The Origins of the Middle East Mess - A Historical Analysis

[Adele Edisen]

Sun, December 30, 2012 10:48:37 PM
The origins of the Middle East mess
From: Brasscheck TV <news@brasschecktv.com>


The Jews and Arabs have not
been at war "for centuries."

That's total BS.

Today's problems are the
direct result of European meddling
and a much more complex history.

At last, understand why Israel,
Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and the
Palestinians are in turmoil.

You'll be ahead of 99.9999% of
the "experts."

Video: 9:58 minutes long

http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/21702.html

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Adele

[Magda Hassan]

Origins of Israel's Anti-Arab Racism

November 28, 2012

The anti-Arab racism that increasingly pervades modern Israel surfaces in the non-human images applied to Palestinians, such as the metaphor "mowing the grass" when targeting militants in Gaza. This tragic development traces back to the attitudes of old European imperialism, argues Lawrence Davidson.
By Lawrence Davidson
By the middle of the 19th Century, the multi-ethnic empire was on its way out as the dominant political paradigm in Europe. Replacing it was the nation-state, a political form which allowed the concentration of ethnic groups within their own political borders.
This, in turn, formed cultural and "racial" incubators for an "us (superior) vs. them (inferior)" nationalism that would underpin most of the West's future wars. Many of these nation states were also imperial powers expanding across the globe and, of course, their state-based chauvinistic outlook went with them.

Hungarian Theodor Herzl (1860-1904), considered the founder of modern Zionism.

Zionism was born in this milieu of nationalism and imperialism, both of which left an indelible mark on the character and ambitions of the Israeli state. The conviction of Theodor Herzl, modern Zionism's founding father, was that the centuries of anti-Semitism were proof positive that Europe's Jews could not be assimilated into mainstream Western society. They could only be safe if they possessed a nation state of their own.
This conviction also reflected the European imperial sentiments of the day. The founders of modern Zionism were both Jews and Europeans, and (as such) had acquired the West's cultural sense of superiority in relation to non-Europeans.
This sense of superiority would play an important role when a deal(the Balfour Declaration) was struck in 1917 between the World Zionist Organization and the British Government. The deal stipulated that, in exchange for Zionist support for the British war effort (World War I was in progress), the British would (assuming victory) help create a "Jewish national home" in Palestine. It was no oversight that neither side in this bargain gave much thought to the Palestinian native population.
Years later, beginning in 1945 (at the end of World War II), the British were forced to officially give up the imperial point of view. They came out of the war with a population burdened by extraordinary high war taxes.
Retaining the empire would keep those taxes high and so the British voter elected politicians who would transform the empire into a commonwealth, granting independence to just about all the Britain's overseas territories. One of those territories was Palestine.
It is interesting to note that in other European colonies, where large numbers of Europeans resided, the era following World War II saw their eventual evacuation as power shifted over to the natives. Kenya and Algeria are examples which show that this process was hard and bloody, but it happened.
And when it did happen, the official imperial mind set was defeated. That does not mean that all Europeans (or Westerners) saw the light and ceased to be racists, but that their governments eventually saw the necessity to stop acting that way.
Some Consequences
Unfortunately, in the case of Palestine, this process of de-colonization never occurred. In this case the European colonists did not want the imperial mother country to stay and protect them. They wanted them out so they could set up shop on their own. They got their chance after the British evacuated in 1947.
Soon thereafter, the Zionists began executing a prepared plan to conquer the "Holy Land" and chase away or subjugate the native population. And what of that imperial point of view which saw the European as superior and the native as inferior? This became institutionalized in the practices of the new Israeli state.
That made Israel one of the very few (the other being apartheid South Africa) self-identified "Western" nation states to continue to implement old-style imperial policies: they discriminated against the Palestinian population in every way imaginable, pushed them into enclosed areas of concentration and sought to control their lives in great detail.
If one wants to know what this meant for the evolving character of Israel's citizenry who now would live out the colonial drama as an imperial power in their own right, one might take a look at a book by Sven Lindqvist entitledExterminate All The Brutes (New Press 1996). This work convincingly shows that lording it over often resisting native peoples, debasing and humiliating them, regularly killing or otherwise punishing them when they protest, leads the colonials to develop genocidal yearnings.
There is evidence that the Zionists who created and now sustain Israel suffer from this process. For a long time Israeli government officials tried genocide via a thought experiment. They went about asserting that the Palestinians did not exist.
The most famous case of this was Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, who on June 15, 1969, claimed that "there were no such thing as Palestinians. … They do not exist." One of the reasons she gave for this opinion was that the Arabs of Palestine never had their own nation state.
Others took a different approach by denying not so much the existence of Palestinians, but rather their humanity. At various times and in various contexts, usually in response to acts of resistance against occupation, Israeli leaders have referred to the Palestinians as "beasts walking on two legs" (Menachem Begin); "grasshoppers" (Yitzhaq Shamir); "crocodiles" (Ehud Barak); and "cockroaches" (Rafael Eitan).
Of course, these sentiments were not confined to the Israeli leadership. They soon pervaded most of the Zionist population because the old imperial superiority-inferiority propaganda had become a core element of their basic education. The Israelis have taught their children the imperial point of view, augmented it with biased media reporting, labeled the inevitable resistance offered by the Palestinians as anti-Semitism and took it as proof of the need to suppress and control this population of "Others."
And, from the Zionist standpoint, this entire process has worked remarkably well. Today all but a handful of Israeli Jews dislike and fear the people they conquered and displaced. They wish they would go away. And, when their resistance gets just a bit too much to bear, they are now quite willing to see them put out of the way.
Thus, during the latest round of resistance rocket fire from Gaza and the vengeful killing that came from the Israeli side, we heard the following: "We must blow Gaza back to the Middle Ages destroying all the infrastructure including roads and water" (Eli Yishai, present Deputy Prime Minister); "There should be no electricity in Gaza, no gasoline or moving vehicles, nothing. … We need to flatten entire neighborhoods … flatten all of Gaza" (journalist Gilad Sharon in the Jerusalem Post); "There are no innocents in Gaza. Mow them down … kill the Gazans without thought or mercy." (Michael Ben-Ari, member of the Knesset); Gaza should be "bombed so hard the population has to flee into Egypt" (Israel Katz, present Minister of Transportation); Gaza should be "wiped clean with bombs" (Avi Dichter, present Minister of Home Front Defense); Israeli soldiers must "learn from the Syrians how to slaughter the enemy" (prominent Israeli Rabbi Yaakov Yosef).
Finally, there were the numerous, spontaneous demonstrations of ordinary Israeli citizens, both in the north and south of the country, where could be heard chants and shouts such as "They don't deserve to live. They need to die. May your children die. Kick out all the Arabs."
If it wasn't for the fact that the outside world was watching, there can be little doubt that the famed Israeli armed forces would have been tempted to do all that these ministers, clerics and citizens wished. After Prime Minister Netanyahu agreed to a cease-fire, a group of Israeli soldiers showed their frustration by using their bodies to spell out (in Hebrew) the words "Bibi Loser" (Bibi is a nickname for Netanyahu).
It was a pre-arranged photo-op and the picture can now easily be found on the Web. What seems to really irk the Israeli citizenry is not that Bibi killed and maimed too many innocent Palestinian civilians, but rather that he did not kill and maim enough of them to grant Israelis "safety and security."
Throughout history it has been standard operating procedure to demonize those you fight and demote to inferior status those you conquer. But as Lindqvist's work shows, there was something different about the way Europeans went about this business. The deeply racist outlook that underlay modern imperialism made it particularly perverse.
Now that apartheid South Africa is no more, the Israelis are the last surviving heirs to that dreadful heritage. So much for a "light unto the nations." That proposition has quite failed. Wherever the Israelis and their Zionist cohorts are leading us, it is not into the light, it is to someplace very very dark.
Lawrence Davidson is a history professor at West Chester University in Pennsylvania. He is the author ofForeign Policy Inc.: Privatizing America's National Interest; America's Palestine: Popular and Official Perceptions from Balfour to Israeli Statehood; and Islamic Fundamentalism.
http://consortiumnews.com/2012/11/28/ori...ab-racism/

