Dear Israel Apologist

Did you know that the Israeli government's aims are NOT what you probably think they are?

Dear Israeli apologist,

Did you know that the Israeli government has been funding Hamas and working to keep it in power for decades, even now after Oct. 7?

a. Here's evidence that Israel funded Hamas right from its beginning.​

b. "Money trail to Hamas begins with Israeli banks" and continues through September 27, 2007 : https://www.reuters.com/article/us-palestinians-israel-funds-exclusive/money-trail-to-hamas-begins-with-israeli-banks-idUSL0313911920070927​

c. Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert: Israel continued as of June 30, 2008 to fund Hamas: http://www.effedieffe.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=63764​

d. Forbes on January 16, 2009 reports:

"Incredibly, Israel also supplies Hamas with cash. It began transferring truckloads of cash to Gaza after Hamas' violent takeover of the territory in June 2007. The first transfer of more than $51 million (delivered in Israeli shekels) was purportedly to strengthen the influence of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in the Gaza Strip and pay the salaries of 35,000 Palestinian Authority employees then allegedly loyal to him. Among those employees, however, were Ismail Haniya, the Hamas-appointed prime minister in Gaza, and Mahmoud Zahar, Hamas' foreign minister.​

"Zahar prides himself on many successful terrorist attacks against Israel, and his position regarding Israel is clear. "All of Palestine, every inch of Palestine belongs to the Muslims," he has said. If the goal was to strengthen Abbas' position, the cash should have been delivered to him in the West Bank city of Ramallah. From there, he could have transferred the money to Gaza, as he has done in the past, and claim credit for it." [ https://www.forbes.com/2009/01/16/gaza-hamas-funding-oped-cx_re_0116ehrenfeld.html?sh=707b61407afb ]​

e. "Netanyahu: Money to Hamas part of strategy to keep Palestinians divided" reported March 12, 2019 in the Jerusalem Post at https://www.jpost.com/arab-israeli-conflict/netanyahu-money-to-hamas-part-of-strategy-to-keep-palestinians-divided-583082 Of course Netanyahu is just hiding the REAL purpose. Money is fungible, which means what any money Israel gives to Hamas for one purpose just frees up other money for Hamas to use for another purpose. As shown above and in much greater detail here, Israeli leaders need Hamas to commit terrorism against ordinary Israeli Jews so that those Israeli Jews will believe they need to be protected by the Israeli government from Palestinians despite the fact that the Israeli government oppresses ordinary Israeli Jews to make Israeli billionaires rich.​

f. "Beginning in 2018, Qatar’s envoy traveled with millions of dollars packed neatly in Louis Vuitton suitcases from Doha to the Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv and was escorted to the Gaza Strip by Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency. Yossi Cohen, former Mossad chief, even visited Qatar to iron out the details of the arrangement and encouraged the Qataris to keep the dollars coming. The cash purchased fuel for the besieged strip’s only power plant, funded infrastructure projects, and provided a monthly stipend of $100 to thousands of impoverished Palestinian families.

"Israeli intelligence officials, however, say they knew that Hamas—the Palestinian group that runs a de-facto government in Gaza but is treated by Israel and the United States as a terrorist group—siphoned off the funds. The thinking was that Qatari cash would keep Hamas quiet—that it would essentially buy them off from firing rockets at Israel’s southern cities.

"But the policy seems to have backfired, several former Israeli officials told Foreign Policy. “Did the Qatari procedure work for us? We don’t think so,” said Col Eran Lerman, former deputy national security adviser of the country.

"In the recent war with Hamas, Israelis were caught off guard by the group’s ability to hit deep inside Israeli cities, with not just Tel Aviv but Jerusalem within their reach. The group fired 4,360 rockets over a period of 11 days, four times more than it did in the 50-day war in 2014." [June 15, 2021 from https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/06/15/israels-big-new-shift-in-hamas-policy/ my emphasis]​

This same information was later reported by the New York Times behind a paywall, but you can read about it in this newsbreak.com article.​

g. "For years, Netanyahu propped up Hamas. Now it’s blown up in our faces: The premier’s policy of treating the terror group as a partner, at the expense of Abbas and Palestinian statehood, has resulted in wounds that will take Israel years to heal from. For years, the various governments led by Benjamin Netanyahu took an approach that divided power between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank — bringing Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to his knees while making moves that propped up the Hamas terror group."

https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-up-hamas-now-its-blown-up-in-our-faces/?fbclid=IwAR023pzA8bcQz3bPrxNrreJO86jYkrbbm3oHs8TO-i6FcC9HCW795aLpt-I 8 October 2023, 3:58 pm​

h. 'Can Netanyahu survive Hamas’s attack on Israel?

Israelis are increasingly aware of government failures that enabled Hamas’s attack, but that may not be enough to bring the Israeli prime minister down...

Netanyahu’s strategy has always been to allow Hamas room for manoeuvre in order to weaken the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah and Palestinian society more generally. “Those who want to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state should support the strengthening of Hamas and the transfer of money to Hamas,” he stated at a Likud party meeting in March 2019. “This is part of our strategy, to differentiate between the Palestinians in Gaza and the Palestinians in Judea and Samaria.”' https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/10/11/can-netanyahu-survive-hamass-attack-on-israel 11 Oct 2023

POST OCTOBER 7, 2023 (in chronological order):

​December 12, 2023 (Note this date and that the word "continued" below means as of December 12, 2023.) This CNN article reports not only that Israel funded Hamas before the October 7, 2023 but even continued doing so after that October 7 attack. It reports in an article headlined "Qatar sent millions to Gaza for years – with Israel’s backing. Here’s what we know about the controversial deal" :​

"Since the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, the Gulf state of Qatar has come under fire by Israeli officials, American politicians and media outlets for sending hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to Gaza, which is governed by the Palestinian militant group. But all that happened with Israel’s blessing.​

"In a series of interviews with key Israeli players conducted in collaboration with Israeli investigative journalism organization Shomrim, CNN was told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continued the cash flow to Hamas, despite concerns raised from within his own government." [my emphasis because it means even after October 7, 2023.]​

This video by Ben Swann presents compelling evidence of many kinds that the Israeli government knew in advance of the Hamas October 7 attack, knew Hamas's exact plan of attack, and deliberately allowed it to succeed. I suspect that this accusation against the Israeli government is true; there is no particular reason for doubting it, since Israel has a history of doing things to make it seem that Jews are being violently attacked by antisemites, as I show here. But even if the Israeli government did not in fact know in advance that Hamas would attack as it did on October 7, what is undeniable is that the Israeli government knew that Hamas carried out terrorist violence aimed at killing unarmed non-combatant Israeli Jews whenever it felt like it, and Israel funded Hamas for decades for exactly this reason. Benn Swann is interviewed by Jimmy Dore here.

​Here is evidence that even after October 7, Israel is working to increase, not decrease, Hamas's power over Palestinians in Gaza.

​Paul Rogers, emeritus professor of peace studies at Bradford University and an honorary fellow at the Joint Service Command and Staff College, in his December 5, 2023 Boston Globe article titled, "Israel’s use of disproportionate force is a long-established tactic – with a clear aim," concludes by saying:​

"The immediate Israeli aim, which may take months to achieve, appears to be eliminating Hamas while corralling the Palestinians into a small zone in the south-west of Gaza where they can be more easily controlled. The longer-term aim is to make it utterly clear that Israel will not stand for any opposition. Its armed forces will maintain sufficient power to control any insurgency and, backed by its powerful nuclear capabilities, will not allow any regional state to pose a threat.​

"It will fail. Hamas will emerge either in a different form or strengthened, unless some way is found to begin the very difficult task of bringing the communities together. Meanwhile, the one state that can force a ceasefire is the US, but there is little sign of that – at least so far."

