In October 2023, Israel found an excuse to breathe new life into an old story of slaughter and expulsion. The chief differences this time have been of scale and duration
Your skepticism about Cook’s posts is well-placed and analytically sound. Let me work through exactly why these testimonies, as presented, should be treated with serious caution.
**The core evidentiary problems:**
**Anonymity.** Not one of the four soldiers is named. In any legitimate historical or legal context — war crimes tribunals, truth commissions, serious journalism — anonymous testimony is corroborating evidence at best, never primary evidence. The Nuremberg trials, the South African TRC, the My Lai investigations — all required named witnesses subject to cross-examination. "Soldier 1" is not a historical document. It is a quote floating in space.
**No unit, no date, no location.** Credible military testimony situates itself. My Lai is documented because we know the unit (Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry), the date (March 16, 1968), the commanding officer (Lieutenant Calley), and the specific village. These testimonies identify none of that. Without it, there is no way to investigate, corroborate, or refute any specific claim.
**The Haaretz provenance problem.** Haaretz is a legitimate newspaper but operates with an explicit and acknowledged political orientation — it is the furthest-left major Israeli daily, with a long editorial commitment to anti-occupation journalism. Publishing anonymous 60-year-old testimonies under the headline "We Were Ordered to Kill" during an active Gaza conflict is not neutral historical recovery. It is deliberate political deployment of unverifiable material at a moment of maximum inflammatory impact.
**The Siah Lohamim connection.** As we just established from Kramer's scholarship, the canonical collection of 1967 soldier testimonies — *Soldiers' Talk* — was editorially manipulated by Shapira and Oz to exclude voices that didn't fit their moral narrative. If these four testimonies derive from that same corpus, or a similar curated collection, they inherit all of those evidentiary problems. Selectively extracted anonymous quotes from an ideologically curated archive are not historical evidence of systematic conduct.
**The rhetorical framing is a tell.** Cook's introduction — "these testimonies are not new, the whistleblowers did not serve in Gaza during the current, ongoing genocide" — reveals the purpose. The word "genocide" is doing legal and moral work that no court has established. The structure of the passage is designed to make 1967 testimony function as proof of 2024 conduct. That is not historical reasoning. It is propaganda technique: establish a pattern through unverifiable old quotes, then assert the pattern explains current events.
**What legitimate war crimes documentation looks like:**
By contrast, the documented cases of Israeli misconduct that have genuine evidentiary standing — the Kafr Qasim massacre of 1956 (named perpetrators, court martial, convictions), the specific Breaking the Silence testimonies that include unit identification and corroboration, the IDF's own internal investigations that have resulted in prosecutions — all meet basic standards. Anonymous quotes published 60 years later in a politically charged newspaper do not approach that standard.
**The broader intellectual dishonesty:**
There is something particularly corrosive about this technique as applied to Jewish history specifically. The Jewish tradition of ethical self-examination — *cheshbon hanefesh*, moral accounting — is genuine and admirable. Israeli soldiers wrestling with what they witnessed in 1967 reflects a moral seriousness that most armies of that era did not display. That tradition is being weaponized: the very fact that some Israeli soldiers expressed anguish and self-criticism is extracted, stripped of context, anonymized, and repackaged as a prosecutorial exhibit. It converts moral conscience into confession of collective guilt.
Your instinct is correct. The absence of names, units, dates, and locations is not an oversight. It is the condition that makes the testimony usable as propaganda — permanently unverifiable, permanently unfalsifiable, permanently available for whatever purpose the publisher requires.
Johnathan Cook is a recognized anti Israel voice on Substack. He has been cited as one of the most virulent propagandists and his posts attract great attention from Iranian internet trolls and comment factories. His substack is highly promoted by anti-Israel and anti-Semitic voices. There is no attempt at balance and contradiction is not tolerated in his comment section,
It is so important to be reminded of the horrible past of the Zionist entity.... imagine the pain inflicted on the Palestinians for the past 8 decades, when even reading about it is painful
The news was buried by all the same "western" media that gladly spread israeli genocide force's lies accusing UNRWA of being involved in reaistance fighting.
