"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/

"On October 7th, a large group of armed fighters broke out of the Gaza Strip to launch an unprecedented attack – by air, land, and sea – in southern Israel, thousands of rockets were launched, military bases as well as kibbutzim were targeted and briefly seized.

During the operation, dubbed Al-Aqsa Flood, over a thousand people were slaughtered, including hundreds of military personnel and innocent civilians. In order to secure concessions such as the release of thousands of Palestinian prisoners held by the Israeli authorities, more than 200 prisoners including some soldiers were taken back to Gaza to be used as bargaining chips amid Israel’s ongoing relentless airstrikes.

Israel has occupied Palestine longer than the Soviet Union occupied Eastern Europe. The so-called “Palestinian Authority” (PA) is trained and supported by the Tel Aviv, London, and Washington, not the people. Essentially trustees in an Israeli prison, the PA is not a sovereign state of any kind. The people of Palestine live under a foreign military occupation.

Gaza, on the other hand, is a concentration camp which measures only 25 miles in length and five miles in width making it one of the most densely populated areas in the world. Crammed inside the camp are 2.3 million Palestinians, refugees in their own ancestral lands along with their descendants.

Since 2007, Israel has imposed a full blockade on Gaza from the air, land, and sea. Gaza is completely controlled by the Israeli military. For more than 15 years, food, potable water, electricity, medicine, building materials, etc. have been severely restricted by Tel Aviv. All the while, Palestinians besieged in the coastal enclave are routinely subjected to small as well as large-scale indiscriminate bombing campaigns.

This recent terrorist attack in Israel which saw so many civilians killed – including in crossfire with Israeli forces – was in fact a prison break led by Hamas, the armed militia which rules the Strip.

This horrible attack was blatantly, if unintentionally, provoked by Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud party and his ruling coalition full of extremist settlers and Jewish supremacists bent on the de jure annexation of the entire West Bank, or “Judea and Samaria” as they call it.

It does not have to be this way at all.

Killing the Peace Process

Beginning in 1979 at Camp David, Israel promised to let the Palestinians have a sovereign state on the 22 percent of Palestine left after Zionist forces ethnically cleansed 750,000 Palestinian Muslims and Christians off their land in 1948, this was known as the “Nakba” or catastrophe. What remained was the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip illegally occupied by Tel Aviv since 1967.

By 1988, Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Leader Yasser Arafat, who headed the Fatah party, had recognized Israel within its 1967 borders. The Oslo Accords “peace process” began in 1993 and was supposed to implement this two-state reality.

It was a sham. All the while, even though the Fourth Geneva Convention says that it is illegal for one nation to transfer their own civilian populations into land seized in war and United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 says that Israel must withdraw from the occupied territories, hundreds of thousands of the Israeli Jewish colonists or “settlers” moved to the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, which they consider part of greater Israel. This has effectively made a sovereign state there impossible.

The Israeli government under Netanyahu, who used to play along with the narrative of an eventual two-state solution, in the last decade officially canceled the illusion that he would ever let this occur.

In fact, Netanyahu said in 2015 that, “I think that anyone who is going to establish a Palestinian state today and evacuate lands is giving attack grounds to radical Islam against the state of Israel. Anyone who ignores this is sticking his head in the sand. The left does this time and time again. We are realistic and understand.”

Netanyahu was then asked specifically whether he meant that a Palestinian state would not be established if he were reelected prime minister. He answered, “correct.”

Even though he temporarily relented on official annexation of the Jordan river valley, Netanyahu still vowed in 2020 that “Israel will retain security control on the entire area west of the Jordan River.” In other words, from the River to the Mediterranean Sea, Palestine will never be free.

So this is why B’Tselem, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International all finally came out in 2021–2022, after the 40-year illusion of “independence someday instead of freedom today” had finally crumbled, and officially declared that Israel was an “apartheid state.”

Jimmy Carter warned that if Israel did not let the Palestinians go, they would be stuck in this apartheid corner. So did former Prime Minister and Defense Minister Ehud Barakand former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.

If the whites of 1920s Jim Crow Mississippi had said, “we will not end segregation and our two-tiered ‘rule of law,’ but we will let northern Mississippi become an independent black nation someday instead,” but then they never did that, that would be where Israel-Palestine is right now.

Ever since then, Western liberals – regulated by the Israel lobby – have only paid lip service to the two-state solution while Israel created “facts on the ground,” with the ever expanding settlements relegating Palestinians to noncontiguous Bantustans cut off from each other with the separation wall and networks of checkpoints run by Israeli occupation forces.

