The US supported the fledgling Mujaheddin to fight Iran. Same result. We now support SA, Al Qaeda and ISIS against…sorry…I have lost track.

by Jeremy R. Hammond

https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/how-israel-supported-hamas-against-the-plo/

Since the Hamas-led attacks in Israel on October 7, 2023, Israel has been executing a devastating assault on the civilian population of the Gaza Strip, blocking humanitarian aid, internally displacing 75% of Gaza’s population, systematically destroying civilian infrastructure, and otherwise bombing indiscriminately. To date, over 34,000 Palestinians have been killed, including over 9,500 women and over 14,500 children.¹ More than 10,000 additional Palestinians are missing under the rubble, and over 77,000 have been injured.² Children have been dying from hunger and malnutrition due to Israel’s use of starvation as a method of warfare.³

In a case brought against Israel by the government of South Africa, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has deemed Israel’s military operation a plausible genocide.⁴ The U.S. government under the administration of Joseph R. Biden has been absolutely complicit in Israel’s war crimes and crimes against humanity.⁵

In reporting on the situation, the American mainstream media has tended to start their timeline for reporting on October 7, with little to no historical context provided to help news consumers understand why Hamas’s armed wing would break through the armistice line fence surrounding Gaza to perpetrate what it called “Operation Al Aqsa Flood.”⁶

Editors at The New York Times even instructed journalists to avoid describing the West Bank and Gaza as “occupied territories” despite Israel being occupying power in both territories under international law, with its belligerent occupation ongoing now for nearly 57 years, leading UN bodies and international human rights organizations to describe it as an apartheid regime.⁷

Times reporters were additionally told not to use the term “ethnic cleansing” on the grounds that it is “historically charged,” even though about 80% of Gaza’s population are refugees or their descendants from the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestine, which was the means by which the self-described “Jewish state” came into existence.⁸

The New York Times further instructed its reporters to restrict the use of the word “genocide,” along with “slaughter” and “massacre,” on the grounds that these words are “incendiary.”⁹ Meanwhile, The New York Times is fine with using the words “slaughter” and “massacre” when referring to Israelis killed by Palestinians. An analysis by The Intercept found that, in the pages of The New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times, “The term ‘slaughter’ was used by editors and reporters to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 60 to 1, and ‘massacre’ was used to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 125 to 2. ‘Horrific’ was used to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 36 to 4.” In fact, The Intercept found that as the Palestinian death toll climbed, mentions of Palestinians decreased.¹⁰

One particularly important piece of historical context that the mainstream media unsurprisingly omit from their reporting, with it only slipping out in very rare exceptions, is how the Israeli government under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had long been effectively utilizing Hamas as a strategic ally to block any movement toward peace negotiations with the Palestinians.¹¹

In fact, Hamas had been essentially nurtured by Israel since its founding in the late-1980s, at which time the Israeli government utilized the group as a counterforce to Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which had dangerously joined the international consensus in favor of the two-state solution to the conflict.¹²

A heightened threat of terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians has always been a price that Israeli leaders were willing to pay to combat the threat of peace, which poses an obstacle to the Zionist regime’s territorial aims. Indeed, Israel has depended on the threat of terrorism to justify the persistence of its occupation regime and brutal oppression of the Palestinians.

The Founding of Hamas

In 1973, an Islamic charity organization named Mujama al-Islamiya was established in the Gaza Strip by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, whose family had fled to Gaza when Zionist armed forces ethnically cleansed their village during what is commonly known as the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.¹³ That is the war that resulted in the establishment of the state of Israel in 78% of the territory formerly known as Palestine.

The village where Yassin was born, al-Jura, was one of over five hundred Arab villages that the Zionists literally wiped off the map in furtherance of their goal to reconstitute Palestine into a demographically “Jewish state.” While the 1948 war is known to Israelis as the “War for Independence,” the ethnic cleansing by which Israel came into being is known to the Palestinians as Al Nakba, or “The Catastrophe.”¹⁴

The tale that we are routinely told by the Western mainstream media is that Arabs were the aggressors for having started the war by invading the newly created state of Israel. Supporting that narrative is the popular myth that Israel was established by the United Nations through a legitimate political process that the Arabs rejected for no other reason than that they hated Jews.

But that is all a lie. The truth is that UN General Assembly Resolution 181 neither partitioned Palestine nor conferred any legal authority to the Zionist leadership for their unilateral declaration of the existence of Israel on May 14, 1948, by which time over a quarter million Arabs had already been ethnically cleansed from their homes.¹⁵

The neighboring Arab states intervened to try to stop the ethnic cleansing, but they mostly failed. By the time it was over and armistice lines were drawn in 1949, approximately 750,000 Arabs had become refugees whose right to return to their homes was denied by the Zionist regime.

Having suffered a severe spinal injury at the age of twelve, Ahmed Yassin was a quadriplegic and wheelchair-bound for most of his life. In 1959, he went to Egypt and spent a year studying at university, but he lacked the funds to continue his academic career and returned to Gaza. The experience had left him deeply influenced by the Egyptian organization known as the Muslim Brotherhood, and he later became involved in the creation of a Palestinian branch of the group in Gaza.¹⁶

In 1978, Mujama al-Islamiya, or the “Islamic Centre,” was legally registered as a charity in Israel. The group built schools, mosques, and clubs in occupied Gaza.¹⁷ “Crucially,” The Wall Street Journal reported in 2009, “Israel often stood aside when the Islamists and their secular left-wing Palestinian rivals battled, sometimes violently, for influence in both Gaza and the West Bank.”¹⁸

The internationally recognized leadership of the occupied Palestinian territories at the time was the secular Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) headed up by Yasser Arafat, a key founder and leader of the political party Fatah.

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