Fake news and genocide.
Israel vs Hamas
On October 7 Israel was attacked, it’s being called Israel’s 9/11 by the white house and the media. 1,400 people, mostly innocent civilians, killed in a day in a country of roughly 9.8 million people. A shocking massacre. They were killed for no other reason than they are Jewish. Only, there is no evidence there were Al Qaeda/ISIS style massacres of the type described by Israeli officials and the media. Yes, civilians died, but not how you may think. What really happened is Israel suffered a military defeat on October 7 and responded with a sophisticated psychological operation before starting a genocidal campaign on the people of Gaza.
First, let’s go through Israel/Palestine 101 and the history of the conflict. It’s necessary context. The “Palestine region” comprising what is internationally recognized as Israel and Palestine is located in between the Jordan river and Mediterranean Sea in the middle east. It borders Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, and Jordan. Israel is in between 2 parts of what is internationally recognized as Palestine, the “west bank” on the east and to the west of Israel is the “Gaza strip”. There are holy cities for the 3 Abrahamic religions of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism located here, the most important being Jerusalem.
Israel is three-fourths Jewish and one-fifth Arab (the rest immigrants). There are Christians and Muslims among the Arabs there, although a vast majority are Muslim. The Palestinian territories are essentially all Arab, a vast majority are Muslim, but they also have a small Christian population in these territories too. So, what is the conflict? Is it as complicated as so many make it seem? Nope. It’s actually quite simple, it’s a settler colonial project. It’s similar to the United States or Canada only Israel’s original sin is in living memory. Israel was only created in 1947-1948, Joe Biden and Donald Trump are older than Israel.
Israel is the end result of the Zionist movement. The idea of returning Jewish people, a persecuted, stateless, people to their ancient homeland they were expelled from thousands of years ago (look at a map from 2,000 years ago and see how many wars this insane logic would cause). A lot of supporters of Israel say anti Zionism is antisemitism, but this is absurd. A lot of Jewish people are anti-Zionist, and most Zionists are Christian. Ironically, Christian Zionists are Zionist for antisemitic reasons, hoping for Jews to take over the land so Jesus can come back and wipe them out. Jerusalem is featured in all the Abrahamic religions’ “end times” stories.
The person considered the father of the Zionist movement is Theodor Herzl, he started the first Zionist congress in 1897. Herzl knew the Zionist project meant expelling or subjugating the local population. In 1902 Herzl wrote a letter (unsent) to Cecil Rhodes saying Zionism was “something colonial”. He seemed to have a lot of respect for a man whose company committed massacres, raping and pillaging in Africa, he wrote to “ask for advice”. The early Zionist movement even had a bank called Jewish Colonial Trust. Before the advent of Zionism only about 4% of modern-day Israel/Palestine, then known as the Palestine region in the Ottoman empire, was Jewish.
Pre Israel, the Muslim controlled Ottoman empire was a safe haven for many Jewish people. There was obviously some antisemitism, but nothing on the scale of European Christian antisemitism, which led to large scale massacres. The Ottoman empire collapsed during World War 1 and it was the British who took over after them. In 1917 as the British were still fighting the ottomans, British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour announced British government support for a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. Of course, the Palestinian people were not consulted. At the time the declaration was written Jewish people were roughly 10% of the region. Most Jewish people resided in Europe. There was no way to create a “Jewish state” without expelling or killing the locals. Balfour and others who supported this weren’t doing it out of a concern for the well-being of Jewish people, he was an antisemite who wanted Jewish people out of his country. Ironically, the only Jewish member of parliament Edwin Montagu at the time opposed Zionism and called out the government for its antisemitism.
After World War 1, there were even more massacres of Jews in eastern Europe, and the Zionist movement started to grow rapidly. Over time, the native population started getting more and more uncomfortable with the continuation of (mostly) European immigration. The Zionists had started paramilitaries and became increasingly aggressive. At the end of World War 2 the Jewish population was just over 30% of the Palestine region. In 1947 the UN decided by majority vote that there were would be a partition plan creating separate Jewish and Arab states. After the holocaust, one of the worst massacres in human history, the idea of a safe haven for Jewish people was stronger than ever. The great powers also finally had a good answer to the Jewish refugee question. There were also other political considerations.