Imagine if someone said about South Africa in 1983 that, “DeClerk and the whites of South Africa have a right to exist. And they have the right to defend themselves. And the blacks, well they have the right to aspirations of having those rights.” This simply will not do.

Hamas Is the Likud’s Strategic Ally

That is not to say that Hamas is secretly controlled by Israel, but their seemingly antithetical interests are in fact closely aligned and serve each other’s purposes. AsBrian McGlinchey, Andrew Higgins, Robert Sale, and others have exhaustively detailed, for decades, Israel has provided Hamas and its precursors with both direct and indirect financial support.

The day after the October 7^th attack, Tal Schneider railed against this policy in Times Of Israel,

For years, the various governments led by [Netanyahu] took an approach that divided power between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank – bringing [PA] President Mahmoud Abbas to his knees while making moves that propped up the Hamas terror group.

The idea was to prevent Abbas – or anyone else in the [PA’s] West Bank government – from advancing toward the establishment of a Palestinian state.

Originally borne out of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, the right-wing Islamist movement was seen by Israeli leadership as an instrument to undercut the dominant opposition to the occupation, Arafat’s secular leftist PLO.

Beginning in the 1970s, Israel’s backing of Hamas and its predecessor, Mujama Al-Islamiya, or the Islamic Center, “was a direct attempt to divide and dilute support for a strong, secular PLO by using a competing religious alternative,” a former senior CIA official told Sale.

According to U.S. intelligence officials speaking with Sale, “funds for the movement came from the oil-producing states and directly and indirectly from Israel.”

In the early 1980s, the Islamist movement began radicalizing. This was precipitated by the rise of Hezbollah in opposition to the Israeli invasion and nearly two decade occupation of southern Lebanon, as well as the overthrow of the Shah Reza Pahlavi, the CIA-installed dictator in Iran, and the subsequent founding of the Islamic Republic.

The group known today as Hamas, or the Islamic Resistance Movement, was officially founded in 1987 and flourished during the First Intifada, or violent uprising against the occupation in Palestine.

Despite the group’s refusal for many years to ever recognize Israel’s “right to exist,” along with the PLO dropping that maximalist demand themselves, Israeli aid to Hamas continued apace.

This is because “the thinking on the part of some of the right-wing Israeli establishment was that Hamas and the other groups, if they gained control, would refuse to have anything to do with the peace process and would torpedo any agreements put in place,” a U.S. official told Sale. Indeed, Hamas condemned the PLO as traitors for going to the negotiating table with Tel Aviv in an attempt to work out a two-state solution.

As Higgins later wrote in the Wall Street Journal,

When it became clear in the early 1990s that Gaza’s Islamists had mutated from a religious group into a fighting force aimed at Israel – particularly after they turned to suicide bombings in 1994 – Israel cracked down with ferocious force. But each military assault only increased Hamas’s appeal to ordinary Palestinians.

Fatah also cracked down on Hamas during the 1990s over their tactics including suicide bombings, which led to further clashes and bad blood.

Following the Second Intifada, in which over 1,000 Israelis and 4,500 Palestinians were killed, Likudnik Prime Minister Ariel Sharon initiated a policy known as “disengagement” in the Gaza Strip. In the summer of 2005, Tel Aviv set about removing thousands of settlers and occupying forces.

The Israeli army was redeployed in the areas surrounding Gaza instead. On the surface, this may look like a concession, but Likud’s goal was to decisively kill the peace process and with it any hopes Palestinians had for their right of return or a future state.

As Dov Weissglass, Sharon’s senior adviser, bluntly told Haaretz almost two decades ago,

The significance of the disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace process. And when you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda. And all this with authority and permission. All with a presidential blessing and the ratification of both houses of Congress.

The disengagement is actually formaldehyde. It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so there will not be a political process with the Palestinians.

The disengagement plan makes it possible for Israel to park conveniently in an interim situation that distances us as far as possible from political pressure. It legitimizes our contention that there is no negotiating with the Palestinians.

And we educated the world to understand that there is no one to talk to. And we received a no-one-to-talk-to certificate. That certificate says: (1) There is no one to talk to. (2) As long as there is no one to talk to, the geographic status quo remains intact. (3) The certificate will be revoked only when this-and-this happens – when Palestine becomes Finland. (4) See you then, and shalom.

Hamas achieved a plurality victory against Fatah – now led by Abbas in the wake of Arafat’s death – in the Palestinian territories’ 2006 parliamentary elections. But before a coalition government could be instituted based on the results, George W. Bush and his neocon retinue – displeased with the results of the democratic election they had encouraged – attempted a coup, supporting Fatah against Hamas.

