I argued in January that all the ingredients for a third intifada were in place after Netanyahu aligned with radical Zionists to form the most extreme right wing Government in Israel’s history.
This toxic Far Right Radical Zionist Government wanted to over rule their Judiciary to allow Zionist Settlers to illegally steal Palestinian land in the West Bank and make the lives of the over 7000 Palestinians prisoners held by Israel even more cruel and draconian.
The Abraham Accords sidelined Hamas and left them with desperate conditions and no hope for the future.
While Hamas has blood on their hands, so too does Netanyahu.
Jon Oliver’s Last Week Tonight did a special last week on Netanyahu and pointed out how many times over his corrupt time in power he and enflamed and enabled Hamas.
From the chants of “In blood and fire we will expel Rabin” that radicalised the assassination of Rabin that Netanyahu had championed to the huge donations of cash paid to Hamas to fuel inter-Palestinian blood feuds…
Netanyahu “has always been hard right”, Oliver emphasized, “but it’s worth taking a minute to underscore just how extreme his current government is”. In his most recent election, Netanyahu assembled the most rightwing government in Israel’s history, with a cabinet “stocked with extremists”. One top minister has said “there is no such thing as a Palestinian people” and advocated for a massive expansion of settlements – seizing Palestinian land – against international law.
And Netanyahu has covertly funded Hamas to play them off their more organized and legitimate rival, the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. “Netanyahu took the risk of betting that he could control Hamas, and use them to his own ends, and he was horribly wrong about that,” Oliver explained.
…blame corrupt Netanyahu as much as Hamas for this inhumanity!
The most tormented irony in this latest regurgitation of sadism between Hamas and Israel is of course Israel helped enable Hamas into the force it is now!
BLOWBACK: HOW ISRAEL WENT FROM HELPING CREATE HAMAS TO BOMBING IT
Did you also know that Hamas — which is an Arabic acronym for “Islamic Resistance Movement” — would probably not exist today were it not for the Jewish state? That the Israelis helped turn a bunch of fringe Palestinian Islamists in the late 1970s into one of the world’s most notorious militant groups? That Hamas is blowback?
This isn’t a conspiracy theory. Listen to former Israeli officials such as Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Segev, who was the Israeli military governor in Gaza in the early 1980s. Segev later told a New York Times reporter that he had helped finance the Palestinian Islamist movement as a “counterweight” to the secularists and leftists of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Fatah party, led by Yasser Arafat (who himself referred to Hamas as “a creature of Israel.”)
“The Israeli government gave me a budget,” the retired brigadier general confessed, “and the military government gives to the mosques.”
“Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation,” Avner Cohen, a former Israeli religious affairs official who worked in Gaza for more than two decades, told the Wall Street Journal in 2009. Back in the mid-1980s, Cohen even wrote an official report to his superiors warning them not to play divide-and-rule in the Occupied Territories, by backing Palestinian Islamists against Palestinian secularists. “I … suggest focusing our efforts on finding ways to break up this monster before this reality jumps in our face,” he wrote.
They didn’t listen to him. And Hamas, as I explain in the fifth installment of my short film series for The Intercept on blowback, was the result. To be clear: First, the Israelis helped build up a militant strain of Palestinian political Islam, in the form of Hamas and its Muslim Brotherhood precursors; then, the Israelis switched tack and tried to bomb, besiege, and blockade it out of existence.
In the past decade alone, Israel has gone to war with Hamas three times — in 2009, 2012, and 2014 — killing around 2,500 Palestinian civilians in Gaza in the process. Meanwhile, Hamas has killed far more Israeli civilians than any secular Palestinian militant group. This is the human cost of blowback.
…Israeli tactics to fund the most radical and extremist groups to topple enemies is a game the Americans played with Al Qaeda and saw resources going to Osama Bin Laden to play the exact same role with the blowback of 9/11.
The problem with the brutal use of tactics like this is that it generates unforeseen blowback.
Hamas is one such unforeseen blowback.
Peace is our only option because the War Gods are interested only in the profit of blood loss, not the prevention of it.
These were the share prices of the war lords as violence exploded in the Middle East.
To paraphrase Gil Scott Heron, ‘they got folk out there working for war, we have to go to work for peace’.
Beyond the immediate, there has to be space for both of these furiously angry neighbours to bond and find common ground in this parched desert of hate.
Peace Academy’s are a genuine attempt to foster these social oasis.
If NZ wants to champion peace, we need to support the NZ Peace Academy concept with grants to help organise and bring Israelis and Palestinians together to find that common ground.
I am not someone who wants the State of Israel wiped from the face of the earth! I despise Israel’s brutal occupation of the Palestinian people, the outrageous 17 year blockade of Gaza and the ongoing theft of land in the West Bank, but I see Israel as a global responsibility and obligation after the obscenity of the Holocaust.
I stand with the Palestinian people AND the Israeli people!
The idea that Jews around the world are now under attack for their State’s deplorable war crimes and group punishments is as irrational as attacking Russians for Putin violence.
Muslims are not our enemy, Jews are not our enemy, Russians aren’t our enemy.
Authoritarian Muslim Regimes propped up by America’s Military Industrial Complex abusing their own faith to exert control over their own people are the enemy!
The far right Zionist Government in Israel is the enemy!
Putin is the enemy!
Hamas is the enemy and so is Netanyahu!
As many as 20 000 Palestinians may be dead if we include the 4100 missing trapped under ruins!
