VIEWS REGARDING ISRAEL,
FROM BAD TO WORSE
[The URL of this article to share it is
https://www.pdrboston.org/views-re-israel-from-bad-to-worse ]
May 17, 2021
[See all of my articles about Israel/Palestine]
There are a range of terrible--factually false and morally repugnant--views regarding Israel. These views differ in some ways, and as a result many good people support one terrible view because it doesn't include some horrible feature of an even worse view. Our U.S. politicians and mass media censor the truthful and morally decent view, which drives good people to latch onto a horrible view just because they've never heard the truly good view even expressed. So, to start with, let's get clear on the truthful view, and then look at the various horrible ones.
THE TRUTH
The truth about Israel (follow the links below for the evidence) is that, like the United States, it is a dictatorship of the rich, of a Jewish billionaire ruling class [5] to which all of the Jewish politicians and parties and generals are beholden. This billionaire ruling class oppresses working class Jews in Israel, driving them into extreme poverty (never reported in our mass media, of course.) The way this billionaire ruling class gets away with it is by creating a bogeyman enemy--the Palestinians--with which to frighten working class Jews into obedience to the Israeli government that pretends to be protecting them from their "real enemy." In order to create this bogeyman enemy the Israeli ruling class carried [6] out ethnic cleansing of non-Jews (Palestinians), forcibly removing most of them from the 78% of Palestine now called Israel, and it continues the ethnic cleansing by refusing to let the Palestinian refugees return.
To enforce this ethnic cleansing the Israeli government brutally and violently oppresses the Palestinians outside of Israel in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and harshly discriminates against the Palestinians still inside Israel (about one fifth of the population.) This brutality and violence--all done in the name of "the Jewish people"--is designed to ensure maximum Palestinian anger (and sometimes violence) at Jews, so they will be the perfect bogeyman enemy that the Israeli billionaire ruling class requires to control and dominate and oppress ordinary Israeli Jews.
This is what "the existence of Israel as a Jewish State" means; it has no more right to exist and to defend itself than the South African regime of apartheid, or the slavery-based American Confederacy.
What is Zionism?
In order to "justify" this ethnic cleansing, the Israeli ruling class uses an ideology called Zionism. The Zionist ideology says that because non-Jews (Gentiles) are (supposedly!) innately (i.e., permanently) antisemitic, therefore Jews can never be safe in the world unless they have a Jewish "state of their own." The first prime minister of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, declared that Israel must have at least 80% of its population be Jewish*, and the Israel Supreme court has ruled [1] that no party can run for office in the Knesset (parliament) if it does not support the goal of keeping Israel's population a majority Jewish no matter what. Note that in reality, Israel is no more a state of ordinary Jews (i.e., run by and for ordinary Jews) than the United States is a state of ordinary Americans (i.e., run by and for ordinary Americans.)
The Occupation
One feature of the ethnic cleansing is the Israeli military Occupation of the West Bank (the 22% of Palestine not presently called Israel.) Palestinians in the West Bank are ruled by a military force that makes absolutely no pretense of having the consent of the people over whom it rules. This Occupation is for two related purposes. First, it militarily prevents the Palestinians from mounting a successful effort to return to the part of Palestine (now called Israel) from which they were forcibly expelled by the Zionists who created the state of Israel in 1948 (i.e., to enjoy their Right of Return). Second, it subjects the Palestinians to daily extreme oppression (often without any other purpose than to make life miserable for Palestinians) to ensure that they will be sufficiently angry at Israel to be easily portrayed by the Israeli ruling class as a mortal enemy of Jews in Israel. While Israel does not have soldiers stationed in the Gaza Strip (a strip of Palestine land unconnected to the West Bank, 70% of whose occupants are Palestinian refugees from what is now called Israel), it totally dominates it as an "outdoor prison" and has the same two purposes regarding it as mentioned above regarding the Occupation of the West Bank.