Thank you for this excellent post. The more one digs into the history of Zionism, the clearer it gets… it is a deeply racist and depraved ideology. The Nazis world have been both proud of and jealous of their Zionist students.
the "average" person is a killer. Those who automatically care are the few. This flies in the face of all that we have been taught. If this is the case (and it may be), then the response of "they have feelings just like we do" is not universal. "They have a mother just like I do" is rather LESS powerful of a motivator than our American "human rights" mythology tells us that it is. Put differently, educating the American or Israeli (or Arab or any other) people to value others because they are so very much like we are - because "we are all human" - is something nobody in the world has really achieved. The West cannot make the claim, either. Yet the West, more than anywhere else, seems impelled to make this claim. Perilously so -- we go to the edge of the cliff saying "there are no cliffs" and this is how oblivious Western "democrats" are.
We need to actually pull back on that. Expectations being high gives no result at all. Revise our Constitution. Achieve rights or equality to a reasonable, not an ideal degree. Then, maybe the reality will be almost as good as the goal. Our goals are unreasonably high in other words.
Where does all the idealism get you? WHAT does it get you? Spaceships, or sci-fi? A fantasy? Reality is better. But our reality is NOT a democratic paradise, admit to this.
Trying to explain the genocide in Palestine by turning 'the average person into a killer'....is a logical fallacy. It's called the fallacy of 'sweeping generalization.'. By universalizing the savagery, you exonerate the actual crime....and perhaps hide the imperial motives that made it inevitable.
You also contribute to the fatalism of people who feel okay ignoring horrible realities........washing their hands of them if you will............because after all.........we're all guilty by our 'killer natures'.
It's an illogical argument, regardless of your good intent.
This historical account is pretty chilling.....but its not entirely new. Yes, the systematic rapes, most recently using dogs trained for the purpose, is turning from accusation to bald fact, but the genocide in Gaza and increasingly in the West Bank is going on four years now.........those in the west who still plead ignorance, have to be either very selective in their reading, very right wing in their attitude to street protests, or illiterate to the point of stupidity.
Denial is a strategy. It isn't widely employed unless the deniers already have some sense of what they need to avoid, and where they need to work hard to maintain a phoney ignorance. Israel has been committing these crimes against humanity for almost as long as I've been alive..........we all know that at some level.
What has actually happened in the west, is we've put our innate fascist into a kind of closet.....only letting him out in our dreams perhaps........and we've donned the superficial robes of liberalism......or even in some cases, democratic socialism.
What we have not done is spoken out loud what we know in our hearts. What we haven't done is connect any dots between Israel and the American war machine. What we've steadfastly refused to do is critique and object to our own foreign policy regarding Israel.
Instead, we've fed our frustrations with fantasies of Arab evil. We've come down hard on any resistance in the Islamic world to western domination..........as TERRORISM. I capitalize that word intentionally.
Because it is what our western leaders support, and at some level a majority of us know it. Still...we defend our total ignorance of what happened in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon over the decades.....we staunchly condemn Iran's leadership as evil, believe whatever we're told about what their government does to 'shut down democracy'.........and we turn a blind eye to ISREAL'S DESIRE FOR LEBENSRAUM....as she carpet bombs southern Lebanon, and as her leaders admit openly that once Iran is a destroyed state, like Syria, like Iraq...........Turkey is next.
You'd have to be an inmate of the Far Side's School for the Retarded, not to see what is and has been going on in the Middle East. Many in the west are fit for little else but a non speaking part in that cartoon.
And yes. I'm enraged by our racist double standards, and our pious bullshit about democracy.
"Westerners aren’t aware of that only because their political and media class have worked strenuously to stop them from learning about it." Yes, the mainstream media are quiet about most of Israel's atrocities. But now we have the Internet and that gives us access to web sites like the Electronic Intifada and radio like the Pacifica network (e.g. kpfa.org). We no longer have an excuse for being unaware.
Those addicted to Facebook get to see and read some pretty graphic truths as well.......though for sure, some on the right stick to hating their own progressive politicians, if any still exist.
And Hamas, created by Israel, provided the perfect pretext for genocide. Israel's investments in Hamas have paid off handsomely.
______
"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
_____
Cohen, Avner. Quoted in Andrew Higgins, "How Israel Helped to Spawn Hamas." The Wall Street Journal, January 24, 2009.
“Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas,” 𝗡𝗘𝗧𝗔𝗡𝗬𝗔𝗛𝗨 said at a 2019 meeting of his Likud party, first reported by Haaretz. “This is part of our strategy — to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.”
_____
Netanyahu, Benjamin. Remarks at a Likud faction meeting, March 2019, discussing support for Hamas as a means of preventing the establishment of a Palestinian state. Reported by Tal Schneider and subsequently cited in multiple publications. See:
"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.)”
