Israel's Amazing Feat

Israel has accomplished quite a feat: its crimes against the people of Gaza are of such a large scale that they make Hamas's Oct. 7 crimes look small.

The Logic of Eradicating Hamas

Is genocide logically required by Israel's stated objective of eradicating Hamas? It looks that way. Israel demonstrably believes that to wipe out Hamas, it must use overwhelming and indiscriminate force in the Gaza Strip, killing tens of thousands, wounding and starving so many others, and destroying homes, hospitals, and infrastructure. If that is not, in effect, a massive recruitment campaign for Hamas, what would be?

So what to do? Simple: wipe everyone out so the inevitably traumatized kids won't grow up radicalized and join Hamas to seek vengeance for their dead relatives and miserable childhoods. Is that so hard to understand, Israel and Israel partisans?

I know we're not supposed to mention Hitler, but it might be worth re-learning that the Hitler Youth recruited its members from young people who had suffered under Britain's starvation blockade of Germany during World War I -- a blockade that lasted several months after the armistice. Those kids didn't grow up resisting Nazism.

TGIF: Israel Humiliated

To more fully understand the ferocity of Israel's massacre of the people of the Gaza Strip, it's perhaps worth considering that on October 7, 2023, the reputedly invincible Israeli Defence Forces and intelligence services were made to look like fools caught sleeping on guard duty. While Hamas's murder, assault, and kidnapping of noncombatants must be strongly condemned, we should be able to see how humiliating that was for the Israeli government, which brags as much about its awesome power as it does about its allegedly unequaled moral stature.

Israel has blockaded Gaza for 20 years, although the "Jewish state" has controlled it since 1967. Even before that, Israel had committed massacres there in 1956 when Egypt controlled it as a result of the 1948 war. The Oct. 7 terrorists were likely too young to have known anything but life without a future in what had become the Gaza open-air prison. Theoretically and officially, Israel regulates all ingress and egress from the strip: people, food, medical supplies, energy, consumer and producer goods, and building materials. The policy is draconian, intended to keep the 2.3 million Palestinians, half of them children, quiet.

Even though long before Oct. 7 Israeli intelligence had evidence that Hamas was up to something, including training videos and a multipage plan of operation (discounted by the experts), the organization managed to blow 10 holes in the fortified fence and send through terrorists who attacked nearby military installations, permissible targets under international law, and impermissibly, kibbutzim and other civilian areas, including a music festival. Some of these locations had likely been the home areas of the grandparents of the fighters. A large percentage of Gazans are descendants of refugees, if not refugees themselves, whom Zionist militias expelled during the 1948 Nakba, or Palestinian catastrophe, an essential part of the program to create a "Jewish state."

As if the attacks of Oct. 7 were not humiliating enough, late-arriving Israeli forces on land and in the air killed some Israelis in vehicles and buildings either by mistake (with autonomous pilots sometimes relying on targeting information from people using WhatsApp) or according to the supposedly abandoned Hannibal Directive, under which the military prefers to kill Israeli hostages along with their abductors rather than have them taken as bargaining chips. Israeli forces also killed many Hamas fighters, but in some cases the Israelis did not know whom they were firing at.

The Israeli media, unlike the American media, has reported extensively on this. For details, see the impressive and fair-minded Al Jazeera documentary October 7. It contains revealing videos from both sides and also covers the Israeli fabrications regarding mass rape and beheaded babies, as though the actual crimes weren't hideous enough.

Israel's mortification on Oct. 7 cannot be exaggerated. Israel has long prided itself not only on its offensive capabilities but on its power to deter attack, although that has been shown on occasion to have been overstated. But Oct. 7 pulverized that reputation. It also wrecked the hope that the Palestinians would acquiesce in being ignored as though they were invisible through the Abraham Accords, started by Trump and carried on by Biden. These are the actual and prospective corrupt deals involving the United States, Israel, and the dictatorial Gulf monarchies, the purpose of which is to buy "stability" in the region through Arab recognition of Israel via bribery, including U.S. weapons contracts and security guarantees. Who thought that would work? 

