I've primarily studied physics of the 19th-21st century, so I can't provide a detailed accounting of the history of this subject for the period before.  The records before circa 1800 are less complete, less common, and more difficult to decipher due to the unique terminology employed by every single discoverer of this physical phenomena.  Suffice it to say that this phenomena has been harnessed for a long time and observed for a very long time.  Any time you see ball lightning in ancient artwork: you are seeing the record of an observation of a huge macroscopic plasmoid/exotic vacuum object/etc (hereafter referred to mostly as plasmoids for simplicity).  Plasmoids are as natural as sunshine and lightning.  They mostly exist at the microscopic scale beyond our ability to directly perceive.  Occasionally the environment is ripe for mother nature to generate ball lightning as in the Hessdalen lights of Norway.  In extreme situations ball lightning can be a yard/meter in diameter.  During earthquakes and volcanic eruptions in particular, the forces at play are so intense as to be difficult to comprehend.  When the right elements are moving relative to one another with the right dynamics, you get ball lightning.  Unfortunately ball lightning isn't so common as to be readily studied in nature.  Until recent decades it was often considered an urban legend or myth.  Thankfully the advancement of mobile camera technology has dramatically increased the documentation of natural ball lightning.  Once you accept that nature produces such a phenomenon rarely it's only a small step from there to accept that it's possible for humans to engineer the conditions that produces such a phenomenon on command.  Just as we see nature produces light and lightning and we humans also make our own (smaller!) light and lightning.  Ball lightning is what plasmoids are called when you find them in nature.  Plasmoids are what you call ball lightning that's made in a lab.

Let's start with John Ernst Worrell Keely.  By today's standards he's regarded as a quack inventor at best and a fraudster at worst.  By 1872 he had created a sort of steam engine that you need only crank to start, then it would be self-powered by water.  Modern debunkers assert he secretly employed air compressors to drive the apparatus and thus was a complete fraud.  Though a closer look at what he built reveals that he created engines which generated a lot of water cavitation using multiple methods (clever geometry, resonant effects, etc), which means he was definitely making plasmoids.

Any time you're generating a large quantity of water cavitation some fraction of those cavitation bubbles will collapse forming Rayleigh jets with a very fine tip which experiences immense pressures and temperatures and voltage over a infinitesimal area.  Any type of hard sharp punch (including a powerful laser pulse) will produce in electromagnetism what is called a toroidal moment where the electric and magnetic fields bend back into each other, forming a closed tube shape that connects to itself: a hollow doughnut.  This is a semi-stable field configuration that can last from mere moments to at least months depending on the environment.  Macroscopic plasmoids intentionally created in a lab typically last on the order the 2 seconds to 2 minutes.  Plasmoids are readily trapped and kept stable at lower powers in metal lattices for long periods, at least months.

John Keely used a steam engine type design to drive pistons to do work.  In recent years there have been numerous much simpler systems working on the same principle.  Some call them "nuclear siphons" because the cavitation is driving a tiny nuclear reaction by the use of short-lived plasmoids.  This nuclear reaction manifests as anomalous pressure and temperature at the site of the water cavitation.  Using clever geometry it's possible to connect together some mundane PVC water pipes together such that they'll cavitate in a way that pushes water uphill.  Water cavitation is perhaps the simplest low-tech way of generating (tiny) plasmoids and its effects have probably been rediscovered many times by many people.

Nikola Tesla independently discovered plasmoids by circa 1890 when experimenting with high power disruptive electric discharges (not resonating, not oscillating, but just unidirectional periodic sharp pulses of high voltage).  When he placed a single-turn copper helix by the spark gap that coil “[…] become ensheathed in an envelope of white sparks. Undulating from the crown of this coil were very long fluidic silvery white streamers, soft discharges which appeared to have been considerably raised in voltage.”

The sparks surrounding the coil (and the plasma streamers) is a very strong sign that in that configuration he was making plasmoids. This same effect is documented by Takaaki Matsumoto and Ken Shoulders.  Some describe the sparks as forming a kind of Pearl necklace, beads on a string, etc. Closer examination of these “sparks” shows they’re super-tightly-wound plasma structures in the fractal toroidal shape.  It was precisely this "Tesla Impulse" technology that he was designing as the enabling basis for his "Radiant Energy" that he wished to broadcast to all homes without wires.  Pulsed Tesla Impulses are capable of generating very high power radio waves, orders of magnitude stronger than any similarly-powered radio transmitter.

In the 1940s the German's were experimenting with various high-power radar technology (high power continuous radio waves).  There are reports that crossing of two such radar beams (such as when two radar stations track the same enemy plane) would occasionally create macroscopic ball lightning that the allied pilots  called "foo fighters."

In the 1950s the US federal government was spending many billions of dollars on nuclear weapons technology and nuclear technology more generally.  They had achieved nuclear fission.  They had also achieved limited nuclear fusion in the form of hydrogen bombs.  There was considerable effort advanced by Truman in 1953 to use "atoms for peace."  This meant in part that money previously spent exclusively on nuclear bombs and their enabling technology would be expanded to include energy-generation technology of both the fission and fusion types.  At the early part of the atomic age many scientists were optimistic they would quickly find a way to do controlled fusion which can provide unlimited clean energy almost for free.

One scientist working on "atoms for peace" projects was Winston Bostick.  Among other things by 1956 Bostick had created a z-pinch plasma gun that would produce plasmoids on command.  More than any other scientists mentioned in this list, Bostick was an insider to the US nuclear regime.  He was an Chicago-trained nuclear physicist that worked at MIT, Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore, etc.

