach the Jewish label to their cause of the day? The choice is ours.

1a)  US, Japan Agree to Tentative Trade Deal Read More



1b) Proposals to Democratic platform taking shape for 2020…………. 

1.  Fred Stevens, a welder, and Joe Frisco, a bartender, neither of whom went to college, will have to pay off the student loans for Eric, an Art History major, and Emma, a Gender Studies major, because they cannot get jobs. (Elizabeth Warren). 

2.  Yusef Hussein, who killed 23 children by bombing their school, will be allowed to vote from prison.  (Bernie Sanders) 

3.  Grace Thompson, who worked hard for 47 years, must give up her employer furnished medical plan and join the National Health plan. (The whole slate) 

4.  La'Darius Washington, who has never had a regular job, will receive a monthly income from the federal government to spend as he pleases.  (Amy Klobuchar) 

5.  Billy White, age 16, who has trouble with subject/verb agreement in English class, still has trouble with fractions in math class, and thinks Judge Judy is on the Supreme Court, will get to vote. (Kirsten Gillibrand) 

6.  Stan Billings, an avid deer hunter, will have his semi-automatic rifle (fires one shot each time you pull the trigger) taken away, or go to jail, because it LOOKS LIKE an AR 15.  (Eric Swalwell) 

7.  Sven Johannson, whose grandfather immigrated to the US in 1953 will have to pay reparations to Sha'lyndia Jefferson because she THINKS her great-great-great grandfather MIGHT HAVE BEEN a slave.  (Cory Booker) 

8.  Thomas Finch, who is an ambitious and motivated adult, cannot get a job because he doesn't want to join a labor union.  (Kamala Harris) 

9.  Sammy Thomas, a farmer, will no longer be able to haul his crops to market in his 3/4-ton diesel pick-up, but will have to make 43 trips in his Toyota Prius.   (The whole slate) 

10.  The population of the US will become 76.4% Hispanic because all of the existing border wall will be torn down.  (Beto O’Rourke) 

11.  NONE OF THIS WILL MATTER BECAUSE THE WORLD IS GOING TO END IN TWELVE YEARS.  (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez)


1c) Just because Trump said it doesn’t mean it’s not true: The Democratic Party is becoming unsalvageable

Earlier this week, my colleague, the wise and empathetic Carly Pildis, wrote a thoughtful and powerful piece about the political future of American Jews. In it, she argues that the Democratic Party, notwithstanding a handful of problematic and relatively inconsequential congresswomen, is still the most safe and welcoming space for Jews, while the president is guilty of rhetoric that is downright anti-Semitic.

It is in the spirit of Carly’s call for dialogue that does not shy away from unpleasant assertions that I would like to offer two observations about the political future of American Jews.

The first has to do with the unthinkable descent of the Democratic Party into being not just blind to anti-Jewish bigotry, but an engine of it. We can argue about when and exactly how this happened—I’ll leave the ultimate timelines to historians—but to keep things simple let’s connect only the most recent dots.

Shortly after Trump was elected, the left moved into resistance mode. The feelings here were entirely understandable—I myself found Trump’s election deeply worrisome. But, very quickly, the energy began to be channeled into causes and outfits with deep and clear anti-Semitic associations—including, most prominently, the Women’s March. Over the course of two years, the leaders of this organization sang hosannas to Louis Farrakahn, flagrantly used Nation of Islam as security, and used their influence to reframe Israel as the world’s biggest state criminal—quite a feat when you have such a calamity happening next door. Jews expressed their discomfort, but time and again were ignored—even told by some of their own leadership, by some of our own rabbis, that to want people in shared spaces simply not to foment vicious hatred of us was to selfishly “center ourselves.”

After Tablet published a 10,000-word expose, revealing that the Women’s March leadership was veritably soaked in hatred for Jews and Israel, some prominent people in the Democratic Party (though not all) finally felt compelled to distance themselves from these obvious bigots.

Then came the midterm elections.

During it, a young candidate named Ilhan Omar emerged—and immediately attracted the adoration of progressives, including Jewish voters in her hometown. At some point, someone surfaced a 2012 tweet in which she argued that Israel had “hypnotized the world.” A few polite Jews apologetically asked if she might, pretty please, explain to everyone that she didn’t actually mean to reference a longtime anti-Semitic canard. She ignored them—perhaps because she knew that no one in the Democratic Party establishment would care, or ever push her on it.

Things got worse. When meeting with Jewish constituents whose votes she wanted, Omar flatly told them what she knew they wanted to hear—that she supported a two-state solution and didn’t believe in BDS. After getting many of them to vote for her, she took it all back—even sponsoring a bill in support of BDS within months of joining Congress. None of Omar’s fellow Democratic congress members called her out for this sharp reversal, and neither The New York Times nor the Washington Post gave it much if any ink.

