Robert W Malone, MD

Israeli building code has required a reinforced safe room in every new home since 1992. It is called a mamad. It was designed for rockets. Rockets give you fifteen seconds. So most of those doors have no lock on the inside. On October 7 the handle was held by hand, or not at all. 🧵 --- Jill and I stood in one of those doorways at Kibbutz Nir Oz this week. The steel around the handle is riddled with bullet holes. When pulling the door open failed, they fired through it at the handle. They were shooting at the hands. --- When the door held, they burned the house. Fire is what defeated the mamad. A room built for fifteen seconds becomes an oven when the building is alight. The air filter was designed for a chemical agent, not smoke. More than 70% of Nir Oz burned. Six houses were left untouched. --- Americans have a framework for this and have forgotten we own it. For a century and a half the southern plains ran on a raiding and captive economy. Comanche raiders killed the men and took women and children. The selection was deliberate. Both sides knew it. --- Spanish and Mexican authorities funded redemption through the rescate system. A reliable buyer creates a standing bid. A standing bid raises the return on acquisition. Every redemption was a mercy. The aggregate of those mercies was a price signal that manufactured more captives. --- Jewish law worked this out seventeen centuries before Menger. Redeeming captives is the highest charity in Maimonides. Mishnah Gittin 4:6 then caps it: not for more than their worth, mipnei tikkun ha'olam. The sages knew what an unlimited bid does to supply. --- The ceiling has not held. 1985: roughly 1,150 prisoners for three soldiers. 2011: 1,027 for Gilad Shalit. Yahya Sinwar walked out in that exchange and planned October 7. The market cleared. The price was published. The buyer came back. --- Now the part that should trouble anyone who thinks a good procedure can substitute for judgment. After the 1973 surprise, the Agranat Commission created a standing devil's advocate office inside Israeli military intelligence. Its job was to write the opposing assessment. --- That office existed on October 6, 2023. Intelligence held a Hamas planning document. It was judged aspirational. Young women watching the border reported rehearsals at mock compounds. They were told to stop filing. The officers held a model instead, and they trusted the model. --- Nir Oz sits under two miles from Gaza. No military outpost between it and the border. 400 to 500 attackers entered a community of 385 people. The IDF's own investigation: the first security forces arrived 40 minutes after the last attacker had already walked back into Gaza. --- The local ready squad fielded nine members. Four were killed. Israeli law then allowed civilians handguns, not rifles. Squad rifles were kept in a communal armory rather than at home. Israel had licensed those men and trained them. It had not given them the key. --- "When seconds count, police are minutes away." On October 7 the answer was closer to eight hours. In a country the size of New Jersey with universal conscription and one of the finest militaries on earth. The gap between a raid and the state is geometry before it is competence. --- One correction, because I heard it repeatedly and it is false. Most Israelis do not carry. Roughly 4% are licensed, after three years of the most aggressive liberalization in Israeli history. What looks like an armed population to a visitor is mostly conscription. --- And there is no right to carry. An applicant needs a qualifying address, a clean record, and a physician's declaration of fitness. The state grants permission and can refuse. They have much of the practice we say we want. They never had the principle. --- The man who saved 32 people near the Nova festival that morning was unarmed. Yunis Alkarnawi, a Bedouin Israeli farmer, hid Jewish kids and 24 Thai workers under his house, then walked to his gate and told Hamas gunmen in Arabic there were no Jews on his farm. --- Other Arab citizens of Israel tried talking to Hamas that day and were murdered anyway. Hold Alkarnawi against the claim that Israel is a colonial project and its people are settlers. The framework has no slot for him. It cannot process the sentence. --- That is what the people who hate Jews require: that the Israeli stay an abstraction. The abstraction collapses the moment he becomes a specific person doing a specific thing. And the specific thing is almost always some variant of holding a door. --- Full essay, with sources, at Malone News: https://www.malone.news/p/the-wolf-at-the-door-the-safe-room First in a series from what Jill and I saw in Israel this month. Next: the West Bank, and why the frontier comparison fits there in ways it does not fit Gaza. 📌Follow and Share👇🏻 🔬🧬 @RWMaloneMD