Bostick published several papers and some of his work was discussed in mainstream press.  His line of research into fusion via plasma confinement then goes dark.  It appears likely that his fundamental research successfully led to nuclear energy and nuclear bomb applications.  All knowledge related to high-end weapons and energy systems are tightly controlled by the US federal government.  Remember that scientists made nuclear bombs with pencils and slide rules in the 1940s, so clearly it has to be the case that the key relevant engineering dynamics aren't that complex.  This is why you can't let the information be shared too broadly: you want to maintain a monopoly on advanced weapons and energy technology that gives you an edge over rival nations.  The most advanced technology will be held back as secret for as long as possible, only shown publicly and admitted when forced by events.

In the 1960s engineer inventor Josef Papp created his "Noble Gas Engine."  Papp did not disclose theories for it's mechanism of action and kept key aspects of his design secret.  He was an engineer, not physicist.  The main technical mechanism was a powerful sharp electric arc discharge into a rarified ionized noble gas.  These are the exact conditions that create plasmoids reliably.  Papp had created an engine using thorium sand and noble gases to drive pistons via the force of a coulombic explosion resulting from the quick destruction of a plasmoid created moments earlier.  His engine produced hundreds of horsepower.  John Keely had a century earlier invented essentially a steampunk version of the Papp engine: both derive their motive force from exploding plasmoids.

In the 1970's hobby electronics enthusiast John Hutchison undertook efforts to reproduce Tesla's Impulse experiments.  John had created his own Tesla disruptive discharge devices and had acquired numerous pieces of surplus military radio equipment.  Using a combination of the two John could rarely (at most once after a full day of trying) produce what he called the "Hutchison Effect".  This effect was able to make aluminum glow and bend like putty without being hot.  This effect allowed dissimilar materials to be welded together.  This Hutchinson Effect is one manifestation of the creation of plasmoids inside metals.

Kenneth R. Shoulders was an experimental physicist who worked at MIT, Stanford, and the CIA.  He was an early pioneer of electron beam lithography and inventor of numerous patents.  He's widely recognized as a founder of microelectronic field emission devices.  In the 1980's he committed himself to the study of the "Hutchinson Effect" after urging by Hal Putoff of SRI.  He initially called the phenomena "Electrum Validum" (EV) and later "Exotic Vacuum Objects" (EVOs) when he realized the underlying electromagnetic toroidal moment driving the key aspects of the unusual properties and effects.  He was an excellent experimentalist and successfully designed an apparatus to generate plasmoids on command and vary their intensity.  He wished to disclosed what he learned though was under CIA contract at the time and knew his research would be suppressed if he brought it to them.  To side-step this problem he wrote a book called "EV: A Tale of Discovery" and distributed copies to numerous people.  Since "the cat was out of the bag" it was not possible for his findings to be completely suppressed.  This enabled Ken to file several patents describing apparatus for creating plasmoids.  Even so, Ken's plasmoids remained just as undiscussed outside of fringe circles as Hutchinson, Papp, Bostick, Tesla, and Keely before him.

In 1989 Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons reported detecting excess heat during electrolysis experiments using deuterium-droped palladium electrodes.  This was then reported was "cold fusion".  Their apparatus only produced this effect infrequently.  The specific microstructure of the palladium mattered.  Although unreliable, this method occasionally produced plasmoids though they didn't know it.

In the 1990s Stanley Meyer invented a "water fuel cell" (WFC) that generated HHO gas by using high-voltage low-current pulsed disruptive electric discharges through pure water contained in a space between two steel plates.  The rate of the electric pulses varies the HHO production rate.  While Tesla used relatively much larger and more powerful mechanisms, Meyer used the smallest weakest mechanism that could get the job done.  Meyer's mechanism makes lots of microscopic plasmoids which quickly explode, splitting water as a side effect.

Also in the 1990's Japanese nuclear physicist Takaaki Matusmoto undertook to study the work of Pons and Fleischmann, trying to reproduce and make reliable their discovery.  Takaaki eventually succeeded at producing plasmoids reliably, which he at first called "itonic clusters" and later accepted was the same thing as "ball lightning."  Takaaki's efforts are well-documented in published scientific papers which are reprinted in a book titled "Steps to the Discovery of Electro-Nuclear Collapse: Collected Papers (1989-1999)."

Since circa 2012 Bob Greenyer has been studying Low-Energy Nuclear Reactions (LENR) as a researcher at the non-profit Martin Fleischmann Memorial Project (MFMP)  he formed.  He has a degree in engineering and is a serial entrepreneur with high intuitive genius and vision.  Bob Greenyer undertook empirical studies of artifacts produced in the material directly involved in "over unity" LENR devices and discovered regular shapes and kinetics that led him to intuit the shape and dynamics of the entity producing the marks.  Bob subsequently learned that these shapes and these effects had been produced by many people in many ways.  Bob Greenyer is arguably the most knowledgeable non-experimentalist with respect to plasmoids in the entire world.  If you want to learn about plasmoids you must subscribe to his work.

