World
21 Israeli Troops Killed While Planting Explosives for a Controlled Demolition in Gaza
Israeli military forces suffered their single largest known loss of troops on Monday when 21 reserve soldiers died as they tried to rig two buildings in southern Gaza with mines to perform a controlled demolition. According to the Israeli Defense Forces spokesperson, Hamas commandos fired a rocket-propelled grenade, or RPG, at an Israeli tank that was deployed to protect the soldiers rigging the buildings with bombs, causing a chain reaction that led to the structures collapsing on top of the Israeli soldiers.
“At around 4 p.m., an RPG was fired by gunmen at a tank securing the forces, and simultaneously, an explosion occurred in two two-story buildings. The buildings collapsed due to this explosion, while most of the forces were inside and near them,” said Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, the Israel Defense Forces spokesperson. “One of the missiles apparently hit a mine, which exploded and caused the buildings to collapse with the soldiers inside them.”
The Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, released a statement Tuesday describing an attack that was consistent with the time and nature of the Israeli military’s description. While the IDF statement was unclear about the exact cause of the explosion inside the buildings, the Qassam Brigades said its operatives “targeted” the structure, leading to the “explosion of the [IDF’s] ammunition and engineering equipment,” “completely blowing [it] up.”
Such controlled demolitions have become an increasingly common tactic used by Israeli forces in Gaza. The Israeli military has justified its destruction of civilian housing and other infrastructure by claiming it houses Hamas facilities or leaders or to gain access to subterranean tunnels. In Monday’s incident, however, Hagari said the buildings were marked for demolition because they were situated in an area of Gaza that Israel unilaterally declared a “buffer zone” between Gaza and Israel. He said the purpose was to protect an Israeli kibbutz located a half mile from Gaza against possible future attacks.
This appears to be the first time the Israeli military has publicly admitted that its systematic destruction of whole areas of eastern Gaza are not entirely aimed at destroying tunnels or other Hamas infrastructure, but at depopulating more areas of Gaza in the name of security for nearby Israeli settlements. “The IDF systematically demolishes Palestinian buildings that enable surveillance and firing capabilities toward Israel, leading to the destruction of hundreds of buildings to date,” the IDF said in a statement.
Controlled demolitions against the property within an occupied territory are generally prohibited under international humanitarian law unless they are “imperatively demanded by the necessities of war.”
But IDF soldiers have posted multiple videos on TikTok and other social media sites of themselves gleefully hitting the trigger button sparking massive controlled explosions in Palestinian neighborhoods, as well as educational, cultural, and government institutions. In a TikTok video showing a military bulldozer knocking down houses in Khan Younis, an Israeli soldier jokes that he and his colleagues are setting up a real estate company. “This field is definitely worth investing in,” he says. “For those who have money, this is the time to invest. Make an offer.”
On January 17, Israeli forces blew up Al-Isra University, reportedly rigging it with more than 300 mines before conducting a triggering strike that leveled the entire campus. “The explosion occurred 70 days after the Israeli military transformed the school into barracks and, later, into a temporary detention facility,” according to the humanitarian organization Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor.
State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller told reporters he had seen the video of the demolition of the privately owned school, but refused to comment on the legality or justification for the operation.
“It looks like a controlled demolition,” said Associated Press correspondent Matt Lee during the briefing. “It looks like what we do here in this country, when we’re taking down an old hotel or a stadium. And you have nothing to say? You have nothing to say about this?”
Miller responded that the Biden administration had made inquiries with the Israeli government about the bombing, “But I’m not able to characterize the actual facts on the ground before hearing that response.” Echoing Israeli inferences that Hamas used the university for military purposes or had an underground facility, Miller added, “I don’t know what was under that building. I don’t know what was inside, inside that building.”
Monday’s mass casualty incident among the ranks of the IDF comes as Israel has become increasingly mired in a morass in its military battle against Hamas and other Palestinian guerrillas. Israel has, to date, confirmed the deaths of 219 soldiers in Gaza ground operations. Significantly, major U.S. and Israeli media outlets have begun to raise questions about the prospects of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu decisively achieving any of the stated goals of the war. “Israel’s limited progress in dismantling Hamas has raised doubts within the military’s high command about the near-term feasibility of achieving the country’s principal wartime objectives,” reported the New York Times on January 20. Haaretz’s defense correspondent Amos Harel penned a January 19 column warning of “clear signs that Israel is getting bogged down in the Gaza quagmire” and saying Netanyahu’s government is increasingly “delusional.”
Netanyahu responded to the deaths of the 21 soldiers killed in the attempted demolition operation, and an additional three IDF soldiers killed Monday, with a pugilistic declaration. “While we bow our heads in memory of our fallen, we are not relenting — even for a moment — in striving for the goal that has no alternative — achieving total victory,” he said. “We are in the midst of a war, the justification of which is without parallel.” Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant echoed those sentiments, saying, “This is a war that will determine the future of Israel for decades to come. The loss of these soldiers is an imperative for achieving the goals of this war.”
While Israel is struggling in its stated aims of eliminating Hamas and freeing the Israeli hostages, the IDF continues to prove murderously adept at killing large numbers of Palestinian civilians. Its ground operations in Khan Younis has seen IDF forces attack numerous shelters, including those run by the U.N., where the Israeli government had instructed Palestinians to flee to remain safe. It has also laid siege to more hospitals and medical facilities. A mass grave has now been dug on the grounds of Nasser Hospital to bury Palestinians killed in the intense Israeli attacks on Khan Younis.
Israel’s War on Gaza
This week, the conservative death figures published by the Gaza health ministry reported that the number of fatalities in the enclave had surpassed 25,000 Palestinians, with another 63,000 wounded. These numbers only include cases where deaths have been officially recorded by Gaza’s hospital and mortuary system. They do not include the thousands of Palestinians unaccounted for and trapped under rubble caused by Israeli bombardment and fighting.
Israeli media outlets are focused on the loss of lives of their nation’s soldiers in Monday’s incident, displaying photographs of the dead and describing the efforts to retrieve any possible survivors. “Rescue forces described the scene as reminiscent of the aftermath of an earthquake,” reported The Times of Israel. “For several hours, a large number of troops from the IDF’s search and rescue units, as well as members of the Israel Fire and Rescue Services, worked to extract the casualties from the collapsed buildings.”
