Israel, from the River to the Sea
The Children of Amalek, Ch. 4
Which brings us to the even more damning contextual issues with those arguments. Hamas, it so happens, was cultivated by the Israeli government, including Likud and Netanyahu specifically, because Likud doesn’t want a “two-state solution”; Likud wants all of “Greater Israel”; according to its original platform of 1977:
The right of the Jewish people to the land of Israel is eternal and indisputable and is linked with the right to security and peace; therefore, Judea and Samaria will not be handed to any foreign administration; between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty
And to this day, that is the situation. Israeli domination spans between the sea and the Jordan. Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank do not live in a separate state; they live in a sprawling, discontinuous, modern ghetto surveilled and controlled by the government of Israel. A lot of outrage has been expressed about the phrase “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”, but the charter of Likud predates Hamas, and it expresses a sentiment that is a mirror-image of the Hamas platform of 2017 which states “Hamas rejects any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea”. The sentiment of complete control over Palestine is the policy of Israel under Likud.
Likud has sought to cultivate Hamas precisely because of its passionate opposition to a two-state solution. From the Times of Israel:
According to various reports, Netanyahu made a similar point at a Likud faction meeting in early 2019, when he was quoted as saying that those who oppose a Palestinian state should support the transfer of funds to Gaza, because maintaining the separation between the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza would prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.
From the Wall Street Journal:
"Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel's creation," says Mr. Cohen, a Tunisian-born Jew who worked in Gaza for more than two decades. Responsible for religious affairs in the region until 1994, Mr. Cohen watched the Islamist movement take shape, muscle aside secular Palestinian rivals and then morph into what is today Hamas, a militant group that is sworn to Israel's destruction.
Instead of trying to curb Gaza's Islamists from the outset, says Mr. Cohen, Israel for years tolerated and, in some cases, encouraged them as a counterweight to the secular nationalists of the Palestine Liberation Organization and its dominant faction, Yasser Arafat's Fatah. Israel cooperated with a crippled, half-blind cleric named Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, even as he was laying the foundations for what would become Hamas.
From the New York Times:
Shlomo Brom, a retired general and former deputy to Israel’s national security adviser, said an empowered Hamas helped Mr. Netanyahu avoid negotiating over a Palestinian state.
“One effective way to prevent a two-state solution is to divide between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank,” he said in an interview. The division gives Mr. Netanyahu an excuse to disengage from peace talks, Mr. Brom said, adding that he can say, “I have no partner.”
Mr. Netanyahu did not articulate this strategy publicly, but some on the Israeli political right had no such hesitation.
Bezalel Smotrich, a far-right politician who is now Mr. Netanyahu’s finance minister, put it bluntly in 2015, the year he was elected to Parliament.
“The Palestinian Authority is a burden,” he said. “Hamas is an asset.”
Benjamin Netanyahu has also been recorded on video admitting he undermined the peace process and boasting about his deceptive influence over the United States. From Haaretz:
No more claims that the Palestinians are to blame for the failure of the Oslo Accords. Netanyahu exposed the naked truth to his hosts at Ofra: he destroyed the Oslo accords with his own hands and deeds, and he's even proud of it. After years in which we were told that the Palestinians are to blame, the truth has emerged from the horse's mouth.
And how did he do it? He recalled how he conditioned his signing of the 1997 Hebron agreement on American consent that there be no withdrawals from "specified military locations," and insisted he choose those same locations, such as the whole of the Jordan Valley, for example. "Why is that important? Because from that moment on I stopped the Oslo Accords," he boasts. The real Netanyahu also brags about his knowledge of America: "I know what America is. America is something that can be moved easily."
In the video he reveals that his public persona toward Americans is fraudulent and manipulates the United States to get what he wants for Israel, which is territorial expansion. Watch the video yourself:
That is the man who came to the United States a few months ago and received a standing ovation from much of congress.
If it is true that Hamas could not have developed the capacity to carry out the attacks of October 7th without the support of the Israeli government, it means the Israeli government was willing to risk the lives of Israeli citizens in order to fulfill its dream of a “Greater Israel.” The religious zeal of Likudites and like-minded Zionists who desire sovereignty over Palestine, such as Benjamin Netanyahu, propelled Israel to cultivate a monster. Holding Palestinians collectively responsible — for example, arguing that Israel has a right to starve Palestinian children in order to kill the monster that Israel helped breed — is an abomination.