Plasmoids can be used as batteries/capacitors storing more charge per unit volume than any other known method.  Plasmoids charged with enough amps can be used as super compact coulomb bombs capable of producing nuclear-level explosions without requiring nuclear materials.  Plasmoids can split water.  Plasmoids can do fusion and fission.  Plasmoids sound like magic, hence why they get associated with "over unity" device claims.  Are plasmoid-driven devices "over unity" type "free energy" devices?  Sort of yes, mostly no.  If you only look at the input electricity vs. the output power, then yes they're very much over-unity.  Though in reality plasmoids perform nuclear chemistry and are powered by this.  Plasmoids are tiny little nuclear reactors with the best radiation shield ever devised surrounding them: closed-loop plasma.  Plasmoids consume whatever atoms are nearby (and relic nutrinos), fissioning and fusing them into new atoms.  Depending on the atoms getting fused these reactions can generate more or less energy, as in conventional fusion.

Almost all mainstream scientists accept the model of stars as being powered by fusion that was initiated by the effect of gravity on a large cloud of hydrogen.  Gravity is a very weak force.  If gravity can produce fusion why not the electromagnetic force that is about 40 orders stronger than gravity?  This is what plasmoids do: they harness the electromagetic force to do nuclear chemistry.

Context:

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/6026276/archived-for-posterity-physics-stanley-meyer-technology-water-fuel-cell-wfc

https://epistemology.locals.com/upost/6029891/physics-decoding-tesla-s-19th-century-language-radio-plasma-plasmoids

http://www.rexresearch.com/evgray/1gray.htm

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/6015937/physics-book-keely-and-his-discoveries

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/6011226/physics-vladimir-pavlovoch-torchigin-nuclear-siphon

https://epistemology.locals.com/upost/5884824/physics-the-white-house-acknowledged-classifying-whole-entire-areas-of-physics-in-the-nuclear

https://lenrdashboard.com/

http://lenrbot.com/

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/5780970/physics-bob-greenyer-on-charge-separated-material-with-extreme-multi-dimensional-multi-axis-hydrod

https://epistemology.locals.com/upost/5832133/physics-patent-tt-brown-type-asymmetric-capacitor-propulsion-demonstrated-at-alt-propulsion-confer

https://epistemology.locals.com/upost/5846404/physics-adrian-marsh-tesla-s-radiant-energy-and-matter

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/5234831/physics-who-was-kenneth-radford-shoulders-memorial-lecture-at-ivnc-2014

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/5273391/physics-kladov-cavitation-destruction-of-matter-lenr

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/5284887/physics-apparent-synthesis-of-nitrogen-and-oxygen-from-heavy-hydrocarbons-the-case-for-lenr

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/5172251/physics-podcast-guest-bob-greenyer-coherent-matter-matter-synthesis-lenr-an-interview-with

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/5136260/physics-plasma-focus-device-in-operation-shows-animation-of-plasmoid-formation

https://epistemology.locals.com/upost/5099065/physics-alexander-g-parkhomov-huge-variety-of-nuclides-that-arise-in-the-lenr-processes-attem

https://epistemology.locals.com/upost/5099071/physics-alexander-g-parkhomov-lenr-as-a-manifestation-of-weak-nuclear-interactions-new-approa

https://epistemology.locals.com/upost/4926436/physics-gravity-from-spinors-driven-by-push-of-relic-neutrinos

https://epistemology.locals.com/upost/4926740/book-dr-john-desalvo-the-complete-pyramid-sourcebook

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/5099081/physics-a-g-parkhomov-investigation-of-lenr-processes-near-incandescent-metals

http://www.rexresearch.com/roschin/roschin.htm

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/5043204/physics-alienscientist-uap-technologies-the-complete-de-classified-history

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/5050887/physics-fernando-de-felice-on-the-gravitational-field-acting-as-an-optical-medium

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/5050875/physics-c-histolinov-a-v-on-the-theory-of-tracks-of-strange-radiation

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/5050854/physics-study-g-c-dijkhuis-a-model-for-ball-lightning

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/4950157/physics-david-fryberger-a-model-for-ball-lightning

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/4950195/physics-david-fryberger-a-model-for-the-structureof-point-like-fermions-qualitative-features-a

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/4950183/physics-book-oliver-heaviside-electromagnetic-theory

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/4942359/physics-george-egely-faces-of-lenr

https://epistemology.localcom/post/4942921/physics-registration-of-high-energy-radiation-from-magnetised-water-exposed-to-scattered-sunli

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/4942963/physics-robert-nelson-hal-fox-ken-shoulders-electrum-validum-charge-cluster-energy-device

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/4942990/physics-bob-greenyer-what-really-is-new-fire-fuel

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/4943008/physics-bob-greenyer-notes-on-alexander-parkhomovs-woodpecker-strange-radiation-generator

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/4943972/physics-phd-thesis-timothy-andrew-raybould-toroidal-excitations-in-free-space-and-metamaterials

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/4943791/physics-book-ev-a-tale-of-discovery-by-kenneth-r-shoulders

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/4942978/physics-s-adamenko-mechanism-of-synthesis-of-superheavy-nuclei-via-the-process-of-controlled-e

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/4944155/physics-pavel-osmera-vortex-ring-fractal-structure-of-atom-and-molecule

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/4936066/physics-bob-greenyer-the-challenge-of-containing-the-active-agent-aa-in-low-energy-nuclear-re

https://www.nanosoft.co.nz/Fusion.php

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/4927856/physics-a-g-parkhomov-lenr-as-a-manifestation-of-weak-nuclear-interactions

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/4926436/physics-gravity-from-spinors-driven-by-push-of-relic-neutrinos

https://epistemology.locals.com/upost/4924245/physics-study-d-n-yue-dynamics-of-moving-electron-vortices-and-magnetic-ring-in-laser-plasma

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/4926506/physics-toroidal-models-of-electron-and-proton