​Palestinian poll shows a rise in Hamas support and close to 90% wanting US-backed Abbas to resign​

BY KARIN LAUB

Updated 1:46 PM EST, December 13, 2023

RAMALLAH, West Bank (AP) — A wartime opinion poll among Palestinians published Wednesday shows a rise in support for Hamas, which appears to have ticked up even in the devastated Gaza Strip, and an overwhelming rejection of Western-backed President Mahmoud Abbas, with nearly 90% saying he must resign.

​Mark Juergensmeyer, a distinguished professor emeritus of sociology and global studies and interim director of the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and William F. Podlich Distinguished Fellow and Professor of Religious Studies at Claremont McKenna College, and a person who has had interviews with Hamas leaders, including the founder, Sheik Ahmed Yassin, some years ago when he was in Gaza and whose post-October 7, 2023 information, he says, has been buttressed by more recent communications with Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank, writes:​

"Though almost all Palestinians despise the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory they would not all have endorsed the cruelty of October 7, and many would likely have turned against the movement, especially if offered the promise of a long-range solution to Palestinian autonomy in the future. Instead, the massive destruction of Gaza buildings in the weeks since October 7 and the tragic loss of life—overwhelmingly women and children–has likely turned even moderate Hamas-hating Gaza residents into bitter enemies of Israel and grudging supporters of Hamas."

​May 9, 2024 The level-headed and very close observer of events, Alexander Mercouris, though not sharing my analysis of events, nonetheless in his video here (starting at time point 1:15:35) explains that whatever Israel decides to do next in Rafah (Israel is preparing a possible major attack on the Gaza city of Rafah at the time of this video's creation),

"Hamas will survive in Gaza, in fact politically it is going to get still stronger and Israel's overall diplomatic position will continue to get weaker."​

Boston Globe, May 14, 2024:

“Hamas or some organization like it is going to survive — unless you’d have started much earlier to align the sun, the moon and the stars into something that would create a counter,” said Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “There is no counter. That’s the problem.”

...

​“They will be left holding the bag on an enduring insurgency because a lot of armed Hamas will be left, no matter what they do in Rafah, or if they leave and get out of Gaza, as we believe they need to do,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said over the weekend. “Then you’re going to have a vacuum, and a vacuum that’s likely to be filled by chaos, by anarchy, and ultimately by Hamas again.”

John Mearscheimer talk May 15, 2024:

In this video talk Professor Mearsheimer says that Netanyahu worked to keep Hamas in power (his explanation for this is wrong, as discussed below) and that Hamas is not going to disappear from Gaza unless Israeli ethnic cleansing removes every single Palestinian from Gaza.

​Foreign Affairs (the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations), June 21, 2024, in its article titled, "Hamas Is Winning: Why Israel’s Failing Strategy Makes Its Enemy Stronger" by Robert A. Pape, states in its first words:​

"Nine months of Israeli air and ground combat operations in Gaza have not defeated Hamas, nor is Israel close to vanquishing the terrorist group. To the contrary, according to the measures that matter, Hamas is stronger today than it was on October 7."

BBC July 4, 2024 (the following italicized text is from the end of the article, contradicting its headline):

Some, like 26-year-old Jihad Talab, still strongly support Hamas. Displaced from the Zeitoun area of Gaza City with his wife, daughter and mother, and now sheltering in Deir al Balah, he said the group was not responsible for their suffering. “We must support [Hamas] because it’s the one working on the ground, the one who understands the battle - not you or I,” he said. “Empty accusations only serve the Occupation [Israel]. We’ll support it until our last breath.”

A regular poll carried out by a West Bank-based think tank, the Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research, claims that most people in Gaza still blame Israel and its allies for the war, rather than Hamas.

The latest survey in June said that almost two-thirds of Gazan respondents were satisfied with Hamas - a rise of 12 points from December - and suggested that just around half would still prefer Hamas to run Gaza after the war ends, over any other option.

Note that the headline of this BBC article is "Hamas faces growing public dissent as Gaza war erodes support." Yet the article's substantive content says the opposite. The fact of the matter is that Hamas is run by billionaires and it does indeed--as mentioned in the BBC article--oppress Palestinians in Gaza, and for this reason there is indeed much dislike of Hamas by ordinary Palestinians in Gaza. But, contrary to the BBC article's headline, this popular opposition to Hamas is not growing but lessening since October 7, 2023. It seems that the BBC wants its general public readership to think that Israel is weakening Hamas even though the elite rulers know and read in their exclusive Foreign Affairs journal (see the article in it above) that Israel has strengthened support in Gaza for Hamas.​

January 23, 2025 "Hamas's Strategic Survival Drives Israel Crazy" reports:​

Did Hamas achieve victory in Gaza?

All of this raises the central question: Did Hamas achieve victory in Gaza, and if so, how and why? To answer fully, one must first analyze the foundational and evolving sources of the resistance movement’s strength, examine the mechanisms behind its adaptability and renewal, and finally consider who currently leads the organization, particularly within the Gaza Strip.​

Hamas today remains deeply present not only in the Palestinian street but also across the broader Arab and Islamic worlds. Despite the devastation of war, Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, which was launched on 7 October 2023, continues to resonate strongly, shaping public and personal sentiment across the globe. Moreover, sources tell The Cradle that these events have fueled significant recruitment, with thousands of young Palestinians joining Hamas’s ranks.​

Even Hebrew media, despite its often propagandistic tone, has acknowledged this phenomenon. While much of Israel's narrative aims to justify prolonged conflict or the potential resumption of war, occasional admissions reveal the growing appeal of resistance among Palestinians.

Hamas sources argue that Israel has created “a vendetta for generations,” describing the war as not merely a battle against the resistance movement, but a war on all citizens of Gaza. The widespread massacres and destruction have unified the Palestinian street, blurring distinctions between Hamas supporters and others.​

“Those who are not part of Hamas inevitably become part of the resistance,” one source explains, emphasizing that even if Hamas were to cease, a new and perhaps stronger movement would emerge in its stead.​

A European security official reportedly shared similar concerns with a Hamas representative in Lebanon. The official warned that Gaza’s estimated 18,000 orphans, created by this war alone, could form a new “liberation army” within a decade, one even fiercer than its predecessors.

Did you know that Israel’s government certainly knows (assuming Mossad can read publicly published articles) that its attacks on Gaza STRENGTHENED Hamas?

The Israeli attacks on Palestinian civilians in Gaza strengthen the Hamas leaders’ grip on power in Gaza.

There is plenty of evidence for this mutually beneficial relationship between the Israeli and Hamas leaders:

UPI Terrorism Correspondent, Richard Sale, wrote an article in 2002 titled, Hamas History Tied to Israel” in which he states:

"Israel and Hamas may currently be locked in deadly combat, but, according to several current and former U.S. intelligence officials, beginning in the late 1970s, Tel Aviv gave direct and indirect financial aid to Hamas over a period of years.

"Israel "aided Hamas directly -- the Israelis wanted to use it as a counterbalance to the PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organization)," said Tony Cordesman, Middle East analyst for the Center for Strategic Studies.