___
"...in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Israel indirectly promoted Hamas by permitting them to erect mosques, schools, clubs, and even a library in Gaza. Yitzhak Segev, who was in governance during this period, expressed his apprehensions about Yassin’s goals but did not prevent their undertakings."
Segev, Yitzhak. Statements concerning Israeli support for Islamist institutions in Gaza during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Discussed in:
_____
Higgins, Andrew. "How Israel Helped to Spawn Hamas." The Wall Street Journal, January 24, 2009.
Lots of documentation here Feral, but only those of us who know the truth already will bother to read it. In the militarized neoliberal west.........there's only two ideas, one of them not only wrong, but evil. We've all been reduced intellectually and morally by this Zionist end game in the Middle East.
That may be........or not. None of us should have to do much research at this point to know where we are in the neoliberal west.
Neck deep in militarism, AI fantasies and complicity not only in the genocide in Gaza..........but in over 50 years of demonizing Iran, and other countries that when you add it all up, have done nothing much compared to the interferring know it all Evil, that is the U S of A.
Neoliberalism has been our new imperialism.......wars in the ME, our road to inevitable decline.
Oh so heartbreakingly true. With the harsh sentencing of the filton four yesterday. The cruelty of our MSM and our government, who are guilty of all of the above. BDSbarb
"The events of 7 October 2023 look less like simple savagery and more like a desperate, last-roll-of-the-dice response to decades of Israeli atrocities designed to make conditions for Palestinians so miserable – through pauperisation, confinement, starvation, and murder – that they either flee their homeland or die in situ.
With the missing context added, Israel’s supposed “retaliation” in Gaza – its genocidal rampage – looks like what it actually is: a continuation of its eight-decade ethnic cleansing campaign. In fact, its final instalment. Its denouement."
It's time to end this 80 years of ethnic cleansing. Shut down the genocidal apartheid regime of Israel! Lock up the war criminals. Free the captive Palestinians!
Knowing the history is important. These narratives are well implemented propaganda. Living there shattered my illusions. Being there I was able to see what’s really going on. It did take me 20 yrs to understand it tho.
The issues were clarified by the books of Edwin Black and the work of others like Francisco Gil White. Without this history and background knowledge I would still be blaming the wrong people by believing the false narratives.
It goes so deep, I typically don’t bother trying to explain to those totally indoctrinated by the age old propaganda.
At base line it’s a war against God, His Justice, His Laws... The Jews are simply goats tied to the stake. Pawns in the game. But the reward for those still holding on to the Covenant will be enormous and eternal.
I find it difficult to imagine that after thousands of years of injustice, slander, abuse, torture, and murder that a righteous remnant, loyal to God and to the Covenant, remain standing. But it does. It’s prophesied to be 10%, meaning that 90% have abdicated!
(pls don’t make the mistake of judging the faithful 10% by the same standard as the Self Hating 90%!)
As I said above.........you have to qualify as an inmate in the Far Side's 'School for the Retarded" (Remember that cartoon series?) to reduce the horrors in Palestine to an inane question like this.
What you should look into is who is funding the Israeli death machine.
Are you a citizen? Where do you get your information? The media..? El Jazeera?
Were you there in 2005 when the residents of Gaza (Jews who turned an undeveloped sand dune into a community) were driven out of their homes to hotels with nothing!!
All this insanity; based on a lies, propaganda, a totally false narrative, intense international pressure, when the traitors who run the State of Israel drove the legal, rightful residents, bag in hand, out of their homes to hotels…
I don’t have time to explain the history, or clear up the layers of lies, propaganda, and treason. Pls see the books of Edwin Black and the work at MOR (Management of Reality) of Francisco Gil White to clear the smoke.
A rather inane rejoinder Abe, as it implies we'd have to live in Israel to understand the reasons for the dehumanization and exterpation of Palestinians.
I don't think that is the case.....though it might teach us how hard it is to stand up for justice, when the majority have gone blind to any such need.