Quest for zero point energy book moray b king:
https://epistemology.locals.com/post/4927907/title

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/4928276/physics-edmund-storms-relationship-between-the-burnishing-process-used-by-mizuno-and-the-storms

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/4927868/physics-p-m-koloc-the-engineering-physics-of-an-optimized-confinement-concept-the-plasmak-co

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/4928065/nikola-tesla-the-cosmic-rays-published-february-6th-1932-in-new-york-times

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/4924536/physics-lutz-jaitner-history-of-condensed-plasmoids-and-lenr-up-to-2019

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/4924541/physics-lutz-jaitner-the-physics-of-condensed-plasmoids-cps-and-low-energy-nuclear-reactions

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/4924550/physics-edward-lewis-health-risks-of-microplasmoids-in-transmutation-energy-generation-experime

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/4925433/physics-vortex-lattices

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/4926436/physics-gravity-from-spinors-driven-by-push-of-relic-neutrinos

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/4926069/boyd-bushman-of-lockeed-martin-on-antigravity

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/4924634/physics-study-observation-of-the-optical-and-spectral-characteristics-of-ball-lightning

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/4920922/physics-needing-more-study4

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/4924245/physics-study-d-n-yue-dynamics-of-moving-electron-vortices-and-magnetic-ring-in-laser-plasma

https://epistemology.locals.com/upost/4917234/physics-book-the-hutchinson-file

https://epistemology.locals.com/upost/4917242/physics-cavitational-destruction-of-matter-by-a-kladov

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/4917423/physics-v-e-zhvirblis-the-bagel-game

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/4917570/physics-a-m-zhang-experiments-on-bubble-dynamics-between-a-free-surface-and-a-rigid-wall

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/4919394/physics-j-reece-roth-ball-lightning-what-nature-is-trying-to-tell-the-plasma-research-communi

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/4919823/physics-patent-paul-m-koloc-method-and-apparatus-for-generating-and-utilizing-a-compound-plas

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/4916411/physics-study-toroid-moments-in-electrodynamics-and-solid-state-physics

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/4916255/physics-study-electromagnetic-toroidal-excitations-in-matter-and-free-space

https://epistemology.locals.com/upost/4895699/malcolm-bendall-s-investor-presentation-for-his-vortex-plasmoid-thunderstorm-generator-internal

https://epistemology.locals.com/upost/4883701/physics-book-ev-a-tale-of-discovery-kenneth-r-shoulders

https://epistemology.locals.com/upost/4883695/physics-book-steps-to-the-discovery-of-electro-nuclear-collapse-matsumoto-t

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/4878522/physics-needing-more-study3

https://epistemology.locals.com/upost/4878178/physics-string-vortex-solitons-svs-magnetotoroelectrical-radiation-mter-j-radiation-is-a-ty

https://epistemology.locals.com/upost/4873625/physics-needing-more-study2

https://epistemology.locals.com/upost/4873597/physics-needing-more-study

https://epistemology.locals.com/upost/4873343/physics-journal-of-condensed-matter-nuclear-science-experiments-and-methods-in-cold-fusion

https://epistemology.locals.com/upost/4871492/physics-1992-plasmoids-evo-ball-lightning-charge-cluster-intro-by-the-military-fusion-folks

https://epistemology.locals.com/upost/4861830/all-salvatore-pais-papers-as-of-november-2023

https://epistemology.locals.com/upost/4861819/book-charles-proteus-steinmetz-electric-discharges-waves-and-impulses

https://epistemology.locals.com/upost/4861456/salvatore-pais-room-temperature-superconducting-system-rtsc-for-use-on-a-hybrid-aerospace-unde

https://epistemology.locals.com/upost/4810069/my-theory-on-papp-s-noble-gas-engine-physics

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/3485383/book-beyond-the-light-rays-explanations-of-the-oscillations-of-radiant-energy-by-t-h-moray

https://epistemology.locals.com/upost/3038592/archive-revision-of-maxwell-s-equations-based-on-a-superfluid-medium

https://epistemology.locals.com/upost/3042081/archive-water-dissociation-in-a-radio-frequency-electromagnetic-field-with-ex-situ-electrodes-pro

https://epistemology.locals.com/upost/3042392/archive-water-cavitation-info

https://epistemology.locals.com/upost/3022299/was-a-magnetohydrodynamics-demonstration-craft-built-for-the-air-force

https://epistemology.locals.com/upost/3004805/what-causes-water-cavitation

https://epistemology.locals.com/post/2897271/podcast-steven-greer-on-uaps-ce5-skinwalker-ranch-and-disinformation