The Palestinians #1 Grievance
The number one grievance of Palestinians is NOT that they do not have a "state of their own" in the 22% (much less, actually, due to the permanent invasion of this land by Israeli settlers) of Palestine that is not called Israel that would supposedly result from the so-called "two-state solution." No! Their number one grievance is the ethnic cleansing [3], specifically a) Israel's denial of their Right of Return, b) the refusal of Israel to justly compensate them for the theft by Zionists of virtually all of their property during the ethnic cleansing (in contrast to Germany's compensation to Jews for the theft of their property by the Nazis) and c) the harsh discrimination (both in the law and de facto) by Israel against non-Jews (Palestinians) inside both Israel and--more obviously!--the West Bank and Gaza Strip; this is why people rightly accuse Israel of being apartheid.
Zionist Leaders' Contempt for Ordinary Jews
The Zionist leaders have always had nothing but contempt for ordinary Jews. Zionist leaders sabotaged rescue efforts of Jews during the Holocaust if they entailed sending the Jews anywhere other than Palestine. Zionist leaders withheld food from Jews in the Displaced Persons camps after World War II in order to force them to go to Palestine to fight Arabs when the place most wanted to go to was the United States. Once established as a ruling class (in the new state of Israel) Zionist leaders continued to oppress ordinary Jews viciously.
No! Arabs Have NOT Always Hated Jews
Before the Zionist movement made its goal of ethnic cleansing evident (prior to 1936) there had been extremely peaceful relations between the minority of Jews and the majority of non-Jews living in Palestine. In fact, when Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492 they went to Muslim lands including Palestine (part of the Ottoman Empire) for safety, which they enjoyed for centuries.
No! The Fundamental Conflict is NOT between "the Jews" and "the Palestinians"
The fundamental conflict is NOT between "the Jews" (who supposedly need a Jewish state with a robust Jewish majority population to be safe) versus "the Palestinians" (who supposedly hate Jews--as opposed to Zionism--for making most of Palestine a Jewish state.) The conflict is between ordinary people (both Jews and Palestinians) who are oppressed and who want to live as equals without oppression [8], versus those who oppress them--mainly the Jewish billionaire ruling class of Israel but also some oppressive Palestinians less obviously.
No! Israel Does NOT Force the U.S. to Support It
United States billionaires--the ruling class (Jews and non-Jews both--support the Israeli ethnic cleansing because the Palestinian bogeyman enemy it creates helps the U.S. ruling class control the American public by pretending to protect us from "terrorism" just as it helps the Israeli ruling class control "its own people." U.S. rulers have their own very rational (though immoral) reason for supporting Israel. The Israel lobby's power comes from the American ruling class.
What Should We Do?
Based on the truth, there is an obvious strategy for people who want to end the oppression of Palestinians; it is the strategy I spell out in "Listen Anti-Zionist!"
Now you know the truth. Let's see what the various lies are.
THE EXTREME PRO-ZIONIST LIE
The extreme pro-Zionist lie goes like this.
"Jews fleeing antisemitism returned to the land God gave them, Palestine: a 'place without people for a people without a home.' Because Arabs are a race of homicidal antisemites who have always hated Jews and always will hate them, Arabs are a permanent existential enemy of Jews in Israel. This is why, much as Jews hate to do it, they must use extreme violent measures to protect themselves against the Palestinians; otherwise the Palestinians would 'drive the Jews into the sea.'"
THE "LIBERAL" PRO-ZIONIST LIE
"Jews of course need a Jewish state--Israel, guaranteed no matter what to always be a robust majority Jewish--and we therefore absolutely cannot allow the Palestinian refugees to return. But we don't need the Occupation. The Occupation is endangering the long term survival of our Jewish state. Why? Because the longer the conflict over the Occupation goes, the more likely that it will come to be perceived by Jews in the United States as Palestinians wanting their civil rights versus the Israeli government denying them their civil rights--in other another version of the U.S. Civil Rights conflict of the 1960s. And if this happens, Israel will lose the support of American Jews and consequently the support of the U.S. government and that will be the end of Israel. [2]
"Therefore, what we need is the 'two-state solution.' Let the Palestinians have a state of their own in the part of Palestine that is not Israel, i.e., the 22% of Palestine consisting of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip (minus, of course, the part of this land presently occupied by the Israeli settlers who clearly will not move out of it.) The Israeli military will, of course, totally dominate this Palestinian state (the way it presently does the Gaza Strip) to ensure that the Palestinians will not ever even dream of returning to the part of Palestine (Israel) from which they were removed.