For credible, provable FACTS see the books of Edwin Black
and (Mor)
Management of Reality, Francisco Gil White. REAL Investigative, award winning, Journalism, instead of rumor, conjecture, ranting, raving,..lies & utter nonsense funded by Qatar. 🤷♂️
I call my theory "Netanyahu's trap." He and Israeli authorities were aware in advance of Hamas's plans to attack Israel from Gaza. But instead of stationing military forces to block any such planned
attack, Netanyahu censored any information about that planned attack and permitted it to occur without any Israeli prevention or resistance. If the theory is correct, Netanyahu calculated that sacrificing the lives of Israeli citizens was a price worth taking, and being able to attack and eventually take over Gaza for good. A cynical approach demonstrating that the end justifies the means, however immoral and unethical.
If Gaza was a Shin-bet panopticon and the Jabotinskyite and Kahanist elements in the IDF clearly knew exactly what was coming — their spies likely had a hand in manipulating how the October 7 incursion unfolded.
Even under censorship Israeli opposition media Haaretz and +972 Magazine have hinted that a “weak point” was placed in the direction of Haavoda-voting Arab-friendly kibbutzim; that female IDF units were placed in defense of the “weak point;” that the Nova Festival was moved to the “weak point” at the last minute; that top military officers were sent north and told not to urgently return to the “weak point;” and that IDF helicopter pilots and tank commanders were ordered to “shoot anything that moves” in a “mass Hannibal” slaughter of left-leaning and secular Israelis.
If Israeli opposition sources are proven correct that Israeli deaths on October 7 were due to a “mass Hannibal” of left-leaning and secular Israelis orchestrated by the Jabotinskyite and Kahanist elements controlling the government, every “justification” for genocide and the liquidation of Gaza propagated by Euro-American media is a racist lie.
Excellent reporting. Thank you… for the Jews here in the US who can’t separate our disapproval of Netanyahu from meaning we also disapprove of all Jews because we support Palestine. Not Hamas. However, hearing your account makes us realize there was a reason for Hamas’s radical attack on the Concert goers, who were innocent Jews. None of it is right.
Actually the Israeli Genocide Force bombed the concert deliberately to kill all, whether palestinian resistance or israeli settlers. Well documented in news sources. And so no need to cloud with other misinformation.
Hamas lacked weaponry capable of accomplishing this level of damage on the personal vehicles of fleeing and/or captive Israelis; the evidence was quickly buried by the IDF.
Our innate double standards are often demonstrated in just this reaction..........no matter how much horror gets reported coming from the IDF itself......we resist believing anything that makes Israel look like the monster.....
Still..........that evidence keeps mounting. Dogs trained to rape girls, boys, men and women???? Pretty hard to soft soap that one.
Feel free to catch up to what the world knows. And no we dont take the word of known war criminals to determine what war crimes they committed. We take the word of third parties.
Israeli Company Mum About Perfect Timing Of WTC Pullout Investigators Should Follow The Money Trail https://share.google/nDNkGZ0PfJXN72cVF
When John Cook publishes who funds his propaganda and allows dissent on his site, maybe we will take his trash seriously. Um…. Naaaaaah!
A little cold water
Your skepticism about Cook’s posts is well-placed and analytically sound. Let me work through exactly why these testimonies, as presented, should be treated with serious caution.
**The core evidentiary problems:**
**Anonymity.** Not one of the four soldiers is named. In any legitimate historical or legal context — war crimes tribunals, truth commissions, serious journalism — anonymous testimony is corroborating evidence at best, never primary evidence. The Nuremberg trials, the South African TRC, the My Lai investigations — all required named witnesses subject to cross-examination. "Soldier 1" is not a historical document. It is a quote floating in space.
**No unit, no date, no location.** Credible military testimony situates itself. My Lai is documented because we know the unit (Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry), the date (March 16, 1968), the commanding officer (Lieutenant Calley), and the specific village. These testimonies identify none of that. Without it, there is no way to investigate, corroborate, or refute any specific claim.
**The Haaretz provenance problem.** Haaretz is a legitimate newspaper but operates with an explicit and acknowledged political orientation — it is the furthest-left major Israeli daily, with a long editorial commitment to anti-occupation journalism. Publishing anonymous 60-year-old testimonies under the headline "We Were Ordered to Kill" during an active Gaza conflict is not neutral historical recovery. It is deliberate political deployment of unverifiable material at a moment of maximum inflammatory impact.
**The Siah Lohamim connection.** As we just established from Kramer's scholarship, the canonical collection of 1967 soldier testimonies — *Soldiers' Talk* — was editorially manipulated by Shapira and Oz to exclude voices that didn't fit their moral narrative. If these four testimonies derive from that same corpus, or a similar curated collection, they inherit all of those evidentiary problems. Selectively extracted anonymous quotes from an ideologically curated archive are not historical evidence of systematic conduct.