[Magda Hassan]

SAVE YOUR KISSES FOR ME

Friday 30 November 2012, 11:21
Adam Curtis

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HOW THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD, HAMAS AND THE ISRAELI RIGHT BECAME CO-DEPENDENTS IN AN ABUSIVE RELATIONSHIP


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Last week there was yet another cycle of horrific violence in the Gaza strip. This week there are demonstrations in Cairo driven by fears that the revolution is being hi-jacked by the Islamists. Liberals in the west look on baffled and horrified. What they thought was a glorious revolution in the Arab world is morphing into something they don't understand. While Gaza is like some brutal other planet forever possessed by hi-tech assassinations and bearded aliens dragging corpses around the streets on motor cycles.
All this is comprehensible though - but only if you look at it in a wider context. A context that western liberals really don't like to think about because it makes them very depressed. It is the great shift of our time - the collapse of the dream that politicians could change the world for the better. A dream that was replaced by a conviction that politicians were untrustworthy and always become corrupted by power.
The collapse of that optimistic vision of what politics could achieve then left the way open for powerful, reactionary forces to take power who don't want to change the world. Instead they want to manage the world and hold it stable - backed up by the threat of violence. A threat to which they have become increasingly addicted.
This has happened not only in America and in Britain - but all over the world. And I want to tell the story of how it happened in the Middle East. It is the intertwined story of the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Hamas in the Gaza strip and the reactionary right-wing nationalist groups in Israel.
All three groups are driven by an angry, pessimistic vision of the world, of human nature - and the inability of politicians to transform things for the better. It's a fascinating story because it shows how the underlying similarities led those groups to become tightly locked together - helping each other cement their ruthless grip on their people - and freeze out any progressive alternatives.

The story begins nearly a hundred years ago with one of the great examples of how you can never trust politicians.
The British promised the Arabs that they would create a new and better world for them. The only problem is that they promised the Jews the very same thing.
In 1915, at the height of the First World War, Sir Henry McMahon, the British High Commissioner in Egypt made an agreement with the Emir of Mecca. It said that if the Arabs helped the British overthrow the Turks who ruled Palestine - then the British would in return give the Arabs independence. Lawrence of Arabia - TE Lawrence - was one of the British agents sent to help organise the Arab Revolt.
But two years later later the British Foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour, promised the Zionist movement that a permanent Jewish homeland would be set up in Palestine. Zionism was in many ways a utopian movement. It had been invented by Theodor Herzl in the 1890s, and he believed that a Jewish state would not just rescue Jews from persecution, but it would also transform them. The state of Israel would be a new kind of environment which would turn its people into stronger and better kinds of human beings.
The British didn't care about that kind of thing. They were desperate to get America into the war on their side - and one of the reasons for the Balfour declaration was to curry favour with the Zionists and their supporters in America.
Here is part of a massive TV series made in the 1960s called The Great War. It tells the story of how in 1917 the British came to find themselves marching into Gaza (what is today the Gaza Strip) on their way to conquer Jerusalem - and the nightmare that trapped them in that small strip of land.
It also gives a very good sense of the background pressures that led Britain to making the contradictory promises.

In the 1920s Britain took over the running of Palestine and came face to face with their hypocrisy and deceit.
On the one hand Jewish immigrants began to arrive in their thousands, buying up the land from the old Palestinian families. While the Arabs were furious at what they saw as British treachery and a revolt began to grow against both the British and the Jews.
One of the main leaders of the Palestinian Arab revolt was Sheikh Izz al-Din al-Qassam. He is forgotten in the west today - but not by Palestinian Arabs and above all by Hamas who see him as the first true Islamist revolutionary. The thousands of Qassam rockets that were fired from the Gaza strip last week are named after him, as is Hamas' military wing - the Qassam Brigades.

Qassam had studied at Al-Azhar university in Cairo and had become one of new wave of reformists who argued that Islam should be cleansed of all the rituals and superstitions that had grown up over 1200 years. It could then become a powerful faith that would deal with all the modern forces at play in society - economic and scientific and political.
And he believed it could help lead a revolt against British power and the Jewish immigrants. Qassam went to the city of Haifa and began attracting followers - promoting the idea of a jihad against the occupying powers. You couldn't trust the old families who run Palestinian society, he said, because they had sold out, as had the politicians and the traditional religious leaders.
The Palestine Post recorded one of Qassam's speeches ending angrily: "Jews do not have to take the country by force as the Arabs are selling it to them"
Here is part of a film that gives a powerful sense of the strange world that Qassam was fighting against. It is about one of the surviving members of a grand Palestinian landowning family. She is called Malika Shawa - and when the film was shot in the late 80s she was running the only hotel in the Gaza Strip, playing the piano as all around her the first intifada was erupting.
The film shows how involved the Palestinian elites had become with the British rulers. Malika tells of her time being educated at Cheltenham Ladies College.

In the 1930s Qassam formed The Black Hand Gang. He and a group of followers took to the hills and for five years they launched armed attacks on Jewish settlements and on the British military and police.
The British called him "The Brigand Sheikh" and he became a terrifying figure - it was said that he would send his followers to kill anyone that said anything bad about him. But in November 1935 the British cornered him in a cave and Qassam was killed in a violent shootout.
It is important to realise that Qassam saw politicians as part of the problem. Like Hassan al Bana who had founded the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in the 1920s with the slogan "The Koran is our Constitution", Qassam saw modernised Islam as a total system that could replace politics. You had to do this because if you left politicians to their own devices they lied and betrayed you, as the British had done, or sold you out, as the Palestinian elites were doing.
In contrast, the Zionists who were moving into Haifa and the rest of Palestine in the 1930s believed deeply in the power of science, technology and politics to change the world for the better. Many of them had read a novel written by Theodor Herzl in 1902 called Altneuland - Old New Land.