"Russia is visibly winning the war and The Chinese hosted Putin At a time when he looks like a winner and that is always a good position to be in So I discussed this I discussed this visit in previous programs. I pointed out that Putin has visited his gone to China With most of the top people of his government there below sif and shoy goo Lavrov and ushikith all of the major economics team Manturoth the Overall the person in overall charge of the economy Ali Khan of who's now replacement or off as the industry minister Novak the energy minister Shatnik of the economics minister Oreshkin Putin's aid on economic issues Of course, Silwan of the finance minister and Abulina the central bank chair. They've all gone altogether to Beijing But it's also turned out that a massive delegation or Group of important Russian business people Also joined this delegation so Oleg Dari Paska the aluminium King Eagle searching the head of Rosneft the giant state Owned oil company Gherman Gref once Russia's economics minister now the chair of spare bank Russia's Biggest bank and the bank with which the vast majority of Russians in which the Russian vast majority of Russians have their accounts and by the way from which the vast majority of Russians received their Mircards Caustin the chair of the other giant bank VTB Dimitri F who? runs the Russian direct investment fund the one that seeks to attract foreign investment into critical center sectors of the Russian economy me health son Owner and chair of Novotak major private company. This is an entirely private business But it's massively involved in liquefied natural gas exports Shivalov head of another Bank the E B and by the way Shivalov was also a minister of the Russian government and for a time also first deputy prime minister in overall charge of the economy and Alexander Shorhind a permanent figure Within the Russian political system. He's been there. He's been a presence at the very top of the Russian Hower elite since before the Soviet Union collapsed Anyway, Shorhind who is the president of the Russian Union of industrialists and entrepreneurs Russia's biggest business organization by far so all of these people have been going have been going alongside Putin to Beijing one notable absence by the way, and I wonder why he wasn't there is Miller who is the head of gas prom given the gas prom has perhaps the biggest projects of all With the Chinese the power of Siberia pipelines. I wonder why he wasn't Apparently participating in this trip or perhaps he was perhaps it's just that I Missed him amongst all of these people who went for the record I expect that signatures and completions of the negotiations for the second Paris Iberia Pipeline are coming very soon and of course Michelson is Working on liquefied natural gas exports to Russia which will To China which will take place by sea but virtually again the all the top people in Russian industry and business they've also gone to China and Over the course of this meeting which Went happened with massive pom and ceremony Putin was received At the airport in Beijing by guard of honor But you know the Chinese dignitaries there ready to receive him a stark contrast from the way in which Secretary of State Blinken received when he arrived in Beijing about 10 days ago Anyway, God of honor for Putin massive, motorcaved to bring him to the Great Hall of the people a hug with residency shipping now, can I just say that The Chinese people generally do not do hugs such over demonstrations of affection I'm not really the sort of thing That is part of Chinese culture, but anyway it happened this time sort of public hug of the two leaders private meetings between them And the publication of a gigantic joint statement lasting Running to about 8,000 words I've only seen the Chinese language version which since I don't speak Mandarin I've had to or read Chinese characters. I've had to read in machine translation though. It's essentials are very clear and Anyway, the 8,000 word statement goes into massive detail about the Enormous correlation between China and Russia There's criticisms of the United States its hegemonic policies outright rejection of the rules based international order a Reaffirmation of international law and of the United Nations a rejection of hegemony and all of those things So jet associated with the United States blame For the present disorders in the world clearly assigned to the United States and to the West and an extraordinary list of the various areas where the two countries will cooperate or rather are cooperating in virtually every field of economics science technology social programs what have you and again Chinese and the Russians setting out in this statement that there's a relationship that is tried and true That will last time that it is not up for negotiation With third parties that they will trade and develop their relations without any external interference The Chinese Or perhaps the Chinese and the Russians agreed to insert in this joint statement an absolutely clear cut rejection of any plan by anybody in the West to confiscate the sovereign assets of any government and Of course the government whose assets the West has been manipulating confiscating is The Russian government at the present time, but anyway, absolutely clear cut rejection of all of this and well It's impossible to avoid the impression reading this lengthy statement seeing All of these people who've turned up in Beijing That this is a relationship that is now at its peak That it's going to develop that what we're basically seeing now is the formation of a unified Eurasian space economically a Eurasian economic space and that the primary purpose of this visit as I've said is for all of these important people To become fully acquainted with each other with their opposite numbers in each of these countries all these top Russian people are going to be meeting their equivalence in Beijing and in the case of people like costing Gref searching Dari Paska Mickelson well until recently most of their National business contacts were with people in the West But they're now Having seen those contacts crumble they're going to establish similar contacts with people in China in their place and I think this is extremely important because even as the two economies are starting to integrate and Dovetail with each other we can see that at the highest level the elites of the two countries are Starting to do the same thing so one day once the present crisis is over once the West fully awakes To the nightmare that they've created the formation of a Eurasian space the integration of the Ukrainian economy Eurasian economies the enormous economic boom that that will result the growing economic and geopolitical weight of this Eurasian system one which various intelligent Western figures have been warning about ever since Mckinder in 1904 we did a good program a very good program on the Duran with Alex Kraner Alex Risoforu and I at livestream in fact in which you can see how Alex Kraner discusses this very issue and quotes from what Mckinder was saying about the enormous potential power of Eurasia if it Comes together and jointly industrializes anyway Others have warned about against this jjenski warned against this Henry Kissinger warned against this Henry Kissinger's entire policy of course was to try to keep the Chinese and the Russians apart from each other and put the United States in a trite in position where it could triangulate with the other two well What's happening is all of these worst nightmares of Mckinder jjenski Kissinger and so many others are now starting to come to happen and As I said one day when Western leaders finally understand that and when they perhaps say to themselves that losing Russia was a catastrophic mistake and that they need to re-establish contacts with the Russians and need to try to Pull the Russians back towards Europe and away and the West and away from the Chinese They will find that The moment to do that has gone because Putting aside the trading and economic and Political and by the way military links the joint statement also refers to military links Putting aside all of these links All of these people all of the elites the Chinese elite the Russian elite will have become so Familiar with each other so accustomed to working together with each other They will know each other so well That it will seem for business people in Moscow as natural for them to do their business in China today as It was 20 years ago for them to do their business in Europe So that when the Europeans come back The Europeans will be strange to them Whereas the Chinese will not So this is going to be a huge cultural shift as well as everything else well There it is It has come to pass. I Don't think it's remotely reversible now. I Think the West will have to try to adapt itself to it The fact that soon The Russians will be dominant in Ukraine Will of course only consolidate further these tendencies But anyway It seems to me that these errors in Western policy These attempts as the Chinese and the Russians complain of mention in their joint statement to contain simultaneously both of them They've now Consolidated This Chinese Russian partnership and made it open And it has happened Despite the fact that the West has long understood that this is the greatest The greatest danger to the greatest danger to its dominance in itself We're now seeing the price of Neocompolysis at least the West now is seeing the price of Neocompolysis Russian Chinese relations were to become very good one way or the other even if relations between Russia and the West had remained very good even if relations between China and the West had remained very good They would nonetheless have been a Coming together of the Chinese and the Russians. There was no logic to their confrontation in the 1960s We now know that one of the Soviet officials who Always made that point was the Soviet prime minister of that period Alexei Kasegan the person who Was the political patron of Bellos of father Perhaps Bellos of New Kim himself just saying Anyway, there was always sooner or later going to be an approach more between the Chinese and the Russians But it didn't follow that it would develop into this System that we see emerge today an Actual unified Eurasian space with the Chinese and the Russians Working on building it up together and by the way, I noticed that they're reviving that they're Assisting in some of the projects that many in the West Confited themselves with thinking that they'd been shelved They're pressing forward despite claims to the country with development of their big wide-bauded Transport aircraft the heavy lift helicopter Russians have made it absolutely clear that they are fully involved in both of those projects despite Western claims to the country anyway It didn't have to be this way You could have had a Russia that was friendly and a China that was friendly with the West Even as they were friendly with each other But now you have a West Which is the adversary of an emerging? You create a Eurasian Colossus This is what near-con policies have brought about and I just get to finish with one last thought Over the last couple of weeks we've seen Repeated attempts by Western leaders Western governments to try to influence Beijing in some way we've had visits to Beijing By Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen Secretary of State Tony Blinken We've had a very fraught meeting in France between President Macron of France and Ursula von der Leyen on the one hand and Xi Jinping on the other and all of these leaders Have been trying to get the Chinese to stop exporting dual-use goods as they call them to Russia and If my own assessment of that financial times article by Martin Sandbou is correct trying to get the Chinese to provide tacit agreement to the West's confiscation of Russia's sovereign assets Well even as all of these Western leaders were coming to Beijing or talking to Xi Jinping with these proposals The Chinese would have been working with the Russians on that joint statement It wouldn't have been written 8,000 words of a statement like this are not written up in two days The rup Chinese and the Russians have probably been working on this document for a very long time probably ever since Xi Jinping's visit to Moscow in March of last year and of course all of these other projects of the Russians and the Chinese have ongoing with each other They will have been worked on and discussed and debated and developed over the same period at least a year So even as the Chinese meet with Biden in San Francisco with the San Francisco summit even as they listen to Secretary Blinken and Secretary Yellen and to Macron and Scholz and Ursula von der Leyen and all of that Well, they carry on doing quietly that which they always said they would do forge ever closer relations with the Russians and telling the Europeans and the Americans basically to get lost and now they haven't just told the Europeans and Get and the Americans to get lost They've basically Stuck two fingers up with this joint declaration that we've just seen in Beijing all together the Neacons in the United States have done a brilliant job of uniting all of America's adversaries against the United States forging de facto alliances between them and transforming them from adversaries into enemies truly Outstanding statesmanship in every respect"

