HAMAS, A CREATURE OF ISRAEL
In 2019, the sociopath that rules over Israel said the following: “Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas (…) This is part of our strategy – to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.”
This statement by Benjamin Netanyahu, proclaimed before parliamentarians of his ultra-conservative party, Likud, is far from being the only example of the favoritism of certain factions of the Israeli government for Hamas, support that resulted indispensable for its installation as the dominant political force in Gaza. Everything indicates that what Yasser Arafat once said—that Hamas is a “creature of Israel”—is nothing less than the sad reality. The Israeli far-right preferred the Islamic fundamentalists of Hamas over any secular Palestinian option, favoring them politically, and even financing them!
Why? Very simple: the Islamists of Hamas offer a justification for the genocidal project of ethnic cleansing and usurpation of Palestinian lands, allowing the Israeli government and the powerful international allies of Zionism to present every form of struggle for the liberation of the occupied territories as the actions of radicals and fanatics. The success of this strategy, in a world governed by psychological warfare and propaganda, is obvious to anyone paying attention to news coverage these days. What we see in the international corporate press—conservative for everything that really matters, “liberal” for everything that does not affect the status quo—is the equating of the entire Palestinian cause with the execrable crimes of the Islamists of Hamas, an attempt to demonize a struggle against what has been qualified once and again, by all credible international bodies like the UN, as an illegal military occupation.
Also in 2019, an associate of Netanyahu, mayor general Gershon Hacohen, explained that: “(…) Netanyahu’s strategy is to prevent the option of two states, so he is turning Hamas into his closest partner. Openly Hamas is an enemy. Covertly, it’s an ally.”
More evidence: In 2010, WikiLeaks released a 2007 diplomatic cable in which the director of Israeli military intelligence, Amos Yadlin, tells the US ambassador to Israel, Richard Jones, that his country preferred a Gaza Strip governed by Hamas, so Israel could declare the Gazans a “hostile entity.” As the Middle East Media Center reported at the time (12/22/10): “Yadlin told the US Ambassador that he would be ‘very happy’ if Hamas formed a government in Gaza ‘as long as they have no (air or sea) port.’ He added that Israel would then work with the rival Palestinian political party (Fatah) to form a government in the West Bank and work to undermine the Hamas government in Gaza.”
In 2009, the Wall Street Journal published the revealing “How Israel Helped to Spawn Hamas.” There, Avner Cohen, a retired Israeli officer, laments an “enormous, stupid mistake made 30 years ago”. Here we question whether Israeli policy was due to a “mistake.”
“Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s invention,” explained Cohen, who worked for more than twenty years in Gaza addressing religious issues. “Instead of trying to curb Gazan Islamism from the outset… Israel for years tolerated and, in some cases, encouraged them as a counterweight to the secular nationalist Palestine Liberation Organization and its dominant faction, Yasser Arafat’s Fatah.”
Another revealing article, this time from “The Intercept”, sheds more light on Israeli financing of Hamas: “(…) former Israeli officials such as Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Segev, who was the Israeli military governor in Gaza in the early 1980s. Segev later told a New York Times reporter that he had helped finance the Palestinian Islamist movement as a “counterweight” to the secularists and leftists of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Fatah party (…) 'the Israeli government gave me a budget, and the military government gives to the mosques.'”
The always predictable Western corporate media has closed ranks in favor of Zionist apartheid and its “right to defend itself” from an “unprovoked” attack. The hypocrisy of the international oligarchic press—aligned with that of the political power centers of the “free” world, which these days project the Israeli flag over its emblematic monuments—exploits the very traditional tendency to define terrorism, not according to the nature of the act itself, but according to who commits it. Thus, the Zionist soldier who bombs and massacres Palestinian civilians from a twenty-million-dollar fighter jet is “defending Israel in a war,” while the young Palestinian who throws a Molotov cocktail at an armored tank is carrying out “terrorist acts”.
European colonialism and American imperialism—midwives and guarantors of Israeli Zionism—have always hidden themselves behind a racist double standard, imposed from their historical (but today waning) military and media advantage. Its distortions of reality are innate to conservative psychology, which—as if it needed to be said—is clearly antidemocratic: the imposition of the strong on the weak represents the “natural order.” On the other hand, the rebellion of the oppressed is an outrageous aberration that must be condemned and crushed instantly, and with exemplary brutality.
Now they want the world to believe that the crimes committed by Hamas invalidate the Palestinian struggle and justifies collective punishment on the Gaza Strip!
Corporate media seeks to turn the tables and justify the brutal response of Netanyahu and his clique of supremacists, who—in clear Nazi language—immediately warned that they would wipe out Gaza and the “human animals” that inhabit it. The Israeli prime minister has even dared to broadcast videos in which his fighter jets bomb civilian buildings to the point of rubble, publicizing crimes against humanity to the world with the complete certainty that they will not be condemned and will remain unpunished.
Collective punishment–such as that which has been carried out on Gazans since Sunday through indiscriminate bombings and the cutting of electricity, water, food supplies and other basic needs–is a war crime contrary to international law. Of course, the United States and the European Union, champions of the Zionist cause, are experts in transgressing it while filling their mouths with the hypocritical language of “international order.”
It must also be emphasized that nearly 40% of the Gazan population—more than two million human beings who live poorly in a huge open-air prison—is under 14 years of age.
Finally, some experts point out that Israel's sophisticated intelligence services should have been aware of the coming attack. Many say that this amounts to a “conspiracy theory.” However, on Monday the 9th it was announced to world public opinion that the Egyptian government had warned Netanyahu's criminal regime, several days before the events, about what was being prepared by Hamas. Egyptian officials say they were surprised by the Israelis' indifference to their repeated warnings. This makes it essential for the world to ask itself if the sociopath in chief and his henchmen in the Israeli military intelligence let the attack by Hamas (“its creature”) happen, in order to use it as justification for another criminal attack on the population of Gaza, perhaps the most savage so far in history.
This is a translation from an article written by me in Spanish, and published by the Peruvian weekly “Hildebrandt en sus trece”, 10/13/23. Feel free to share & republish this article.