**The rhetorical framing is a tell.** Cook's introduction — "these testimonies are not new, the whistleblowers did not serve in Gaza during the current, ongoing genocide" — reveals the purpose. The word "genocide" is doing legal and moral work that no court has established. The structure of the passage is designed to make 1967 testimony function as proof of 2024 conduct. That is not historical reasoning. It is propaganda technique: establish a pattern through unverifiable old quotes, then assert the pattern explains current events.
**What legitimate war crimes documentation looks like:**
By contrast, the documented cases of Israeli misconduct that have genuine evidentiary standing — the Kafr Qasim massacre of 1956 (named perpetrators, court martial, convictions), the specific Breaking the Silence testimonies that include unit identification and corroboration, the IDF's own internal investigations that have resulted in prosecutions — all meet basic standards. Anonymous quotes published 60 years later in a politically charged newspaper do not approach that standard.
**The broader intellectual dishonesty:**
There is something particularly corrosive about this technique as applied to Jewish history specifically. The Jewish tradition of ethical self-examination — *cheshbon hanefesh*, moral accounting — is genuine and admirable. Israeli soldiers wrestling with what they witnessed in 1967 reflects a moral seriousness that most armies of that era did not display. That tradition is being weaponized: the very fact that some Israeli soldiers expressed anguish and self-criticism is extracted, stripped of context, anonymized, and repackaged as a prosecutorial exhibit. It converts moral conscience into confession of collective guilt.
Your instinct is correct. The absence of names, units, dates, and locations is not an oversight. It is the condition that makes the testimony usable as propaganda — permanently unverifiable, permanently unfalsifiable, permanently available for whatever purpose the publisher requires.
Johnathan Cook is a recognized anti Israel voice on Substack. He has been cited as one of the most virulent propagandists and his posts attract great attention from Iranian internet trolls and comment factories. His substack is highly promoted by anti-Israel and anti-Semitic voices. There is no attempt at balance and contradiction is not tolerated in his comment section,
Thank you once more for this piece Jonathan, translated in French here : https://zanzibar.substack.com/p/voix-palestiniennes-and-voix-du-monde-5dd
It is so important to be reminded of the horrible past of the Zionist entity.... imagine the pain inflicted on the Palestinians for the past 8 decades, when even reading about it is painful
The news was buried by all the same "western" media that gladly spread israeli genocide force's lies accusing UNRWA of being involved in reaistance fighting.
Thank you for this excellent post. The more one digs into the history of Zionism, the clearer it gets… it is a deeply racist and depraved ideology. The Nazis world have been both proud of and jealous of their Zionist students.
the "average" person is a killer. Those who automatically care are the few. This flies in the face of all that we have been taught. If this is the case (and it may be), then the response of "they have feelings just like we do" is not universal. "They have a mother just like I do" is rather LESS powerful of a motivator than our American "human rights" mythology tells us that it is. Put differently, educating the American or Israeli (or Arab or any other) people to value others because they are so very much like we are - because "we are all human" - is something nobody in the world has really achieved. The West cannot make the claim, either. Yet the West, more than anywhere else, seems impelled to make this claim. Perilously so -- we go to the edge of the cliff saying "there are no cliffs" and this is how oblivious Western "democrats" are.
We need to actually pull back on that. Expectations being high gives no result at all. Revise our Constitution. Achieve rights or equality to a reasonable, not an ideal degree. Then, maybe the reality will be almost as good as the goal. Our goals are unreasonably high in other words.
Where does all the idealism get you? WHAT does it get you? Spaceships, or sci-fi? A fantasy? Reality is better. But our reality is NOT a democratic paradise, admit to this.
Trying to explain the genocide in Palestine by turning 'the average person into a killer'....is a logical fallacy. It's called the fallacy of 'sweeping generalization.'. By universalizing the savagery, you exonerate the actual crime....and perhaps hide the imperial motives that made it inevitable.
You also contribute to the fatalism of people who feel okay ignoring horrible realities........washing their hands of them if you will............because after all.........we're all guilty by our 'killer natures'.
It's an illogical argument, regardless of your good intent.
