Did Egypt Warn Israel Before the Attack?

I’ll be brutally honest — I really hate the question. I wasn’t the first one to ask that question, though, and I also intend to answer it.

To me, the idea is preposterous…that the Israeli government knew in advance that last Saturday, more than one thousand Palestinian terrorists would invade their country from the Gaza Strip with their objective being to rape and murder hundreds of Israeli civilians. What sort of immoral monster would you have to be to know something like that was coming and deliberately choose to allow it to happen? I can think of a few people who might do something like that but they were vicious dictators like Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, and Mao, not the leaders of a free world nation.

It’s a stupid question. It presumes that leaders of a country selected by free and fair elections could deliberately ignore verified and actionable information about a pending attack merely to give themselves an excuse to retaliate afterward. Similar claims have been made about Roosevelt and Pearl Harbor, but why blame a horrific attack on a conspiracy when simple incompetence might be an equally reasonable argument?

Historian Craig Shirley didn’t blame FDR. He attributed the intelligence failure at Pearl Harbor to mistakes and miscommunication and general government incompetence, not deliberate and malicious intent. Even so, Hitler didn’t actually allow Polish soldiers to kill German troops before using that as an excuse to invade Poland. However, he did claim his troops were killed to give him the excuse to invade. People often do lie, especially when the lie helps them gain some advantage.

But are Egyptian officials telling the truth? Did Egypt warn Israel in advance of the pending attack? Who knows? Perhaps the Egyptians did warn the Israelis, in some form or fashion. But why should Israel trust the Egyptians? Weren’t the rockets and other weapons being used by Hamas smuggled into the Gaza Strip from Egypt? Hasn’t Egypt attacked Israel before themselves?

Why yes, they have. It became known as the Six-Day War, because Israel defeated the combined armed forces of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria in less than one calendar week. Most impressive. The Israelis rarely start wars (if they ever do), but they always win them.

The moral of the story is this: even if the Egyptians were telling the truth about knowing the attack was coming and warned the Israelis in advance, the Israelis had no reason to trust them. You might want to warn security to keep a more vigilant eye on border activity, but you wouldn’t want to mass large numbers of troops in the area prior to the attack precisely because that could be perceived as a provocation.

This is nothing more than an attempt to spread the blame for terrorism to the victims. It is despicable and sows confusion. Hamas and only Hamas is guilty of mass murder and terrorist attacks on Israel. They burned and decapitated babies. They raped women and murdered a lot of innocent people. They have committed crimes against humanity.

In case it still needs to be said, I stand with Israel.

They have a right to exist. Hamas disagrees.