Jim Clancy and I discuss Israel’s policy of utilizing Hamas as a strategic ally to block peace negotiations with the Palestinians.

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.

We 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.

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.

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.

Related Reading

• Israel Charged with Genocide at the International Court of Justice
• US Humanitarian Aid to Gaza Is a Cynical PR Ploy
• How Israel Supported Hamas Against the PLO
• Scott Horton and I Explain How Israel Supported Hamas
• ICC Prosecutor Seeks Arrest Warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
• ICJ Orders Israel to Halt Military Assault on Rafah in Gaza
• The Significance of the ICC’s Arrest Warrant for Netanyahu
• Amnesty International: Yes, Israel Is Committing Genocide in Gaza
• Human Rights Watch: Yes, Israel Is Committing Genocide in Gaza
• How Trump Approved the Resumption of Israel’s Gaza Genocide

Books

• Obstacle to Peace: The US Role in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
• Exposing a Zionist Hoax
• The Rejection of Palestinian Self-Determination
• Benny Morris’s Untenable Denial of the Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

Cross-posted from JeremyRHammond.com.