This historical account is pretty chilling.....but its not entirely new. Yes, the systematic rapes, most recently using dogs trained for the purpose, is turning from accusation to bald fact, but the genocide in Gaza and increasingly in the West Bank is going on four years now.........those in the west who still plead ignorance, have to be either very selective in their reading, very right wing in their attitude to street protests, or illiterate to the point of stupidity.
Denial is a strategy. It isn't widely employed unless the deniers already have some sense of what they need to avoid, and where they need to work hard to maintain a phoney ignorance. Israel has been committing these crimes against humanity for almost as long as I've been alive..........we all know that at some level.
What has actually happened in the west, is we've put our innate fascist into a kind of closet.....only letting him out in our dreams perhaps........and we've donned the superficial robes of liberalism......or even in some cases, democratic socialism.
What we have not done is spoken out loud what we know in our hearts. What we haven't done is connect any dots between Israel and the American war machine. What we've steadfastly refused to do is critique and object to our own foreign policy regarding Israel.
Instead, we've fed our frustrations with fantasies of Arab evil. We've come down hard on any resistance in the Islamic world to western domination..........as TERRORISM. I capitalize that word intentionally.
Because it is what our western leaders support, and at some level a majority of us know it. Still...we defend our total ignorance of what happened in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon over the decades.....we staunchly condemn Iran's leadership as evil, believe whatever we're told about what their government does to 'shut down democracy'.........and we turn a blind eye to ISREAL'S DESIRE FOR LEBENSRAUM....as she carpet bombs southern Lebanon, and as her leaders admit openly that once Iran is a destroyed state, like Syria, like Iraq...........Turkey is next.
You'd have to be an inmate of the Far Side's School for the Retarded, not to see what is and has been going on in the Middle East. Many in the west are fit for little else but a non speaking part in that cartoon.
And yes. I'm enraged by our racist double standards, and our pious bullshit about democracy.
Enraged, and ashamed.
"Westerners aren’t aware of that only because their political and media class have worked strenuously to stop them from learning about it." Yes, the mainstream media are quiet about most of Israel's atrocities. But now we have the Internet and that gives us access to web sites like the Electronic Intifada and radio like the Pacifica network (e.g. kpfa.org). We no longer have an excuse for being unaware.
Those addicted to Facebook get to see and read some pretty graphic truths as well.......though for sure, some on the right stick to hating their own progressive politicians, if any still exist.
And Hamas, created by Israel, provided the perfect pretext for genocide. Israel's investments in Hamas have paid off handsomely.
______
"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
_____
Cohen, Avner. Quoted in Andrew Higgins, "How Israel Helped to Spawn Hamas." The Wall Street Journal, January 24, 2009.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB123275572295011847
_____
“Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas,” 𝗡𝗘𝗧𝗔𝗡𝗬𝗔𝗛𝗨 said at a 2019 meeting of his Likud party, first reported by Haaretz. “This is part of our strategy — to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.”
_____
Netanyahu, Benjamin. Remarks at a Likud faction meeting, March 2019, discussing support for Hamas as a means of preventing the establishment of a Palestinian state. Reported by Tal Schneider and subsequently cited in multiple publications. See:
https://www.vox.com/world-politics/2023/10/31/23938474/netanyahu-benjamin-israel-palestine-gaza-hamas-war-remove-prime-minister-hostage-crisis
_____
"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.)”
___
"...in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Israel indirectly promoted Hamas by permitting them to erect mosques, schools, clubs, and even a library in Gaza. Yitzhak Segev, who was in governance during this period, expressed his apprehensions about Yassin’s goals but did not prevent their undertakings."
Segev, Yitzhak. Statements concerning Israeli support for Islamist institutions in Gaza during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Discussed in:
_____
Higgins, Andrew. "How Israel Helped to Spawn Hamas." The Wall Street Journal, January 24, 2009.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB123275572295011847
_____
Hasan, Mehdi. "Blowback: How Israel Went from Helping Create Hamas to Bombing It." The Intercept, February 19, 2018.
https://theintercept.com/2018/02/19/hamas-israel-palestine-conflict/
_____
"Buying Quiet: Inside the Israeli Plan That Propped Up Hamas." The New York Times, December 10, 2023.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/10/world/middleeast/israel-qatar-money-prop-up-hamas.html
_____
Qatar financial transfers to Gaza discussed in:
"Qatar Gave Over $1.1 Billion to Gaza Strip from 2012–18, Ministers Told." The Times of Israel, February 2019.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/qatar-gave-over-1-1-billion-to-gaza-strip-over-six-years-report/
_____
Secondary Analyses and Commentary
Hasan, Mehdi. "Blowback: How Israel Went from Helping Create Hamas to Bombing It." The Intercept, February 19, 2018.
https://theintercept.com/2018/02/19/hamas-israel-palestine-conflict/
___
Klein, Menachem. "A Brief History of the Netanyahu-Hamas Alliance." Haaretz, October 20, 2023.
