Video by Mehdi Hasan, Dina Sayedahmed
The Intercept
What do you know about Hamas?
That it’s sworn to destroy Israel? That it’s a terrorist group, proscribed both by the United States and the European Union? That it rules Gaza with an iron fist? That it’s killed hundreds of innocent Israelis with rocket, mortar, and suicide attacks?
But did you also know that Hamas — which is an Arabic acronym for “Islamic Resistance Movement” — would probably not exist today were it not for the Jewish state? That the Israelis helped turn a bunch of fringe Palestinian Islamists in the late 1970s into one of the world’s most notorious militant groups? That Hamas is blowback?
This isn’t a conspiracy theory. Listen to former Israeli officials such as Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Segev, who was the Israeli military governor in Gaza in the early 1980s. Segev later told a New York Times reporter that he had helped finance the Palestinian Islamist movement as a “counterweight” to the secularists and leftists of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Fatah party, led by Yasser Arafat (who himself referred to Hamas as “a creature of Israel.”)
“The Israeli government gave me a budget,” the retired brigadier general confessed, “and the military government gives to the mosques.”
“Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation,” Avner Cohen, a former Israeli religious affairs official who worked in Gaza for more than two decades, told the Wall Street Journal in 2009. Back in the mid-1980s, Cohen even wrote an official report to his superiors warning them not to play divide-and-rule in the Occupied Territories, by backing Palestinian Islamists against Palestinian secularists. “I … suggest focusing our efforts on finding ways to break up this monster before this reality jumps in our face,” he wrote.
[…]
Via https://theintercept.com/2018/02/19/hamas-israel-palestine-conflict/
The Most Revolutionary Act 
So, everyone fights for ‘self preservation’. Where is the common unifying human factor?
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Sometimes, Aunty, it’s really hard to distinguish reality from propaganda. The situation of Israel is extremely complicated, in large part because the US corporate oligarchy created Israel and guarantees its continued existence as a belligerent opponent to the oil-producing Arab states that surround it (to ensure continued favored US access to cheap Middle East oil).
From this vantage point, the US is directly responsible for violently expelling hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes and using military occupation and blockades to condemn those that remain to a life of abject poverty and misery.
All the talk of Israel’s “self-preservation” is pure propaganda on the part of Israel and the US politicians influenced by America’s powerful Zionist lobby.
The problem in my view is that a country cannot simultaneously be a “theocracy” (ie Jewish state governed by Jewish religious law) and a democracy governed by the will of the people. Thus far, the Israeli solution to this dilemma is to create an apartheid state in which Arab (and many Christian) residents of Palestine are denied free access to the homelands (now within the state of Israel) from which they originated.
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