Source:

https://epistemology.locals.com/upost/5649055/podcast-clip-alexander-mercouris-on-russia-s-major-visit-to-china-with-all-top-figures-on-both-si

"Since the Hamas-led attacks in Israel on October 7, 2023, Israel has been executing a devastating assault on the civilian population of the Gaza Strip, blocking humanitarian aid, internally displacing 75% of Gaza’s population, systematically destroying civilian infrastructure, and otherwise bombing indiscriminately. To date, over 34,000 Palestinians have been killed, including over 9,500 women and over 14,500 children.¹ More than 10,000 additional Palestinians are missing under the rubble, and over 77,000 have been injured.²Children have been dying from hunger and malnutrition due to Israel’s use of starvation as a method of warfare.³

In a case brought against Israel by the government of South Africa, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has deemed Israel’s military operation a plausible genocide.⁴ The U.S. government under the administration of Joseph R. Biden has been absolutely complicit in Israel’s war crimes and crimes against humanity.⁵

In reporting on the situation, the American mainstream media has tended to start their timeline for reporting on October 7, with little to no historical context provided to help news consumers understand why Hamas’s armed wing would break through the armistice line fence surrounding Gaza to perpetrate what it called “Operation Al Aqsa Flood.”⁶

Editors at The New York Times even instructed journalists to avoid describing the West Bank and Gaza as “occupied territories” despite Israel being occupying power in both territories under international law, with its belligerent occupation ongoing now for nearly 57 years, leading UN bodies and international human rights organizations to describe itas an apartheid regime.⁷

Times reporters were additionally told not to use the term “ethnic cleansing” on the grounds that it is “historically charged,” even though about 80% of Gaza’s population are refugees or their descendants from the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestine, which was the means by which the self-described “Jewish state” came into existence.⁸