The estimated 7,000 Palestinians trapped under the rubble of their former homes and other structures receive no such media coverage. They are simply nameless statistics often omitted from the descriptions of the carnage in Gaza, a mass destruction enabled primarily by U.S.-supplied and manufactured bombs. The vast majority of these victims have no official search-and-rescue operation and no fire department to respond to their desperate, muffled pleas for help. Often their only hope is that their neighbors might somehow claw their way through the heavy concrete wreckage using whatever tools they can find. Or they are left, trapped, spending their last moments desperately scraping their own hands raw and bloody in an effort to dig their way out.
Correction: January 23, 2024, 1:45 p.m. ET
Al-Isra University in Gaza was blown up on January 17, not January 18, as previously reported. The piece was also updated to include more details from Hamas’s statement on the incident.
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Blinken Visits Nigeria as Questions Swirl About Civilian Deaths and U.S. Security Ties
The Nigerian military conducted an airstrike last month on a religious festival in the northern part of the country, killing scores of Nigerian civilians. Thirty minutes later, the military launched a second missile, killing dozens more, including people trying to rescue victims of the first strike.
The December 3 attack killed more than 120 villagers celebrating Maulud, the birthday of the Islamic prophet Muhammad, according to Amnesty International. But in a press call ahead of U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s trip to Nigeria and several other African nations this week, a State Department official expressed annoyance when journalists asked about regional insecurity and coups, complaining that the press was not focusing on the “fun” aspects of the trip. She then challenged The Intercept’s characterization of the drone attack and defended Nigeria’s handling of the aftermath of the December airstrikes in the village of Tudun Biri.
“I wouldn’t call it an attack,” Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Molly Phee told The Intercept on the January 18 call. “The Nigerians have admitted it was an operational error that tragically killed people in Kaduna State.”
“The one thing that is clear in this case is the fact that the military launched an attack which inadvertently killed innocent people,” Anietie Ewang, Human Rights Watch’s Nigeria researcher told The Intercept. “There should be less focus on semantics and more effort to ensure accountability and a stop to these unacceptable mistakes that have caused needless deaths, pain, and suffering.”
Last month’s attacks were just the latest of hundreds of Nigerian airstrikes that have killed thousands of Nigerians, including a 2017 attack on a displaced persons camp in Rann, Nigeria, that killed more than 160 civilians, many of them children. In 2022, The Intercept exclusively revealed that the attack was referred to as an instance of “U.S.-Nigerian operations” in a formerly secret U.S. military document.
While the drone that conducted the December 2023 attack was most likely a Turkish-made Bayraktar TB2, Nigeria has killed a growing number of civilians even as the United States has strengthened military ties with the West African nation and signed off on its purchase of attack aircraft and lethal munitions. The strike on Tudun Biri came just two days before a group of senators urged the Biden administration to ensure greater oversight of Israel’s use of U.S.-provided weapons in Gaza. The State Department did not answer questions about U.S. monitoring of American weapons transferred to Nigeria.
“In addition to recognizing civilian harm when it happens, it’s also important that the U.S. push for accountability and justice for that harm — both in U.S. military operations and also in partner operations, like with the case in Nigeria,” Rep. Sara Jacobs, D-Calif., told The Intercept. “I have long emphasized the importance of upholding human rights in our security relationship with Nigeria and will continue to push the State Department on this issue.”
“You Guys Are Bumming Me Out”
Phee spoke with reporters on a conference call ahead of Blinken’s trip to Cabo Verde, Cote d’Ivoire, Nigeria, and Angola. The visit is his third overseas mission of 2024, following a 10-nation trip to the Middle East and a three-day sojourn to the World Economic Forum in Switzerland and amid ongoing crises in Ukraine, Gaza, and the Red Sea that have buffeted the Biden White House. The State Department emphasized that Blinken would “highlight how the United States has accelerated the U.S.-Africa partnership” regarding climate, food, and health security. During the press call, Phee took exception to repeated questions about turmoil in the West African Sahel that strayed from her “positive” messaging. “You guys are bumming me out because you’re not talking about any of the really fun and positive, forward-looking things we’ll be doing,” she said.
Blinken will spend Tuesday and Wednesday in Nigeria, where he will meet with President Bola Tinubu and Foreign Minister Yusuf Tuggar to discuss economic opportunities, trade, and countering terrorism.
Nigeria is West Africa’s economic leader and plays a major role in regional security issues, including responses to the coups and spiraling militant Islamist violence in the Sahel region. The country is also waging a long-running war against extremist militants and armed groups that it typically refers to as “bandits.”
Between 2000 and 2022, the U.S. provided, facilitated, or approved more than $2 billion in security aid and weapons and equipment sales to Nigeria, according to a report by Brown University’s Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Studies, the Security Assistance Monitor at the Center for International Policy, and InterAction. Over that time, the U.S. also carried out more than 41,000 training courses for Nigerian military personnel.
In 2021, the U.S. delivered to Nigeria 12 Super Tucano warplanes as part of a $593 million package, approved by the State Department in 2017 that also included bombs and rockets. Last May, as part of the sale, the U.S. completed a $38 million project to construct new facilities for those aircraft.
In 2022, the State Department approved the sale to Nigeria of nearly $1 billion in AH-1Z attack helicopters and supporting munitions and equipment. “The proposed sale will better equip Nigeria to contribute to shared security objectives [and] promote regional stability,” reads a Defense Department press release.
Last year, Reps. Jacobs and Chris Smith, R-N.J., called on the Biden administration to scuttle the nearly $1 billion attack helicopter deal. “We write to express our concern with current U.S. policy on and military support to Nigeria,” the lawmakers said, urging “a review of security assistance and cooperation programs in Nigeria, including a risk assessment of civilian casualties and abuses.” The Biden administration eventually held a classified briefing to address lawmakers’ questions, according to a source on Capitol Hill.
“The United States and other countries providing security assistance to Nigeria must conduct thorough assessments of civilian harm risks and condition their assistance on thorough investigations into civilian harm incidents as well as concrete changes to rules of engagement and procedures that address the risks and gaps identified,” said Vianney Bisimwa, the regional director of the Sahel program at Center for Civilians in Conflict, or CIVIC.