"This 'two-state solution' will end the conflict, since all the Palestinians really want is a state of their own."
This liberal Zionist two-state-solution has been the stated aim (never really taken seriously) of virtually every U.S. government since the Clinton administration until the present, and it is what Bernie Sanders advocates (he criticizes Netanyahu for not genuinely pursuing the two-state solution.)
The pro-Zionist Israeli newspaper, Ha'aretz, advocates this "two-state-solution" and its famous columnists, Gideon Levy and Amira Hass, write exceedingly eloquent denunciations of the Occupation and of the violence carried out by the Israeli government against Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip but they never (as far as I have seen; please correct me if you have information to the contrary) explicitly support the Right of Return of the Palestinian refugees; they thus implicitly support the "two-state solution" as does their employer, Ha'aretz.
Advocating the "two-state solution" is a morally repugnant view because it endorses ethnic cleansing and aims to make it permanent.
THE HAMAS LIE
The Hamas lie goes like this:
"The conflict is fundamentally between the Palestinian people and the Jews of Israel who are the oppressors of Palestinians. In this conflict, Palestinians are morally justified in killing any Jew--even children--in any part of Palestine (including the part called Israel) because all of the Jews oppress us one way or another, and even the babies [4] are brought up to do it. The goal of Palestinians is to make Islam the "umbrella" over people of all religions in all of Palestine, from the [Jordan] River to the [Mediterranean] Sea. We will fight the Jews until we prevail, and call on all who oppose oppression to support our resistance to Zionism."
This Hamas view is truly antisemitic (which is wishing to harm Jews just because they are Jews), and truly pro-terrorism (which is the targeting of non-combatants with lethal violence for a political end). It is extremely useful to the Zionists to have Hamas as a supposed enemy. In fact Zionists funded Hamas because they knew how useful it was for them to have Hamas represent Palestinians to the world community. [7] Zionist so-called attacks on Hamas are well-known to actually strengthen Hamas's rule over the people in the Gaza Strip. [9] Hamas is objectively an agent of Zionism, not its enemy. The right way to respond to Hamas terrorism is to condemn Zionism first, and only then to also condemn Hamas terrorism, as I have also written about here and here and here.
PRO-PALESTINIAN LIES OF OMISSION
Now we come to the pro-Palestinian views that, by omitting the full truth about Israel, enable Zionism to prevail.
Version #1
"We need peace in the Middle East. Let's just get the warring sides to talk to each other and reach a compromise agreement."
This is standard politician BS; it totally hides the truth about Israel.
Version #2
"We need to support the Palestinians' Right of Return, end the Occupation and end the apartheid discrimination against Palestinians; and we should use BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) to put pressure on Israel to win these goals."
This view is wonderful for what it advocates, but terrible for what it does not say. The good people who advocate this view virtually never say that Zionism is an attack on ordinary Israeli Jews as well as Palestinians. As a result of this, Zionists are able easily to (falsely) portray people expressing this view as enemies of the Jewish people. I wrote "Listen Anti-Zionist!" to persuade these good people to speak the truth about Israel.
This version #2 view is the view, apparently, of Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, but not of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (although I am willing to be corrected if somebody has more recent solid information on their views.) It is also the view of The Nation magazine and many progressives and Leftists.
Version #3
"Whatever any Palestinians do to resist Zionism is justified and we will never criticize them, even if some act in a way that helps the Zionists portray all Palestinians as antisemitic terrorists who aim to kill people just because they are Jews."
The Zionists absolutely LOVE it when people express this view, because it makes it super easy to portray them as enemies of the Jewish people. Note: Violence in self-defense against armed Zionist oppressors (Israeli soldiers and armed Israeli civilian settlers who violently oppress Palestinians) is perfectly morally justified, but not violence against noncombatants. Note also: The wrongful use of terrorist violence directed against noncombatants by some Palestinians is absolutely no excuse for supporting Zionism.