While I agree that the suicide bombings by Hamas targeting random civilians have been depraved, I also think the Israeli soldiers dancing and singing about bombing and starving innocent people in Palestine is equally depraved. The former certainly demonstrates more desperation, but not greater depravity. The blind generalized violent hatred of Israeli Jews who try to block aid from reaching Gazan civilians so that they are more likely to starve is no less meaningfully alarming than the blind generalized violent hatred that has been demonstrated by Hamas. Apparently it’s not enough that the Israeli government is systematically restricting aid to the brink of famine and a dire lack of medical supplies such as anesthesia for amputations, many Israeli citizens want to stop the flow of international aid entirely.
There is a video of Palestinian children expressing bigoted violent hatred toward Jews. The interviews show some Palestinian children saying they want to kill Jews or fight Jews, who they view as their captors, given that it is the “Jewish State” their parents hold responsible for the apartheid (which has recently been even acknowledged in an advisory opinion by the International Court of Justice).
Israel is not a state of all its citizens… [but rather] the nation-state of the Jewish people and only them - Benjamin Netanyahu
There shouldn’t be anything surprising about the bigoted hatred held by many Palestinians, anymore than you might be surprised to learn that many slaves had a bigoted hatred toward “white” people or “Americans” in the 1800s or that many Native Americans had bigoted hatred toward Christians. It’s understandable intellectually, based on a sober acceptance of common human nature, that humans often come to hate their captors or people who’ve destroyed their homes, in a bigoted way, even though the bigotry itself is a vice. After all, many Americans were abolitionists and fought and even died to end slavery, and many Jews are sympathetic with ending the apartheid of Palestinians. But that doesn’t change the human tendency to poorly generalize hate (or love). And of course, the hatred held by many of the captives, as much of a vice as it may be in its bigoted form, wouldn’t justify racial slavery, racial cleansing, or apartheid, nor would it justify blind collective violent hatred directed toward all of the enslaved and the captured. There is also a video of Israeli children singing about the destruction of Gazans:
Just as such murderous bigoted hate displayed by Israeli children wouldn’t justify the oppression or wanton destruction of Israelis, nor should bigoted hatred displayed by Palestinian children justify the oppression and destruction of Gazans.
What came first, the Israeli children’s bigoted hatred toward the Palestinian children or the Palestinian children’s bigoted hatred toward the Israeli children? Regardless, we know for sure that Zionist children at some point in the early 1900s were raised to believe that Palestine belonged to Jews and eventually that it was justified to cleanse Palestine of non-Jews. Before then there simply were no “Zionists” in Palestine. And that’s because Zionists, who were at the time primarily a subset of European Jews, colonized Palestine.
And “colonize” is not simply a hyperbolic term thrown about by hysterical social justice warriors in this instance. It’s clearly reflected in the data and it’s the language the earliest Zionists like Theodore Herzl, the man who is commonly viewed as the founder of modern Zionism, and who is memorialized in the Israel Declaration of Independence, used:
Should the Powers declare themselves willing to admit our sovereignty over a neutral piece of land, then the Society will enter into negotiations for the possession of this land. Here two territories come under consideration, Palestine and Argentine. In both countries important experiments in colonization have been made, though on the mistaken principle of a gradual infiltration of Jews. An infiltration is bound to end badly. It continues till the inevitable moment when the native population feels itself threatened, and forces the Government to stop a further influx of Jews. Immigration is consequently futile unless we have the sovereign right to continue such immigration.
The Society of Jews will treat with the present masters of the land, putting itself under the protectorate of the European Powers, if they prove friendly to the plan. We could offer the present possessors of the land enormous advantages, assume part of the public debt, build new roads for traffic, which our presence in the country would render necessary, and do many other things. The creation of our State would be beneficial to adjacent countries, because the cultivation of a strip of land increases the value of its surrounding districts in innumerable ways.
We have evidence of Likud cultivating Hamas, but we don’t have evidence of Hamas cultivating Likud in an analogous fashion. Hamas didn’t cultivate the Zionist groups that are responsible for trying to starve Palestinian civilians or teaching their children to sing about the destruction of Gaza. That is Israeli, totally home-grown. But Hamas was encouraged to grow and inevitably teach their children to hate Jews, by Zionists. It’s perverse, but true. History didn’t begin on October 7th. Thus anything that Hamas does the Israeli government holds substantial moral responsibility for — it has consciously contributed to its cultivation.
It would be as if the U.S. government had known about Nat Turner’s “organization”, permitted funds to go toward it, but blocked funds that went to organizations that weren’t itching to annihilate white people. And then when Nat Turner and his gang murdered a bunch of infants following a plan that the U.S. government had detailed knowledge of because the U.S. government meticulously surveilled everything the slave population did, the U.S. government turned around and decimated the slave population under the pretense it was necessary to eliminate the people responsible for the atrocities. When evaluating Israel’s response to October 7th, the history of Israel and its relationship to Hamas should not be set aside.c