Israel and its supporters want the world to believe that Jewish people face an existential threat -- another Nazi genocide -- and that Israel is the only insurance against it. Biden believes it; he ridiculously implies that Jews are in danger in America. How wrong that is. Israel is the least safe place for Jewish people, but that's a consequence of how Zionists have treated the Palestinians from the start because they were not Jewish. There's a sick joke in the hollow claims that as tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza are being killed, maimed, starved, and dispossessed, the real threat is to Jews, not only in Israel but in America! 

The presence of anti-Semitism is vastly exaggerated and thankfully confined to the fringes, The only thing that could change that is the premeditated conflation of anti-Zionism, entirely legitimate, with anti-Semitism, an effort that serves to innoculate Israel from proper criticism. By doing this, Israel and its supporters have diluted anti-Semitism and, inexcusably, made it seem less bad.

Finally, when Israel's defenders bring up Hamas's execrable anti-Semitic and genocidal charter, they should be reminded that for decades before the 1948 self-declared founding of Israel, Zionist leaders and settlers had talked about reclaiming and sanctifying the "Promised Land" for the "Chosen People"; supported the "transfer," by force if necessary, of the Palestinian Arabs (those non-Jewish people who for generations lived inexplicably in the "land without a people"); treated them with utter contempt to their faces (to the dismay of other Jews); expelled over 750,000 Palestinian Arabs in 1948; massacred hundreds of others and even poisoned their wells; destroyed some 500 villages to make way for Jewish towns, forests, and parks; attacked refugees in Gaza and Jordan, and militarily ruled the remaining Palestinian Arabs for the next two decades. Then came the occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights through the 1967 war, with its attendant brutality and humiliation.

All of that preceded Hamas's emergence, which Israel encouraged, in the late 1980s. This does not justify Hamas's terrorism against noncombatants, but perspective advances comprehension -- if comprehension is deemed desirable.

But Hamas...

When Israel's defenders bring up Hamas's execrable anti-Semitic and genocidal charter, they should be reminded that for decades before the 1948 self-declared founding of Israel, Zionist leaders and settlers had talked about reclaiming and sanctifying the "Promised Land" for the "Chosen People"; supported the "transfer," by force if necessary, of the Palestinian Arabs (those non-Jewish people who for generations lived inexplicably in the "land without a people"); treated them with utter contempt to their faces (to the dismay other Jews); expelled over 750,000 Palestinian Arabs in 1948, the Nakba; massacred hundreds of others and even poisoned their wells; destroyed some 500 villages to make way for Jewish towns, forests, and parks; and militarily ruled the remaining Palestinian Arabs for the next two decades. Then came the occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip through the 1967 war with its attendant brutality and humiliation.

All of that preceded Hamas's emergence in the late 1980s. This does not justify Hamas's horrendous violence against noncombatants, but perspective advances comprehension -- if comprehension is deemed desirable.

Appearance on the Scott Horton Show

Scott Horton and I talked about issues related to the Israel-Palestine conflict on his show recently. You can listen here.

TGIF: When History Didn't Begin

I agree with UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. I've never written those words before. But on Oct 24, Guterres said to the UN Security Council (emphasis added):

The situation in the Middle East is growing more dire by the hour.

The war in Gaza is raging and risks spiralling throughout the region.

Divisions are splintering societies. Tensions threaten to boil over.

At a crucial moment like this, it is vital to be clear on principles -- starting with the fundamental principle of respecting and protecting civilians.

I have condemned unequivocally the horrifying and unprecedented 7 October acts of terror by Hamas in Israel.

Nothing can justify the deliberate killing, injuring and kidnapping of civilians – or the launching of rockets against civilian targets.

All hostages must be treated humanely and released immediately and without conditions. I respectfully note the presence among us of members of their families.....

It is important to also recognize the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum.

The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation.

They have seen their land steadily devoured by settlements and plagued by violence; their economy stifled; their people displaced and their homes demolished. Their hopes for a political solution to their plight have been vanishing.

But the grievances of the Palestinian people cannot justify the appalling attacks by Hamas. And those appalling attacks cannot justify the collective punishment of the Palestinian people....