“A Propaganda Scheme”
Phee lauded the Nigerian government’s response to the December 2023 drone strike. “They acted with transparency, immediately acknowledged the horrific accident. They set up a reparation process and a transparent investigation,” she told The Intercept. “So, they have, I think, responded to that tragedy in a constructive way that will contribute to rebuilding confidence of the Nigerian people and the security services.” Amnesty International reported, however, that the Nigerian military engaged in a cover-up and offered contradictory explanations for that attack — first claiming the airstrike was a mistake and then, as Amnesty put it, that “suspected bandits had embedded with civilians.”
The Nigerian military has a long history of errant attacks on innocent people and has repeatedly denied responsibility for strikes and frequently been accused of covering up civilian deaths, including running what a 2023 investigation by Nigeria’s Premium Times called “a systemic propaganda scheme to keep the atrocities of its troops under wraps.”
In addition to the December 2023 strike in Tudun Biri, an attack last January killed 39 civilians and injured at least six others. Witnesses and local officials said a December 2022 strike that targeted “bandits” killed at least 64 people, including civilians. An August 2022 attack that the Nigerian military said killed a Boko Haram commander actually left at least eight civilians dead. In February 2022, a reported Nigerian airstrike on a village in neighboring Niger killed at least 12 civilians. In September 2021, following an initial denial, the Nigerian Air Force admitted that it attacked a village, killing 10 civilians and injuring another 20. That April, a Nigerian military helicopter reportedly launched indiscriminate attacks on homes, farms, and a school. And the January 17, 2017, airstrike on a displaced persons camp in Rann, Nigeria — which a secret U.S. military investigation said involved the United States — killed more than 160 civilians and seriously wounded more than 120 people.
In 2022, the Protection of Civilians in Conflict Caucus — of which Jacobs is a founder — called on Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to disclose details of the U.S. role in the 2017 airstrike on the displaced persons camp. That year, the Pentagon missed a 90-day deadline to provide answers and, last week, refused to say whether Austin ever provided the information. “As with all correspondences received, the Department responds to the authors of the letter as appropriate,” Pentagon spokesperson Lisa Lawrence told The Intercept. “I do not have anything further to share at this time.”
A source on Capitol Hill told The Intercept that the Biden administration briefed members of Congress on the 2017 attack but declined to provide details because the information was classified.
A 2023 Reuters analysis of data compiled by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, a U.S.-based armed violence monitoring group, found that even outside Nigeria’s three northeastern states beset by its long-running war against Islamist militants, more than 2,600 people were killed in 248 airstrikes during the previous five years. Most victims were identified as “communal militia,” a catchall category that includes local self-defense forces, criminal gangs, and so-called bandits. An analysis by Action on Armed Violence, a U.K.-based organization that investigates civilian harm, counted 14 airstrikes that killed 399 civilians and injured 310 others between 2010 and 2023.
“There has been a concerning pattern of deadly strikes in Nigeria and civilians have paid a heavy price. This cannot go on,” said CIVC’s Bisimwa. “Scrutiny into the conduct of military operations of Nigeria’s air force is a must.”
Phee told The Intercept that Blinken would “definitely” speak to Tinubu about the strikes on Tudun Biri, noting that “promoting and protecting human rights” is “part of our ongoing dialogue” with Nigeria’s government. She went on to say that the State Department hosted a Nigerian delegation for four hours of discussion last week on such issues. “So, I’m certain,” she said, that “the Secretary will talk about it when he sees the president and the foreign minister.”
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The four horsemen of Gaza’s apocalypse
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Is climate change too hard for democracy?
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Division, terrible suffering, and learnings about peacebuilding
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Why Israel’s Violence Gets So Much Notice (It’s Not Antisemitism)
A picture taken from southern Israel shows the destruction of Israel’s bombs in the Gaza Strip on Jan. 18, 2024.
Photo: Jack Guez/AFP via Getty Images
Partisans of Israel have often asked: On a planet overflowing with war, famine, and cruelty, why does the world pay so much attention to what’s happening in Gaza (and the West Bank) in comparison with other horrors? The implied or explicit answer is that this must be due to antisemitism.
This question held more power during Israel’s past attacks on Gaza — e.g., Operation Cast Lead from 2008-2009, Operation Pillar of Defense in 2012, and Operation Protective Edge in 2014, when Palestinian casualties measured in the thousands rather than the tens of thousands. The current war, Operation Swords of Iron, is in fact one of the grimmest things currently happening on Earth.
And that’s the key thing, of course — Israel is now before the International Court of Justice charged with genocide. Americans have an obvious reason to focus on its actions, given that they could not happen without our financial and diplomatic support. But what explains the intense interest of everyone else, not just at the present moment, but for the decades and military offensives before? The answer is both clear and important to understand: People across the globe are particularly appalled by Israel’s violence because it is a manifestation and symbol of European colonialism, plausibly the most terrifying and destructive ideology in human history.
This is a difficult concept for most Americans and Europeans, especially the white ones, to get their minds around. To start with, there’s been an effort in the higher-toned areas of the U.S. media to deny that Israel has much to do with European colonialism in the first place.
This is an extremely peculiar denial of reality and can be ignored. The founders of Zionism and Israel, from Theodor Herzl to Ze’ev Jabotinsky to David Ben-Gurion, stated clearly that they were engaged in settler colonialism. This is a specific form of colonialism in which settlers migrate to a territory and attempt to permanently take over the land from its present occupants. For instance: the United States of America.
Everyone has to face this: The question of Israel is the question of whether European colonialism can make peace with the rest of the world without obliterating it.
To begin with, European colonialism is the most significant political fact of the past 500 years. Christopher Columbus arrived in the Western Hemisphere in 1492. By the start of World War I in 1914, Europe and the U.S. controlled 85 percent of the world’s land mass.
This required atrocities and barbarism across the planet on a mind-warping scale. Spain worked as many as 8 million Indigenous people and enslaved Africans to death mining silver from one mountain near the Bolivian city of Potosí. Belgium, which seems today like a tiny, inoffensive land of talented cyclists, conducted a campaign of murderous colonialism that killed perhaps 10 million people in Congo. During the 19th century, the U.K. imposed conditions on India that murdered 30-60 million people via starvation.
And this barely scratches the surface of this history of violence and blood, a history that was always combined with hilariously self-congratulatory justifications. For instance, the first seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony depicted an American Indian pleading “come over and help us.”