The novel is a utopian vision of a future perfect society set up in Palestine with the city of Haifa at it's heart - Herzl calls it "The City of the Future." Herzl's Zionism was part of a socialist vision of utopia that went back to writers like Fourier and Saint Simon, and he described a society where the land was under common ownership and people lived in co-operatives and communes. There was also a model welfare system, no social classes and exploitation - yet individuals could pursue their own ends and profit by them.
It was a glorious vision, but it was also firmly rooted in the European tradition of empire. In the novel the characters listen to a phonograph roll that describes the achievements of The New Society for the Colonisation of Palestine. It describes how the benevolent technocracy that runs this new society has brought the benefits of European progress to a backward and sparsely populated land.
That's not quite how Sheikh Qassam and his Black Hand Gang saw the Jewish settlers.

But then - in the late 1940s - a new political force emerged to challenge Zionism - Arab nationalism.
It's charismatic leader was the President of the new independent Egypt - Gamal Abdel Nasser. He became a heroic and inspirational figure for millions of Arabs because he promised a united Arab world that would become strong enough to challenge western imperialism.
And also strong enough to challenge the new state of Israel which had been established in Palestine after the war of 1948 between the Arabs and the Jews.
Here is Nasser talking about the revolution he has begun - and you get a good sense of the progressive optimism at its heart. Nasser was convinced that the Arab people could be transformed by a modern planned socialist society into new, more confident individuals who would no longer meekly accept the iron hand of authoritarian dictators who were backed by the west.
Nasser was ignoring the fact that he himself was an authoritarian dictator.

And Nasser began to organise the fight against Israel - using the Gaza strip as the base.
After the 1948 war hundreds of thousands of Palestinians had ended up living in refugee camps in Gaza. Beginning in 1955 Nasser got Egyptian intelligence to organise small resistance groups from the Palestinians in the camps. They were called Fedayeen and they started to do hit and run attacks into Israel.
Israel retaliated by attacking the Gaza strip and the border guards. The man who led the commando units that fought back against the Fedayeen was a young Ariel Sharon.
Here are the fragments of film from the archive that report those incidents. What is really interesting is how forcefully both America and Britain in the UN condemn the Israeli actions.

At first the Islamists - the Muslim Brotherhood - welcomed Nasser. They liked the fact that he banned all political parties because it seemed to fit with their ideas about the "unity of the faithful". But they quickly discovered that Nasser's idea was to turn Egypt into a modern secular society - inspired by socialist ideas and driven by the by the ideology of authoritarian nationalism.
So they tried to assassinate him. In turn Nasser jailed or hanged several of their leaders and sent the rest into exile. Everyone thought the Muslim Brothers were finished - another hangover from colonial times gone forever.
I have found a fascinating film in the archive which shows how dramatically marginalized the religious establishment became under Nasser. It's about the famous Muslim University at the grand Al Azhar mosque in Cairo. For centuries it had been the powerhouse of Islamic thought throughout the Arab world. It was the place that Sheikh Qassam had gone to study - and where he had become inspired by the new radical ideas of reforming Islam.
But now Al Azhar was under orders from the revolution to modernize in a very different way. The film shows how the revolutionary government has insisted that Al Azhar teach courses that have nothing to do with religion - even a department of Business has been formed.
And the new, modernising head of Al-Azhar says he is trying to prevent a class of "priests" arising who will stop progress.

In the 1950s Israel was also driven by a deep sense of progressive optimism. And in an odd way it mirrored the ideas of a planned socialist society that Nasser was trying to build.
Starting in the 1930s, the Israelis set out to try and build in Palestine the new kind of Zionist society that Theodor Herzl had laid out in his novel Altneuland - Old New Land. The new capital was called Tel Aviv - which was the Hebrew title given to Herzl's novel by it's translator. It roughly means "a new spring coming from an old mound".
The new city was constructed as a grand experiment in town planning. It was based on plans drawn up by the Scottish town planner, Patrick Geddes. His ideas about how cities could be planned came from the same utopian traditions as Herzl's belief in a socialist planned society. What linked them was the technocratic belief that flourished in the 1930s - and again in the 1950s - that you could shape the environment around human beings as a total system that would make them stronger, more confident and morally better human beings.
It was a grand dream. Here is Patrick Geddes.

And here is the utopian city that was built according to his plans - it was called "The White City". Many of the architects who actually designed it had been trained in the 1930s at the Bauhaus school and were deeply influenced by the ideas of Le Corbusier. One pamphlet described the ideas behind it:
"The city is an experimental laboratory for the implementation of modern principles of planning and architecture, it has influenced the whole country.
The plan was based on the idea of creating a new place for a new society, where the Zionist ideal would come true through the Modern Movement. It is also a synthesis between Oriental and Western cultures."

And in the 1950s - that utopianism spread through a lot of Israeli society . At it's heart was the kibbutz movement. Again the idea of the kibbutz had been developed in the 1920s - and was an attempt to create model socialist collectives that were a concrete expression of the Zionist theory.
The kibbutzim were more than just a collective way of managing the land. They were seen as a new kind of environment in which individuals would come together in the evenings, have group dances and then group discussions. In some cases the discussions were like early versions of group therapy - individuals being given permission to express their ideas and feelings. Out of all this would come "new people".
Unfortunately many of the kibbutzim had been constructed on land on which Palestinian Arabs had lived - and whose families now lived in cramped misery in the refugee camps in the Gaza strip. And increasingly there was a realisation in Israel that the kibbutzim were a powerful weapon in establishing a more permanent Israeli presence in the outlying fringes of the new state.
The kibbutzim in the 1950s and 60s became a weird combination of happy-clappy utopian socialism and an armed fearfulness - with bomb shelters and trenches built around their modernist-inspired communal halls. It was a bit like some JG Ballard story.

But then a character from the past came back in a dramatic way into the heart of Israeli society. And his presence - and what he said - sent out shockwaves that began to undermine the very underpinnings of the optimistic progressivism at the heart of Israeli society.
In May 1960 a group of Mossad agents kidnapped Adolf Eichmann in Argentina. They drugged him and flew him to Israel on an El Al plane disguised as a member of the plane's crew.The kidnapping was a world-wide sensation because Eichmann had been one of the main organisers of the Final Solution - the mass extermination of the Jews.

A year later the Israelis put Eichmann on trial in Jerusalem. He was encased in a bulletproof glass booth - and it became a powerful image of this terrifying figure who had organised the Holocaust sitting on show in the midst of the new state of Israel.