Essentially the entire Arab world reacted horribly, several Arab countries declared war. These states clearly had the moral high ground. The UN plan was absurd, the Jewish population was just over 30% of the region yet they were given 56% of the land. There was no way to create a legitimate Jewish state without Palestinian Arab dispossession. The war ended in 1948 with a Zionist victory and the beginning of the state of Israel. Over the course of the victory roughly half the Palestinian population was forced out, thousands of innocents were killed on top of that. Palestinians call this the Nakba or the catastrophe. This horrible event is in living memory, you can see videos of those Zionist terrorists in their 90s bragging about some of these 1948 massacres on social media.
Historian Avi Shlaim along with others have debunked many of Israel’s founding myths. They were not an underdog in the fight, they had access to European weaponry and more trained fighters. The Arab leaders did not tell the Palestinians to leave. All the Arab countries were not a monolith, and each had their own political aims. The British were not as opposed to the creation of Israel as they said and on and on. What about after 1948?
Bad blood would understandably remain between Israel and Arab states after 1948. Outside of the original sin of Israel it continued to allow in Jewish people from all over the world with no actual connection to the land. Again, their claims to the land are based on the fact that their ancestors lived there thousands of years ago, an absurd claim. Meanwhile, Palestinians expelled in 1948 could not come back. The neighboring Arab states also took in large amounts of Palestinian refugees. In 1956 Israel along with the British and French invaded Egypt and lost. In 1967 Israel was at war with Egypt and other Arab states again, but this time they won easily. Israel took over the west bank, Gaza strip, the Golan Heights in Syria, and the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt. Israel still occupies all these places besides the Sinia Peninsula to this day (illegal under international law). Later in the early 80s Israel would invade Lebanon because of the presence of Palestinian resistance fighters there along with territorial ambitions. They occupied part of Lebanon for almost 2 decades but were eventually expelled. So, what is Israeli occupation like? Extremely brutal.
People in the west bank have no rights and there are military checkpoints everywhere. They are second class citizens to the Jewish settlers there. Human rights organization have called Israel a Jewish supremacist apartheid state (Israel was also the last developed nation to sanction apartheid South Africa and had such a close relationship they helped them get a nuclear weapon). There are separate Jewish roads Palestinians aren’t allowed on and Palestinians get their homes taken regularly. Israeli forces kill civilians, torture people, rape, and imprison thousands without trial. In Gaza things are much worse. Israel has had them under blockade for almost 2 decades. Norman Finkelstein, an expert on the Palestine issue, describes Gaza as hell on earth. It’s one of the most densely populated places on earth, half the population under 18. They are under blockade and people are essentially trapped. Israel controls what goes in and what goes out. People barely eat, 96% of the water is contaminated, half the people are unemployed. If that isn’t bad enough, every few years Israel launches massive bombing campaigns killing or injuring thousands. Mainstream sources describe it as an “open air prison” or even a concentration camp.
So, what about the “peace process” and Hamas? Isn’t Israel a level-headed secular nation while their counterparts are crazy fundamentalist Arabs? Aren’t they forced into this aggression? Israel is a settler colonial project; they don’t want peace and harmony. Anyone pretending otherwise is ill informed or has ill intentions. Right after 1967 Israel started the illegal settlements in the west bank and has expanded them ever since. Since 1977 the country has mostly been run by the Likud party, a party of religious fanatics who want the entire “land of Israel” to fulfill prophecies. The entire Palestine region plus more.
It was founded by Menachem Begin; he ran a Zionist military group called Irgun before the creation of Israel. They were an extremist organization that carried out terror attacks to get Palestinians to flee the land. They were so vicious a group of well-known Jewish intellectuals including Hannah Arendt and Albert Einstein wrote to the New York Times comparing Begin’s crew to Nazis. He was a member of Israel’s first Knesset in 1948 and later became Prime Minister in 1977. While Prime Minister there were massacres committed in Lebanon that had his defense minister fearing they would be charged with genocide. This is the political lineage of the current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who also recently spoke of fulfilling prophecies with a ground invasion of Gaza, citing genocidal scripture. He openly says he wants to annex the west bank. I have seen some right wingers posting things like “think Hamas likes LGBTQ?” as a gotcha towards pro-Palestinian folks. In Israel only about one-third support gay marriage, compared to about two-thirds in the US and an even higher percentage in other rich countries. Israel has a larger amount of anti-LGBTQ hate crimes than the United States despite being thirty something times smaller.