The French writer Hilaire Belloc famously described the basic facts of Europe’s conquest of the world by putting them in the mouth of a character literally named Blood:
Blood understood the Native mind.
He said: “We must be firm but kind.” …
He stood upon a little mound,
Cast his lethargic eyes around,
And said beneath his breath:
“Whatever happens we have got
The Maxim Gun, and they have not.”
The Maxim Gun was the first fully automatic machine gun.
The rest of the world remembers this, even if the descendants of the perpetrators do not. As Samuel Huntington, the late conservative Harvard University political scientist, once put it, “The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.”
To understand what colonialism means to the rest of the world, white Americans and Europeans should consider that 20th century fascism, including the Holocaust, was in a profound sense the child of colonialism. If you like your horrifying history in entertainment form, this is examined at length in the 2021 HBO documentary series “Exterminate All the Brutes.”
This perspective is not the product of Harvard professors driven mad by wokeness; just ask Adolf Hitler. On the eve of Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, he told a small group of companions, “We’ll take away its character of an Asiatic steppe, we’ll Europeanize it. … Our colonists will settle. … There’s only one duty … to look upon the natives as Redskins.” Hitler welcomed white people in general, not just Germans, to take part: “All those who have the feeling for Europe,” he said, “can join in our work.”
At the same moment in the U.S., my grandfather Lewis Hanke — a historian of the Spanish colonization of the Americas — also saw Germany’s project as comparable to European colonialism, except he thought that was a bad idea. One of his students later wrote, “As Hitler voiced the extremities of racism, Hanke encountered it in the records of the conquest, and he sensed the connection.”
European colonial movements came in different flavors, and Zionism was unique in that its members — certainly after World War II — were fleeing not just persecution, but also extermination. Still, it was of psychological necessity shot through with colonization’s standard ideological racism. Rudolf Sonneborn, an American who would go on to make a fortune in the oil business, was secretary of the Zionist Commission in Palestine following World War I. He reported that “the average [Arab] is inferior even to our average Negro … I believe there is very little to ever fear from them. Besides, they are a cowardly race.”
This was also true for Christian Zionists. George Biddle, a friend of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the ultra-WASPy descendant of the original settlers on the Mayflower, took this view in an article in The Atlantic after visiting Israel shortly after its 1948 founding. First, Biddle enthused about how Israel would serve Western interests. Then, he explained that Arabs were “foul, diseased, smelling, rotting, and pullulating with vermin and corruption.” Fortunately, they “were about as dangerous as so many North American Indians in modern mechanized war.”
The fact that European Jewry were the greatest victims of the racism that was central to this worldview, which Zionism adopted (in a less virulent form), is one of the most bizarre twists of human history.
In any case, Europe’s centurieslong reign of piracy and mass death should make it clear why people around the world — including such far-flung, surprising places as South Korea and Peru — look at Israel’s action in Gaza with particular concern. It is not a coincidence that the genocide case at the International Court of Justice in The Hague was brought by South Africa with the participation of Irish lawyers.
Palestinians mourn over bodies of victims of Israeli bombardment on Jan. 18, 2024, in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip.
Photo: AFP via Getty Images
But what happens now? No one knows.
Israel was, in a sense, both too early and too late. If it had been founded earlier, it could have massacred the entire Arab population, just as the United States killed most Native Americans and Australia wiped out huge swaths of the country’s Aboriginals. Then there would be no Palestinians left for the world to be concerned about.
On the other hand, if it had come along later, Zionists might have believed that they should join forces with the decolonization movements across the Mideast and the world in the 1950s and 1960s. But in our timeline, an Arab nationalist approached Ben-Gurion about fighting the U.K.’s colonial forces together while Palestine was still under the British mandate — and Ben-Gurion reported him to the British.
Israel’s War on Gaza
In any case, despite the dreams of the Israeli right, the “expel and/or kill them all” solution is (probably) no longer available. But it’s also extremely difficult to imagine a South Africa outcome, in which Jewish Israelis accede to becoming a minority in a one-person, one-vote, one-state Palestine.
Meanwhile, some parts of the Arab world fantasize about an Algeria analogy, in which (after massive bloodshed) the colonists go back to where they came from. Hassan Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah, recently claimed every Jewish Israeli “has a second nationality and has his bag ready.” This is both factually false and extremely foolish. Israelis are not going anywhere any more than Americans or Australians are.
That leaves a two-state solution, one Israeli and one Palestinian. The problem here is that the Israeli government has, with rare exceptions, never been willing to accept this. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu just reiterated that stance this week.
But if the October 7 attacks showed anything, it’s that it will be difficult for Israel to simply continue on its current path. If the brutalization of Gaza does not end with a future with hope for Palestinians, there will sooner or later be more October 7s, conducted by Palestinians or others, on greater scales. The Israeli revenge will be greater still. The country is therefore on a path to its own destruction, along with the destruction of a big chunk of the rest of the world. Given the momentum of European colonialism, that is plausibly inevitable, and therefore many of us are doomed.
However, history is not foreordained. It is still possible to imagine a future in which the Israeli version of European colonialism reconciles itself to living with the rest of humanity. That in turn could show the path toward other badly needed reconciliations across the world. Such a future wouldn’t make any side happy; on the contrary. But it’s far preferable to the alternative. As the Israeli writer Amos Oz once perceptively explained:
Tragedies can be resolved in one of two ways: there is the Shakespearean resolution and there is the Chekhovian one. At the end of a Shakespearean tragedy, the stage is strewn with dead bodies and maybe there’s some justice hovering high above. A Chekhov tragedy, on the other hand, ends with everybody disillusioned, embittered, heartbroken, disappointed, absolutely shattered, but still alive. And I want a Chekhovian resolution, not a Shakespearean one, for the Israeli-Palestinian tragedy.
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The Houthis May Have Checkmated Biden in Red Sea Standoff
Israel’s unrelenting assault on the Gaza Strip is beginning to tip the Middle East into a wider regional conflict. In the past week, the Houthis in Yemen emerged as an unlikely power player, successfully disrupting global shipping in the name of Palestinians in Gaza and goading the U.S. into launching a series of airstrikes in a failed bid at deterrence.