A number of historians have argued that Eichmann's trial created an enormous shock to Israeli society because for the fifteen years after the second world war no one in Israel - or in the Jewish communities in America - really talked about the Holocaust. It was if it was forgotten and wiped.
Hundreds of thousand of survivors from the death camps came to Israel, but the mood among them was to look towards the future - turning their faces towards a better future promised by the Zionist dream, and trying to forget the horrors of the past.
Above all they didn't want to be seen as victims in an optimistic age. The leader of the American Jewish Committee wrote that
"Jewish organizations should avoid representing the Jew as weak, victimized and suffering" Because it reinforced "long ingrained stereotypes - the hunted wanderer, inured to universal hatred and contempt"
Other historians have challenged this argument - and it can quickly lead into the dead end of arguments about how the memory of the Holocaust has been used and abused.
But I have found a really interesting film shot in Israel in 1961 during the Eichmann trial. It asks ordinary Israelis - including some on a kibbutz - what they feel about Eichmann and his effect on their world. Some approve - but the majority feeling is that this should have been forgotten - and is doing real harm to the new country of Israel.
One woman who speaks very powerfully finishes - "I would be happy if he had never entered this country"

But that was only the beginning of the terrible corrosive effect Eichmann was going to have not just on Israeli optimism about their society - but on the whole western liberal belief that human beings could be transformed for the better.
In 1963 a political philosopher called Hannah Arendt who had attended the Eichmann trial published a series of articles in the New Yorker. In them she challenged the idea put forward by the Israeli prosecutors that Eichmann was a special kind of evil human being. Arendt argued that he was the very opposite - that he was "terrifyingly normal". That far from being a demonic monster he was actually a bland, mindless and extremely efficient bureaucrat. He was motivated, she said by personal ambition and that he wasn't even particularly anti-semitic.
Arendt called it "the banality of evil".
"evil deeds, committed on a gigantic scale, which could not be traced to any particularity of wickedness, pathology, or ideological conviction in the doer.
However monstrous the deeds were, the doer was neither monstrous nor demonic.
Evil can spread over the whole world like a fungus and lay waste precisely because it is not rooted anywhere. It was the most banal motives, not especially wicked ones which made Eichmann such a frightful evil-doer."
Arendt's reports caused an outrage. The journalist Norman Podhoretz wrote that Arendt's picture of Eichmann -
"violates everything we know about the Nature of Man."
And that went to the heart of it. Because what Arendt was implying was that human beings might not be changeable or perfectible. That anyone could do really evil, horrible things any time depending on the circumstances they found themselves in. And what was worse - that the modern world of intricate bureaucracies and bland management might make it more possible.
It was a pretty pessimistic and conservative view of human beings - and it challenged the idea that you could change the world for the better. And this dark frightening idea, born out of the horrors of twenty years before, began to worm its way into the post war optimism not just in Israel but a whole generation of liberals in Europe and America.

Here is part of a documentary about Arendt and the trial of Eichmann. The first interviewee is Arendt's biographer, the second is one of her students. They are intercut with the extraordinary defence Eichmann gave at the trial. He does sound like a General Manager trying to excuse himself.

And four years later the optimistic vision of the future that Nasser had held out to the Arab people also began to collapse - because of Israel.
In June 1967 Nasser was told by the Soviet Union that Israel was planning to attack Egypt - so he began to mass troops. The report was false - but in response the Israelis launched a pre-emptive attack against Egypt and Syria.
It was a catastrophe for the Arab states. In six days Egypt's military was overwhelmingly defeated. It was also a crippling humiliation for Nasser because it exposed as a sham his promise that the Zionist state would be annihilated. Nasser then behaved like a petulant drama queen - resigning in a spectacular public way, then retracting it.
Millions still loved Nasser - but the defeat was the beginning of the end of the dream that a new confident Pan-Arabism could transform the fortunes and the subservient psychology of the Arab people. Left wing students began to protest in Cairo - they demanded Egypt attack Israel again, and they blamed the defeat on corrupt generals who headed the Egyptian Army.
But power in the struggle with Israel was now seized by the revolutionary left in the Palestinian refugee camps. In 1969 Yasser Arafat became the head of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation which was an umbrella for a range of left-wing, secular groups - including Arafat's own Fatah organisation.
And again Gaza was the centre of the opposition. After the Six Day war Israel had taken over both Gaza and the Sinai peninsula and the Palestinian refugees now found themselves facing the Israelis as their overlords.
Here are some of the earliest news reports from Gaza about the new young terrorists who are promising to rid Palestine of the state of Israel. It begins in 1969 with the coverage of three Palestinian schoolgirls who have been arrested and put on trial for supporting "a subversive organisation"
It is all a bit ramshackle, and the journalists have no idea really what they are reporting on. Then I have added a report from just three years later - 1972 - about an Al-Fatah training school for children. It shows just how quickly the movement has grown - and how intense the belief in the armed struggle had become.

Although Nasser's dream had failed - and he died in 1970 - the PLO and their fighters had inherited his progressive world view. Many of the groups in the PLO were left wing revolutionaries and they believed that they were not only fighting to get rid of Israel, but also to create a new kind of secular, socialist state in Palestine.
But in Egypt that optimistic view of politics and its ability to transform society was collapsing. A vacuum was opening up which would be filled by the group that only fifteen years before everyone thought was dead and buried - the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, along with their much more conservative view of how to run society.
In 1975 a feature film was made called Al-Karnak. It told the story of how after the defeat in 1967 hundreds of Nasser's opponents had been jailed and tortured. The film showed the torture in detail and it was a powerful exposure of how Nasser's visionary ideals had become horrifically corrupted.
It seemed to prove dramatically the central message of the Islamist movement - that if you gave power to politicians in a secular society they would inevitably become corrupted and dangerous - however noble their original ideals had been.
Here is part of a documentary made in Cairo as the movie gripped both the elites and ordinary Egyptians. It begins with Mustafa Amin - a famous journalist who had been one of those imprisoned and tortured. Then it goes on to the sensation caused by the movie. It is a good report because it gives a real feeling of the changing mood within the Arab world at that moment in the mid 1970s

And that pessimistic mood began to spread through the Palestinian resistance movement too - carried by the odd logic of terrorist violence. Because the terrorists' actions would lead them to be haunted by the same old ghost that Eichmann had brought back into the heart of Israel - the Final Solution.
Since the early 1970s various different Palestinian groups had hi-jacked western passenger planes. The motive was to draw attention to the plight of the Palestinian people and their fight against Israeli occupation. They also had developed close links with a number of western terrorist groups - in particular the groups in West Germany like the Red Army Faction, and The Revolutionary Cells.

In June 1976 a group of terrorists hi-jacked an Air France plane and flew it to Entebbe in Uganda. Some of the terrorists were from the Patriotic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, others were from the German Revolutionary Cells. At Entebbe the terrorists began inspecting the passengers' passports. As they did so they separated the Jewish passengers out from the others, and said they would release the non-Jewish hostages.
It was a powerfully symbolic moment for the revolutionary left - both Palestinian and German. They had turned to violence in the belief that they were fighting to go forwards - to liberate Palestine and create a new revolutionary world. Instead they now found themselves behaving like the Nazis thirty years ago separating the jews out from the others.
One of the Jewish hostages later described how he had shown the terrorists the concentration camp number tatooed on his arm. He described how one of the German terrorists, Wilfried Bose, plaintively responded - "I'm no Nazi - I'm an idealist"
It seemed that idealism might be taking the secular revolutionary movement not forwards into a better future but backwards into the very worst times of the past.
It is also important to remember that one of the Israeli rescuers who was killed at Entebbe was Jonathan Netanyahu. He was the older brother of Benjamin Netanyahu - the future Prime Minister of Israel. His brother's death, it is said, was a powerful shaping force on the younger brother.

