October 7 2023: this is Max Blumenthal talking to Judge Andrew Napolitano on the Judging Freedom podcast yesterday on the third anniversary of the Hamas massacre

I knew most of this very shortly after 7th October. I assume that many who had died on that day had been killed by the IDF as part of the Hannibal doctrine because Gilad Admon posted about this on the 8th of October. He also posted a very moving interview with a young Jewish woman who was in one of the kibbutzim when Hamas attacked. She talked about her sadness that the attack would be used by Netanyahu as a reason for killing many Arabs. I felt exactly the same on October 7. I imagine most people did but many British conservatives were seized by what I can only describe as a bloodlust. 


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The standard narrative surrounding October 7 has become a ritual observed in a more sacred and passionate fashion than 9/11 has been in my lifetime. It is an effort to paper over the reality of why October 7 happened, which was a siege that had been taking place since 2005. One of the architects of that siege, an Israeli academic named Arnon Soffer who consulted for various governments, said we have to kill and kill and kill all day every day in order to maintain control of Gaza. And that's what Israel did.
It was an occupation of the West Bank and 300,000 Palestinians in East Jerusalem. It was constant incursions into the third holiest site in Islam at the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the violation of long-standing rules. There were so many factors. It was the attempt to force a normalization between Saudi Arabia and Israel, and various other Arab states, in order to bury the Palestinian struggle and the Palestinian issue so that they would never achieve any form of autonomy and would languish under occupation or as refugees for eternity. All these factors fed into October 7.
The way October 7 is being observed in the United States—as though it's some sort of second Holocaust, as though Israelis were innocent victims—is designed to reorient history, actually to obliterate the real history of October 7.
Yesterday, I screened a documentary I made with Ahmed Husam at Prop and Co. and the filmmaker and academic Sut Jhally called Atrocity Incorporated. It was released on the first anniversary of October 7, 2024, and it is basically me narrating for 45 minutes all of the lies and deceptions that Israel spun out through U.S. corporate media to manufacture consent for genocide. All the deceptions about October 7, such as the 40 beheaded babies, systematic Hamas mass sexual assault, and so forth.
There's a section about the Hannibal Directive, a once-secret Israeli doctrine which allows and encourages the Israeli military to actually kill Israeli citizens if they feel that they're falling into enemy hands and can become political collateral. We now know for a fact that the Hannibal Directive was enacted on a mass scale on October 7. Every vehicle that was going from the Gaza envelope in Israel into Gaza was targeted by Israeli helicopters and drones, and artillery was blanketing the border between Gaza and Israel. It's very likely that hundreds of Israeli citizens were killed under the Hannibal Directive, which could potentially mean a majority of the civilians who were killed on October 7 were killed by the Israeli military.


We know the Hannibal Directive was enacted on a mass scale. Everyone from the Israeli defense minister to various Israeli officials and Israeli media have admitted it. But U.S. media, years on after October 7, has made no effort to investigate the Hannibal Directive. No effort whatsoever, no discussion of it in U.S. media. And so that to me was another failure to observe the real history of this day. And the failure is deliberate.