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.

There was a study in April, 2024 that showed the IDF attacks between 7^th October and 22nd November of 2023 on hospitals, schools and water infrastructure in Gaza were not “random.” The IDF response to the 7^th October terrorist attack was absolute. Revenge on a people. Sympathy for the Israeli government concluded, “there needed to be a response.” The Palestinians, most of them youth, were decided as guilty. It had been stated on numerous occasions, because decades earlier they had elected Hamas. There had been no elections since. The Hamas regime needed to go, if the people won’t do it. They will be killed for it.

The terrorist killers of the October attacks, had come from Gaza. Any in that region, thus are ‘understood’ to be guilty, responsible or at least should be killed and punished for the deeds of their familiars. After the September, 2001 attacks on the United States, those responsible had come from the Middle East, mostly Saudi Arabia. This in turn led to the invasion of Iraq, none of the terrorists had come from Iraq, it was in the Middle East. Therefore the response was, understood, justified. Iraq should be punished, the regime of Saddam Hussein to be toppled.

In the wake of the 2001 attacks, the sentiment was that, “they” deserved it. The collective “they” being Muslims, the near Orientals. The brown folk from a particular region. It was the return of the Crusades, a clash of Civilisations. Despite a history of harmony and co-existence, the fundamentalist view was that there is no co-existence. Only revenge, hatred and the imperial ambitions of theology and ideology. Convert or die, Deus Vault!, Jihad! Democracy or Die, etc

The 2023 attacks invoked a similar self-righteous need for revenge. Those who had attacked that October, like those who had attacked in September in 2001, did it with a sense of self-righteousness. Vengeance. Hatred. They had either been wronged, suffered injustice or were motivated by witnessing such. The innocent to be avenged, their innocent. In turn, they would kill the innocent of another group.

“Anyone who tries to destroy our villages and cities, then we are going to destroy their villages and cities. Anyone who steals our fortunes, then we must destroy their economy. Anyone who kills our civilians, then we are going to kill their civilians. “ – Osama Bin Laden, 24th November 2002.

“The other thing with the terrorists is you have to take out their families, when you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families. They care about their lives, don’t kid yourself. When they say they don’t care about their lives, you have to take out their families.” – Donald Trump, 3^rd December, 2015.

The US attacks on Iraq were not limited to military or government facilities. The people of Iraq were punished. The dictator Hussein was captured, then executed. Chaos and carnage savaged the nation. It has still not recovered. The region has since experienced instability, terrorism, war and a decline in the quality of life for those there. It is unhealthy and dangerous for the people in the region, more so than what they had suffered beneath the dictatorship of Hussein. Such is regime change.

Numerous media outlets have reported that around 377,000 Gazans have “disappeared,” since 7^th October, 2023. Likely dead. The victims of a policy that is genocide. A widespread punishment of the people in the region. The call for regime change or that the innocent are killed because Hamas are using them as shields, or unintentionally during the fighting, has been countless times proven false. It continues on as an intentional mass murder campaign. The goal is regime change, to remove Hamas. It’s also collective punishment and the intentional removal, replacement and expulsion of the people from the region. Extermination included.

After spending his first few decades as the pariah mastermind of much the world’s terrorism, the self proclaimed anti-colonist Qaddafi of Libya transformed himself into a senior statesman. Mellowing to a degree in the late 1990s and into the 2000s, he no longer had ambitions of possessing weapons of mass destruction or supporting revolutionaries, AKA terrorists. Instead, along with his sons he was looking to transform Libya into a modern and more liberal nation. He was a tyrant, a rapist, torturer and oppressor. What followed was terrifying for Libya. Qaddafi was regime changed in the aftermath of the Arab spring in 2011.

Libya fell into carnage. Slavery and mass rapes savaged the nation. Life beneath the tyrant seemingly far more beneficial than the war and misery of modern Libya. War lords and murder pirates directly and indirectly supported by the Western nations rule with unstable injustice. Thousands have died since.