By the late 1970s there was a massive political, social and moral vacuum at the heart of Egypt - and much of the Arab World. The collapse of President Nasser's grand progressive, and secular vision had left the society adrift.
Into the vacuum came a resurgent Islamism. Some of the Islamists turned to extremism and violence - like the Al-Jihad group who assassinated President Sadat in 1981. But the Muslim Brotherhood took another route.
Sadat had freed many of the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood from jail, but they were banned as a political party. So the leaders of the Brotherhood turned to building their influence through the complex social and professional organisations in Egyptian society. Brotherhood members stood for election to the syndicates and guilds of many of the leading middle-class professions - and in the 1980s they took control of the doctors, the dentists, the engineers, the pharmacists, and even the Egyptian bar - the lawyers.
At the same time the Brotherhood created a powerful system of social welfare for millions of ordinary Egyptians in villages across the country that was far more efficient and responsive than the cumbersome state welfare.
Many middle-class Egyptians began to fear a silent, creeping political coup. But the Brotherhood argued that what they were doing was openly creating the foundations for their idea of a modern society. Islam would be a total system that could manage and guide all parts of society.
Here is part of a film made about the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. It was filmed in 1992 and it is really good because it takes you into the heart of their revolution and allows them to express their utopian vision. But it is a deeply conservative sort of utopia - because the system they want to build would act as a restraint on politicians who tried to use their power to change the world. You couldn't let them do that because it always led to disaster.
I love the TV preacher who argues that society is like a TV set. God, he says, is just like the person who writes the instruction manual for a TV set.
"The rules are written by the person who creates it.
And when it goes wrong you take the product to the manufacturer. He knows how to fix it. But if you take it to someone else he screws it up."
That puts politicians in their place.
And the prizes given by the Muslim Brotherhood's newspaper for their religious quiz are great. First prize - a trip to Mecca. Second prize - a vacuum cleaner.
I have followed it with part of another documentary about how the Muslim Brotherhood took over the Lawyers Syndicate. Their opponents forcefully argue that this is a silent, creeping political coup. The two films take you to the heart of the mystery about the Muslim Brotherhood. What are they really up to?

At the same time the Muslim Brothers' ideas - and their techniques - began to spread into the Gaza strip. And as they did so they became weirdly mixed up with the Israeli forces who were fighting against Yasser Arafat and the PLO. Out of that would come a tacit cooperation to destroy a common enemy but it would also have very dark consequences - it would lead to both sides becoming locked together in a static world.
It happened through the rise of Hamas - who were directly inspired by the Muslim Brotherhood.
To begin with they weren't called Hamas. Back in 1973 a preacher in the Gaza Strip called Sheikh Ahmed Yassin formed an organisation called al-Mujamma al-Islami (The Islamic Centre). Yassin wanted the organisation to spread the ideas of the Muslim Brotherhood through the Palestinian world - and that also meant getting rid of the secular resistance movement and replacing it with one inspired by Islamist ideas.
Sheikh Yassin was an extraordinarily powerful character. Crippled since his childhood by a broken spine he was totally dependent on his followers to look after him, feed him and put him to bed. But he inspired those around him to believe that one day their tiny group could destroy the leftist infidels around the PLO and take control of the Palestinian movement.

The Mujamma did what the Muslim Brotherhood were doing in Egypt. They set up a complex system of welfare in Gaza, including kindergartens, free food and clothing. It also set up clinics offering free healthcare and medicines. They also began to take over many of the professional associations - like the Medical Association, the Engineering Association and the Bar Association.
And the Israeli authorities not only allowed them to do this - but encouraged it. They did this because they saw the conservative ideas of the Islamists as a potent force that could undermine and damage the secular Palestinian revolutionary movement.
There is a really good book about the rise of Hamas by Beverley Milton-Edwards and Stephen Farrell. In it they got a number of very senior Israelis to admit the tacit support they gave to Yassin and the Mujamma. One director military intelligence says:
"At the beginning some elements within the Israeli government - not the government, some elements within the government - were thinking that by strengthening Mujamma they could put some more pressure on Fatah in the Gaza Strip, back in the mid eighties.
I think it was a mistake, yes."
One of the key factors in Mujamma's rise was the decision by the Israelis in 1978 to grant the organisation official status. This was something that would never have been granted to secular groups. Milton-Edwards says that this was on the orders of the office of the Prime Minister - Menachem Begin, and that former Israeli officials concede that it was part of a strategy to undermine the PLO, divide secular nationalists - and encourage them to join this more conservative alternative.
The former president of the Islamic University of Gaza says:
"They were given permission from the Israeli officials to form. The Israeli authorities kept their eyes closed to the reality of what they were allowing to be created, to the preaching of Islam that was spreading all over the Gaza strip, because at that time the PLO factions had power - and the Israelis wanted an adversary to fight them."
The Israeli military governor of Gaza, Brigadier General Segev even arranged for Sheikh Yassin to be taken to hospital in Tel Aviv to see if the best surgeons in Israel could operate on his spine. They decided they couldn't because they said the damage was too severe.

Bit by bit through the 1980s, with the tacit encouragement of the Israelis, Sheikh Yassin built the structure of an alternative Islamist society in Gaza. All this went unrecorded - I have searched the archives and can find nothing, all the TV reports from Palestine and Israel focus on Yasser Arafat and the PLO. Even when Hamas is formed in 1987 during the first Intifada there is nothing. The first news item about Hamas isn't until December 1992 - when they kidnap an Israeli border guard.
But to give you a sense of the world in which Yassin built Hamas, and of what Yassin is like, I want to show parts of a brilliant film made by the wonderful journalist Sean Langan. He made it in 2001 about the Gaza strip - including going to see Sheikh Yassin at his house. By now Hamas was dominant and its military wing was ordering repeated car bombings of Israeli civilians.
What I love is the way Langan gives you a real sense of the place - both the layout and the mood. It's something that news reports never do. And when he goes to see Sheikh Yassin, Langan's reactions to camera are truthful and honest - scared and silly in equal measure. So much better than the pompous self-confidence of most news reporters which increasingly feels both fake and alien.