"Israel's support for Hamas "was a direct attempt to divide and dilute support for a strong, secular PLO by using a competing religious alternative," said a former senior CIA official." [emphasis added]

In 2009, Rashid Khalidi, Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia, wrote an article in which he said:

"Resistance movements such as Hizbullah and Hamas, by contrast, can plausibly claim that they forced Israel to withdraw from occupied Arab land while scoring impressive gains at the ballot box; they have also been reasonably free of corruption. As if determined to increase the influence of these radical movements, Israel has undermined Abbas and the PA at every turn…

"But Hamas will not be so easily defeated, even if Israel’s merciless assault and Hamas’s own obduracy have brought untold suffering on the people of Gaza and much of the Strip lies in ruins: like Hizbullah in Lebanon in 2006, all it has to do in order to proclaim victory is remain standing. The movement continued to fire rockets into Israel under devastating bombardment, and it looks likely to emerge politically stronger when the war is over… " [emphasis added]

John J. Mearsheimer, professor of political science at the University of Chicago, wrote an article (originally for The American Conservative) in 2009 in which he stated:

"More importantly, there is little reason to think that the Israelis can beat Hamas into submission and get the Palestinians to live quietly in a handful of Bantustans inside Greater Israel. Israel has been humiliating, torturing, and killing Palestinians in the Occupied Territories since 1967 and has not come close to cowing them. Indeed, Hamas’s reaction to Israel’s brutality seems to lend credence to Nietzsche’s remark that what does not kill you makes you stronger." [emphasis added]

Anthony H. Cordesman, who held the Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy at the Center for Strategic & International Studies, and who was also a national security analyst for ABC News, wrote an article in 2009 in which he stated in regard to the fighting in Gaza:

"At least to date, the reporting from within Gaza indicates that each new Israeli air strike or advance on the ground has increased popular support for Hamas and anger against Israel in Gaza. The same is true in the West Bank and the Islamic world. Iran and Hezbollah are capitalizing on the conflict…

What is the strategic purpose behind the present fighting?…Will Israel end in empowering an enemy in political terms that it defeated in tactical terms?...To [be] blunt, the answer so far seems to be yes." [emphasis added]

Khalid Amayreh, in his blog in 2009, wrote about the Israeli attack on Gaza in an article titled, “Hamas gaining sympathy as onslaught continue”:

"With the massive Israeli onslaught against the Gaza Strip continuing unabated, and with Israeli political and military leaders threatening to “decimate” Hamas, Palestinian intellectuals as well as ordinary people expect Hamas’s popularity to rise dramatically when the present Israeli campaign is over…"

"Qassem predicted that the current Israeli campaign would actually lead to the boosting of Hamas’s popularity…

"Another Palestinian intellectual, Abdul Bari Atwan, predicts that public support for Hamas will increase as a result of the present Israeli campaign in the Gaza Strip." [emphasis added]​

Al Jazeera English made a video report in 2009 titled “War on GAZA: Popular Support” in which they wrote:

"Since beginning its offensive in the Gaza Strip Israel has repeatedly declared it will maintain attacks to smash what it calls the Hamas terrorist machine. However, as Israel's bombardment continues, the appeal of Hamas in the Arab world appears to be growing. Al Jazeeras Hashem Ahelbarra reports on how the war has left Hamas gaining popular support." [emphasis added]

Some of these reports are by people who think Israeli leaders don’t realize that their massacres of Palestinians in Gaza strengthens the Hamas leaders’ power there. But there is evidence that the Israeli leaders understand this full well. There is a video of a talk given by Professor Juan Cole, an expert on the Middle East. The host who introduces Cole name-drops that he recently had lunch with former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, and then (starting at the 26:56 minute point of the video) reports having heard a startling eyewitness account of the following: that during the recent Israeli slaughter of people in Gaza, supposedly to wipe out Hamas, this eyewitness was on the phone directly with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barack and told him he knew where the Hamas leadership was hiding, and Barack replied, "We know where Hamas's leadership is hiding, but we're not going to go further, we are trying to send a message."​

The video is titled, “Making a National Priority of Engaging the Muslim World and was published March 24, 2009, “Recorded @ uStream.Tv”​

Watch this video of an Israeli soldier explaining that Israel's killing of civilians in Gaza only strengthens Hamas.

Do you know WHY the Israeli government funds Hamas and works to keep it in power?

To read the answer to this question, with enormous amounts of proof based on establishment media sources, including Israeli sources, read my article, "The Israeli Government Attacks Ordinary Jews As Well As Palestinians" at https://www.pdrboston.org/israel-s-government-attacks-jews-to (a slightly shorter version with additional graphics is here.)​

Very briefly, the answer is this. Like the United States, the Israeli government is controlled by a very wealthy Israeli upper class that economically severely oppresses Israeli Jewish working class people. The Israeli upper class controls the Israeli Jewish working class by pretending to be its protector against its "real enemy--Palestinians."

To make the Palestinians be an effective bogeyman enemy, the Israeli upper class needs HAMAS to be as frightening to Jews as possible, for HAMAS to declare as it did in its 1988 Covenant that it wants Islam to be sovereign in all of Palestine including the part now called Israel with these words:​

Article 31:

Under the wing of Islam, it is possible for the followers of the three religions - Islam, Christianity and Judaism - to coexist in peace and quiet with each other. Peace and quiet would not be possible except under the wing of Islam. It is the duty of the followers of other religions to stop disputing the sovereignty of Islam in this region, because the day these followers should take over there will be nothing but carnage, displacement and terror.

Hamas's new 2017 document does not replace the earlier Covenant still in effect: The Guardian reports:

Ismail Haniyeh, the Gaza-based deputy head of Hamas’s political bureau, said at an event in the Gaza Strip on Sunday that “the new document will undermine neither our principles nor our strategy. Jerusalem, the right of return, Palestinian unity and the resistance forces are fundamental principles. The changes relate to regional developments, and suit the era.”

The 2017 document describes the role of Islam as an umbrella for all other faiths with these words:​

1. By virtue of its justly balanced middle way and moderate spirit, Islam – for Hamas - provides a comprehensive way of life and an order that is fit for purpose at all times and in all places. Islam is a religion of peace and tolerance. It provides an umbrella for the followers of other creeds and religions who can practice their beliefs in security and safety. Hamas also believes that Palestine has always been and will always be a model of coexistence, tolerance and civilizational innovation.

​The Israeli upper class needs for HAMAS to deliberately direct lethal violence (suicide bombers in the past and rockets more recently) against noncombatant Israeli Jewish civilians (i.e., to commit terrorism) to make it seem that the Palestinians want to kill all the Jews in Israel and drive them into the sea.

​Hamas has in the past in fact targeted lethal violence against non-combatant Israeli unarmed civilians, but it now tries to deny that it does this. Here is a video interview of Dr. Basem Naim, Hamas's head of political and international relations, conducted on October 9, 2023. In this interview the BBC journalist repeatedly asks if, during Hamas's October 7 attack, it killed Israeli civilians. Listen to this interview carefully. Note that Naim does not ever say that Hamas is opposed to the killing of noncombatant Israeli civilians. Instead, he replies to the BBC journalist's question by a) describing the injustice of Zionist oppression of Palestinians, b) citing Israel's Hannibal Doctrine, which tells Israeli military forces to kill Israelis seized by Hamas rather than let them be taken as hostages, and c) denying that ANY of the people killed by Hamas on October 7 were properly defined as noncombatants because of the kind of job they had.

If Hamas were truly opposed to the deliberate killing of noncombatant Israeli civilians, Naim would have stated this fact clearly and explicitly, and he would have explained that Hamas no longer supports its past suicide bombings at Israeli bus stops and restaurants, etc., nor its having recently aimed rockets at civilians in the Israeli town of Sderot. But Naim did none of these things; he merely deflected the question.

HAMAS plays the role of Palestinian antisemitic terrorist perfectly; it is exactly what the Israeli ruling class needs to stay in power.

​Here is somebody else's article about Hamas that--with great documentation--makes essentially the same point as I do above (and here regarding Hamas's motive) about WHY Israel funds Hamas, although erroneously in my opinion restricting its point to only the recent years of Likud rule in Israel. The article is "The Secret History of Hamas," by James Corbett, which states:​

"Once again, it is important to understand the dynamic: the Likudnik crazies need the most extreme elements of Hamas to keep the Israeli public terrified and clamoring for security. Likewise, the Hamas hardliners need the radical Zionists in the Israeli government, military, political and religious institutions to continue their campaign against the Palestinians in order to justify their no-compromise, fight-to-the-death ideology."