All of these views omit, and thereby enable the mass media to censor, the most important fact, that the "warring sides" are NOT "the Jews" versus "the Palestinians" but rather oppressed people--both ordinary Jews and Palestinians--versus those who are oppressing them--Israeli billionaires (with their Israeli government) and also some oppressive Palestinians. As long as this fact remains censored, the Zionist propaganda--that Israel is defending Jews against their mortal enemy and is simply using whatever violence this requires--will remain extremely effective. The Zionists will be able to persuasively assert that anybody who sides with the Palestinians, even if they are not intentionally antisemitic, is nonetheless objectively opposing the one force that is protecting Jews from antisemitic violence, and by doing so is therefore objectively if not intentionally antisemitic.
This is why the Oh-so liberal Boston Globe newspaper (pro-Israel, of course!), owned by the billionaire John Henry, removed my comment from one of its articles about Israel, a comment that linked to my article about how Israel oppresses ordinary Jews as well as Palestinians, but did not remove the other comments some of which were pro-Israel and others of which were pro-Palestine (and some of which also had links to online articles).
Likewise YouTube removed this video of mine about how Israel's government oppresses ordinary Jews as well as Palestinians. YouTube said it was "hate speech."
What Zionism needs is for people to believe that Israel is defending ordinary Jews against a world of antisemites, that the fundamental conflict is between Jews versus Palestinians, and that one can be on one side or the other but one has to choose. Zionism doesn't need the good people who are horrified at Israel's violence against Palestinians to take the side of Israel. All Zionism needs is for these good people to accept the false framework (i.e., that the conflict is between Jews and Palestinians). As long as this false framework for the conflict is the one in which the conflict is debated there will for sure be sufficient people taking the side of Israel to enable Zionism to prevail.
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1. "There are 40% non-Jews in the areas allocated to the Jewish state. This composition is not a solid basis for a Jewish state. And we have to face this new reality with all of its severity and distinctness. Such a demographic balance questions our ability to maintain Jewish sovereignty...Only a state with at least 80% Jews is a viable and stable state." David Ben-Gurion [Israel's first prime minister], in a speech given on December 3, 1947 in front of senior members of his Mapai party (the Eretz Israel Workers Party), quoted in The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (hardcover), pg. 48, by Ilan Pappe
Section 7A(1) of the Basic Law of Israel explicitly prevents Israeli citizens – Arab or Jewish – from using the "democratic" system of Israeli elections to challenge the inferior status of Arabs under the law; it restricts who can run for political office with this language: "A candidates' list shall not participate in elections to the Knesset if among its goals or deeds, either expressly or impliedly, are one of the following: (1) The negation of the existence of the State of Israel as the State of the Jewish People. …" In a 1989 Israeli Supreme Court ruling (reported in the 1991 Israel Law Review, Vol. 25, p. 219, published by the Faculty of Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem) Justice S. Levine, speaking for the majority, ruled that this law meant that a political party could not run candidates if it intended to achieve the cancellation of one of the fundamental tenets of the State – namely "the existence of a Jewish majority, the granting of preference to Jews in matters of immigration, and the existence of close and reciprocal relations between the State and the Jews of the Diaspora."
2. Ehud Olmert, as reported in Ha'aretz November 29, 2007, said:
WASHINGTON - "If the day comes when the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights (also for the Palestinians in the territories), then, as soon as that happens, the State of Israel is finished," Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told Haaretz Wednesday, the day the Annapolis conference ended in an agreement to try to reach a Mideast peace settlement by the end of 2008.
"The Jewish organizations, which were our power base in America, will be the first to come out against us," Olmert said, "because they will say they cannot support a state that does not support democracy and equal voting rights for all its residents."
3. The right of the refugees to return is the #1 issue for most Palestinians. An opinion poll of Palestinians reports: “Right of Return Not Negotiable, Say Palestinians July 01, 2008 (Angus Reid Global Monitor) - The vast majority of people in the West Bank and Gaza would reject giving up the so-called right of return, according to a poll by the Palestinian Center for Public Opinion. 89.8 per cent of respondents are not willing to compromise the right to re-occupy their land in Israel in exchange for the creation of a Palestinian state and a peace agreement.” [full article is at http://www.angus-reid.com/polls/view/31128/right_of_return_not_negotiable_say_palestinians ].
4. When I was working with the anti-Zionist Somerville Divestment Project in 2005 in Somerville, MA, two of its members (not Palestinians)--a married couple--lectured me about how Jews in Israel say a prayer when a baby is born that makes the baby a Zionist soldier and hence a legitimate target to be killed by the Palestinian resistance. (These individuals were subsequently fortunately removed from the organization.)