But there was a nasty and dark side to what Sheikh Yassin and his fellow Islamists were up to in Gaza in the 1980s. They got a reputation for violently attacking anything that supported the PLO - rather than the Israelis. Milton-Edwards writes:
"After Friday prayers burning torches were held aloft as Mujamma thugs set fire to libraries, newspaper offices, billiard halls and bars. They burned cinemas and cafes, closed liquor stores and ran intimidation campaigns in the community and on the university campus.
Men and women students were severely beaten or had acid thrown at them for speaking out against the Mujamma.
The apparent indifference of the Israeli authorities to such violence was noted by PLO supporters."
An Israeli journalist - Danny Rubinstein - says:
"Ever since, many have accused Israel of providing the raison d'etre for the Islamic religious movement - a phenomenon identical to American support for the Mujahedin in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation."
But Yassin and the other Gaza islamists did have a sense of humour. One of their main slogans was:
AN UNCOVERED WOMAN AND BEATLE-HAIRED MEN WILL NEVER LIBERATE OUR HOLY PLACES.
And what began to rise up in Gaza was a rigid, limited world view. There is a dramatic expression of this in Sean Langan's film from the Gaza strip. Wandering along the beach he comes upon a group of young Palestinian men - everything goes swimmingly until suddenly they get onto the subject of the Jews and the holocaust.
Suddenly you discover just how much the distorted ghosts from the Nazi era have also risen up to possess the Palestinian mind as well.

When the Intifada began, Sheikh Yassin and other leaders of Mujamma formed Hamas - and Hamas members took part in the ongoing confrontation with the Israeli forces. This was a shift away from the Muslim Brotherhood - who claimed to have renounced violence - but Hamas still saw itself as the Palestinian branch of the Brotherhood.
But Hamas also spent a lot of their time attacking the secular PLO, refusing to have strikes on the same day as the other Palestinian groups, beating up PLO prisoners who were in jail with them - and generally creating divisions within the Palestinian movement. Again the Israelis gave them preferential treatment - not cutting of the flow of funds to Hamas from abroad, and allowing them to keep their schools open. It was all part of a strategy of divide and rule.
At the same time the violence of the Intifada began to create growing divisions within Israeli society. Here are some sections from a fascinating Open Space film made in Israel at the height of the Intifada in 1988. It's made by community activists - and it is following the liberal group Peace Now who are asking for a dialogue with the Palestinians.
But it shows how there was growing opposition to that liberal view. It's actuality footage - with very little commentary - records the moment when you see the progressive optimism of the early Zionism beginning to crumble - and being replaced by a much harsher and above all defensive mood with the rise of the Israeli right. It is epitomised in a woman shouting
"Stinking Arabs - send them all to the gas chambers"

But then Hamas went out of control. The Israelis were worried about its growing strength - and in 1990 they arrested Sheikh Yassin and put him in jail. Their aim was to weaken the command structure of Hamas - but it didn't have that effect at all.
Hamas responed by inventing a "military wing" for themselves which they called the Izz al-Din al-Qassam brigades - after Sheikh Qassam the early Islamist who had fought the British in the 1930s. And in 1992 the Qassam brigades kidnapped an Israeli border guard and threatened to kill him unless Sheikh Yassin was released from jail.

The Israelis refused - so Hamas killed the border guard. There was outrage in Israel - especially from the right who demanded that action be taken against Hamas. The Israeli government went and grabbed 400 of the leading members of Hamas from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank and dumped them on top of a freezing snowy mountain in the south of Lebanon.
It was a public relations disaster for Israel. Day after day news reports showed the Hamas men huddled on top of the mountain. Their organization now became a global brand - and what was worse Hamas attacks on the Israeli forces increased.
It was the beginning of the unstoppable rise of Hamas. here are some of the reports as they unfolded.

At the heart of the Islamist ideas that Hamas was born out of was the belief that secular politicians were dangerous - above all if they used their power to try and change the world.
And in September 1993 Hamas were faced by a secular politician trying to do just that. Yasser Arafat stood on the White House lawn and signed what were called the Oslo Accords - they were agreements that were supposed to lead to peace between the Palestinians and Israel - and a Palestinian state.

Hamas hated it - as also did many from the secular left. They thought that Arafat was selling out the Palestinian people, that the dream of a real liberation had been reduced, as one Hamas leader said, to the dream that Palestinian policemen will have the power to direct traffic.
But Hamas' response would lead them yet again into a very strange relationship with forces in Israel - in particular with the Israeli right who also hated and distrusted the peace process.
Hamas's problem was that many palestinians welcomed the idea of peace - and the promise of safety and calm it promised. But on the 25th February 1994 their chance came to change things. A right-wing Israeli extremist opened fire on Palestinian civilians in a mosque in Hebron. 29 were killed and 125 injured. Hamas promised revenge.
Forty days later - the traditional time of mourning - a Hamas suicide bomber blew up a car bomb in an Israeli town called Afula, killing eight people and wounding many more. Hamas had chosen the town specifically. It had been founded back in 1925 by The American Zion Commonwealth who were an American company set up to try and build model utopian communities that would make the Zionist dream come true.

Afula had been one of these utopian models - built on land bought off an absentee Palestinian landowner. Now it's heart was torn out by a suicide bomber - and it shocked Israel. Hamas was now exploding suicide bombs in Israel with the deliberate aim of killing Israeli civilians. And they followed it up with more - including one in the heart of Tel Aviv.
Here are the reports of the Afula and Tel Aviv bombs. They show the shock and fear that was now gripping Israeli society. And note the politician who turns up at the end of the Tel Aviv report - Benjamin Netanyahu - he says that Rabin's concessions in the peace process have led to this.

Hamas insisted that there was a perfect logic behind the civilian killings - Sheikh Yassin gave interviews saying that if they kill our civilians, then we'll kill theirs. But everyone knew that the real aim was to stop the peace process - to undermine the negotiations between Arafat and Israel.
Then in 1996 there were elections in Israel. The Prime Minister was Shimon Peres who was a veteran of the left-wing Labour Zionist movement. His opponent was the star of the newly rising right in Israel - the leader of the Likud party, Benjamin Netanyahu. He was an opponent of the peace process.
Hamas intensified their suicide bombing campaign. They claimed it was in response for the killing of their best bomb maker - called The Engineer. But in March 1996 Palestinian TV broadcast an interview with a jailed Hamas member who had been organising the bombings.
He was called Abu Warda - and he claimed in the interview that the leaders of Hamas' military wing had told him that the aim of the bombings was to make sure that Peres was defeated, and Netanyahu was elected.
"They thought that the military operations would work to the benefit of the Likud and against the left. They wanted to destroy the political process, and they thought that, if the right succeeded, the political process would stop."
Everyone was furious and all sides - Likud, Fatah, and Hamas said that Abu Warda had been forced to lie. And each blamed the other for doing it. But Netanyahu then went on to win the election by a narrow margin - and he started to do everything he could to drag his feet on the peace process.
And since then Hamas and the Israeli right have been locked together in a terrible cycle in which both shift back and forth between politics and violence in order to promote their aims. Last week's flare up in the Gaza strip was just another example of that cycle.
And at their heart those aims are deeply conservative. Both Hamas and the Israeli right are rooted in defensive ideologies that distrust change and are seeped in a deep pessimism about the ability of politics and politicians to change the world for the better. To try and prevent change both groups have increasingly turned to violence to stop things from running away from them. But it is growing increasingly desperate - because it is impossible to stop the world from changing and the growing addiction to using violence to stop change has corrupted both sides ideals.
But it cannot last. In Egypt, the new President - Mohammed Morsi was elected as a leading member of the Muslim Brotherhood. Yet this week he started acting in the very way the Islamists fear most. He used his political position to ride roughshod over democracy - grabbing power for himself.