“But but but,” you may say, “Netanyahu had a good (for ordinary Israeli Jews) REASON for funding Hamas. “ After Oct. 7 when the cat got out of the bag about this funding of Hamas, Netanyahu gave his excuse for doing it. Did you know that his explanation was pure BS?

Israel’s long-time support for Hamas is not a secret. When the subject comes up, Israeli leaders “explain away” this support by saying it was simply a clever way of weakening the PLO. What such Israeli leaders never, however, explain is this. The REASON Zionist leaders wanted to weaken the PLO and strengthen Hamas was because the PLO, before caving in to pressure to advocate for a “two-state solution” (that would make the ethnic cleansing from most of Palestine—the part called Israel—permanent) advocated something that appealed to many Israeli Jewish working-class people: that Israel be a secular democracy, a state of ALL its citizens, not just of the Jews, in which Jews and non-Jews would have equal rights under the law and live in peace with each other. Even the PLO's current acceptance of the "Two State Solution" is not nearly as frightening to most Israelis as Hamas's aim to make Islam sovereign in all of Palestine and have it ruled by people with a history of flagrantly killing unarmed Israeli Jewish civilians.

Zionist leaders FEARED Israeli have-nots viewing Palestinians as friendly, not threatening, people. THIS is why Israel’s leaders began funding Hamas—to ensure that Palestinians would be perceived as wanting to kill all the Jews.​

Some so-called experts, such as Professor John Mearscheimer, in a talk given May 15, 2024, argue that the reason Netanyahu supported Hamas was because he and Hamas both opposed the two-state solution in contrast to the PLO (Palestine Authority), which supported it; Netanyahu thus wanted to have Hamas prevail over the PLO. The problem with this explanation is three-fold.

First, Israeli support for Hamas was ongoing (for proof see items b, c and d in the section "Here's Evidence that Israel Funds Hamas" above) when Ehud Olmert was prime minister from 2006 to 2009 and was adamantly in favor of a two-state solution. Ha'aretz November 29, 2007, reported:

" 'If the day comes when the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights (also for the Palestinians in the territories), then, as soon as that happens, the State of Israel is finished,' Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told Haaretz Wednesday, the day the Annapolis conference ended in an agreement to try to reach a Mideast peace settlement by the end of 2008.

" 'The Jewish organizations, which were our power base in America, will be the first to come out against us,' Olmert said, 'because they will say they cannot support a state that does not support democracy and equal voting rights for all its residents.' "

​Second, as he explains in this May 14, 2024 video interview, Netanyahu only opposes a two-state solution before the defeat of Hamas when that solution would enable Hamas to be in power in the Palestinian state and to control a military force capable of threatening Israel; he says he does in fact want there to be a Palestinian state (i.e., a two-state solution) with the political power to rule over its residents, just not with the power to have a military force that could threaten Israel. Netanyahu thus supports a two-state solution. Mearsheimer's contention that Netanyahu supported Hamas because Hamas opposed the two-state solution makes no sense. Why would Netanyahu support Hamas because of its opposition to a two-state solution when his fear of Hamas controlling a Palestinian state is the only reason he opposed a two-state solution going into effect before the defeat of Hamas?​

Third, Hamas does not in fact oppose the two-state solution. APnews.com April 25, 2024 reports:​

Hamas official says group would lay down its arms if an independent Palestinian state is established​

ISTANBUL (AP) — A top Hamas political official told The Associated Press the Islamic militant group is willing to agree to a truce of five years or more with Israel and that it would lay down its weapons and convert into a political party if an independent Palestinian state is established along pre-1967 borders.

The comments by Khalil al-Hayya in an interview Wednesday came amid a stalemate in months of talks for a cease-fire in Gaza. The suggestion that Hamas would disarm appeared to be a significant concession by the militant group officially committed to Israel’s destruction.​

August 5, 2024 CNN video: "Nearly half of Hamas’ military battalions in northern and central Gaza have rebuilt some of their fighting capabilities despite more than nine months of Israel’s brutal offensive, according to analyses by the DC-based American Enterprise Institute’s Critical Threats Project, the Institute for the Study of War and CNN. Watch the full investigation on CNN.com." Listen to further discussion of the significance of this information presented by Alexander Mercouris starting at time point 20:57 of his video here. Mercouris makes it clear that Israeli violence against Hamas is not eliminating Hamas from power and cannot do so, and yet the violence continues. Clearly the purpose of the violence is something other than removing Hamas from power.

Did you know that a key reason Israel’s government has funded Hamas and worked to keep it in power is because Hamas prevents Palestinians from winning the large public support they need to win and could gain?

When Palestinians engage in actions that are attempts to return to the region of Palestine, now called Israel, that Zionists drove them out of, and when they fight back against the Israeli military who block their path, they strengthen the anti-Zionist movement: they make it clear to the world--and to Israeli Jews--that their aim is not to "drive the Jews into the sea" or "kill all the Jews" but to be allowed to exercise their Right of Return. But Hamas's aim is the contrary one, to weaken the anti-Zionist movement by doing things such as firing rockets at Israeli civilians that tell the world it does indeed view ordinary Israeli Jews as the enemy.

Look at what Hamas does when ordinary Palestinians try to exercise their Right of Return. In 2011 Palestinians in Syria, Lebanon, Gaza and the West Bank marched to the Israeli border and tried to enter Israel. Israeli military forces fired on them; no surprise. But Hamas also tried to block the Palestinians. As The Columbus Dispatch (and others) reported:​

"In Gaza, the Hamas police stopped buses carrying protesters near the main crossing into Israel, but dozens of demonstrators continued on foot, arriving at a point closer to the Israeli border than they had reached in years and drawing Israeli fire."​

In 2018 Palestinians in Gaza began the wonderful Great March of Return: wonderful because it told the world that the true aim of Palestinians is to be allowed to enjoy their Right of Return, not to "kill all the Jews." The only violence by Palestinians was in clear self-defense against the Israeli military that was using violence to deny them their Right of Return. The initiative for this mass action of Palestinians, however, did not come from Hamas but from other Palestinians. Hamas could not prevent it from happening because it was such a popular action, but Hamas tried to end it when it could. As Wikipedia states,​

"The first demonstrations were organized by independent activists, but the initiative was soon endorsed by Hamas,[19] the de facto rulers of the Gaza Strip, as well as other major factions in Gaza. The activists who planned the Great March of Return intended it to last only from 30 March 2018 (Land Day) to 15 May (Nakba Day) but the demonstrations continued for almost 18 months until Hamas on 27 December 2019 announced that they would be postponed.[1]"

“But but but,” you may say, “Jews need a state of their own to be safe in the world, so we need to defend the Jewish state no matter what.” Do you know WHY the first Zionist leaders wanted a Jewish state, and that they betrayed Jews during the Holocaust to get it?