As David Rose reported in Vanity Fair,

[This outlet] has obtained confidential documents, since corroborated by sources in the U.S. and Palestine, which lay bare a covert initiative, approved by Bush and implemented by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Deputy National Security Adviser Elliott Abrams, to provoke a Palestinian civil war. The plan was for forces led by [Muhammad Dahlan, Fatah’s long-time resident strongman in Gaza], and armed with new weapons supplied at America’s behest, to give Fatah the muscle it needed to remove the democratically elected Hamas-led government from power…

But the secret plan backfired, resulting in a further setback for American foreign policy under Bush. Instead of driving its enemies out of power, the U.S.-backed Fatah fighters inadvertently provoked Hamas to seize total control of Gaza.

As a result of this proxy war, came Hamas’ complete takeover in Gaza which has been used to justify the blockade and the rest of Tel Aviv’s illegal collective punishment policies.

Ever since the siege was imposed, the fact that the Palestinians in Gaza voted for Hamas years ago is predictably trotted to justify Israel’s wars against the Palestinians trapped in the enclave. Gaza has no air defense, army, navy, or air force to speak of, but thousands of Palestinian civilians have been killed amid these canned hunts.

Half of the population in Gaza – approximately 1.15 million people – are children who were not even alive when Hamas won in 2006, and there was never another election.

As Israeli journalist Meron Rapaport hasextensively chronicled, this is exactly what Likud wanted.

“The split between Abbas’ Judea and Samaria and Hamas’ Gaza is optimal for Israel. When necessary, we can strike Hamas in Gaza and not be forced to withdraw to the Auschwitz borders in Judea and Samaria,” Erez Tadmor, a former head of Likud information campaigns, posted on Twitter.

“[Netanyahu] succeeded in disconnecting between Gaza and Judea and Samaria, and effectively shattered the vision of a Palestinian state in these two areas. Part of the achievement is linked to the Qatari money that comes to Hamas every month,” said Yonatana Orich, one of Netanyahu’s advisers and another Likudnik campaign manager.

Distal Abtaryan, former minister of information and current Likudnik member of the Knesset, put it this way,

Every home needs a balcony, and Israel is a home. The balcony of this home is Samaria… if Hamas crumbles, Mahmoud Abbas may rule [Gaza]. If he rules it, voices on the left will encourage negotiations, a political settlement, and a Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria as well… this is the real reason Netanyahu doesn’t annihilate Hamas, everything else is bullshit.

In 2019, Gershon Hacohen, a major general in reserves and an associate of Netanyahu,said, “We need to tell the truth. 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.”

That same year, Netanyahu boasted to members of his party in the Knesset,

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.

Bezalel Smotrich, leader of Israel’s Religious Zionist Party and the current Finance Minister was even more explicit,

The [PA] is a burden and Hamas is an asset. On the same international field, in this game of delegitimization, and think about it for a moment, the [PA] is a burden and Hamas is an asset. It’s a terrorist organization. No one will recognize it. No one will give it status at the [International Criminal Court]. No one will let it put forth a resolution at the UN security council. Then would we need an American veto? Or would we not need an American veto? … Given that the main game, the central court, where we play now, is the international delegitimization, there [Abbas] is beating us in significant spaces. And Hamas, at this point in my opinion, will be an asset. I don’t think I have to worry about [Hamas].

The Netanyahu Doctrine

They thought it would work so well. In March, Smotrich proclaimed that there is “no such thing as a Palestinian people.” Last month, Netanyahu even presented a map of “The New Middle East” to the UN General Assembly with Palestine, from the river to the sea, completely erased.

“There’s no question: the Abraham Accords heralded the dawn of a new age of peace,” Netanyahu announced. “I believe we’re on the cusp of a more dramatic breakthrough: a historic peace between Israel and Saudi Arabia.”He continued, emphasizing “we must not give the Palestinians a veto over new peace treaties with Arab states.”

The Donald Trump and Joe Biden administrations, along with Netanyahu, also believed the Palestinians could be erased. They envisioned a Middle East where Washington’s long-time Arab dictatorship vassals would finally plant the Palestinians firmly under the bus, recognize Israel, and sign phony peace deals in exchange for American arms as well as other favors.

For instance, in 2020, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain became signatories of the Abraham Accords which is a thinly veiled foundation for a regional military coalitionled by the US and Israel eyeing Iran.

Under the accords, Gulf capitals such as Abu Dhabi or Manama recognize Israel – absent a Palestinian state or end to the apartheid regime – so they can receive increased access to advanced weapon systemsmanufactured by the US military-industrial complex.