5. In the February 13, 2006 edition of Israel’s Haaretz newspaper, an article by Ora Corwen and Lilach Weissman had the headline, “18 wealthiest families earn 32% of Israel's revenues.” The article went on to report:
The income of the 18 wealthiest families in Israel is equivalent to 77 percent of Israel's national budget, which is NIS 256 billion a year, and constitutes 32 percent of the country's revenues, according to a survey conducted by the Business Data Israel company published Monday…
The Labor party responded to the statistics, saying they were proof Acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Likud Chairman Benjamin Netanyahu, both former finance ministers, parcelled the state off to cronies during their pushes for privatization.
"It's no coincidence that of the 18 families, at least seven [including Dankner] are considered Olmert's close friends," the party said in a statement.
"The connection between wealth and power makes it hard to have equal opportunities, and threatens Israeli society," Labor representatives said.
The most powerful families include the Dankners; Sami and Yuli Ofer; Shari Arison; Izzy and Dedi Borovich; Zadik Bino; Yair Hamburger; Avi Wertheim; Stef Wertheimer; Zohar, Yehuda and Roy Zisapel; Lev Leviev; Mickey Federmann; Eliezer Fishman; Jacob Shachar; Israel Kass; Ofra Strauss; Reuven Shmeltzer; and Yitzhak Tshuv.
The Jewish Daily Forward in 2006 reported :
"Israel’s growing population of retirees has been reduced to a state of profound economic insecurity in recent years, as self-styled economic reformers have hollowed out the Jewish state’s time-honored system of care for the elderly. Pensions have been frozen. Social security payments, known in Israel as national insurance, have been relentlessly whittled away — cut by 35% in a single decade. Health care and prescription drug coverage have been slashed, along with funds for senior housing and assisted living. It’s part of a deliberate move by Jerusalem policy-makers to modernize Israel’s economy, by which they mean to remodel it along American lines. Determined to bury the socialist ethos of Israel’s founders, successive governments since the mid-1980s have slashed income supports and welfare payments even as they’ve privatized and deregulated industries, opened capital markets to international competition and reduced workers’ job security (they call it “liberalizing labor laws”). Over the past three years, under the economic leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu, the reforms have been ramped up to a revolution."
The Forward explains the "meteoric rise of the Pensioners' Party" in the April, 2006 election this way:
"And then there was the simple, glaring fact of poverty. Too many Israelis had reached the point where their own personal security seemed more precarious than their country’s."
6. In a famous interview with Ha’aretz newspaper, Morris discusses how David Ben-Gurion deliberately "transferred" the Arab population out of Israel's new borders during the years from 1947 to 1949:
BM: "Of course. Ben-Gurion was a transferist. He understood that there could be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in its midst. There would be no such state. It would not be able to exist."
Ha'aretz: "I don't hear you condemning him."
BM: "Ben-Gurion was right. If he had not done what he did, a state would not have come into being. That has to be clear. It is impossible to evade it. Without the uprooting of the Palestinians, a Jewish state would not have arisen here."
This uprooting of the Palestinians was a crime against humanity under international law. It was bigotry on a massive scale. The Zionist (after May of 1948, Israeli) military forced at gunpoint or intimidated (especially as word spread of Israeli massacres of Palestinians in villages like Deir Yassin) approximately 750,000 Palestinians (nearly all of those who lived inside what became the new state of Israel) into leaving their villages and towns of many generations. All of this was done in the name of "security," but for the security of a project in which, as David Ben-Gurion stated, the Zionists "are the aggressors and they [the Palestinians] defend themselves." And Israel today persists in the bigotry, employing the same excuse of "security." Israel refuses to allow the approximately four million Palestinian refugees to return to Israel-proper (i.e., the land inside the 1948 borders of Israel) where they or their forebears lived and owned property (subsequently confiscated by Israel) before fleeing in fear for their lives in the 1947-9 years of violence and warfare which preceded and immediately followed the founding of the state of Israel.