Over the past three months, the Houthis have attacked merchant ships passing through the Red Sea, an unexpected military intervention aimed at forcing Israel to end its U.S.-backed offensive in Gaza and allow aid into the besieged territory.
The Houthis’ squeeze on the critical trade route is already impacting the global economy: Spooked shipping companies have diverted vessels toward more costly routes, with risk insurance premiums and global shipping prices rising. The effects of the attempted blockade could soon be seen in the costs of oil and consumer goods worldwide.
The U.S. Navy, considered the security guarantor of maritime shipping routes across much of the world, was eventually pressured into action. Since last week, the U.S. launched five airstrikes on Houthi positions. The Houthis doubled down. They fired at passing ships with several more rounds of missiles and drones. The targets included U.S. commercial vessels and a U.S. Navy warship — signs that the rebels were only emboldened by the U.S. volley.
During a White House press briefing on Thursday, President Joe Biden acknowledged that the airstrikes were not stopping the Houthis but said the U.S. would keep targeting the group anyway.
With its decision to attack, the Biden administration appears to have opened itself up to a geopolitical checkmate by the Houthis. Escalating the strikes against the rebels will likely bring more shipping disruptions — potentially counterproductive to mitigating economic consequences — and risk a full-blown regional war. Negotiating or submitting to the demands of a nonstate militia group from one of the poorest countries in the world would be seen by many as a U.S. surrender and would boost the Houthis’ newfound popularity.
Battle-hardened in a brutal civil war with a Saudi-backed Yemeni government-in-exile, the Houthis look unready to back down, even inviting the wider conflict.
“The Houthis absolutely want this conflict,” said Iona Craig, a journalist and political specialist focused on Yemen. “It is part of their ideology, whose anti-American element was formed during the period of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. They now very much see themselves as the defenders of Palestinians and the people of Gaza.”
“The Houthis absolutely want this conflict. … They now very much see themselves as the defenders of Palestinians and the people of Gaza.”
With the Houthis undeterred, the U.S. State Department took a different approach on Wednesday, designating the militia as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist group, a partial reversal of its decision in 2021 to remove the Houthis from the more stringent Foreign Terrorist Organization list. The new designation makes the Houthis subject to economic and political sanctions but avoids the stricter rules of the FTO list. Humanitarian groups said harsher measures would impede aid to areas of Yemen that Houthis came to control during the civil war.
Two hours after being redesignated as a terror group in the U.S., the Houthis targeted a U.S. carrier ship, and the U.S. responded with another round of strikes.
“The Biden administration seems to be hoping that degrading Houthi capabilities will coerce them to stop, but that doesn’t appear to be working,” Daniel DePetris, a fellow at Defense Priorities, a foreign policy think tank based in Washington, told The Intercept. “Everyone is deterrable, and the Houthis are not lunatics. But the problem when dealing with nonstate actors is that it requires more force to get them to change their strategic calculus.”
He added, “The Saudis also thought that they could beat the Houthis militarily without having to address any of the political demands that they were making.”
Ragtag Rebels to Regional Aspirations
Once a small, ragtag army, the Houthis learned to hit back against much more powerful militaries over years of civil war and foreign intervention — acquiring knowledge they appear to be putting into practice against the U.S.
The Houthis, officially known as Ansarallah, emerged decades ago as a movement opposed to the perceived corruption of the Yemeni government. For the past several years, the group has been at war with the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen and are currently in peace negotiations to end the conflict. The U.S. played a key role in the civil war, heavily arming — and for a time giving direct assistance to — an air campaign by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates that inflicted huge civilian casualties. The onslaught failed to defeat the Houthis.
Israel’s War on Gaza
The civil war became a training ground where the Houthis learned to outmaneuver vastly superior U.S.-made weapons — especially air power — in its current operation in the Red Sea. The rebels use inexpensive anti-ship missiles and small boats to attack the shipping vessels, utilizing the advantage of light and mobile forces that drive up costs and weaken the effectiveness of enemies’ attacks from the air.
“The Houthis have a big force, but they rely on distributing their power broadly across the territory that they control. They rely more on being mobile than on heavy infrastructure,” said Baraa Shiban, a political analyst on Yemen and associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute. “They have survived a long air campaign by two of the stronger militaries in the region, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, and have adapted how to move and operate their forces accordingly.”
The Houthis are often dismissed as mere proxies of Iran, part of a nexus of groups referred to as the “Axis of Resistance,” which includes Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Palestinian militants of Hamas. Analysts, however, say that while Iran does provide the Houthis with money, weapons, and military training, the Houthis operate with relative political independence.
“It is robbing them of their agency when we say that the Houthis are merely stooges of Iran,” Hisham Al-Omeisy, senior adviser on Yemen with the European Institute of Peace, told The Intercept. “They have their own mindset, agenda, and ideology.”
The civil war became a training ground where the Houthis learned to outmaneuver vastly superior U.S.-made weapons.
In its most dramatic display of independence, the Houthis reportedly rebuffed Iranian efforts to stop them from taking the Yemeni capital of Sanaa in 2015, according to U.S. intelligence reports.
The Houthis have long made confrontation with the U.S. and Israel a major plank of their ideology, expressed as a blend of Islamism, anti-imperialism, and overt antisemitism. Along with other Iran-backed groups, the Houthis reject most aspects of the U.S.-backed political order in the region and have made serious threats to the stability of U.S.-allied regimes like Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
“One of the main things people miss about the Houthis is that their end goal is not just Yemen. This is an expansionist group with regional ambitions,” said Al-Omeisy. “This conflict is a perfect opportunity for them to say that they are the real vanguard of the Arab nation, while other leaders are complicit in the suffering of the Palestinians.”
Winning Hearts and Minds
At the center of the unrest in the Red Sea is the crisis in Gaza, which has been devastated by Israeli attacks since the October 7 offensive by Hamas. Though Israeli troops are carrying out the war that has killed more than 24,000 Palestinians, the U.S. is the patron and enabler. The Biden administration continues to offer unblinking financial and diplomatic support to Israel, despite mounting accusations against the U.S. of complicity in genocide.
The Houthis entered the fray almost immediately. In the days after Israel launched its retaliatory assault, the Houthis sent ballistic missiles toward Israel and began its attacks on the Red Sea shipping lanes.