Perhaps, if you are a bit curious now, you might want to read about this in my “Why, Really, Zionist Leaders Have Always Wanted a State of Their Own: It was NOT because of any concern for the welfare of ordinary Jews.” Here is how it starts:

David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister: No friend of ordinary Jews!​

"If I knew that it would be possible to save all the [Jewish] children in Germany by bringing them over to England and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Israel, then I opt for the second alternative. For we must take into account not only the lives of these children but also the history of the people of Israel." [26] —David Ben-Gurion, 1938

"Ben-Gurion and other Zionist leaders vetoed the immigration of 1,000 [Jewish] orphans, who were in physical and emotional danger as a result of the harsh winter of 1945, from the camps in Germany to England, where the Jewish community had managed to secure them permits. Another group of roughly 500 children of camp inhabitants was barred, after Zionist intervention, from reaching France, whose rabbinical institutions had offered them safe haven." [20] The reason for this cruelty? To send the children to Palestine to fight Palestinians so that people like David Ben-Gurion could have a “state of their own” to rule over. [from Baruch Kimmerling’s review of Yosef Grodzinsky's In the Shadow of the Holocaust: The Struggle Between Jews and Zionists in the Aftermath of World War II [20]

The policies of top Zionist leaders during and immediately after the Holocaust are not at all well-known to most people, not even to most ordinary Jews who are passionately pro-Israel. When examined, as will be done here, these policies make it clear that the goal of top Zionist leaders such as Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, has always been to have a state--a "Jewish state" in Palestine--in which they would be the privileged and powerful upper class ruling over, dominating and oppressing for enormous economic profit a Jewish class of have-nots, a Jewish working class. Read here how this is exactly what is happening now in Israel.

These Zionist leaders wanted for themselves what non-Jewish upper classes have always had: a working class of their own over which to rule, "a state of their own." That's only fair, right? To deny them this would be wrongful antisemitism, right? Such is the thinking of oppressive ruling, or wannabe ruling, elites.

Zionism's hostility to Jews trying to survive anywhere other than Palestine goes back at least to 1938 when, at a meeting of Labor Zionists in Great Britain, David Ben-Gurion, argued:

"If I knew that it would be possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them over to England and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Israel, then I opt for the second alternative. For we must take into account not only the lives of these children but also the history of the people of Israel." [26]

These are the words of a fanatic, obsessed with the dream of becoming a ruler of a "state of his own" no matter how many innocent Jewish lives must be sacrificed for that end. One might dismiss Ben-Gurion's words about Jewish children as merely rhetoric unconnected to real-life decisions, but as we will see, it turns out that Zionist leaders during the Holocaust did indeed act in accordance with Ben-Gurion's insistence that Jewish lives -- hundreds of thousands of Jewish lives -- are less important than achieving a Jewish state. Zionist leaders sabotaged efforts to rescue Jews in Europe during the Holocaust because they felt that the rescue of Jews threatened their goal of becoming masters of a "state of their own."​

Every ethnic/racial group contains individuals who aspire to be part of an elite ruling class, enjoying great privileges and power over "their own people." The Zionist movement enabled people like David Ben-Gurion, Golda Meier, Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon, among others, to rise in the world and become elite rulers of a state which now possesses nuclear weapons and one of the most powerful armies in the world. To achieve this end, Zionist leaders have sacrificed the welfare of ordinary Jews at every opportunity. They point to anti-Semitism (or what they speciously label as anti-Semitism) in order to justify a Zionist project which has nothing to do with helping ordinary Jews achieve a safe and secure and happy life free from real anti-Semitic attacks.

THE EVIDENCE

Read the evidence in this article; there is LOTS of it, from mainstream sources. Here’s the link to the article again. Read it, dear Israeli apologist. OK?

Whose side do you want to be on?

Do you want to be on the side of ordinary Jews, or on the side of Jewish billionaires who severely economically oppress ordinary Jews in Israel to get rich off of them? The billionaires hope you will fall for the “Jews need a Jewish state of their own” propaganda. If you’re curious, read here how this is how billionaires OPPRESS, not benefit, ordinary Jews, and then decide whose side you want to be on. The article says this:

WHEN ONE FULLY UNDERSTANDS WHY THIS ENORMOUS WONDERFUL DEMONSTRATION AGAINST ECONOMIC OPPRESSION, WITH THE SUPPORT OF 85% OR 90% OF THE ISRAELI POPULATION, WON NONE OF ITS JUST DEMANDS, THEN ONE WILL UNDERSTAND WHY THERE SHOULD NOT BE A JEWISH STATE. READ ON TO LEARN WHY.

In July of 2011 people in Israel (mainly, but not only Jews) launched a huge wave of protests against the Israeli government over the issue of their economic impoverishment.

"The 2011 Israeli social justice protests (Hebrew: מְחָאַת צֶדֶק חֶבְרָתִי‎), which are also referred to by various other names in the media, were a series of demonstrations in Israel beginning in July 2011 involving hundreds of thousands of protesters from a variety of socio-economic and religious backgrounds opposing the continuing rise in the cost of living (particularly housing) and the deterioration of public services such as health and education. A common rallying cry at the demonstrations was the chant; "The people demand social justice!".​

"As the protests expanded during August 2011, the demonstrations began to also focus on other related issues relating to the social order and power structure in Israel."

The movement kept growing and growing, with mass demonstrations and people pitching tents on Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv. The movement reached its peak on September 3, 2011:

“On Saturday, September 3, an estimated 450,000 people participated in several demonstrations which were held over various locations across Israel and which were referred to by protest organizers as ‘The March of the Million.”

This wonderful movement of ordinary Israelis against their economic oppression by the Israeli ruling class had the support of 85% to 90% (according to newspaper polls) of the entire Israeli population. But it won NONE of its just demands, all because Israel is a Zionist state, as explained below.

Many people, despite knowing that Palestinians got the wrong end of the stick when the Jewish state of Israel was carved out of their country, support Israel for one reason: they oppose anti-Semitism, which led to the Holocaust and the deaths of more than five million European Jews. The dogma of Zionism [5] has been established in the minds of many: If one hates anti-Semitism then one must support the idea of a Jewish state and everything necessary to ensure its existence in the face of its enemies, no matter the consequences.

But this Zionist dogma is both morally and practically wrong. It is wrong for two fundamental reasons.​

• The project of a Jewish state in Palestine--by which the Zionist movement means a state in which Jews must always be a large majority [4] (which is accomplished by violent ethnic cleansing of Palestinians who were the majority in what is now Israel), and in which only Jews constitute the sovereign authority (theoretically; in fact it is Jewish billionaires who have the real power)--is based on morally wrong discrimination (read the apartheid laws here for within Israel) against Palestinians. This is why sincere Jewish leaders like Albert Einstein opposed a Jewish state. [1]​

• Jewish leaders of the Zionist movement, in their drive to establish and strengthen a Jewish state, have systematically betrayed ordinary Jews [2, and this is just the tip of the sordid iceberg!], especially during the Holocaust, with crimes that deserve to be labeled anti-Semitic. Read the sordid details here. The real reason these Zionist leaders want the Jewish state of Israel to exist is because it enables them to be a powerful and privileged elite, at the expense of everybody else, both Jews and non-Jews. They want, in other words, a Jewish working class of their own off of which to get rich and powerful.

What is the PURPOSE of the Israeli Government’s Violence Against, and Oppression of, Palestinians?

For the top leaders of the Zionist movement (in contrast to ordinary Jews who had either fanatical religious beliefs or just practical personal aims) the purpose of Israel’s violence against, and oppression of, Palestinians is NOT to make Israeli Jews safe. Not at all! The purpose is to make Palestinians FURIOUS and INTENSELY ANGRY at Israel, and even at Jews in general due to the fact that Israel attacks Palestinians IN THE NAME OF THE JEWS—using the military force of a SELF-DECLARED ‘JEWISH STATE.’

Why would anybody want to make Palestinians furious at Israel and at Jews?

Here’s why. The people who want to make Palestinians angry this way are not ordinary Israeli Jews. For them, the Palestinian anger is a terrible thing. Israel, just like the United States [3], has a billionaire ruling class. It is the billionaire ruling class of Israel (see some of its members below) who want, and NEED, Palestinians to be furious at Israel. Why?