Then there is carnage inflicted on Afghanistan, Lebanon, Yemen or Syria and the many other victims of foreign policy as it is expressed by the exceptional nations. The victims of war and policy are insignificant and never considered by the executioners of such policies. The victims are not even counted properly. It will take decades to calculate just how many are actually dead. Unmarked graves, lost bones in the desert and the refugees who have fled, make it hard for those who count the dead to ever know. The missing are grieved all the same.

The US along with it’s ally, Israel have attacked Iran. For the US, it’s claimed, the goal was to destroy the regimes ability to produce nuclear WMD’s. For the nuclear WMD armed Israel the goal seems to be regime change. The claim that Iran has been or is, producing “nukes” comes from the same unreliable sources. Them being those who use their claims to justify their attacks. For them and the powerless, that is enough to validate attacks on Iran and turn them into the present pariah nation. The population of Iran, to suffer.

From his book, Night of Power – The Betrayal of the Middle East, Robert Fisk shares a testimony from an official in the Anglo-US Iraq Survey Group, tasked with finding Iraq’s WMD’s,

“We used to go to the interrogation rooms at Abu Ghrahib and ask for a particular prisoner. After about forty minutes, the Americans brought in this hooded guy, shuffling along, shackled hand and foot. He had a big beard. We asked where he received his education. He repeatedly said: ‘Mosul’. Then he said he’d left school at fourteen – remember, this guy is supposed to be a missile scientist. We said; ‘We know you’ve got a PhD and went to the Sorbonne – we’d like you to help us with information about Saddam’s missile project.’ But I said to myself: “This guy doesn’t know anything about fucking missiles.” Then it turned out he had a different name from the man we’d asked for – he’d been picked up on the road four months earlier – he didn’t know why…It was a complete farce. The incompetence of the US military was astounding, criminal.”

Executions of officials and suspects continued under these conditions. The prior regime of Saddam Hussein had been a vile example of might is right. For the people of Iraq, the might was all the more reckless and violent in the decades that followed.

That is the nature of the evidence raised against Iran now. The validity and credibility comes from power itself. No evidence is needed. The enemy exists to validate power. Those, them, they, the different, the oriental are viewed as or, treated like they are not human beings. It is an exceptional outlook, chauvinism of the mighty. There is no opposition that can argue with any reason, expose the hypocrisy or seek a rationale. It’s religion, a belief in their absolute might, that is what makes them right. The Weapons of Mass Destruction have been found long ago, they keep getting elected time and time again.

What if there were a country with no state, no taxes, no politicians, and no public institutions? That’s the premise of Utopyc, a novel that answers the need—long identified by Rothbard—for a libertarian narrative capable of moving, convincing, and inspiring.

The protagonist, Gabriel Dan, is a journalist who discovers the existence of Utopyc, a small country where everything public has been entirely abolished, and society is organized through private contracts, voluntary agreements, and cooperation without coercion. Coming from our own dystopian world, Dan travels to investigate and is soon surprised to find that unrestricted liberty does not lead to chaos, but to harmony.

Through the journalist’s eyes, readers visit hospitals, schools, courts, security systems, defense services, and even media outlets—all functioning without any state intervention. Along the way, he also discovers a new kind of humanism that reclaims the dignity of the free individual.

Utopyc is not fantasy or theory, but a narrative and realistic representation of how a truly libertarian world might function. Readers see how liberty gives shape to a more prosperous, peaceful, and humane society. This imagined country includes places like the Museum of Liberty and the Museum of Beauty, showcasing the cultural richness of a society without coercion—and the birth of a new humanism.

For centuries, utopia has been monopolized by collectivist thinking. This novel shows that only a stateless society can truly be utopian. If you were moved by Atlas Shrugged or The Fountainhead, Utopyc may be your next must-read.

You can also explore other related titles at http://www.utopyc.net/ such as Do You Like Being a Slave?, a powerful critique of the current Western political status quo from a libertarian perspective, and Cold Monster, a dystopian take on the immediate future of the West.

The paperback edition of Utopyc is available at Amazon and the book’s website.

I would love for the readers of the Libertarian Institute to enjoy this unprecedented journey to the land of the libertarians. Only when liberty is seen in action can one truly grasp the magnitude and dignity of this fight.