Israel has killed as many civilians in 6 weeks as Russia has in 22 months!
Israel dropped more bombs on Gaza in a week than America did in 1 year of war with Afghanistan.
This isn’t a proportional response, it is a war crime and we all know it!
The only solution is an immediate ceasefire.
Now!
Meanwhile…
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Absolutely Netanyahu is a scumbag along with Putin and friends.
Thank fuck for the Houthi’s!!
The poorest nation on the planet has the biggest pair of nuts by declaring war on Israel and taking action whereas the 54 Arab states are stuck in a Stockholm psychosis!! And the rest of the world leaders just do what they’re good at and do nothing for the Palestinians who have been killed and for those who are still alive.
That is not fair.
Many in the rest of the world sponsors the death cultists active in the world.
A cynic would suggest “blowback” is exactly what these ghouls wanted.
Especially if it is true Egypt warned Israel 3 days before Oct 7th what was due to happen and the Israeli’s let it happen Pearl Harbour style.
“We were always at war with Eurasia.”
This is USA’s latest calamity with Netanyahu being their indignant puppet leading the charge. Will we ever learn that the USA underpins all the crap rumbling throughout the world. I say, no we won’t because independent media’s reach throughout the world, well, certainly the western world, is still too small.
Im guessing a lot of the posters on here think Palestinians are subhuman vermin, fit only for extermination, and that the the IDF should have a free pass to wipe them out.
That is your language. Own it.
Evil prevails where good people fail to watch their backs while being stabbed in the front.
The Kiwi moron class has just voted with their babbling minds stuffed with plastic wood grain flooring and gargantuan house prices. Go you, Morons! You harped on about getting them, so now you feed them.
Martyn – Correct…But, knowing this, and the firepower that Israel would unleash on them, why on Earth did Hamas launch the attack?
Once again far right scum are fighting far right scum.
Can you lot on the right fix this one please, as you’re the tools who created it.
Man hanging on to him me my care, POLITICAL only for Israil, the monster he has unleashed, will never, cruxiefy Hamas. AND THE SLAUGHTER OF CHILDREN HIS SHAME, AS THE GERMAN MONSTERS IN THOSE CAMPS.
Hamas launched its attack because Israel was about to sign an agreement with Biden, Netanyahu and MBS leaving the Palestinians out in the cold.
Hamas broke out of Gaza and put a stop to that.
Hamas was painted as the terrorist and Israel the victim.
Now the victim is making a genocide in Gaza and the West Bank.
The liberation of Palestine won’t happen without the defeat of the Zionist regime which for over a century has been fighting for a Jewish state at the expense of the Palestinians.
Israel under the Zionists is an occupying, oppressor state.
Palestine today is an oppressed state having lost 70% of its territory during the Nakba in 1948.
There cannot be any moral equivalence between the two states.
Israel cannot claim the right to defend itself against the people it is oppressing.
Israel is the terrorist, the Palestinians are the freedom fighters.
Hamas was elected by the Palestinian people of Gaza, and is fighting a war of national liberation.
In such wars innocents die and there are some atrocities.
But these are grossly disproportionate.
Israelis in the hundreds, Palestinians in the 10s of thousands.
The difference is like road deaths compared with genocide.
There can be no two state solution since Jews cannot claim any state on Palestinian land.
The Zionists must go so that Palestine can become free as a single secular, socialist republic, in which Palestinians and Jews along with other peoples can live together in harmony alongside other Arab and West Asian states.
They can join the rest of the corrupt totalitarian fucked up failed states and go back to the middle ages where they all clearly want to be.
If i was Jewish Id let them fuckin have it.
If we stop and consider the implications of the Israeli state deliberately developing an enemy terrorist organisation which it could unleash at will to rain carnage on its own people, for the political rewards it was deemed that would bring, and if we recall that that same Israeli state’s most sophisticated surveillance and defence system was “switched off” on October 7, then we should seriously consider who might have really been behind some other “Pearl Harbour” events in recent history where mighty defence systems were similarly awol.
Apart from the conspiracy theory BS that we read in some of the comments here I agree basically with what Martyn is saying. Netanyahu is an arsehole and doesn’t govern with the blessing of a large chunk of the Israeli population. The leaders of our world are the biggest problem. This particular war started by Hamas wouldn’t be happening but for the Leaders in Iran, who do not enjoy the support of many of their population. Xi does what he wants and like Putin follow their own twisted agendas regardless of what their populations really think. The same can be said of the US Britain and many other countries. These leaders lust for power and their corrupt relationships with their military enable them to inflict their twisted versions of the world as they see it on others no matter the cost. Because many leaders fail to do the basic job of looking after their own people, that discontent grows to give birth to the trumps and Putins of this world. I don’t hope to understand the rights and wrongs of the issues in the Palestine area but can plainly see the actions of leaders from all sides willing to take advantage of the situation. These leaders are the real criminals.
If supporting the Palestinians makes me a Nazi, then so be it.
And I will not support a religion that makes women dress modestly or shave their hair when they get married, or bars the socialisation of males and females. And that includes Judaism. And if that makes my a Nazi for opposing bodyshaming and prudishness. SO be it.
Your essay had the problem I often have. Israel not having any right there, but there. I flinched at you stating my opinion — Israel and Palestine beside one another.
It’s one or the other I realize now. As Israel realized since 1948. In which case it will have to be Palestine for me.