In the 1950s Nasser used his power to try and enforce his vision of a progressive, planned world. Now Morsi is doing the same - to try and enforce his vision of a deeply conservative, rigid world.
Again it will fail because it is impossible to control the world in that way - either for progressive or conservative aims. What is badly needed in the Middle East - and in the West - is a new, sophisticated politics that accepts the dynamic forces of history, yet tries to seize them and use the chaotic events of this incredibly exciting time we are living through to try and change the world for the better.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/po...ses_for_me

[Magda Hassan]

Context of '1967-2001: Israel Provides Support to Militant Islamic Groups in the West Bank and Gaza'


This is a scalable context timeline. It contains events related to the event 1967-2001: Israel Provides Support to Militant Islamic Groups in the West Bank and Gaza. You can narrow or broaden the context of this timeline by adjusting the zoom level. The lower the scale, the more relevant the items on average will be, while the higher the scale, the less relevant the items, on average, will be.



1954-1970: CIA and the Muslim Brotherhood Ally to Oppose Egyptian President Nasser




In 1954, Egyptian President Gamal Abddul Nasser's nationalist policies in Egypt come to be viewed as completely unacceptable by Britain and the US. MI6 and the CIA jointly hatch plans for his assassination. According to Miles Copeland, a CIA operative based in Egypt, the opposition to Nasser is driven by the commercial communitythe oil companies and the banks. At the same time, the Muslim Brotherhood's resentment of Nasser's secular government also comes to a head. In one incident, Islamist militants attack pro-Nasser students at Cairo University. Following an attempt on his own life by the Brotherhood, Nasser responds immediately by outlawing the group, which he denounces as a tool of Britain. The following years see a long and complex struggle pitting Nasser against the Muslim Brotherhood, the US, and Britain. The CIA funnels support to the Muslim Brotherhood because of "the Brotherhood's commendable capability to overthrow Nasser." [BAER, 2003, PP. 99; DREYFUSS, 2005, PP. 101-108] The Islamist regime in Saudi Arabia becomes an ally of the United States in the conflict with Nasser. They offer financial backing and sanctuary to Muslim Brotherhood militants during Nasser's crackdown. Nasser dies of natural causes in 1970. [DREYFUSS, 2005, PP. 90-91, 126-131, 150]
Entity Tags: UK Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), Saudi Arabia, Central Intelligence Agency, Gamal Abddul Nasser, Muslim Brotherhood
[B]Timeline Tags: Alleged Use of False Flag Attacks[/B]


[B][B]1967-2001: Israel Provides Support to Militant Islamic Groups in the West Bank and Gaza

Following the Six-Day War in 1967, Israel takes over the administration of the West Bank and Gaza. Whereas Egyptian President Gamal Abddul Nasser had been tough on Islamist militants (see 1954-1970), Israel is much more permissive. One of their first actions is to release Sheikh Ahmed Yassin from prison. Yassin, a charismatic radical Islamist and the future founder of Hamas had been jailed in 1965 during one of Nasser's crackdowns. [DREYFUSS, 2005, PP. 195] David Shipler, a former New York Times reporter, later recounts that he was told by the military governor of the Gaza Strip, Brigadier General Yitzhak Segev, that the Israeli government had financed the Islamic movement to couteract the PLO and the communists. According to Martha Kessler, a senior analyst for the CIA, "we saw Israel cultivate Islam as a counterweight to Palestinian nationalism." In the 1970s, Yassin is able to form some Islamic organizations (see 1973-1978). In the 1980s, he forms Hamas as the military arm of his organizations (see 1987). [DREYFUSS, 2005, PP. 195, 197, 198]
Entity Tags: Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, Palestinian Liberation Organization, Hamas
[B]Timeline Tags: Alleged Use of False Flag Attacks[/B]

[/B][/B]
[B][B][B]1973-1978: With Israel's support, Ahmed Yassin Forms Islamist Organizations in the West Bank and Gaza

In 1973 Israeli military authorities in charge of the West Bank and Gaza allow Sheikh Ahmed Yassin to establish the Islamic Center, an Islamic fundamentalist organization. With Israel's support, Yassin's organization soon gains control of hundreds of mosques, charities, and schools which serve as recruiting centers for militant Islamic fundamentalism. In 1976 Yassin creates another organization called the Islamic Association that forms hundreds of branches in Gaza. In 1978 the Islamic Association is licensed by the government of Menachem Begin over the objections of moderate Palesinians including the Commissioner of the Muslim Waqf in the Gaza Strip, Rafat Abu Shaban. Yassin also recieves funding from business leaders in Saudi Arabia who are also hostile to the secular PLO for religious reasons. The Saudi government, however, steps in and attempts to halt the private funds going to Yassin, because they view him as a tool of Israel. [UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL, 2/24/2001; COUNTERPUNCH, 1/18/2003; DREYFUSS, 2005, PP. 195 - 197]Yassin will go on to form Hamas in the 1980s, which is created with the help of Israeli intelligence (see 1987).
Entity Tags: Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, Saudi Arabia, Rafat Abu Shaban, Islamic Center,Islamic Association, Israel
[B]Timeline Tags: Alleged Use of False Flag Attacks[/B]

[/B][/B][/B]
[B][B][B]1987: Hamas Forms with the Support of Israeli Intelligence

Sheikh Ahmed Yassin forms Hamas as the military arm of his Islamic Association, which had been licensed by Israel ten years earlier (see 1973-1978). According to Charles Freeman, a former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia, "Israel started Hamas. It was a project of Shin Bet, which had a feeling that they could use it to hem in the PLO." [COUNTERPUNCH, 1/18/2003; DREYFUSS, 2005, PP. 191, 208] Anthony Cordesman, a Middle East analyst for the Center for Strategic Studies, states that Israel "aided Hamas directlythe Israelis wanted to use it as a counterbalance to the PLO." A former senior CIA official speaking to UPI describes Israel's support for Hamas as "a direct attempt to divide and dilute support for a strong, secular PLO by using a competing religious alternative." Further, according to an unnamed US government official, "the thinking on the part of some of the right-wing Israeli establishment was that Hamas and the other groups, if they gained control, would refuse to have anything to do with the peace process and would torpedo any agreements put in place." Larry Johnson, a counterterrorism official at the State Department, states: "The Israelis are their own worst enemies when it comes to fighting terrorism. They are like a guy who sets fire to his hair and then tries to put it out by hitting it with a hammer. They do more to incite and sustain terrorism than curb it." [UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL, 2/24/2001 SOURCES: LARRY C. JOHNSON, UNNAMED FORMER CIA OFFICIAL]
Entity Tags: Israel, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, Bin Laden Family
[B]Timeline Tags: Alleged Use of False Flag Attacks, Complete 911 Timeline[/B]