7. Forbes reports:
"Incredibly, Israel also supplies Hamas with cash. It began transferring truckloads of cash to Gaza after Hamas' violent takeover of the territory in June 2007. The first transfer of more than $51 million (delivered in Israeli shekels) was purportedly to strengthen the influence of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in the Gaza Strip and pay the salaries of 35,000 Palestinian Authority employees then allegedly loyal to him. Among those employees, however, were Ismail Haniya, the Hamas-appointed prime minister in Gaza, and Mahmoud Zahar, Hamas' foreign minister.
"Zahar prides himself on many successful terrorist attacks against Israel, and his position regarding Israel is clear. "All of Palestine, every inch of Palestine belongs to the Muslims," he has said. If the goal was to strengthen Abbas' position, the cash should have been delivered to him in the West Bank city of Ramallah. From there, he could have transferred the money to Gaza, as he has done in the past, and claim credit for it."
8. What ordinary Palestinians and Israelis, as opposed to their respective “leaders,” want can be inferred from an event that I read about back in 2001. On August 30, 2001 in the West Bank Palestinian village of Ni'elin, Amos Tagouri, a 60-year-old Israeli Jewish cab driver, was having breakfast in a little restaurant just opened by his Palestinian friend, Mursi Amira, when a masked gunman walked up to his table and fatally shot him. Tagouri was an Israeli Jew in a village of Palestinians who were largely unemployed because Israel wouldn't let them travel to their former jobs in Israel. But he was highly regarded by the people of Ni'elin.
According to the Boston Globe report of the incident (September 1, 2001), Amira said:
"Amos was one of us. He knew our culture. If he prayed with us he would have been one of us completely. . . . This is a bigger loss for us than for the Jews...he helped people here a lot. He was not rich, but he drove the farmers to sell their cactus fruit and figs in Israel, and if they didn't have enough money to pay until after the market, he accepted that...The whole village is angry. The people of this village spit on this. It is an act of cowardice."
Mustafa Amira, a vegetable stand owner, said, "He helped us. He respected us, we respected him. Hamas, Fatah - I don't know" who killed him. "I know they are a gang." Amira's mother condemned the killers. "They think if they kill him, the Israelis crack down, and the village will be radicalized. I hope it will not happen." "The extremists do not want peace," said Sakhi Hayun, 34, owner of the Sandwich Bar in Modi'in and former employer of Amira and his brother. "That's why they kill Arab and Israeli civilians in the road. Ninety percent of the people, both Israelis and Arabs, do not support this."
The Boston Globe reported this as a freak event, calling the village the "rarest of places in the bitter struggle that has convulsed Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories for 11 months—a place where one side cried over a death on the other." But what happened in Ni'elin is what Arab and Jewish elites are afraid will happen everywhere unless they can prevent it by spreading fear and mistrust with terrorism and government-sponsored discrimination.
This is why, for example, the Israeli government was afraid of the solidarity between Jews and Arabs that was developing in the struggle against the construction of a super highway. On October 15, 2001, Arab residents of Baka al Gharabiya and Jatt demonstrated against the Israeli government's plan to confiscate 2,800 dunams of their land for the Trans-Israel Highway. While Arabs in Israel own only 3% of the privately held land, 85% of the land confiscated for the highway (travel on which is restricted for non-Jews) had been taken from Palestinian Israelis, destroying agricultural land they needed to survive. Jews in Israel rallied to support the Arab protest, arguing that "The highway will effectively deepen cleavages between Jews and Arabs, rich and poor, taking jobs from poor peasants and farmers, to make transportation more convenient for the rich." Jewish residents of nearby Kibbutz Magal and Ma'anit told the Israeli government that, if the road must be built, the land confiscation should not discriminate against non-Jews, and for that reason they proposed an alternative plan that entailed giving over some of their land to their Palestinian neighbors in a logical compromise. But the Israel Lands Authority and Ariel Sharon's government insisted that the plans move forward without changes. The incident is but one example of why Palestinians are fighting the Israeli government.
Incidents like these show that most people in Palestine and the part of it called Israel want peace and security in a society based on equality, concern for one another and mutual aid. Their leaders want society to be unequal, with them at the top ruling over and dominating everybody else.