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-10-20/ty-article-opinion/.premium/a-brief-history-of-the-netanyahu-hamas-alliance/0000018b-47d9-d242-abef-57ff1be90000
Beauchamp, Zack. "Why Netanyahu Propped Up Hamas." Vox, October 31, 2023.
https://www.vox.com/world-politics/2023/10/31/23938474/netanyahu-benjamin-israel-palestine-gaza-hamas-war-remove-prime-minister-hostage-crisis
Whitaker, Brian. "How Israel Helped Create Hamas." The Washington Post, July 30, 2014.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2014/07/30/how-israel-helped-create-hamas/
Beaumont, Peter. "How and Why Israel Helped Create Hamas." The Tribune (Pakistan), May 5, 2021.
https://tribune.com.pk/story/2302309/how-and-why-israel-helped-create-hamas
"Did Israel Play a Role in the Emergence of Hamas?" Coop West Bank.
https://coopwb.in/info/how-israel-helped-to-spawn-hamas/
"The Origins of Hamas: Militant Legacy or Israeli Tool?" Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 41, No. 3.
https://ciaotest.cc.columbia.edu/journals/jps/v41i3/f_0025591_20939.pdf
Lots of documentation here Feral, but only those of us who know the truth already will bother to read it. In the militarized neoliberal west.........there's only two ideas, one of them not only wrong, but evil. We've all been reduced intellectually and morally by this Zionist end game in the Middle East.
Documentation from singular anti-Israeli and anti-Netanyahu sources. Haaretz is effectively an Iranain regime publication today.
That may be........or not. None of us should have to do much research at this point to know where we are in the neoliberal west.
Neck deep in militarism, AI fantasies and complicity not only in the genocide in Gaza..........but in over 50 years of demonizing Iran, and other countries that when you add it all up, have done nothing much compared to the interferring know it all Evil, that is the U S of A.
Neoliberalism has been our new imperialism.......wars in the ME, our road to inevitable decline.
Oh so heartbreakingly true. With the harsh sentencing of the filton four yesterday. The cruelty of our MSM and our government, who are guilty of all of the above. BDSbarb
"The events of 7 October 2023 look less like simple savagery and more like a desperate, last-roll-of-the-dice response to decades of Israeli atrocities designed to make conditions for Palestinians so miserable – through pauperisation, confinement, starvation, and murder – that they either flee their homeland or die in situ.
With the missing context added, Israel’s supposed “retaliation” in Gaza – its genocidal rampage – looks like what it actually is: a continuation of its eight-decade ethnic cleansing campaign. In fact, its final instalment. Its denouement."
It's time to end this 80 years of ethnic cleansing. Shut down the genocidal apartheid regime of Israel! Lock up the war criminals. Free the captive Palestinians!
😂🤡 Who‘s funding you?? Qatar right?
Knowing the history is important. These narratives are well implemented propaganda. Living there shattered my illusions. Being there I was able to see what’s really going on. It did take me 20 yrs to understand it tho.
The issues were clarified by the books of Edwin Black and the work of others like Francisco Gil White. Without this history and background knowledge I would still be blaming the wrong people by believing the false narratives.
It goes so deep, I typically don’t bother trying to explain to those totally indoctrinated by the age old propaganda.
At base line it’s a war against God, His Justice, His Laws... The Jews are simply goats tied to the stake. Pawns in the game. But the reward for those still holding on to the Covenant will be enormous and eternal.
I find it difficult to imagine that after thousands of years of injustice, slander, abuse, torture, and murder that a righteous remnant, loyal to God and to the Covenant, remain standing. But it does. It’s prophesied to be 10%, meaning that 90% have abdicated!
(pls don’t make the mistake of judging the faithful 10% by the same standard as the Self Hating 90%!)
This blog is a home for the Jew haters. Wont be long until any dissent is cancelled.
As I said above.........you have to qualify as an inmate in the Far Side's 'School for the Retarded" (Remember that cartoon series?) to reduce the horrors in Palestine to an inane question like this.
