Israel repeats and risks the same Hamas blowback mistake by funding ISIS factions

Here we go again...

Israel has admitted to arming ISIS-linked gangs as proxy forces in Gaza, throwing some cold water on the fuzzbrained narrative that the west is backing Israel to help defeat Islamic extremism. Israel is backing these forces in order to sow chaos and strife with the goal of advancing its ethnic cleansing objectives in the Palestinian territory.

…Jesus wept.

Israel, just like America believe they are Gods who can fuck around and arm dangerous groups without ever appreciating the blowback.

Israel did the exact same thing by funding Hamas in the 1970s, yes that’s right, Israel funded Hamas to take out the PLO and then they in turn became the new danger…

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, funding ISIS to now attack Hamas after Isreal funded Hamas to attack the PLO is just madness!

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’s 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!

Trump is the enemy!

Netanyahu is the enemy!

Hamas is the predictable outcome!

As many as 250 000 Palestinians may be dead.

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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