Then came Omar’s “all about the Benjamins” tweet, which outright accused Jews of using their money to buy influence and force America into supporting Israel, a potent mix of several anti-Semitic tropes, from the one accusing the Jews of dual loyalty to the one positing that Jewish money makes the world go round. Some on the left condemned Omar. But many others rushed to her defense, creating a hashtag, #IStandWithIlhan, that soon went viral.

Then, last week, came the storm following Israel’s decision to ban Rashida Tlaib and Omar from visiting. Soon after, it was revealed that their trip was to be sponsored by a Palestinian organization called Miftah. “Much of the chatter and gossip about historical Jewish blood rituals in Europe are real and not fake as they claim,” read an article posted on the organization’s website, as reported by the Washington Free Beacon. “The Jews used the blood of Christians in the Jewish Passover.” The article goes on to criticize then-President Barack Obama for hosting a Seder in the White House: “Does Obama in fact know the relationship, for example, between ‘Passover’ and ‘Christian blood,’” the article continues. “Or ‘Passover’ and ‘Jewish blood rituals?!’”

Did prominent voices in the Democratic Party rush to defend the Jews from these obvious and dangerous canards? I wish. The Washington Post described Miftah as a nonprofit headed by “longtime peace negotiator Hanan Ashrawi” and The New York Times contextualized as “a group dedicated to raising global awareness and knowledge of Palestinian realities.” Peter Beinart went on CNN to defend Ashrawi and her group as paragons of goodwill. Instead, the entity that came under fire was…you guessed it. A hailstorm of wails about the death of democratic norms ensued, all culminating in a #BoycottIsrael trend on Twitter—pushed by many of the same sort of polite people behind the last big boycott of the Jews.

Next, both congresswomen shared the same cartoon by Carlos Latuff, a notoriously anti-Semitic illustrator who, in 2006, had placed second in Iran’s infamous Holocaust-denying cartoon contest. No Democratic congressperson said a peep. Neither the Times nor the Washington Post nor CNN covered it.

Friends: We have to stop talking about preventing the Corbynization of the Democratic Party, because it is already here. And if you don’t believe me—if you want to draw a line under all of the above and hope that all the Democratic Party needs is some gentle nudging and organizing—I have bad news for you: The next thing coming down the pike is even worse.

Earlier this year, Rep. Betty McCollum (D.-Minn.) introduced a bill in the House of Representatives titled “H.R. 2047—Promoting Human Rights for Palestinian Children Living Under Israeli Military Occupation Act.” In June, a host of high-profile Democrats co-sponsored her bill, including Seth Moulton, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib.

The bill’s purpose is to require that “United States funds do not support military detention, interrogation, abuse, or ill-treatment of Palestinian children.” It then goes on to present a long list of citations from reports compiled by non-government organizations that accuse Israel of everything from applying coercive interrogation techniques against children as young as 11 to holding minors for days without a trial.

You could easily tear apart most of the bill’s cherry-picked claims by explaining, as the Israel Democracy Institute had, that Israel’s approach to underage suspects is far more complicated than the bill presents it to be. But there is an even simpler, more enlightening explanation—especially after seeing Ocasio-Cortez’s glib tweet about the bill: “I don’t believe in caging kids. Pretty straightforward value. I don’t care if it’s American kids, Mexican kids, or Palestinian kids.”

Except, of course, that the bill doesn’t apply to Mexico or Egypt or South Africa—all of which receive substantial amounts in American foreign aid.

If it had, we’d be on solid moral ground. Instead, this bill—backed by a cadre of House Democrats who abjure anti-Semitism in theory and yet astonishingly manage to “accidentally” perpetrate it over and over—tracks, in an eerily perfect way, with a long and murderous tradition: Fantasizing that Jews have a special fondness for killing, abducting, maiming, or otherwise abusing non-Jewish children, and leading mobs to attack them based on these accusations.

The phenomenon dates back to at least 1144, when a young boy, William of Norwich, was found dead in the forest near his home in central England with stab wounds covering his body. A local monk, Thomas of Monmouth, claimed that little William was murdered by a global cabal of Jews who, each year, choose one Christian child to sacrifice in accordance with their sinister religion. The story spread, William was considered a martyr, and decades of pogroms against Jews were promptly launched. They were intensified in 1255, when the lifeless body of an 8-year-old named Hugh was found in a well in the English town of Lincoln. A local Jew named Copin was forced to confess and repeat the old story about ceremonial killing of Christian children, and dozens of Jews were arrested or executed. By 1290, the recurring fabrications about Jewish obsession with harming innocent children led the Crown to expel all Jews, a decree that lasted centuries.

