Thread by @Saul_Sadka

Operation Grim Beeper was the turning point of the war.

A year ago today at this hour, the entire Hezbollah organisation built up over 40 years and at the cost of hundreds of billions was neutered by a mere 50 kilograms of explosives. It precipitated a new Middle East. (1/10)

In seconds it was transformed from the most fearsome terror army the world has ever seen into a rehabilitation charity, with thousands of living anti-martyrs, who will be rolling, castrated examples of what Allah does to people who plan Jihad against Jews into the 22nd century.

So much changed, everything was flipped upside down, and so many things had to line up for this all to occur. (2/10)

Hezbollah had been forced, against its will and against the will of its sponsor Iran, to come to the symbolic aid of Hamas, who had failed to understand the plan: wait for an Iranian nuke and only then attack in tandem under a nuclear umbrella.

Sinwar jumped the gun, and from that moment the fate of the entire axis was sealed—just so long as Israel could hold a coherent strategic line. The Biden administration, by holding Israel back and restarting the pace of the main effort in Gaza, accidentally made this all possible. (3/10)

Israel sat back patiently and watched, even as 80,000 of its own citizens were displaced in hotels, as Hezbollah poked at Israel with rockets and RPGs over the northern border, and as Israel comprehensively infiltrated and mapped Hezbollah.

Israel was happy to let the war of attrition in the north drag on as long as possible, since while Hezbollah is strong, Israel is much stronger and Hezbollah would thus lose a war of attrition the longer it went on. (4/10)

But by September, Israel was ready to act, and act it did. The attack on the Druze schoolchildren gave Israel the casus belli to drag Hezbollah up an escalation ladder they would certainly fall off, and that was set in motion with the assassination of Fuad Shukr, their military chief, as he visited his girlfriend.

But this was just the prelude. Hezbollah had long been avoiding escalation, since they and Iran understood that, even if they could strike a grievous blow—Israel predicted that 10,000 might die in a combined Hezbollah attack—it was a one-shot enterprise. (5/10)

They were the last arrow in Iran's quiver, and they couldn't afford to use it since if they did, Iran's nukes were unprotected. There would be nothing left to deter an Israeli attack on them except the Biden administration.

Not only was the Beeper attack without doubt the most effective and consequential act of military subterfuge in history, it was also the first act in one of the most extraordinary executions of the "shock and awe" doctrines ever seen. (6/10)

Within two weeks, Nasrallah and most of the leadership were dead, not as heroes but as losers. Their vast stockpiles of rocketry were destroyed on the ground before they could be used, their banks and bases alike reduced to rubble.

Once the rocket arsenal was neutered, Israel was able to cross the border and demolish the decades of prepared fortifications and armouries ready for the Radwan force—Hezbollah's elite invasion force—and end the threat from Hezbollah entirely. (7/10)

It was the hostile Biden administration that accidentally facilitated all this by dragging out the Gaza War, and it was the Trump administration, elected a few months later, that allowed Israel to press home the advantage.

A year later, there is a new Middle East. There is no more nuclear threat from Iran, and its proxies are dead or dying. Israel has no enemies that can hurt it in a kinetic, strategic way. Its borders are now cleared of Jihadis. (8/10)

The pan-Arab attempts to destroy Israel that failed in the 1970s have now been compounded by the Jihadi and Shia-led attempts, and Israel is now stronger and richer than ever.

By poisoning the minds of almost all living Israelis against the idea of a real Palestinian state, while decimating the armies arrayed against Israel who could have been used as a cudgel to force them into it, the Arabs of Gaza, Judea and Samaria will not see one in the next 50 years, and by then, due to demographic issues, it will be moot. (9/10)

All that the enemies of the Jews have left are lies and propaganda, but that can only go so far. Israel has yet to decipher a means to undermine the vast propaganda network arrayed against it, that is now, just for example, busy making the murder of Charlie Kirk by a trans extremist about Israel.

Perhaps it's simply impossible for a democracy to play information warfare the way Qatar, Beijing, and Moscow do. But ultimately, winning a propaganda war on behalf of terror armies that no longer exist is totally pointless. (10/10)