Before Israel began its latest war on Gaza,killing hundreds of Palestinians every day, recent polling had already shown that as a result of Israeli massacres and war crimescommitted against the Palestinians, the Abraham Accords have become increasingly unpopular among the populace in Bahrain and the UAE.

In July, with the support of the Joe Biden administration, Israel’s security forcesinvaded and bombed the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank, killing a dozen people including five children. Israeli bulldozers tore up the camp’s roads, electricity, and water networks. 1,000 troopsparticipated in the raid, along with Apache helicopters, drones, and 150 armored vehicles.

Another point of contention in the region is Netanyahu’s policies of setting records this year for settlement expansion and construction in illegal Jewish-only colonies,further eviscerating even the pretense of a future Palestinian state.

Israeli forces and settlers have repeatedly desecrated, the Al-Aqsa Mosque this year. During the holy month of Ramadan, worshipers within, including women and children, were viciously beaten. Members of Netanyahu’s cabinet have also encouragedattacks against Palestinian Christians, which have escalated substantially.

For Palestinians, prior to this month, this year was already one of the deadliest on record. Before the end of September, more than 220 Palestinians had been killed by Israeli forces, including over three dozenchildren. That figure included 187 people who were murdered in the occupied territories and another 37 killed – mostly amidst a smaller bombing campaign – in the Gaza Strip.

Netanyahu and Biden were dead wrong. Peace in the region must be made with the Palestinians. But never again will any heads of state be foolish enough to believe Palestine and its people can be circumvented, erased, or ignored.

Slaughtering “Human Animals”

Since the October 7^th attack led by Hamas, Israel has pummeled Gaza indiscriminately with thousands of bombs so far killing more than 7,000 Palestinians, including nearly 3,000 children. Concurrently, in the West Bank, over 100 Palestinians have been killedby settlers and Israeli occupation forces.

Foreign ministers from Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Qatar, Kuwait, Egypt along with Abraham Accords signatory states the UAE, Bahrain, and Morocco published a joint statement condemning Israel’s collective punishment against the Palestinians in Gaza. The diplomats implored the UN Security Council to implement a ceasefire immediately, as almost half of all residential units in the enclave are said to have been obliterated.

After 20 straight days of bombing, Mondoweiss reported,

• Around 219 educational facilities have been hit by Israeli bombardment, including at least 29 UNRWA schools.
• Approximately 1.4 million people in Gaza are internally displaced.
• 24 hospitals have received evacuation notices from Israel in northern Gaza.
• Hospitals are operating at more than 150 percent of their capacity.
• At least 130 neonatal babies dependent on incubators are at risk of death due to lack of electricity.
• There are approximately 166 unsafe births taking place per day in Gaza.
• 101 health personnel have been killed by Israeli strikes, over 100 others wounded.
• Gaza’s population of over 2 million, which continues to be carpet bombed, is still being denied fuel, clean water, and adequate food supply by Israel’s ongoing siege on the enclave.

The death toll of Palestinian civilians in Gaza may soon skyrocket, as Tel Aviv has cut off Gaza’s food, water, electricity, and medicine. William Schomburg, the head of the Gaza mission for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), has warned the al-Quds and al-Shifa hospitals, the Strip’s main medical centers, are “rapidly running out of fuel and medical supplies.”

He added, “during our visit to al-Quds hospital there were heavy airstrikes all around us and the entire hospital shook.” A third of Gaza’s hospitals are no longer functioning. The dire lack of fuel, water, and sanitation will soon break the back of Gaza’s healthcare system and may lead to outbreaks of infectious diseases like cholera.

The White House’s unconditional backing of this unprecedented Israeli onslaught against Gaza  threatens to drag Americans into a regional war with Hezbollah, Iran, and their Resistance Axis allies including in Iraq and Syria, where U.S. forces illegally occupy a third of the war-torn country.

The destruction of Washington’s Global War on Terror and regime change wars of the last 20 years will likely be dwarfed by such a conflict.

To put this in perspective, the American government’s wars in the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia during this century killed and caused the deaths of well over four million people.

Washington should immediately cut all military aid and ties with Tel Aviv, as well as cease its disgraceful diplomatic cover. American forces should not be in harm’s wayto “deter” other actors from getting involved, nor to defend this merciless regime. The Israeli government, currently waging siege warfare against Gaza, has declared the Strip is populated by “human animals.”

Tel Aviv is now readying for its ground invasion, the American people must swiftly demand a lifting of the siege and a ceasefire."

Source:

https://original.antiwar.com/connor_freeman/2023/10/26/netanyahus-support-for-hamas-backfired/