9. The Israeli attacks on Palestinian civilians in Gaza strengthen the Hamas leaders’ grip on power in Gaza.
There is plenty of evidence for this mutually beneficial relationship between the Israeli and Hamas leaders:
UPI Terrorism Correspondent, Richard Sale, wrote an article in 2002 titled, Hamas History Tied to Israel” in which he states:
"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." [emphasis added]
In 2009, Rashid Khalidi, Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia, wrote an article in which he said:
"Resistance movements such as Hizbullah and Hamas, by contrast, can plausibly claim that they forced Israel to withdraw from occupied Arab land while scoring impressive gains at the ballot box; they have also been reasonably free of corruption. As if determined to increase the influence of these radical movements, Israel has undermined Abbas and the PA at every turn…
"But Hamas will not be so easily defeated, even if Israel’s merciless assault and Hamas’s own obduracy have brought untold suffering on the people of Gaza and much of the Strip lies in ruins: like Hizbullah in Lebanon in 2006, all it has to do in order to proclaim victory is remain standing. The movement continued to fire rockets into Israel under devastating bombardment, and it looks likely to emerge politically stronger when the war is over… " [emphasis added]
John J. Mearsheimer, professor of political science at the University of Chicago, wrote an article (originally for The American Conservative) in 2009 in which he stated:
"More importantly, there is little reason to think that the Israelis can beat Hamas into submission and get the Palestinians to live quietly in a handful of Bantustans inside Greater Israel. Israel has been humiliating, torturing, and killing Palestinians in the Occupied Territories since 1967 and has not come close to cowing them. Indeed, Hamas’s reaction to Israel’s brutality seems to lend credence to Nietzsche’s remark that what does not kill you makes you stronger." [emphasis added]
Anthony H. Cordesman, who held the Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy at the Center for Strategic & International Studies, and who was also a national security analyst for ABC News, wrote an article in 2009 in which he stated in regard to the fighting in Gaza:
"At least to date, the reporting from within Gaza indicates that each new Israeli air strike or advance on the ground has increased popular support for Hamas and anger against Israel in Gaza. The same is true in the West Bank and the Islamic world. Iran and Hezbollah are capitalizing on the conflict…
What is the strategic purpose behind the present fighting?…Will Israel end in empowering an enemy in political terms that it defeated in tactical terms?...To [be] blunt, the answer so far seems to be yes." [emphasis added]
Khalid Amayreh, in his blog in 2009, wrote about the Israeli attack on Gaza in an article titled, “Hamas gaining sympathy as onslaught continue”:
"With the massive Israeli onslaught against the Gaza Strip continuing unabated, and with Israeli political and military leaders threatening to “decimate” Hamas, Palestinian intellectuals as well as ordinary people expect Hamas’s popularity to rise dramatically when the present Israeli campaign is over…"
"Qassem predicted that the current Israeli campaign would actually lead to the boosting of Hamas’s popularity…
"Another Palestinian intellectual, Abdul Bari Atwan, predicts that public support for Hamas will increase as a result of the present Israeli campaign in the Gaza Strip."
Al Jazeera English made a video report in 2009 titled “War on GAZA: Popular Support” in which they wrote:
"Since beginning its offensive in the Gaza Strip Israel has repeatedly declared it will maintain attacks to smash what it calls the Hamas terrorist machine. However, as Israel's bombardment continues, the appeal of Hamas in the Arab world appears to be growing. Al Jazeeras Hashem Ahelbarra reports on how the war has left Hamas gaining popular support."
Some of these reports are by people who think Israeli leaders don’t realize that their massacres of Palestinians in Gaza strengthens the Hamas leaders’ power there. But there is evidence that the Israeli leaders understand this full well. There is a video of a talk given by Professor Juan Cole, an expert on the Middle East. The host who introduces Cole name-drops that he recently had lunch with former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, and then (starting at the 26:56 minute point of the video) reports having heard a startling eyewitness account of the following: that during the recent Israeli slaughter of people in Gaza, supposedly to wipe out Hamas, this eyewitness was on the phone directly with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barack and told him he knew where the Hamas leadership was hiding, and Barack replied, "We know where Hamas's leadership is hiding, but we're not going to go further, we are trying to send a message."
The video is titled, “Making a National Priority of Engaging the Muslim World and was published March 24, 2009, “Recorded @ uStream.Tv”