The New York Times further instructed its reporters to restrict the use of the word “genocide,” along with “slaughter” and “massacre,” on the grounds that these words are “incendiary.”⁹ Meanwhile, TheNew York Times is fine with using the words “slaughter” and “massacre” when referring to Israelis killed by Palestinians. An analysis by The Intercept found that, in the pages of The New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times, “The term ‘slaughter’ was used by editors and reporters to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 60 to 1, and ‘massacre’ was used to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 125 to 2. ‘Horrific’ was used to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 36 to 4.” In fact, The Intercept found that as the Palestinian death toll climbed, mentions of Palestinians decreased.¹⁰

One particularly important piece of historical context that the mainstream media unsurprisingly omit from their reporting, with it only slipping out in very rare exceptions, is how the Israeli government under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had long been effectively utilizing Hamas as a strategic ally to block any movement toward peace negotiations with the Palestinians.¹¹

In fact, Hamas had been essentially nurtured by Israel since its founding in the late-1980s, at which time the Israeli government utilized the group as a counterforce to Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which had dangerously joined the international consensus in favor of the two-state solution to the conflict.¹²

A heightened threat of terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians has always been a price that Israeli leaders were willing to pay to combat the threat of peace, which poses an obstacle to the Zionist regime’s territorial aims. Indeed, Israel has depended on the threat of terrorism to justify the persistence of its occupation regime and brutal oppression of the Palestinians.

The Founding of Hamas

In 1973, an Islamic charity organization named Mujama al-Islamiya was established in the Gaza Strip by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, whose family had fled to Gaza when Zionist armed forces ethnically cleansed their village during what is commonly known as the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.¹³ That is the war that resulted in the establishment of the state of Israel in 78% of the territory formerly known as Palestine.

The village where Yassin was born, al-Jura, was one of over five hundred Arab villages that the Zionists literally wiped off the map in furtherance of their goal to reconstitute Palestine into a demographically “Jewish state.” While the 1948 war is known to Israelis as the “War for Independence,” the ethnic cleansing by which Israel came into being is known to the Palestinians as Al Nakba, or “The Catastrophe.”¹⁴

The tale that we are routinely told by the Western mainstream media is that Arabs were the aggressors for having started the war by invading the newly created state of Israel. Supporting that narrative is the popular myth that Israel was established by the United Nations through a legitimate political process that the Arabs rejected for no other reason than that they hated Jews.

But that is all a lie. The truth is that UN General Assembly Resolution 181 neither partitioned Palestine nor conferred any legal authority to the Zionist leadership for their unilateral declaration of the existence of Israel on May 14, 1948, by which time over a quarter million Arabs had already been ethnically cleansed from their homes.¹⁵

The neighboring Arab states intervened to try to stop the ethnic cleansing, but they mostly failed. By the time it was over and armistice lines were drawn in 1949, approximately 750,000 Arabs had become refugees whose right to return to their homes was denied by the Zionist regime.

Having suffered a severe spinal injury at the age of twelve, Ahmed Yassin was a quadriplegic and wheelchair-bound for most of his life. In 1959, he went to Egypt and spent a year studying at university, but he lacked the funds to continue his academic career and returned to Gaza. The experience had left him deeply influenced by the Egyptian organization known as the Muslim Brotherhood, and he later became involved in the creation of a Palestinian branch of the group in Gaza.¹⁶

In 1978, Mujama al-Islamiya, or the “Islamic Centre,” was legally registered as a charity in Israel. The group built schools, mosques, and clubs in occupied Gaza.¹⁷“Crucially,” The Wall Street Journal reported in 2009, “Israel often stood aside when the Islamists and their secular left-wing Palestinian rivals battled, sometimes violently, for influence in both Gaza and the West Bank.”¹⁸

The internationally recognized leadership of the occupied Palestinian territories at the time was the secular Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) headed up by Yasser Arafat, a key founder and leader of the political party Fatah.

In 1984, Fatah tipped off the Israeli military that Yassin was stockpiling weapons, and he was arrested and jailed. According to David Hacham, who was then an Arab-affairs expert in the Israeli military, Yassin told Israeli interrogatorsthat the weapons were for use against his Palestinian rivals, not Israel. The following year, Israel released Yassin as part of a prisoner exchange agreement.¹⁹

In December 1987, a mass uprising of the Palestinian people against Israel’s military occupation began, which uprising became known as the first “intifada,” an Arabic word meaning “throwing off.”

In August 1988, a new organization founded by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin published its charter.²⁰ The group went by the name “Hamas,” an acronym for Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiya, or the Islamic Resistance Movement.

Israel’s Initial Support for Hamas

At the time, The New York Times reportedhow Hamas had quickly become “a major force in the Gaza Strip,” causing “the first serious split of the nine-month-old Palestinian uprising.” Hamas was critical of the PLO, the Times explained, and posed a threat to its secular leadership. The Israeli government had “taken no direct action against Hamas,” which led to a belief among many Palestinians that Hamas was “being tolerated by the Israeli security forces in hopes of splitting the uprising.” This was a tactic, the Timesnoted, that Israel had used before.²¹

Israel viewed the PLO as a threat because of its movement away from armed conflict toward diplomatic engagement with the aim of establishing a Palestinian state alongside Israel in just 22% of the Palestinians’ historic homeland.