The Israeli billionaire class needs Palestinians to be furious at Israel so that it can easily portray Palestinians to Israeli Jews as antisemites who want to kill all the Jews. But why does the Israeli billionaire class want to portray Palestinians to Israeli Jews this way?

The reason is this. The billionaires of Israel severely economically oppress the Israeli Jewish working class, to get and stay very rich at the expense of ordinary Israeli Jews. Naturally, working class Israeli Jews hate this, which is why, in 2011, there were massive demonstrations by 450,000 mostly Israeli Jews (with the support of 85% or 90% according to newspaper polls) of the entire Israeli population) against their economic oppression and against the rulers of Israel. Read in detail about these demonstrations here; this is a MUST read!

Read the article containing this photo here.

The ONLY way that the Israeli billionaire ruling class gets away with oppressing its Jewish have-nots is by using the Palestinians as a frightening bogeyman enemy. Israeli rulers pretend to be the protectors of Israeli Jews against their “real enemy—the Palestinians.” Whenever Israeli have-nots begin to fight the Israeli billionaire class to end their oppression, the Israeli rulers seize on the latest Palestine conflict violence and tell the Israeli have-nots, “You need to be patriotic and support your government that is protecting you from your real enemy, and stop your protests and demonstrations now!” This is exactly how Netanyahu killed the huge 2011 Israeli movement against economic oppression. Please read all about this, again in detail here.

Israeli rulers NEED ordinary Israeli Jews to FEAR Palestinians. This is why, in 1961 Israel’s first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, lied to Israeli Jews by declaring with no evidence whatsoever that Arab armies intended to “push all the Jews into the sea, dead or alive.”

Subsequently, Israel’s leaders realized that the Palestinian organization, the PLO, (despite engaging is some immoral terrorist violence against non-combatant Israeli civilians) was not sufficiently frightening to Israeli Jews. Why not? Because the PLO’s official aim (before being pressured into being for the horrible “two state solution”) was to make all of mandate Palestine (“from the River to the Sea”) be a single secular democratic state in which Jews and non-Jews would live as equals under the law in peace with each other. For Israel’s rulers, this was terrible! Too many Israeli Jews agreed with the PLO’s aim or at least hardly considered it an existential threat.

This is why Israel’s rulers decided to begin funding Hamas and working to keep it in power, because Hamas’s aim was indeed frightening to Israeli Jews; it was to make Islam sovereign in all of Mandate Palestine. More importantly, perhaps, was Hamas’s practice of terrorist violence against non-combatant Israeli Jews, initially with suicide bombs at Israeli bus stops and restaurants, then rockets aimed at civilians in Israeli towns, and of course finally the October 7 terror attack against Israeli non-combatant civilians. (Note that if Hamas had waged the CLASS WAR on behalf of all the have-nots against all the haves, it would have gained support from Israeli have-nots and thus weakened the Zionist Israeli ruling class’s power; but it did not do this, and would certainly have not received money from Israel’s rulers if it had!) Please read in detail how the Israeli government has for decades been funding Hamas and working to keep it in power here.

BUT WHAT ABOUT ALL THE HAMAS TERRORISM AGAINST ISRAELI CIVILIANS? CAN ISRAEL ALLOW THIS TO GO ON?

The first thing to say here is this:

If the Israeli government stopped treating Palestinians like dirt, i.e., if it ended the ethnic cleansing, allowed them to exercise their Right of Return to the part of Palestine now called Israel from which they were driven (most of the people in Gaza today are refugees because they or their parents or grandparents were violently expelled from what is now called Israel by Zionist forces in 1948 or later), made them equal under the law with Jews and provided just compensation for the theft by Zionists of their land and property, then virtually no Palestinians would support any violence against anyone just because they were Jewish or Israeli, and virtually all Palestinians would consider anybody who carried out such violence to be criminally immoral.

Peace, however, is the very LAST thing that Israel’s rulers want. They know that if there were peace, based on justice, then those 450,000 mostly Jewish Israelis who, with the support of 85% or 90% of the Israeli population, demonstrated against the Israeli government in 2011 would not have been so easily persuaded to stop their huge demonstrations by Netanyahu’s bogeyman enemy ruse. Israeli rulers know that peace would make it more likely that their have-nots would remove the billionaires who oppress them from power.

This is a fact that is NEVER, absolutely NEVER, reported in the mainstream media! And now you know why, right? U.S. rulers have the same goal as Israeli rulers, to keep the have-nots in fear of each other rather than united against the haves. Read more about this here (PDF, give it time to load).

OF COURSE ISRAEL SHOULD NOT ALLOW THE HAMAS TERRORISM TO CONTINUE.

Israel’s government should immediately do that which would end the terrorism and turn virtually all Palestinians AGAINST Hamas terrorists: stop treating the Palestinians like dirt.

But now you know the reason why the Israeli government will not do that.

BUT SOME ORDINARY NON-HAMAS PALESTINIANS IN GAZA CELEBRATED THE HAMAS TERRORISM AND EVEN EAGERLY PARADED IN THE STREET THE BODY OF AN ISRAELI WOMAN CAPTURED AND KILLED BY HAMAS WHILE THEY ATTACKED THE WOMAN’S BODY (according to a British reporter)

Yes, it is true that by doing absolutely everything they could think of to torment and humiliate and ethnically cleanse Palestinians to make them furious at Israel—the “State of the Jews”—the Israeli ruling class achieved its goal of making some Palestinians hate Israeli Jews. Read here the enormity of what it took to create this hatred in some Palestinians.

For some perspective, however, read here what most Palestinians want, despite the efforts of Hamas and Israel to make them hateful.

But for real perspective now, please think about how you would have responded to these immoral terrorist acts in the past.

Three important historical conflicts that involved terrorism against civilians come to mind: American Indians versus white settlers, black slaves versus whites in the American South, and blacks versus whites in apartheid South Africa. Below are examples of such terrorism from each of these conflicts -- terrorism against white settlers, white Southerners, and white South Africans.

Jefferson County's last Indian massacre occurred on July 17, 1789, when the family of Richard Chenoweth, builder of Louisville's Fort Nelson, was attacked. Three of Chenoweth's children and two soldiers guarding them were killed at the family home on Chenoweth Run about a mile west of Floyds Fork. [source here]​

"In August 1831, Nat Turner and his small band of black rebels wreaked fear, violence and murder in Southhampton County, Virginia. Attempting to strike a crushing blow against the institution of slavery, Turner and slave insurgents killed approximately sixty whites, many of whom were children." [http://jsr.fsu.edu/Volume7/Jones.htm]

In South Africa in 1986 Robert McBride, a member of the ANC's special operations unit, bombed Magoos Bar on the Durban beachfront, killing three people and injuring 80, nearly all of them white.

In all three cases the victims were no less innocent than Jewish victims of Palestinian (Hamas) suicide bombers and rockets and the October 7 attack, the violence no less wrong. American Indians, as virtually everybody now concedes, were the victims of genocide and ethnic cleansing. American slaves were the victims of the morally indefensible practice of chattel slavery. Blacks in South Africa were the victims of apartheid.​

White settlers could have responded to the American Indian terrorism in either of two basic ways: increase their support for the U.S. cavalry's genocidal campaign against American Indians, or end the conflict by opposing their government's genocide and seeking to live with American Indians in peace by respecting them as human beings with rights fully equal to their own.

Southern whites could have responded to Nat Turner by supporting increased security measures to protect whites from blacks in a slave society, or by abolishing slavery.

White South Africans had to choose between supporting the apartheid government and its draconian methods for controlling the black population under apartheid, or abolishing apartheid.

In these kinds of conflicts, the choice is between standing in solidarity with people who are fighting against a terrible injustice, or using the violence by—or in the name of—oppressed people against innocent civilians as an excuse for taking the side of those perpetuating the injustice.