What was the reaction? Israel's government demanded that Guterres resign for justifying (sic) Hamas's crimes. According to statements from Israeli UN ambassador Gilad Erdan and foreign minister Eli Cohen, Guterres therefore is unfit for his job.

According to the officials, Guterres's offending words were these: "the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum." Those words preceded Guterres's reference to what the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank endured under Israeli occupation since 1967.

Beyond doubt, Guterres condemned Hamas's mass atrocities of Oct. 7. He clearly said that killing civilians cannot be justified. And he unequivocally called for the immediate and unconditional release of the hostages. Look at his remarks. But he has been vilified by Israeli politicians for saying in effect that history did not begin on October 7, 2023. Of course, the statement is true, but some things just may not be said.

Strangely, the Israeli government says Guterres did not condemn the horrendous Hamas violence against Israeli civilians. Israel's position apparently is that even to remind people that history did not begin on October 7 is to justify murder, kidnapping, and mayhem. It's as if trying to comprehend is to justify. But those are two different mental operations. 

The Israeli officials also presumably objected to Guterres's condemnation of the collective punishment that Israel was inflicting, again, on the rightless Palestinians in the crowded Gaza Strip, most of whom are not members of Hamas and most of whom could not have voted for Hamas almost 20 years ago because they were too young or had not even been born yet. Almost half the 2.3 million Palestinians of tiny Gaza are under 18.

So Israel is gaslighting. If we can't believe the Israeli government on something we can so easily check, how can we believe it on anything else? Just the other day U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said something similar to what Guterres said, but so far without consequence: "Ultimately, the only way to ensure that this crisis never happens again is to begin setting the conditions for durable peace and security, and to frame our diplomatic efforts now with that in mind." In his requests is that Israel not reoccupy Gaza and that it end the 17-year blockade. That sounds like another way of acknowledging that the October 7 attacks "did not happen in a vacuum."

Why is Israel going after Guterres for his unexceptional statement? It wasn't just the timing. Yair Lapid, a former prime minister of Israel and a former journalist, gave the answer when he said, "If the international media is objective, it serves Hamas. If it just shows both sides, it serves Hamas... My argument is that the media cannot just claim to bring both sides of the story. If you do that, you are only bringing one – Hamas’s side...."

Really?

Hamas, Israel, and the United States

For obvious reasons, I cannot endorse Hamas's firing projectiles at residential centers in Israel. But if is wrong to terrorize Israeli noncombatants into changing their government's outrageous anti-Palestinian policies, then it must also be wrong for Israel and the United States to terrorize noncombatants into changing their rulers' policies, which those countries routinely do through sanctions and other, explicitly military ways.

One morality--one set of individuals rights--for all!

Discussing Israel-Palestine on Year Zero

 I discussed what's going on in Israel-Palestine on the Year Zero podcast. Have a listen.

TGIF: Trump Turns to Gaza as Middle East Deal of the Century Collapses

 

The Trump administration's "Deal of the Century" for the Palestine-Israel has, predictably, gone over like a lead balloon. So it's shifting gears. The Washington Post reports, "With President Trump’s promised Middle East peace plan stalled, administration officials are focusing on improving conditions in the impoverished Gaza Strip — a move that could put political pressure on Palestinian leaders to come to the negotiating table." 

Don't hold your breath.

Read TGIF at The Libertarian Institute.

TGIF (The Goal Is Freedom) appears on Fridays. Sheldon Richman, author of America's Counter-Revolution: The Constitution Revisited, keeps the blog Free Association and is executive editor of The Libertarian Institute. He is also a senior fellow and chair of the trustees of the Center for a Stateless Society and a contributing editor at Antiwar.com.

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What's Going On

From Jerry Haber at The Magnes Zionist:

I spoke with an expert on the Israeli military shortly after "Operation Cast Lead," and when I told him that many argued that the operation was a reaction to Hamas rocket-fire, he laughed. He said that Hamas rocket-fire was deliberately provoked when Israel broke the cease-fire so that Israel could do a little "spring cleaning," deplete Hamas's arsenal of weapons. He told me that this happens every few years, and that I should expect it to happen in another few years. Israel will assassinate a Hamas leader, Hamas will have to respond (wouldn't Israel, under those circumstances?) and Israel will perform a "clean up" operation.