The Houthis have long been a polarizing force in Yemeni politics, but they have seized on anti-American sentiment in the Arab world and the seeming indifference of pro-U.S. regimes to the suffering in Gaza to elevate their geopolitical status. Not only are the Houthis distinguishing themselves as champions of the Palestinian cause, but they are also rehabilitating their reputation at home, where they have struggled to set up a functional government amid civil war. Houthi spokespeople have become fixtures on Arabic-language television stations, where they relish their role challenging the West over the plight of the Palestinians.
Not only are the Houthis distinguishing themselves as champions of the Palestinian cause, but they are also rehabilitating their reputation at home.
Anger toward the U.S. seems likely to grow in the region, as the Biden administration appears to be putting the global economy over Palestinian lives in its strikes on the Houthis.
“The U.S. should consider that these actions in Gaza are enraging people throughout the region,” said Al-Omeisy. “The local perception is that when Palestinian blood was being shed the last three months, no one was bothered, but when the economic interests of the West were threatened, they immediately acted. This message fits right into Houthi rhetoric and is resonating very strongly in the region.”
Their bid is working. Rather than weakening the Houthis, the U.S. airstrikes seem to be boosting the Houthis’ political standing throughout the Middle East, where analysts say public opinion of the U.S. has reached lows not seen since the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. Polls taken among Arabs in the region show widespread anger and disillusionment toward the U.S. since the start of the Gaza war, with far more favorable views of rival countries like China and Russia.
“The Biden administration and U.S. policymakers have not yet grasped how high anti-Americanism is in the region, where it is at a level that we have not seen since the war in Iraq,” Shiban, of Royal United Services Institute, said. “Even if they claim that this is an Israeli operation and we have nothing to do with it, the Arab public does not buy it.”
With the U.S. military now stuck in an exchange of attacks with the Houthis, experts say the Biden administration has no good options.
“I don’t think that the U.S. is trying to engage in regime change in Yemen,” said DePetris, the Defense Priorities fellow, “but if this continues to snowball, that may end up being something that the administration may try to consider.”
The post The Houthis May Have Checkmated Biden in Red Sea Standoff appeared first on The Intercept.
Biden on Yemen Airstrikes: “Are They Stopping the Houthis? No. Are They Gonna Continue? Yes.”
This article was originally published as a newsletter from Ryan Grim. Sign up to get the next one in your inbox.
“Are the airstrikes in Yemen working?”
It was a simple question, delivered directly to President Joe Biden this afternoon. The president delivered a response that ought to be the epitaph for the period of non-Pax Americana we’ve been living through since the fall of the Soviet Union.
“Well, when you say, ‘working’ — are they stopping the Houthis? No. Are they gonna continue? Yes.”
Biden wasn’t lying. On Thursday, the U.S. led another round of airstrikes in Yemen. “U.S. Central Command forces conducted strikes on two Houthi anti-ship missiles that were aimed into the Southern Red Sea and were prepared to launch,” CENTCOM posted on X.
Doubling down on things that haven’t worked, the Biden administration also announced new sanctions on the Houthis, the de facto government in Yemen, along with a new “specially designated global terrorist” label, which makes it difficult for the Houthis to engage in global transactions.
The designation badly undermines the Saudi–Yemen peace talks and threatens to exacerbate the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Yemen. It also doesn’t make sense: Yemen has been bombed and sanctioned on and off for years, through three presidencies and counting, and the only result has been famine and disease, not a more pliant posture toward the United States or its allies in the region.
In fact, the Houthis emerged from the conflict stronger than before, a point highlighted by Ben Rhodes recently. The Houthis have not been stellar when it comes to governing, to say the least, and getting into another conflict with the United States lets them off the hook for that and boosts their popularity both domestically and in the region.
There’s zero reason to think these sanctions or these airstrikes will get them to stop their blockade of shipping. It’s amazing to see Biden admit it. “Glad POTUS agrees with me that the strikes are not working. Next time come to Congress instead of McGurk,” Rep. Ro Khanna said on X, referring to Brett McGurk, the Mideast envoy who has overseen this catastrophe yet has somehow still retained his job.
The way the sanctions are being rolled out has its own story behind it. I joined a background briefing the State Department hosted on the new sanctions, and the transcript is now available. I wanted to highlight one part. From a senior administration official: “This [terror] destination will take effect 30 days from now to allow us to ensure robust humanitarian carveouts are in place so our action targets the Houthis and not the people of Yemen. We are rolling out, as we take this action, unprecedented carveouts and licenses to help prevent adverse impacts on the Yemeni people. The people of Yemen should not pay for the price – pay the price for the actions of the Houthis.”
The State Department has always insisted, against all evidence and common sense, that U.S. sanctions do not harm civilian populations. Yet here is the State Department saying it is adding “unprecedented carveouts” to mitigate the harm of these sanctions to regular people. They said they’ll monitor how effectively they immunize people from harm and reevaluate down the road. But think about what an admission that is: Why are these “unprecedented carveouts” needed if typical sanctions don’t actually harm civilians?
Politics With Ryan Grim
That the State Department is waiting 30 days to implement the sanctions is also noteworthy. The Houthis have said they will cease all attacks on shipping if Israel ceases its attack on Gaza. The U.S., too, has said it wants the Israeli attack on Gaza to wind down. But this 30-day delay suggests the U.S. is not at all confident this attack is winding down anytime soon. In fact, the bombing as described by people inside Gaza seems only to be getting fiercer, with disease and starvation spreading, driven by the Israeli refusal to allow in sufficient aid.
Tomorrow’s episode of Deconstructed is on the rupture inside progressive communities in general post-October 7, and American Jewish communities in particular. It’s a rich conversation with Simone Zimmerman, a former Zionist activist who now leads the Jewish American peace group IfNotNow, and the co-directors of the fascinating new documentary “Israelism.”
If you’re not subscribed to Deconstructed, you can get it on iTunes or wherever else you listen to podcasts.
Ibogaine For Ukraine
The Ukrainian military is experimenting with ibogaine, a psychedelic drug banned in the U.S. but often used to treat opioid use disorder elsewhere, to treat traumatic brain injury, and promote battle readiness.
To do so, it is partnering with a founder of the Yippie movement, Irvin Dana Beal, a longtime ibogaine advocate. Beal recently traveled to Ukraine to help launch the project. Oleksii Skyrtach, a Ukrainian military psychologist attached to the 57th Motor Infantry Brigade, provided Beal with a letter for immigration authorities to help him move through customs with the drug.