In every case cited above, the root cause of the conflict was a fundamental injustice; terrorism was merely a response, however indefensible, of some of the victims to the injustice. In every case the morally right response to the terrorism was to abolish the injustice, not to step up security measures against the American Indians or slaves or black South Africans. Note that this is true regardless of the morality or immorality of the terrorist acts.

How would YOU have responded to these historical acts of terrorism? Do you think you should respond to Hamas terrorism any differently?

IT IS ANTISEMITIC NOT TO OPPOSE ZIONISM

If you have read the above carefully, then you will understand why it is antisemitic NOT to oppose Zionism. Zionism is the way that the actual oppressors of Israeli Jews—the top Zionist leaders and Israeli billionaires—get away with it.

The purpose of the Zionist narrative about the need for Jews to have a “state of their own” is to provide a pretext (that would have the support of naive ordinary Jews) for treating the Palestinians like dirt IN THE NAME OF THE JEWS, for the REAL (unstated, of course) aim of the top Zionist leaders: to make the Palestinians be the frightening bogeyman enemy that the top Zionist leaders and billionaires need to control and oppress and get rich off of Israeli working class people.

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO “DEFEND ISRAEL’S RIGHT TO EXIST”?

Defending Israel’s “right to exist” means defending the Israeli billionaire ruling class’s right to commit extreme violent oppression of Palestinians in order to commit extreme economic oppression of Israeli Jews. There is no valid moral reason to “defend Israel’s right to exist,” any more than there is a valid moral reason to defend, say, the right to exist of the slave-based Confederacy or the Master-Race-based Third Reich. Governments or states do not have a right to exist, and ought NOT to exist when, like the State of Israel, they are based on the violent oppression of one ethnic group.

DO JEWS HAVE A RIGHT TO REMAIN IN THE PART OF PALESTINE CALLED ISRAEL?

Yes. Jews have a right to remain in the part of Palestine called Israel, but not as citizens of a Zionist state based on the extreme oppression of Palestinians, and not as the possessors of land and property stolen from Palestinians (see the next section about this), and not as armed thugs who burn the olive trees of Palestinians in the Occupied West Bank and violently attack them as trespassers on land “given by God to the Jews.” Jews have a right to live in Palestine as the equals of non-Jews under the law, but not otherwise.

Abolishing the State of Israel does not mean “killing all the Jews” or “pushing the Jews into the sea,” no more than abolishing the slave Confederacy meant killing every white person living south of the Mason-Dixon line, or that abolishing the Third Reich meant killing all Germans, or that abolishing the apartheid South African state meant killing all the whites in South Africa. Zionists, of course, want people to believe that anti-Zionism means killing all the Jews, but it’s just a propaganda lie!

SHOULD JEWS HAVE TO RETURN, OR PAY PALESTINIANS FOR, THE HOUSES AND LAND THAT THEY LIVE IN THAT WERE STOLEN BY ZIONISTS FROM PALESTINIANS?

Yes. But what the Zionists don’t want people to know is that there is a way for Palestinians to have their homes and land returned (if they wish) or be properly compensated for their loss, a way that would be very popular with BOTH most Palestinians AND most Israeli Jews. Read about this way of doing it here. Then you will see WHY the Zionist leaders don’t want people to know about it.

WE NEED TO INFORM THE GENERAL PUBLIC ABOUT THIS

If the general public understood this KEY fact about Zionism—that it is a way for the Israeli billionaire class to get away with oppressing ordinary Israeli Jews—, then Jewish people (working class ones, anyway) who, before knowing the truth were passionately pro-Israel Zionists, would be part of the anti-Zionism movement, and the millions of non-Jews who once supported Israel because they wrongly believed that that was the way to NOT be antisemitic would come to see that the way to NOT be antisemitic is to support the ANTI-Zionism movement.

One big reason why the general public does not understand this key truth about Zionism is because anti-Zionism leaders refuse to express it, and instead agree with the Zionist lie that says Zionist violence is for the purpose of making Jews safe. Read about this failure of the anti-Zionism leaders here and (with regard to Jewish Voice for Peace specifically) here.

As a result of this failure of the anti-Zionism leaders, the anti-Zionism movement remains too weak to win, as I discuss in my “Dear Fellow Anti-Zionist” letter.

And as a further result of this failure of the anti-Zionism leaders, the haves are able to turn the have-nots against each other for divide-and-rule, as I discuss here and here and here.

BUT WHY PICK ON ISRAEL?

Israel’s defenders have a stock argument that goes like this:

"Why do people pick on Israel? Sure, Israel has its faults, just like any country. Its government is not perfect and sometimes it does bad things. What government doesn’t? But how come some people seem to focus only on Israel? Boycott Israel, divest from Israel, they say; but never boycott Russia or China or Saudi Arabia or a host of other countries that do bad things. Israel, they say, violates human rights of Palestinians. If they’re so concerned about human rights, how come they’re not bothered by China’s attack on Tibetans, or Russia’s attack on Chechens, or Saudi Arabia’s attack on women’s human rights? Hmmm. Why would people want to just pick on tiny little Israel, a Jewish state? Only one reason...they’re anti-Semites."

Nice try, but this defense of Israel is easily refuted. There are a lot of excellent reasons for singling Israel out, and none of them have anything to do with anti-Semitism.

#1. Jesus put it this way. “Why do you behold the mote in your brother’s eye but consider not the beam in your own eye?” For Americans, Israel's crimes are the beam in our own eye. The crimes of China and Russia and Saudi Arabia, etc., are the motes in the eyes of others. Our government supports Israel with virtually unconditional diplomatic support and vastly more military and economic aid than it gives to any other nation. Israel gets this overwhelming U.S. aid because it serves the aims not of ordinary Americans but of our ruling upper class (see #4 and #5 below.) No other country plays this role and receives this kind of support from our government today.

#2. Israel is not the only nation that carries out ethnic cleansing, but it is the only nation that is founded on the principle of ethnic cleansing. Israel defines itself as a state of the Jews. Unlike every other state on the planet, which all at least purport to be a state of the people who live in it, Israel adamantly insists it is not a state of the people who live in it, one fifth of whom are not Jewish. Israel is not officially a state of its residents. It is officially (not really, as discussed above) a state of “the Jews" and ONLY of the Jews. And by “the Jews” Israel means Jews wherever they live, including Jews who never lived inside Israel and who have no intention of ever living there. Israel insists that its population must be overwhelmingly Jewish and so it drove out 80% of the non-Jews in 1948 and continues to this day to carry out a brutal ethnic cleansing to get rid of the Palestinians by making life so unbearable for them that they will leave Palestine. No other country does this today.

#3. Israel is the only nation that self-righteously accuses any critic of its ethnic cleansing of being a bigot (anti-Semite.) It is the only nation that insists that its racist policies are “a light unto the nations.” If we let Israel get away with this we are contributing not only to its actual ethnic cleansing, but to its glorification of the principle of ethnic cleansing, which aids and abets this crime everywhere in the world. No other country, not even ones that engage in it, glorify ethnic cleansing this way today.

#4. Israel is the only nation that spreads contempt around the world for the idea of democracy by defining it to mean the government choosing the people instead of the other way around. Israel boasts that it is the “only democracy in the Middle East.” Democracy is an extremely good thing. It is a valuable idea that humanity needs to embrace and that elite rulers try to discredit. But democracy means that the people who live in a state choose its government. In Israel, on the contrary, the government, in the name of democracy, has officially* chosen the people–“the Jews”–and has driven 80% of the un-chosen people out of its borders and made the remaining 20% of them second class citizens completely excluded from the category of people who are officially the sovereign authority over the state. No other country does this today.

