I recently had the pleasure of speaking with former CNN reporter Jim Clancy on his podcast The Brief
about how Hamas really came to power in Gaza. Dispelling mainstream
propaganda narratives, we detail how Hamas from the start was used by
Israel as a strategic ally to block implementation of the two-state
solution. 👉 Watch the full interview now! Interview SummaryWe
explain how the precursor organization to Hamas, Mujama Al-Islamiya,
was founded by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin as an offshoot of the Muslim
Brotherhood, registered in Israel in 1978 as a charity organization. The
group evolved into Hamas, which published its charter in 1988. From
the start, Israel showed favor to the Islamists as a counterforce to
Yasser Arafat’s secular Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the
threat of peace posed by the PLO’s acceptance since the mid-70s of the
two-state solution. In
2004, Sheikh Yassin declared Hamas’s willingness to accept a
Palestinian state alongside Israel along the 1949 armistice lines, also
known as the 1967 lines after the June 1967 war in which Israel invaded
and occupied the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza
Strip. Israel’s response to Hamas’s movement away from armed conflict
toward political engagement was to assassinate Yassin. Israeli
security officials criticized the assassination, warning that it would
only empower the more radical extremists in Hamas and escalate the
threat of terrorism. But the political calculation was that Hamas was
becoming too much like the PLO in posing a threat of peace by expressing
a willingness to accept Israel’s existence alongside a free Palestine. In
2005, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon implemented his
“disengagement plan” involving an abandonment of its illegal settlement
regime in Gaza to focus on its expropriating more land in the West Bank.
Contrary to Zionist propaganda, this did not end Israel’s status as
Occupying Power in Gaza since it continued to control Gaza’s borders,
airspace, and waterways as well as continuing administrative functions.
As I explained in the interview, it is also a myth that the response to
Israel’s withdraw was incessant rocket fire from Hamas. Under
the 1990s Oslo Accords, the Palestinian Authority (PA) was established
effectively to serve as Israel’s collaborator in enforcing its
occupation regime. The PA’s corruption under President Mahmoud Abbas and
his Fatah party was a key reason why Hamas became so popular in the
occupied territories. In
2005, Hamas participated in municipal elections, and in early 2006,
Hamas defeated Fatah in a legislative election, resulting in a Hamas-led
government in the occupied territories. The
response from Israel was to place Gaza under siege to collectively
punish the civilian population while colluding with the US and Abbas to
try to overthrow the democratically elected government. The result was a
violent feud between Hamas and Fatah, the expulsion of Fatah from Gaza,
and a division of the Palestinian leadership between Hamas in Gaza and
the PA in the West Bank. 👉 Learn more with my books on the subject! After
discussing the true history of Hamas’s rise to power in Gaza, we turned
our focus to the US government’s longstanding policy of supporting
Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians. I
explained why the popular belief that the United Nations (UN) created
Israel is a myth aimed at concealing the truth that the “Jewish state”
was founded in 1948 through the ethnic cleansing of most of the Arab
population from their homes in Palestine. The
US joined other Western countries in rejecting the Palestinians’ right
to self-determination and immediately recognized the state of Israel
after its unilateral declaration of existence on May 14, 1948, by which
time a quarter million Arabs had already been ethnically cleansed from
their homes. US
support for Israel escalated in 1967 after it started a war by invading
Egypt and invading and occupying the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The
claim this attack was “preemptive” is another Zionist myth. Egyptian
President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s belligerent rhetoric was a face-saving
reaction to being accused by allies Jordan and Syria of hiding behind UN
peacekeeping forces stationed along the border since Israel’s 1956
invasion of Egypt during the Suez Crisis. Another
supposed proof of Egypt’s intent to attack Israel was its expulsion of
the UN Emergency Force (UNEF), but this was again a face-saving measure
after Nasser was accused of hiding behind the force, and when the
proposal was made to restation UNEF on Israel’s side of the border,
Israel rejected it. The
US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) observed that once Egyptian forces
entered the Sinai Peninsula, often cited as proof of an intention to
attack Israel, they took up defensive positions,
and US President Lyndon B. Johnson was informed that if war was to
break out, it would be started by Israel, which would easily defeat the
combined Arab armies due to its overwhelming qualitative military
superiority. Next, I explained how the US-led so-called “peace process” was always the means by which Israel and its superpower benefactor blocked implementation of the two-state solution. I also clarified the important distinction between the two-state
solution premised upon the applicability of international law to the
conflict and the goal of the “peace process”, which was premised on a rejection of
international law, including a rejection of UN Security Council
Resolution 242, which was passed in the wake of the 1967 war and
required Israel to withdraw its occupying forces to the 1949 armistice
lines. Under
the alternative framework of the “peace process”, the occupation would
continue, and Palestinians were expected to negotiate with their
oppressors over how much of their own land they could keep and maybe
someday exercise some kind of limited autonomy over. Mr.