Ibogaine’s most famous American patient may well be Hunter Biden, who has battled his own drug addiction with help from ibogaine treatment at a Mexican clinic. At low doses, Beal and researchers behind the project believe ibogaine can have salutary effects on traumatic brain injury as well as help with battle readiness. “These guys need something for traumatic brain injury,” Beal said. “But nobody else is willing to fucking go into a war zone with ibogaine but me, apparently.”
Skyrtach agreed. “We really need as much ibogaine as possible,” he said. “Even if the war ends now we’ll have too many ‘rambos’ to come back home from the frontline. It’ll be much more serious problem [than the] USA faced when thousands of veterans came home from the Vietnam war.”
My full story on this fascinating new project is up at The Intercept.
Earlier this week, I was unable to get in touch with Beal to fact-check a few final details for the article, though we figured out another route to get that done. After the story was published, I learned why he had gone dark: He was arrested in Idaho for marijuana trafficking. He has been working with the state of New York to open up a pot shop, and it’s legal in lots of states — but definitely not in Idaho. The 77-year-old is facing serious charges.
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In Video From Gaza, Former CEO of Pegasus Spyware Firm Announces Millions for New Venture
It was an unusual place for a tech company to announce a successful $33 million round of venture capital fundraising. But, on November 7, former NSO Group CEO Shalev Hulio and two colleagues stood in the Gaza Strip, stared into a laptop’s built-in webcam, and did exactly that.
“We are here on the Gaza border,” said Hulio, the Israeli entrepreneur, on a little-noted YouTube video released by his new start-up, Dream Security. Hulio, a reservist who had been called up for duty, appeared in the video with a gun slung over his shoulder.
“It’s very emotional,” he said. “After all of us being here, some of us reserves, some of us helping the government in many other ways, I think that doing it here is a great message to the high-tech community and the people of Israel.”
Hulio, who stepped down from his role at NSO in August 2022, was sending a clear signal: He was back.
After a rocky few years, marred by revelations about the role of NSO’s spyware in human rights abuses and the company’s blacklisting by the U.S. government, Hulio and his team were using the moment — timed exactly one month after Hamas’s attack — to announce lofty ambitions for their new cybersecurity firm, Dream Security.
“Israeli high-tech is not only here to stay, but will grow better out of this,” said Michael Eisenberg, an Israeli American venture capitalist and Dream co-founder, in the promo video. “It’s going to deliver on time, wherever it’s needed, to whatever country or whatever company it’s needed at.”
Their new project is another cybersecurity company. Instead of phone hacking, though, Dream — an acronym for “Detect, Respond, and Management” — offers cyber protection for so-called critical infrastructure, such as energy installations.
Dream Security builds on the successful team NSO put together, with talent brought on board from the embattled spyware firm. At least a dozen of NSO’s top officials and staffers, along with an early investor in both NSO and Dream, followed Hulio to Dream since its founding last year.
Lawyers for Dream Security who responded to The Intercept’s request for comment said the companies were distinct entities. “The only connection between the two entities is Mr. Hulio and a small portion of talented employees who previously worked at NSO Group,” said Thomas Clare, a lawyer for Dream, in a letter. Liron Bruck, a spokesperson for NSO Group, told The Intercept, “The two companies are not involved in any way.”
“It’s worrying. It seems like a new way to whitewash NSO’s image and past record.”
Now, with so many NSO people gathered under a new banner, critics are concerned that their old firm’s scandals will be forgotten.
“It’s worrying,” said Natalia Krapiva, tech-legal counsel at Access Now, a digital rights advocacy group. “It seems like a new way to whitewash NSO’s image and past record.”
At the same time, NSO Group is also using Israel’s war effort to try and revamp its own reputation. After Pegasus, NSO’s phone hacking software, was exposed for its role in human rights abuses and the firm was blacklisted in the U.S., the company suffered years of financial troubles. In the new year, it seemed to be bouncing back, with Israeli media reporting on its expansion and reorganization.
Clare, Dream’s lawyer, stressed that Hulio was no longer affiliated with NSO. “Currently, Mr. Hulio holds no interest in NSO Group—not as an officer, employee, or stockholder,” Clare wrote to The Intercept. “Since Dream Security’s foundation in late 2022, he has exclusively led the company.”
With Hulio at its helm, Dream boasts an eclectic and influential leadership team with connections to various far-right figures in Israel, Europe, and the U.S. — and an ambitious plan to leverage their ties to dominate the cybersecurity sector.
A view of the entrance of the Israeli cyber company NSO Group branch in the Arava Desert on Nov. 11, 2021, in Sapir, Israel.
Photo: Amir Levy/Getty Images
New Mission, Same Executives
Hulio has said that, with Dream, he moved from the “attack side to defense” — focusing on defending infrastructure, including gas and oil installations. A jargon-laden blurb for the company brags that it delivers surveillance to detect threats and an unspecified “power to respond fast.”
“Dream Security’s product is a defensive cybersecurity solution to protect critical infrastructure and state-level assets,” Clare said. “Dream Security is not involved in the creation, marketing, or sale of any spyware or other malware product.”
Clare said that Dream’s mission is “to enable decision-makers to act promptly and efficiently against any actual and potential cyber threats, such as malware attacks committed by states, terrorist organizations, and hacker groups, among others.”
Kathryn Humphrey, another Dream lawyer and an associate at Clare’s firm, said in one of a series of emails, “Dream Security is not involved with offensive cyber, nor does it have an intention of becoming involved with offensive cyber. Dream Security is developing the world’s best AI-based defensive cyber security platform, and that is its only mission.”
The Intercept found that 13 former NSO staffers now work at Dream Security — about a fifth of the new company.
The mission may be new, but Dream is staffed in part by NSO veterans. A recent report from the Israeli business press said Dream has 70 employees, 60 of them in Israel. The Intercept found that 13 former NSO staffers now work at Dream Security — about a fifth of the new company.
“Dream Security recruited the best talent to achieve its goal of becoming the globally leading AI-based cyber security company,” said Humphrey in a letter to The Intercept. “A small minority is top talent from NSO Group, including executives and other employees.”
