I mean, Hamas took power by killing Palestinian civilians. They don’t represent anyone and they openly say they will martyr civilians.
The Palestinian National Authority (Fatah) was the democratically elected government of Palestine before 2007. Hamas staged a coup and executed Fatah officials, which is why Gaza and the West Bank are separate entities today.
Hamas is as much a state as Al-Qaeda. They’re a terrorist group that seized power by way of murder and have openly declared they intend to use their citizens as shields and martyrs.
They’re not a state. They’re a terror cell that deserves to be eliminated. Unfortunately their own admitted tactics of using civilians as shields means that civilians will be killed.
This is a lie. Hamas won the vote. The EU, UN, and the Carter Center all called those elections free and fair. If anything, Hamas was an underdog given that Israel, in collaboration with Fatah, kept arresting the politicians in Hamas as they defined Hamas a terrorist organization. Fatah and Israel wanted to delay the elections, but with the encouragement of the US (GWB in particular who felt Hamas would definitely not win), they decided to keep them as they were. Stop making things up to fit your narrative. Hamas still typically wins the popular vote in polling done since then. You have a fucking computer. Just google it. It’s all there in black and white.
I mean they did have conflicts with Fatah. But the biggest fights weren’t until after they won the election.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Gaza_(2007)
The elections in 2006 is not when Hamas took power. Their coup in 2007 was.
They aren’t making the IDF bomb apartment buildings, which is something they’ve been doing for decades, before Israel helped create Hamas.
https://theintercept.com/2018/02/19/hamas-israel-palestine-conflict/
So where is Israel’s responsibility there, in sponsoring terrorists? Or do we pretend notiing happened before the last few weeks because then we can sort of pretend Israel has no culpability, you know, if we squint and try to avoid looking at the bombing of civilians?
Yes they are. By their own admission in this article.
Hamas by their own damn admission uses civilians as shields and intends to martyr them.
Your article leaves out the fact that Israel funded and supported several Islamic organizations at the time in both Gaza and the West Bank. One became a terrorist institution.
Take the whole history into account. After the six day war, Israel was in the position that they needed all the support they could get. So they supported anyone that opposed the PLO, which was sponsored by Egypt and Fatah. Because that’s who they just were attacked by.
Israel funded dozens of Islamic organizations that were opposed to Fatah, including mosques and schools. Hamas came out of one of them.
That article has such a stupid take. It takes tiny pieces of quotes from a couple of ex-Israeli officials and with one of them is clearly omitting context. Did Israel permit Islamist groups to do stuff like build mosques and have charities? Yes. Did he also say, but it is not mentioned in the article, that they were completely peaceful at the time and that Israel didn’t want to be viewed as attacking Islam? Also yes.
See, what you are saying is that Israel created Hamas by not using more oppression to stop these groups at a time when they were not attacking Israel, but the PLO was. And that is just such a simple naive take that it is ridiculous. Yeah if Israel could redo things, they might have decided that was a good idea. But then again, what if it just caused more attacks from the surrounding countries after they were claimed to be “attacking Islam.” Then would we also blame Israel for those attacks due to them repressing the Islamist movements?
It even does the same by using cherry picked foresight about Afghanistan. It entirely ignores the situation in Afghanistan and just implies that the US caused Al Qaeda. Things just aren’t that simple. It’s entirely possible that had the US and other countries not interfered in Afghanistan that the soviet union would’ve lasted longer and Afghanistan might’ve been another Chechnya.
At the time, Israel was having to fight against the PLO. They were not fighting against the religious Islamic groups. And knowing the history of the time period and the politics in the region, the very religious groups were not nearly the force that they are now. So they made choices for reasons that absolutely made sense at the time. And we have no way of knowing how things would be different if they made different choices.
We can say that places that aren’t Israel still have issues with the Muslim brotherhood or are friendly with them all over the middle east. And Israel certainly didn’t create the Muslim Brotherhood. And if Israel didn’t exist and it was all a Palestinian state with a secular government, it isn’t a stretch to say that they would be in that area too, calling for an Islamist government. As they have done in Jordan, Syria, Egypt, Iraq, and more.