Hamas is indeed religious, by western standards even extreme. But they’re no more religious than the Likud party or other Jewish extremists in Israel. They don’t, for example, condone spitting on Christians. Hamas started in the 80s as a creation of Israel, who preferred Islamists to gain prominence in the liberation movement. It’s easier to get people on your side when your opponents have people doing suicide bombings and calling for an Islamic state among them. But Hamas then is not Hamas now. Most of the original members are almost certainly dead or in prison. There are no more suicide bombings. The old “Hamas charter” Zionists love to cry about has been rewritten to become much more moderate and it was never more extreme than the Likud’s rhetoric anyway.
The popularity of Hamas is used by many Zionists to justify the indiscriminate bombing of the dense Gaza strip. They won an election they say. Well, this election was held so long ago about half the population wasn’t born then. Two-thirds weren’t born when the original Hamas charter was written. Hamas has very little popularity in the west bank, and they still live under apartheid. What about the rockets shot at Israel? Palestinians have no regular army, no air force, no tanks. They are legally and morally allowed to fight occupation though. The best they can do is janky rockets most of which get caught by Israeli’s air defense called the iron dome and almost never kill anyone. Even rich countries with precision weapons tend to miss sometimes, focusing on Hamas rockets is disingenuous.
This is the background to the events of October 7, which were clearly not random or unprovoked. We have been told repeatedly that civilians were intentionally burned alive and shot en masse. We were told that babies were beheaded, and that mass rapes took place. The holocaust has been invoked repeatedly, outrageous considering the context. There is no evidence for any of these atrocities, only evidence of a military operation where, yes, civilians died. Mainstream media is asking every anti-Zionist to condemn Hamas or terrorism in general or specific actions like beheading babies. As Norman Finkelstein has pointed out, even if this stuff were true, it would still be wrong to condemn Hamas. He compared it to Nat turner’s slave revolt where innocents died, the abolitionists at the time did not condemn the revolt. They didn’t praise it, but they didn’t condemn it either. What would you do if you grew up in a concentration camp? In wars of independence ugly things can happen, civilians died in the ANC’s struggle against apartheid South Africa. Would you have been condemning the ANC, calling Mandela a terrorist, or blaming the apartheid regime for forcing them to fight?
Even though I’ve brought up international law many times, this is only to give the facts about the situation and show something is mainstream, widely accepted, and not radical. I think discussing international law in situations like this is silly for several reasons. No world powers follow them, and in the context of the Palestinian situation telling them to follow international law is essentially telling them “You cannot match the brutality of your oppressor”. Palestinians’ peaceful demonstrations have always gotten brutally put down. In 2018 there were massive demonstrations, Israel responded by shooting people indiscriminately. Even before October 7, Israel had been using dehumanizing language for years. Armed struggle is common sense here.
On October 7 several Palestinian groups with different ideologies launched “operation Al Aqsa flood”. The barrier between Gaza and Israel was broken, military bases were taken over, high level military people taken prisoner, hundreds of Israeli soldiers dead. This doesn’t sound like a terror attack trying to maximize civilian deaths. Were they caught off guard or was this an inside job? Inside job can be discarded right away, that theory relies on the assumption only Hamas was fighting on the Palestinian side and Hamas is controlled by Israel. Hamas leadership isn’t on the ground and its unlikely they have as much power in Gaza as people say. Were the Israelis caught off guard? Not really, soldiers reacted immediately.
Israel may have nuclear weapons, but they can’t use them on Palestinians because of proximity. It has a modern air-force and US backing, but on its own its vulnerable. Its ground forces are weak, they have been embarrassed multiple times by Hezbollah in Lebanon despite their inferior firepower. On top of this there has been civil strife bordering on civil war in recent months. On October 7 Palestinian fighters “struck 29 points on the border. They neutralized observation towers using drones and use motorbikes to penetrate into Israel” according to the Jerusalem post. There has been reports of Palestinians disguising themselves in fake IDF uniforms. On top of that there has been civil strife bordering on civil war lately in Israel. There was also increased tensions in the west bank prior to October 7.