In addition to Hulio himself, former top NSO officials permeate the upper echelons of Dream. From the heads of sales to human resources to their legal departments, at least seven former executives from NSO now hold positions at Dream in the same jobs. Five additional Dream employees — from security researchers to software engineers and marketing designers — formerly worked at NSO.
Dream’s lawyers told The Intercept that the “only overlap” between the companies were Hulio and former NSO employees, but other people tie NSO history and Dream’s present together. In one case, it was familial: Gil Dolev, one of Dream’s founders, is the brother of Shiri Dolev, who, according to NSO spokesperson Bruck, was NSO Group’s president until last year. (Shiri Dolev did not respond to a request for comment.)
The two companies also share at least one investor. Eddy Shalev, the first investor in NSO, told The Intercept he had put money into Dream. “I was an early investor in NSO,” Shalev said. “I am no longer involved with NSO. I did invest in Dream Security.”
Asked about Shalev’s investments in Dream and NSO, Humphrey said, “While Eddy Shalev is a valued investor, he is not a major investor—his investment is roughly 1% of the overall amount invested in Dream Security.”
Former Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz arrives at court on the first day of his trial in Vienna on Oct. 18, 2023. Kurz is charged with making false statements to a parliamentary inquiry into alleged corruption in his first government.
Photo: Heinz-Peter Bader/AP
Austria’s Mini-Trump
From its inception, Dream Security’s strategy was based around an in-house connection to the international right. Former Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, dubbed “Austria’s mini-Trump,” is a Dream co-founder.
The former chancellor was forced to step down from the Austrian government in October 2021, facing corruption allegations and he remains on trial for related charges.
Along the way, Kurz had made powerful friends. He reportedly has relationships with top officials around Europe and the U.S., including right-wing Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orbán, and Jared Kushner, former President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and former top adviser. Last year, Kurz joined Kushner on the honorary advisory council to the Abraham Accords Peace Institute, a group set up to foster normalization between Israel and Gulf monarchies like the United Arab Emirates — the very authoritarians that used NSO’s Pegasus software to crack down on dissidents.
For all his connections to powerful politicians, experts said Kurz was never purely an ideologue. “Kurz is really a political professional,” said Laurenz Ennser-Jedenastik, a professor of Austrian politics at the University of Vienna. “He never struck anybody as extremely convicted of anything. I think his personal career and business were always the number one priority.”
“Kurz is really a political professional. … I think his personal career and business were always the number one priority.”
Once Kurz was out of government, he pivoted to the world of tech investment. He first met the cyber-spying titan Peter Thiel in 2017 and landed a job at one of the far-right billionaire’s firms, Thiel Capital, in 2021. Thiel, one of the largest donors to right-wing causes in the U.S., is deeply involved in the world of spy tech: His company Palantir, which allows for the sorting and exploitation of masses of data, helped empower and expand the U.S. government’s international spy machine.
When Dream’s creation was announced, Kurz’s connections to Thiel — and therefore Palantir — raised alarms. In the European Parliament, lawmakers in the Committee of Inquiry to investigate the use of Pegasus and equivalent surveillance spyware took note.
“The cooperation between Kurz and Hulio constitutes an indirect but alarming connection between the spyware industry and Peter Thiel and his firm Palantir,” said a committee report earlier this year. (Thiel is not involved with NSO or Dream, a person familiar with his business told The Intercept.)
In November, nearly 80 percent of the European Parliament voted to condemn the European Commission for not doing enough to tackle spyware abuse, including NSO’s Pegasus software, across member states.
Questions have cropped up about whether Dream will, like NSO before it, sell powerful cybersecurity tools to authoritarian governments who might use them for nefarious purposes.
Asked by the Israeli business publication Globes about where Dream would sell its wares, Kurz said, “This is a company that was founded in Israel and is currently looking to the European market.”
According to Globes, Kurz was brought on to open doors to European governments. Dream has said that its customers already include the cybersecurity authority of one major European country, though it has declined to say which.
Over time, Europe has become a strong market for commercial cybersecurity firms. Sophie in ’t Veld, a European parliamentarian from the Netherlands who led the charge on the Pegasus committee resolution, told The Intercept, “Europe is paradise for this kind of business.”
The Israeli Right
Dream’s right-wing network is nowhere more concentrated than in Israel itself. Venture capitalist Dovi Frances, a major Republican donor who led Dream’s recent $33 million fundraising round, is close to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. And Lior Atar, head of cyber security at the Israeli Ministry of Energy for six years, was directly plucked from his government role to join Dream earlier this year.
Dream officials’ entanglement with the Israeli right also extends to grassroots right-wing movements. Two investors and Hulio are involved in a ground-level organization considered to be Israel’s largest militia, HaShomer HaChadash, or “the new guardians.” A Zionist education nonprofit established in 2007, HaShomer HaChadash says it safeguards Israel’s agricultural lands, largely along the Gaza border.
“I look forward to building Dream, against all odds, to become the world’s largest cybersecurity company. Mark my word: It fucking will be.”
Eisenberg, the Dream co-founder, chairs HaShomer HaChadash’s board. Hulio became a HaShomer HaChadash board member in May 2017 — a month before NSO Group was put up for sale for $1 billion — and has donated nearly $100,000 to the group. (Neither Dream nor HaShomer HaChadash responded to questions about whether Hulio remains on the board.) Another Dream investor, Noam Lanir, has also been vocal about his own contributions to the organization, according to Haaretz.
HaShomer HaChadash has a budget of approximately $33 million in 2022, of which over $5 million came from the government, according to documents filed with the Israeli Corporations Authority. The group is staffed in part by volunteers as well as active-duty personnel detailed from the Israeli military.
“They seem like a mainstream organization,” said Ran Cohen, chair of the Democratic Bloc, which monitors anti-democratic incitement in Israel. “But in reality, the origins of their agenda is rooted in the right wing. They have also been active in illegal outposts in the West Bank.”
For Dream, HaShomer HaChadash is but one node of its prolific links to the right at home and abroad. With those connections and the business chops that brought the world NSO Group, Dream — as the name itself suggests — has large ambitions. “I look forward to building Dream, against all odds, to become the world’s largest cybersecurity company,” Frances, the VC, said from the U.S. in the YouTube video announcing the successful fundraising drive. “Mark my word: It fucking will be.”
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