Demonstrating this policy shift, in 1976, the PLO supported a draft UN Security Council resolution recognizing the Palestinians’ equal right to self-determination and calling for a two-state settlement. It was vetoed by the United States.²² In November 1988, the PLO officially proclaimed its acceptance of what is known as the two-state solution, an independent state of Palestine consisting of the West Bank and Gaza alongside the state of Israel.²³ In December, Arafat again declared the PLO’s acceptance of the two-state solution before the United Nations General Assembly.²⁴

The “Palestinian peace offensive,” as it was called in 1982 by Israeli strategic analyst Avner Yaniv, was problematic for Israel since the Israeli government rejected the two-state solution, which is premised on the applicability of international law to the conflict.²⁵Accordingly, the two-state solution requires implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 242, which called on Israel in the aftermath of the “Six Day War” of June 1967 to fully withdraw its forces from the occupied Palestinian territories of Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.²⁶

Israel had no intention of withdrawing its forces to its side of the 1949 armistice lines, which are also called the “1967 lines” or the “Green Line” for the color with which it was drawn on the map. The government had no intention of giving up on the Zionist dream of establishing Eretz Yisrael, the Land of Israel, in all of the former territory of Palestine—but withoutthe Palestinians.

Consequently, at the time, the strategy adopted by Israeli policymakers was to try to disarm the threat of peace posed by the PLO by undermining its leadership. As Yaniv had elaborated on the “peace offensive,” a moderate PLO “could become far more dangerous than the violent PLO of the previous years.” so it was necessary to “undermine the position of the moderates.” Israel therefore aimedat “destroying the PLO as a political force capable of claiming a Palestinian state.”²⁷

To that end, during the First Intifada, Hamas was viewed as a useful tool to the Zionist regime.

This Israeli strategy was illuminated by Richard Sale of the United Press International (UPI) news service in an article published in 2001. Anthony Cordesman, a Middle East policy analyst for the Center for Strategic Studies, told UPI that Israel “aided Hamas directly—the Israelis wanted to use it as a counterbalance to the PLO.”

A former senior CIA official likewise told UPI that Israel’s support for Hamas “was a direct attempt to divide and dilute support for a strong, secular PLO by using a competing religious alternative.”

An anonymous U.S. intelligence source similarly told UPI that Israel was funding Hamas as a “counterweight” to the PLO and to enable Israeli intelligence to identify the most “dangerous hardliners” within the movement.²⁸

Escalating the Threat of Terrorism

The predictable consequence of Israel’s policy of blocking implementation of the two-state solution by undermining the PLO was an increased threat of terrorism, but that was an acceptable risk in the calculation of Israeli policymakers.

As former State Department counterterrorism official Larry Johnson put it, “The Israelis are their own worst enemies when it comes to fighting terrorism…They do more to incite and sustain terrorism than to curb it.”²⁹

This reality was more recently disclosedby David Shipler, The New York Times’ Jerusalem bureau chief from 1979 to 1984, who wrote a letter to the editor published on May 17, 2021, stating that,

“In 1981, Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Segev, Israel’s military governor of Gaza, told me that he was giving money to the Muslim Brotherhood, the precursor of Hamas, on the instruction of the Israeli authorities. The funding was intended to tilt power away from both Communist and Palestinian nationalist movements in Gaza, which Israel considered more threatening than the fundamentalists.”³⁰

The U.S. State Department, in a cablefrom the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv to the Secretary of State dated September 29, 1989, acknowledged that, despite having outlawed Hamas and imprisoning Sheikh Yassin under “administrative detention” without charge or trial, “some Israel officials indicated that Hamas served as a useful counter to the secular organizations loyal to the PLO.” Consequently, the State Department noted, “Israeli forces may be turning a blind eye to Hamas activities.”³¹

As I wrote in the first chapter of my book Obstacle to Peace: The US Role in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict,

“That the real threat to Israel has been that of peace achieved through implementation of the two-state solution is well evidenced by its policies and their predictable consequences. This is oftentimes the only rational explanation for Israel’s actions. Its continued occupation, oppression, and violence toward the Palestinians have served to escalate the threat of terrorism against Israeli civilians, but this is a price Israeli leaders are willing to pay. Indeed, the threat of terrorism has often served as a necessary pretext to further goals that would not be politically feasible absent such a threat.”³²

This was recognized within the Israeli government itself. In October 2003, for example, Moshe Ya’alon, the Chief of Staff of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), criticized the policies of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon because they served to increase hatred of Israel and strengthen terrorist organizations.³³

The following month, four former chiefs of Israel’s domestic security service, the Shin Bet, similarly criticized that Israel was headed in the direction of “catastrophe” and would destroy itself if it continued to take steps “that are contrary to the aspiration for peace,” such as the continued oppression of Palestinians under Israeli occupation. “We must admit that there is another side,” said Avraham Shalom, Shin Bet director from 1980 to 1986, “that it has feelings and that it is suffering, and that we are behaving disgracefully.”³⁴

Conclusion

When Hamas was first founded in the 1980s, the Israeli government viewed it as a useful force to advance its policy aim of undermining the PLO, which was seen as a threat because of its acceptance of the two-state solution. Israel therefore effectively treated Hamas as a strategic ally to divide the Palestinian leadership.

Right up until the Hamas-led attacks in Israel in October 2023, Benjamin Netanyahu, who first served as Israeli prime minister in the late 1990s and has again been in power since 2009, maintained the Israeli government policy of utilizing Hamas as a strategic ally to block any peace negotiations with the Palestinians because Israel has always rejected the two-state solution.

The threat of terrorism was preferable, in Netanyahu’s calculation, to the threat of peace, and while the mainstream media never put it into this proper context, it is important to recognize that Hamas’s “Operation Al Aqsa Flood” on October 7, 2023, was blowback for this Israeli government policy."

Source:

https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/how-israel-supported-hamas-against-the-plo/