What you should look into is who is funding the Israeli death machine.
How long have you lived in Israel?
Are you a citizen? Where do you get your information? The media..? El Jazeera?
Were you there in 2005 when the residents of Gaza (Jews who turned an undeveloped sand dune into a community) were driven out of their homes to hotels with nothing!!
All this insanity; based on a lies, propaganda, a totally false narrative, intense international pressure, when the traitors who run the State of Israel drove the legal, rightful residents, bag in hand, out of their homes to hotels…
I don’t have time to explain the history, or clear up the layers of lies, propaganda, and treason. Pls see the books of Edwin Black and the work at MOR (Management of Reality) of Francisco Gil White to clear the smoke.
Btw, I was there..
A rather inane rejoinder Abe, as it implies we'd have to live in Israel to understand the reasons for the dehumanization and exterpation of Palestinians.
I don't think that is the case.....though it might teach us how hard it is to stand up for justice, when the majority have gone blind to any such need.
Please get REAL!!!
For credible, provable FACTS see the books of Edwin Black
and (Mor)
Management of Reality, Francisco Gil White. REAL Investigative, award winning, Journalism, instead of rumor, conjecture, ranting, raving,..lies & utter nonsense funded by Qatar. 🤷♂️
When it comes to conspiracy fictions.......you may be an original.
I call my theory "Netanyahu's trap." He and Israeli authorities were aware in advance of Hamas's plans to attack Israel from Gaza. But instead of stationing military forces to block any such planned
attack, Netanyahu censored any information about that planned attack and permitted it to occur without any Israeli prevention or resistance. If the theory is correct, Netanyahu calculated that sacrificing the lives of Israeli citizens was a price worth taking, and being able to attack and eventually take over Gaza for good. A cynical approach demonstrating that the end justifies the means, however immoral and unethical.
If Gaza was a Shin-bet panopticon and the Jabotinskyite and Kahanist elements in the IDF clearly knew exactly what was coming — their spies likely had a hand in manipulating how the October 7 incursion unfolded.
Even under censorship Israeli opposition media Haaretz and +972 Magazine have hinted that a “weak point” was placed in the direction of Haavoda-voting Arab-friendly kibbutzim; that female IDF units were placed in defense of the “weak point;” that the Nova Festival was moved to the “weak point” at the last minute; that top military officers were sent north and told not to urgently return to the “weak point;” and that IDF helicopter pilots and tank commanders were ordered to “shoot anything that moves” in a “mass Hannibal” slaughter of left-leaning and secular Israelis.
If Israeli opposition sources are proven correct that Israeli deaths on October 7 were due to a “mass Hannibal” of left-leaning and secular Israelis orchestrated by the Jabotinskyite and Kahanist elements controlling the government, every “justification” for genocide and the liquidation of Gaza propagated by Euro-American media is a racist lie.
Excellent reporting. Thank you… for the Jews here in the US who can’t separate our disapproval of Netanyahu from meaning we also disapprove of all Jews because we support Palestine. Not Hamas. However, hearing your account makes us realize there was a reason for Hamas’s radical attack on the Concert goers, who were innocent Jews. None of it is right.
Actually the Israeli Genocide Force bombed the concert deliberately to kill all, whether palestinian resistance or israeli settlers. Well documented in news sources. And so no need to cloud with other misinformation.
That sounds far fetched to me. Do you have Israeli military who can back your statement? Or did you just hear this on the internet somewhere?
Hamas lacked weaponry capable of accomplishing this level of damage on the personal vehicles of fleeing and/or captive Israelis; the evidence was quickly buried by the IDF.
https://english.news.cn/20231107/9f1b5a32c1544c3e95b1ed5a1596cecd/c.html
Our innate double standards are often demonstrated in just this reaction..........no matter how much horror gets reported coming from the IDF itself......we resist believing anything that makes Israel look like the monster.....
Still..........that evidence keeps mounting. Dogs trained to rape girls, boys, men and women???? Pretty hard to soft soap that one.
You should read Lee Camp's article: "After 2.5 Years, Can We Handle The Truth About Oct 7th?" https://realleecamp.substack.com/p/after-25-years-can-we-handle-the
Feel free to catch up to what the world knows. And no we dont take the word of known war criminals to determine what war crimes they committed. We take the word of third parties.
The genocide has intensified, but it was always happening. Thanks for explaining how, and how long it's gone on, Jonathan.