Clancy and I also discussed how Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu, throughout his time in power, has furthered the basic policy
of the “disengagement plan”, aiming for a complete takeover of the West
Bank while utilizing Hamas as a strategic ally to block any movement
toward peace negotiations with the Palestinians. For
maintaining that policy, Netanyahu was widely blamed in Israel for the
Hamas-led attacks on October 7, 2023, dubbed “Operation Al Aqsa Flood”, a
reference to Hamas’s self-described role as protector of the Al Aqsa
Mosque Compound, known to Israelis as the Temple Mount, in occupied East
Jerusalem. While
there were intelligence warnings and foreknowledge of Hamas’s planned
operation, the Israeli leadership blinded themselves to the threat,
clinging to the view that their policy was working to contain Hamas
within the “huge concentration camp”, as Gaza was described in 2004 by
then head of Israel’s National Security Council Giora Eiland—an
outspoken voice advocating genocide after 10/7. We
also discussed the reasons for Netanyahu’s reluctance to allow an
inquiry into the security failure and how real atrocities against
Israeli civilians were embellished with many false claims, such as the
beheading of babies and systematic rape as a weapon of war, aimed at
gaining sympathetic support from the international community for
Israel’s genocidal response. It
is also now evident that some—if not many—Israeli civilians were killed
on 10/7 not by Hamas or other armed Palestinian groups but by IDF
forces, akin to the “Hannibal Directive” developed in the 1980s whereby
overwhelming force would be used to prevent soldiers from being
captured, even if it meant killing the soldier. Early reports about the
IDF firing indiscriminately and killing Israeli civilians from The Grayzone, Electronic Intifada, and Mondoweiss were initially dismissed as conspiracy theories but later confirmed by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. 👉 Be sure to follow me on social media! Clancy
and I next turned our focus to the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the
claim that Hamas has been stealing aid. In fact, the IDF has attacked
Hamas when its security forces have tried to protect aid convoys—and the
IDF has been protecting the criminal gangs actually responsible for the
hijacking and looting of aid trucks. I
shared my outlook on the prospects of the international community doing
something to stop the slaughter in Gaza. While there have been some
moves, such as South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the
International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the issuance of arrest warrants
for Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant by the
International Criminal Court (ICC), the prospects are grim. Most
of Israeli society, polls have shown, has become genocidal. There was
ceasefire agreement between Hamas and Israel earlier this year that
Hamas was honoring, but President Donald Trump encouraged Israel to
violate it and resume its genocidal assault, so it did. Domestically,
Trump has cracked down on student protests against the genocide by
threatening universities for not cracking down on free speech and
threatening deportation of non-citizen activists legally in the US. Finally,
I discuss the role of the mainstream media in deceiving the public
about the nature of the Israel-Palestine conflict by spreading Zionist
propaganda designed to manufacture consent for the US policy of
supporting the Jewish supremacist state’s crimes against the
Palestinians, including the crimes against humanity of ethnic cleansing,
apartheid, and now genocide. Without
US support, it could not continue, and Americans in particular among
the citizens of Earth have a moral responsibility to stand up and speak
out. Silence is complicity when genocide is occurring. 👉 Watch the full interview and share this knowledge! Support My WorkNobody paid me to do the research reflected in this interview. I cannot do this work without reader support. Recently,
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