The trend soon spread to the rest of the continent. In 1171, in the French town of Blois, a rabbi named Isaac was accused of drowning a boy in the Loire, and in 1267 in Pforzheim, Germany, Jews were accused of buying a little girl from her mother only to cut her open and then drown her. In both cases, the stories led to violence against the local Jewish communities, a grim tradition that persisted in Europe through much of the 20th century—the notorious Kishinev pogrom of 1903 was launched after a local newspaper reported that the Jews had killed a boy named Mikhail and used his blood to make matzo.

Sadly, blood libels are still popular today in the Arab world, where media outlets and high-ranking officials frequently report on the Jewish lust for the blood of the young. Some American academics, too, are practitioners of this hateful art, like the Rutgers professor who accused Israel of killing Palestinian children in order to traffic in their organs.

If the history of anti-Semitism teaches us anything, it’s that when blood libels appear, real violence isn’t far to follow. If you harbored any reservations before now, H.R. 2047 should leave no doubt that the Democratic Party has a very real and very deep anti-Semitism problem.

This brings me directly to my second observation, which has to do with President Trump’s claim that Jews who vote for the Democrats are showing “either a total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty.” Like so many of the president’s utterances, this one, too, is deeply regrettable. And it, too, reflects, as Bari Weiss brilliantly pointed out in The New York Times, the president’s Manichean worldview: “Indeed,” Weiss wrote, “if we have learned anything about the former host of ‘The Apprentice,’ it is that he looks at the world in the exact way he looked at those contestants. You’re a winner or you’re a loser. You’re for him or you’re a turncoat. In his small mind, if you’re on Team Jew, you vote for his party because Republicans are pro-Israel and, therefore, pro-Jew. If you’re on Team Anti-Semite, well, then you vote for the other guys.”

That the world, glanced through the windows of the Oval Office, ought to seem bigger, brighter, and brimming with hope, not discord, goes without saying, mainly because it has already been said, so many times and in so many ways by so many people these past two years. But observe Trump’s statement on its own merit, and you’ll find little there to justify the absolute hysteria that has led even some of our more astute observers to wail that the president is nothing less than the greatest anti-Semite of our age.

Really?

You can point out the president’s many flaws, and lament—as I have, frequently—anything from his words to his actions. But being on social media actually obscures and prevents us from thinking clearly about Trump: On Twitter, it often feels like right-wingers plug their ears and mention the embassy move again and again, while those on the left just keep maniacally bleating “he said ‘good people on both sides’! He said ‘good people on both sides!’” None of these points are particularly helpful. There are many things to say about this president—a whole host of them bad. You can find his policies reprehensible, and his appointments of cabinet members appalling. But seeing him as an anti-Semite or even anti-Semite-adjacent requires leaving reason further behind than any educated citizen of a modern republic ought to ever do.

How best to understand Trump’s statement? You can begin by consulting with Louis Brandeis, America’s first Jewish Supreme Court justice and a founding father of American Zionism. As Daniel Gordis notes in his upcoming and stellar book We Stand Divided, American Zionism had always differed from its European counterpart in one important way: While the Jews of Plonsk and Pinsk and Minsk saw Zionism as the answer to the very existential problems that were robbing them of life and limb—Zion was a literal safe haven from persecution—their brothers and sisters in Boston and Baltimore needed a way to support a Jewish homeland in Eretz Yisrael without ever having to leave the Goldene Medina, the other promised land.

This, American Zionists realized early on, is a tricky proposition in a meting pot society where, as Woodrow Wilson thundered in 1915, “you cannot dedicate yourself to America unless you become in every respect and with every purpose of your will thorough Americans.” Conscious of the perpetually pending charge of dual loyalty, Brandeis helped engineer an ingenious solution.

“Let no American imagine that Zionism is inconsistent with patriotism,” he wrote, adding that “a man is a better citizen of the U.S. for being also a loyal citizen of his state, and of his city, for being loyal to his family… every American Jew who aids in advancing the Jewish settlement in Palestine, though he feels neither he nor his descendants will ever live there, will likewise be a better man and a better American for doing so.”

Put simply, Brandeis believed that if you didn’t support Israel, you either lacked knowledge or showed a great disloyalty to your own people — a view that would’ve been utterly uncontroversial, even banal, until very recently. Unless you require neither context nor reason and are inclined to hear everything the president says as hate speech, you can rest easy and understand his latest gaffe as poorly stated at worst.

So where does all of this leave us American Jews? Many of us are losing a bunch of sleep these days, feeling as if the world may be coming to an end. It’s not, but it is changing, which is history’s single defining characteristic and the thing that makes human life on this planet so terrifying and so thrilling. And, historically speaking, Jews who refused to take heed when things started changing dramatically all around them very often wound up as dead Jews.