Also from Haber: "And That's Why Israel Doesn't Want A Cease-Fire."

The Attack on Gaza

Two points to keep in mind as this latest Israeli aggression unfolds:

First, Hamas did not start the last flare-up in violence. See John Glaser's "Israel’s Latest Assault on Gaza: The Lie of Who Started It."

Second, the just-assassinated Hamas leader, Ahmed Jabari, was in the process of negotiating a permanent truce with Israel. See the Haaretz report "Israeli peace activist: Hamas leader Jabari killed amid talks on long-term truce." According to the daily  newspaper, "[Israeli peace activist Gershon]

Baskin told Haaretz on Thursday that senior officials in Israel knew about his contacts with Hamas and Egyptian intelligence aimed at formulating the permanent truce, but nevertheless approved the assassination."

I submit that Jabari's willingness to talk true and his assassination are no coincidence. Israel does not want to see Hamas evolve. It needs an enemy.

More things to keep in mind:

Gaza has been under an Israeli blockade for years. Needed goods are kept out.

Israel helped to make Hamas what it is today. Years ago it promoted the organization as an alternative to the secular Fatah. Why? To splinter the Palestinians. If Israel now considers Hamas a mortal threat, it has only itself to blame. This is a case of blowback.

Israel's partisans refer to Hamas's declaration of war on Jews in its charter as a reason for scoffing at the idea that real negotiations are possible with the organization. That charter may be put in perspective by noting the words of David Ben-Gurion, Israel's founding prime minister:

‎Why should the Arabs make peace? If I was an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country.... We have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that?

All Zionist leaders were aware of that fact.

Nevertheless, Hamas has distanced itself from the charter and has shown a willingness to talk, as we've seen.The Israeli response has been assassination, bombing, and ground invasion. It is not Hamas that has consistently violated cease-fires.

Finally, one need not condone the shooting of rockets into southern Israel to care about the context. In 1948 Zionist paramilitary forces drove Palestinians out of their villages in the south and pushed them into the Gaza Strip. Many Gazans are refugees or descendants of refugees of the Nakba. The violence may be inexcusable, but it is not unprovoked.

See this roundup of the violence from Mondoweiss.

What Israel Really Fears about Iran

From the Washington Post:

A nuclear Iran could make it tougher for Israel to act against enemies closer to home, a senior Israeli military official said Tuesday, suggesting that regional fallout would be broad should Tehran achieve bomb making capabilities.

Military planning division chief Maj. Gen. Amir Eshel said if Tehran attains atomic weapons, that could constrain Israel from striking Iranian-backed Islamist groups in Lebanon and Gaza, Hezbollah and Hamas.

In other words, Israeli leaders don’t fear an attack. (Others have already said this, and American neocons agree.) Rather they fear that a nuclear Iran could deter Israel from asserting its will in the region. Hezbollah is a “threat” only if Israel again invades Lebanon. Hamas would cease being a threat if the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank (and Israel itself) were treated justly.

All of this presumes Iran is working toward acquiring a nuclear weapon (Israel has about 200), but to – to repeat—there is no evidence of this.

Blowback

From UPI, June 18, 2002:

Israel and Hamas may currently be locked in deadly combat, but, according to several current and former U.S. intelligence officials, beginning in the late 1970s, Tel Aviv gave direct and indirect financial aid to Hamas over a period of years.

Israel "aided Hamas directly -- the Israelis wanted to use it as a counterbalance to the PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organization)," said Tony Cordesman, Middle East analyst for the Center for Strategic Studies.

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," said a former senior CIA official.

According to documents United Press International obtained from the Israel-based Institute for Counter Terrorism, Hamas evolved from cells of the Muslim Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in 1928. Islamic movements in Israel and Palestine were "weak and dormant" until after the 1967 Six Day War in which Israel scored a stunning victory over its Arab enemies.