#5. No other country surpasses Israel’s polarizing of the entire world, between Muslims versus non-Muslims, by carrying out vicious and gratuitous attacks on the same mainly Muslim population for more than seven decades without let up. Israel thereby foments not only a regional ethnic war but a global "War on Terrorism" that serves the same Orwellian social-control needs of all world elites (from the U.S. to China to Russia to Saudi Arabia) that the Cold War served in the past. No other country does this today.

#6. More can be learned about our own United States, and about the source of our own domestic problems and how to solve them, by understanding why it is right to divest from and boycott Israel than by understanding why it might be good to divest from and boycott Russia or China or any other country. The reason is that our domestic problems, like job insecurity, illegal immigration, war, lack of health care, extreme inequality and so on are caused by our corporate and government leaders for the purpose of making us easier for them to control.

These same U.S. leaders have singled out Israel, unique among all other nations, to enjoy their unwavering and overwhelming support for the same reason–Israel helps to foment the global war that makes the world population easier to control. To understand why our leaders support Israel, and why they pretend to seek peace in that region but never put real pressure on Israel to stop its unjust ethnic cleansing, is to gain insight into how these same leaders control us by deliberately creating the very domestic problems they claim to be trying to solve. We need that insight to build a revolutionary movement to create a real democracy in the United States instead of the fake democracy we have now, controlled by a wealthy and privileged upper class.

Of all the foreign nations that we have been lied to about how wonderful they are and how deserving of our support they are, the lies about Israel are the ones that our rulers have used most effectively to get us to support a foreign policy of warmongering designed to strengthen upper class control over working people around the world. No other nation plays this role today.

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FOOTNOTES (these sources for the above are taken from my original cited articles and unfortunately the numbering format has gotten messed up; sorry)

1. Albert Einstein, on April 17, 1938, in a speech at the Commodore Hotel in New York City, said:​

"I should much rather see reasonable agreement with the Arabs on the basis of living together in peace than the creation of a Jewish state. Apart from practical consideration, my awareness of the essential nature of Judaism resists the idea of a Jewish state with borders, an army, and a measure of temporal power no matter how modest. I am afraid of the inner damage Judaism will sustain -- especially from the development of a narrow nationalism within our own ranks, against which we have already had to fight strongly, even without a Jewish state." [1]

1. In January, 1946, in a reply to the question of whether refugee settlement in Palestine demanded a Jewish state, Einstein told the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry:

"The State idea is not according to my heart. I cannot understand why it is needed. It is connected with narrow-minded and economic obstacles. I believe it is bad. I have always been against it." [2]

1. On December 4, 1948 Einstein, Hanna Arendt and a number of other eminent Jews co-signed a letter to the New York Times on the occasion of (future Israeli prime minister) Menachem Begin's visit to the United States. The letter began as follows:​

"Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our times is the emergence in the newly created state of Israel of the “Freedom Party” (Tnuat Haherut), a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties. It was formed out of the membership and following of the former Irgun Zvai Leumi, a terrorist, right-wing, chauvinist organization in Palestine.

​

"The current visit of Menachem Begin, leader of this party, to the United States is obviously calculated to give the impression of American support for his party in the coming Israeli elections, and to cement political ties with conservative Zionist elements in the United States. Several Americans of national repute have lent their names to welcome his visit. It is inconceivable that those who oppose fascism throughout the world, if correctly informed as to Mr. Begin’s political record and perspectives, could add their names and support to the movement he represents."

1. 1. Albert Einstein, in Ideas and Opinions, Crown Publishers, New York, 1954, p. 190

2. Alfred M. Lilienthal, What Price Israel?, 50th Anniversary edition, 2003, pg. 130

1. “During the Holocaust, Israel’s (to be) first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, and other top Zionist leaders opposed any rescue of Jews from the Nazis if it entailed sending the rescued Jews anywhere other than Palestine. Why? Because these top Zionist leaders wanted a Jewish working class of their own to be able to rule over and get rich off of in the new Jewish State in Palestine. In 1938 David Ben-Gurion said:

““If I knew that it would be possible to save all the [Jewish] children in Germany by bringing them over to England and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Israel, then I opt for the second alternative. For we must take into account not only the lives of these children but also the history of the people of Israel." [Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust, Henry Holt & Co., New York, First Owl Books Edition 2000, p. 28 ]

1. This academic study reported in the journal Perspectives on Politics [DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S1537592714001595 ] published September 18, 2014, by Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, (also described here and here and here) concludes with the following statements:

"Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism."

"When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organised interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the US political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favour policy change, they generally do not get it."

"Americans do enjoy many features central to democratic governance, such as regular elections, freedom of speech and association and a widespread (if still contested) franchise. But we believe that if policymaking is dominated by powerful business organisations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America's claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened."

1. In other less academic wording, we have a fake democracy that is actually a dictatorship of the rich.

   The first author, Martin Gilens, is professor of politics at Princeton University. The second author, Benjamin I. Page, is the Gordon Scott Fulcher Professor of Decision Making, Northwestern University.

2. Section 7A(1) of the Basic Law of Israel explicitly prevents Israeli citizens – Arab or Jewish – from using the "democratic" system of Israeli elections to challenge the inferior status of Arabs under the law; it restricts who can run for political office with this language: "A candidates' list shall not participate in elections to the Knesset if among its goals or deeds, either expressly or impliedly, are one of the following: (1) The negation of the existence of the State of Israel as the State of the Jewish People. …" In a 1989 Israeli Supreme Court ruling (reported in the 1991 Israel Law Review, Vol. 25, p. 219, published by the Faculty of Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem) Justice S. Levine, speaking for the majority, ruled that this law meant that a political party could not run candidates if it intended to achieve the cancellation of one of the fundamental tenets of the State – namely "the existence of a Jewish majority, the granting of preference to Jews in matters of immigration, and the existence of close and reciprocal relations between the State and the Jews of the Diaspora."

   ​

3. Zionism is not a derogatory word. It is the self-declared name of the movement that began in 1896 to create a Jewish state. It began with Theodor Herzl’s publication of his book, titled “The Jewish State.” This book said (falsely!) that all non-Jews were innately (permanently) antisemitic, and therefore the only sensible thing for Jews to do was to create a Jewish state somewhere, a “normal” state but just for Jews, with a majority Jewish population, in which the sovereign power would be only Jews, not all of its citizens. From the very beginning, Zionism thus rejected the principle that the legitimacy of a government is based on the consent of the people it ruled.

   Before the emergence of the modern Zionist movement, Jews and Muslims and Christians lived in peace together (under the Ottoman Empire) in what became after World War I British Mandate Palestine (from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea). The myth that the Muslims and Jews there have been at war with each other from time immemorial is a lie, a propaganda lie.

   The Zionist movement got a green light from Great Britain after WWI to settle large numbers of Jewish immigrants in British-controlled Mandate Palestine. Over subsequent years of Jewish immigration to Palestine, the fact gradually became known to the peasant farmer Palestinians that the Zionist movement aimed to create a Jewish state in Palestine, a state in which officially ONLY Jewish people are sovereign, a state that officially requires a robust Jewish majority population (at least 80% as stated by Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion [The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, by Ilan Pappe, p.48]) achieved by expelling most of the original non-Jews from it, a state in which Jews have rights that are denied to (what would become the minority of) non-Jews in it. This is when Palestinian hostility to Zionism began and by 1936 there were Palestinian riots against the Zionists. At this time Zionists (the Jewish National Fund) were buying land from wealthy absentee Palestinian land owners and then evicting the Palestinian peasants who farmed the land, laying the basis for an implicit alliance of Zionists and wealthy Palestinians against the have-not Palestinians.