Let us, then, observe these changes candidly and without succumbing to the pressures of screaming ideologues on either side. The party our parents voted for, the party we thought would be ours for eternity, appears to be well on its way to becoming something entirely hostile to Jews. The president we are told again and again is the single greatest menace to our community is many things, but certainly not that.

What you choose to do with these realities is entirely up to you. Decent people will likely invest their energies in divergent projects, working in good faith to create a safe and sustainable future for themselves and their children. We may still disagree. We may still find ourselves divided on important, substantive questions, from immigration to health care reform to foreign policy. Arguing, after all, is our birthright. But if we grow addicted to the narcotic effect of absurd histrionics masquerading as moral outrage on social media, and if we insist that observable reality take a backseat to our feverish fantasies and desperate hopes, we’ll find ourselves the authors of a new and particularly bleak chapter of the timeless Jewish story.
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2)

The power of Israeli intelligence in its recent attack on Iran - analysis

By YONAH JEREMY BOB
With Monday morning’s jaw-dropping sharing of a wealth of intelligence by the IDF about the Iranian drone crew it struck in Lebanon, the power of Israeli intelligence became ever clearer. 

The key to the IDF thwarting the planned attack by Iran on Israel was not merely that it identified the Lebanese operatives working with the Iranians who were en route to carry out their attack, but that it traced the presence of particular operatives involved in using drones on their way to the area before they got there. 

Let’s analyze the information put out by the IDF. First, there were three casualties from the strike, two of whom were Hezbollah operatives being trained by Iran’s external intelligence Quds Force: Hassem Yussuf Zabib from Nabatieh in southern Lebanon, born in 1996, and Yasser Ahmed Tzahr from Beleide village, born in 1997. 
According to the IDF, the two visited Iran several times this year and went through training targeted at operation of unmanned aerial vehicles and explosive drones at the Quds Force base. 

Stunningly, the IDF even published pictures of the two on board a flight and near an airplane to Iran to take part in some of the training sessions. 

According to IDF Spokesperson Brig.-Gen. Ronen Manelis, the IDF was ordered specifically to strike Aqraba early Sunday morning after they received intelligence that the attack would happen on Sunday. 

He said that the drones were like the kind used by the Houthis in Yemen against Saudi Arabia. Each of the drones could carry several kilograms of explosives and was supposed to be operated in conjunction with a group of Iranian pilots who arrived in Syria several days before, especially for this mission. 

The IDF has not identified the name of an additional Iranian it said was killed in the strike. 

From the above released intelligence, which is likely still only part of the full picture, part of the key is that the IDF has been watching these two individuals. 
Even nearly 20 years ago, when Israeli intelligence pulled off one of its best coups of all time, tracking and capturing the Palestinian terror Karine A massive weapons boat through the Indian Ocean and deep into the Red Sea, a huge key was tracking the movements of four or five individuals who it knew were part of the Palestinians’ smuggling network. 

Tracing those individuals, and likely tracing these two Hezbollah operatives, invariably includes old-school intelligence like HUMINT, or human spying provided by the Mossad. 

Israel has confirmed through various leaks that dozens of Mossad agents penetrated Iran to pull off its appropriation of Tehran’s secret nuclear file in January 2018. 
So, even as the CIA’s network in Iran was purged at least once in the 2010 to 2013 period due to security breaches, and the Iranians recently claimed to have purged a newer CIA network trying to track its illicit oil shipments, the Mossad likely still has found a way to have physical agents deep in the Islamic Republic. 

These agents could be responsible for the footage of the Hezbollah agents traveling on the airplane to Iran, but more likely is that one of Israel’s many cyber arms hacked a phone or video camera on or near the various airplanes. The photos appear like they were taken by the Hezbollah operatives to show off. 

Other tracing of these operatives, including video footage of some Quds Force operatives taking what appears to be an Iranian drone out to prepare it for a strike, could have been accomplished by Israeli drones, the IDF’s F-35, Mossad or IDF special forces in the field or again by hacking some kind of Hezbollah video feed nearby. 
The intelligence also makes it clear that Israel’s network for tracking these Hezbollah agents was spread out over multiple countries.

All of this highlights that often a key to preventing disastrous attacks on Israel is not merely having an answer once the attack is in motion, but having unmatched intelligence prior to the attack so that the rug can be pulled out from beneath the feet of the attackers before they have been able to “hit the on-button” for their attack. 
There are some good questions to ask about what information security Israel may have compromised by sharing this information with the public and what the motivations for sharing it really was, which could be anything from psychologically beating Iran in public to politics. 

But Monday morning’s information showed unmistakably once again that in the arena of Middle East intelligence, Israel is second to none.
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