After 1967, a great part of the success of the Hamas/Muslim Brotherhood was due to their activities among the refugees of the Gaza Strip. The cornerstone of the Islamic movements success was an impressive social, religious, educational and cultural infrastructure, called Da'wah, that worked to ease the hardship of large numbers of Palestinian refugees, confined to camps, and many who were living on the edge.

"Social influence grew into political influence," first in the Gaza Strip, then on the West Bank, said an administration official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

According to ICT papers, Hamas was legally registered in Israel in 1978 by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the movement's spiritual leader, as an Islamic Association by the name Al-Mujamma al Islami, which widened its base of supporters and sympathizers by religious propaganda and social work.

According to U.S. administration officials, funds for the movement came from the oil-producing states and directly and indirectly from Israel. The PLO was secular and leftist and promoted Palestinian nationalism. Hamas wanted to set up a transnational state under the rule of Islam, much like Khomeini's Iran.

What took Israeli leaders by surprise was the way the Islamic movements began to surge after the Iranian revolution, after armed resistance to Israel sprang up in southern Lebanon vis-a-vis the Hezbollah, backed by Iran, these sources said.

"Nothing provides the energy for imitation as much as success," commented one administration expert.

A further factor of Hamas' growth was the fact the PLO moved its base of operations to Beirut in the '80s, leaving the Islamic organization to grow in influence in the Occupied Territories "as the court of last resort," he said.

When the intifada began, Israeli leadership was surprised when Islamic groups began to surge in membership and strength. Hamas immediately grew in numbers and violence. The group had always embraced the doctrine of armed struggle, but the doctrine had not been practiced and Islamic groups had not been subjected to suppression the way groups like Fatah had been, according to U.S. government officials.

But with the triumph of the Khomeini revolution in Iran, with the birth of Iranian-backed Hezbollah terrorism in Lebanon, Hamas began to gain in strength in Gaza and then in the West Bank, relying on terror to resist the Israeli occupation.

Israel was certainly funding the group at that time. One U.S. intelligence source who asked not to be named said that not only was Hamas being funded as a "counterweight" to the PLO, Israeli aid had another purpose: "To help identify and channel towards Israeli agents Hamas members who were dangerous terrorists."

In addition, by infiltrating Hamas, Israeli informers could only listen to debates on policy and identify Hamas members who "were dangerous hard-liners," the official said.

In the end, as Hamas set up a very comprehensive counterintelligence system, many collaborators with Israel were weeded out and shot. Violent acts of terrorism became the central tenet, and Hamas, unlike the PLO, was unwilling to compromise in any way with Israel, refusing to acquiesce in its very existence.

But even then, some in Israel saw some benefits to be had in trying to continue to give Hamas support: "The thinking on the part of some of the right-wing Israeli establishment was that Hamas and the others, if they gained control, would refuse to have any part of the peace process and would torpedo any agreements put in place," said a U.S. government official who asked not to be named.

"Israel would still be the only democracy in the region for the United States to deal with," he said.

All of which disgusts some former U.S. intelligence officials.

"The thing wrong with so many Israeli operations is that they try to be too sexy," said former CIA official Vincent Cannestraro.

According to former State Department counter-terrorism official Larry Johnson, "the Israelis are their own worst enemies when it comes to fighting terrorism."

"The Israelis are like a guy who sets fire to his hair and then tries to put it out by hitting it with a hammer."

"They do more to incite and sustain terrorism than curb it," he said.

Aid to Hamas may have looked clever, "but it was hardly designed to help smooth the waters," he said. "An operation like that gives weight to President George Bush's remark about there being a crisis in education."

Cordesman said that a similar attempt by Egyptian intelligence to fund Egypt's fundamentalists had also come to grief because of "misreading of the complexities."

An Israeli defense official was asked if Israel had given aid to Hamas said, "I am not able to answer that question. I was in Lebanon commanding a unit at the time, besides it is not my field of interest."

Asked to confirm a report by U.S. officials that Brig. Gen. Yithaq Segev, the military governor of Gaza, had told U.S. officials he had helped fund "Islamic movements as a counterweight to the PLO and communists," the official said he could confirm only that he believed Segev had served back in 1986.

The Israeli Embassy press office referred UPI to its Web site when asked to comment.

A textbook case of blowback if ever there was one.