A sergeant in the IDF told Israel’s Ynet news that on that morning there was a rocket barrage the likes of which she’d never seen. She said the cameras had gotten shot out and that the lookout observers alerted every one of the breaches of the fence. She also said she saw “a group of look-out observers whom I dearly love crying and hiding so as to not get shot.” According to her it was a weekend and a holiday, so they were short staffed. These are the details of the initial incursion. Sounds like they were prepared, but that they’re just weak and underestimated their opponent.
The official story of the initial incursion is Israel wasn’t ready, and there was no reaction when “Hamas” started shooting at people dancing at a rave near the Gaza border. Again, there were more Palestinians fighting besides Hamas, second, this is easily refutable nonsense. There is witness testimony and videos showing Palestinians in a shootout with police and IDF. Let’s use some common sense, there were thousands at the rave and the death total at the rave was reported as 260. If this was really a massive attack on unprepared civilians by a bunch of guys with assault rifles the death total would be much, much higher. The “we weren’t ready” story sounds a lot better than the reality from the Israeli perspective. Why was there a rave in between a concentration camp and Israeli military bases anyway?
How about the so cold massacres in the residential areas? People shot for no reason in different “kibbutz”? Electronic intifada and the Grayzone have both reported that there was heavy crossfire in these areas and that Israel killed a lot of its own civilians. Not just with guns either, tanks were used, the air force was called in. What killed more civilians, Palestinian guns or Israeli heavy weaponry? We can come to a commonsense conclusion. There are even more damning testimonies from Mishpacha magazine, which describes itself as a magazine for orthodox Jewish people.
In terms of firing on kibbutz areas, an IDF reservist in the home front command named David Borenstein said a pilot told him “I’ve been a fighter pilot for 25 years,” he says, “and I’ve never seen anything like this. Not in Lebanon, not in Protective Edge [in 2014]. Those terrorists were ready for us — they ambushed fighter planes with missiles and anti-aircraft weapons. Later when our ground forces showed up and fought like lions we supported them from the air: We fired at terrorists in kibbutzim, providing cover for our ground fighters and attacking nonstop. I never thought we would ever have to use live fire inside Israeli territory. You can all be very proud of my fellow pilots and our brothers fighting on the ground.” He described it as real war. This was no terror attack. A rabbi named Ze’ev Pizem in Sderot said the initial stop in town for the “terrorists” was the police headquarters, he said Israel blew up the police station, how many civilians died there? Another rabbi named David Fendel in Sderot admitted “the terrorists target was the police station”. Probably to try and free unjustly held Palestinian prisoners, this was also the logic behind hostage taking, try to free some of the thousands held without trial.
One has to understand that Israel by some measures is considered the most militarized society on earth. There is a draft, and a ton of civilians are probably former IDF or reserves. In Mishpacha magazine testimonies show reserves were called up immediately, and lots of civilians took arms to “fight the terrorists”. How many of the dead civilians were really just gunmen in plain clothes? How much fear and confusion did this cause among Palestinian fighters? Were there fighters who shot at random people? Perhaps, but this is necessary context. Furthermore, every military at war has had soldiers go off the rails, it’s an unfortunate aspect of war and usually people don’t demean the entire military unless there is proof of direct orders to do it.
Some other interesting quotes from these testimonies “This isn’t a ‘terror attack’” my friend explained to me with a mix of terror and despair. “Since morning, we’ve been under the occupation of Hamas.”” There are several quotes in there about hearing rumors of massacres, but none actually describe seeing any. It was like the Israeli military was planting the seed early. The people quoted in Mishpacha also repeatedly refer to the events as the “Simchas Torah War” and complain about the weakness of the military. This was only terrorism if you are a hardcore Zionist who thinks Palestinians have no right to fight a government that has decided their people must be displaced en masse or killed. So how could people have fallen for these psychological operations?
The media is mostly pro Zionist because Zionism helps the corporate agenda, weapons sales, a presence in big oil nations partially on the basis of “protecting Israel” and so on. They parrot Israeli officials and don’t do actual journalism. Israel has no free press with regards to war, they have an official military censor that is legally allowed to control the narrative for security purposes. They censor information they don’t like regularly; what do you think they’ve been up to since October 7? British channel 4, funded by an ally government of Israel, showed they have fabricated audio evidence while trying to defend their actions in Gaza. Not a word the Israelis say should be believed. They’ll say anything to justify the final solution of the Palestinian problem.