[/B][/B][/B]
[B][B][B]1989-January 1993: Hamas Trains and Fundraises in US

Hamas logo. [Source: Hamas]Hamas is a Palestinian group known both for charitable works benefiting the Palestinian population and suicide attacks against Israeli targets. Hamas was formed in 1987, after a Palestinian uprising began the year before. Some claim that Israel indirectly supported and perhaps even directly funded Hamas in its early years in order to divide the Palestinians politically. For instance, a former senior CIA official will later claim that Israel's support for Hamas "was a direct attempt to divide and dilute support for a strong, secular PLO [Palestinian Liberation Organization] by using a competing religious alternative." Hamas begins attacks on Israeli military and civilan targets in 1989 and will begin suicide attacks on these targets in April 1994. The US will not officially declare Hamas a terrorist organization until 1995 (see January 1995). This means that funding Hamas is not a crime in the US before that year, but knowingly participating in or supporting a violent act overseas outside of the rules of war such as a suicide bombing could still potentially result in criminal charges in the US. [UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL, 6/18/2002; ASSOCIATED PRESS, 3/22/2004] Mohammad Salah, a Palestinian-American living in Chicago as a used car salesman, was reputedly trained by Hamas in terrorist techniques, including the use of chemical weapons and poisons, in the late 1980s. Working on the orders of high-level Hamas leader Mousa Abu Marzouk, Salah leads a four day Hamas training camp in the Chicago area in June 1990. According to one trainee, the approximately twenty-five trainees study Hamas philosophy, receive weapons training, and learn how to plant a car bomb. Two of the trainees are ultimately selected to fly to Syria, where they undergo more advanced training in making car bombs and throwing grenades. Ultimately, they are sent into Israel to launch attacks. Similar training camps take place in Kansas City and Wisconsin from 1989 through early 1991. Then, Salah is told by Marzouk to change his focus from training to fundraising. In early 1992, Salah receives about $800,000 from Saudi multimillionaire Yassin al-Qadi, and he temporarily invests it in a BMI real estate scheme (see 1991). Between June 1991 and December 1992, Salah repeatedly travels to the Middle East and spends more than $100,000 in direct support of Hamas military activities. He attempts to spend the $800,000 that is still invested in BMI, but BMI is unable to quickly liquidate the investment. Marzouk sends Salah almost $1 million to spend. Salah goes to the West Bank in January 1993 and begins dispersing that money, but he is arrested before the end of the month. With Salah arrested, Hamas needs a new point man to collect and transfer new money raised in the US. Jamil Sarsour, a grocery store owner in Milwaukee, is chosen. It will be reported in 2003 that Sarsour is still living openly in Milwaukee (see June 2-5, 2003) [CHICAGO TRIBUNE, 10/29/2001; LA WEEKLY, 8/2/2002; FEDERAL NEWS SERVICE, 6/2/2003]
Entity Tags: Mousa Abu Marzouk, Central Intelligence Agency, Jamil Sarsour, Yassin al-Qadi, Mohammad Salah, Hamas, BMI Inc.
[B]Timeline Tags: Complete 911 Timeline[/B]


[/B][/B][/B]
[B][B][B]December 17-18, 2001: Hamas Threatens to Attack US

On December 17, 2001, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad release a joint manifesto declaring, "Americans are the enemies of the Palestinian people [and] a target for future attacks." The next day, Hamas leaders issues a statement declaring that "Americans [are] now considered legitimate targets as well as Israelis." So far, Hamas has not followed through with this threat. However, in February 2003, top Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin will called on Muslims to "threaten Western interests and strike them everywhere" in the event of a war in Iraq, which will begin one month later. [NATIONAL POST, 10/18/2003] Despite these threats, known Hamas operatives will continue to live openly in the US. For instance, the US officially declared Mohammad Salah a terrorist in 1995 (see June 2-5, 2003), the FBI knew he was living openly in Chicago since late 1997, and yet he will not be indicted for crimes committed in the early 1990s until 2004 (seeAugust 20, 2004).
Entity Tags: Palestinian Islamic Jihad, United States, Hamas
[B]Timeline Tags: [URL="http://www.historycommons.org/timeline.jsp?timeline=complete_911_timeline"]Complete 911 Timeline
[/URL][/B]http://www.historycommons.org/context.js...tancy_2027

[/B][/B][/B]

[Jan Klimkowski]

Magda - excellent article by Adam Curtis, thanks for posting.

It's all worth reading, in large part because Curtis' historical method has always involved the interpretation of archive film - original documentary and news. Curtis (and his film researchers) search for both rare and what we would now call MSM material, and then read these documents (documentaries) with intelligence and insight.

A case in point is his interpretation of the impact of Eichmann's trial on Israel and the Zionist movement, where vox pops from a kibbutz provide a perspective which other historians attempt to deny. The discussion of the meaning of Hannan Arendt's "banality of evil" in this context is provocative too.

A number of historians have argued that Eichmann's trial created an enormous shock to Israeli society because for the fifteen years after the second world war no one in Israel - or in the Jewish communities in America - really talked about the Holocaust. It was if it was forgotten and wiped.
Hundreds of thousand of survivors from the death camps came to Israel, but the mood among them was to look towards the future - turning their faces towards a better future promised by the Zionist dream, and trying to forget the horrors of the past.
Above all they didn't want to be seen as victims in an optimistic age. The leader of the American Jewish Committee wrote that
"Jewish organizations should avoid representing the Jew as weak, victimized and suffering" Because it reinforced "long ingrained stereotypes - the hunted wanderer, inured to universal hatred and contempt"
Other historians have challenged this argument - and it can quickly lead into the dead end of arguments about how the memory of the Holocaust has been used and abused.
But I have found a really interesting film shot in Israel in 1961 during the Eichmann trial. It asks ordinary Israelis - including some on a kibbutz - what they feel about Eichmann and his effect on their world. Some approve - but the majority feeling is that this should have been forgotten - and is doing real harm to the new country of Israel.
One woman who speaks very powerfully finishes - "I would be happy if he had never entered this country"But that was only the beginning of the terrible corrosive effect Eichmann was going to have not just on Israeli optimism about their society - but on the whole western liberal belief that human beings could be transformed for the better.
In 1963 a political philosopher called Hannah Arendt who had attended the Eichmann trial published a series of articles in the New Yorker. In them she challenged the idea put forward by the Israeli prosecutors that Eichmann was a special kind of evil human being. Arendt argued that he was the very opposite - that he was "terrifyingly normal". That far from being a demonic monster he was actually a bland, mindless and extremely efficient bureaucrat. He was motivated, she said by personal ambition and that he wasn't even particularly anti-semitic.
Arendt called it "the banality of evil".
"evil deeds, committed on a gigantic scale, which could not be traced to any particularity of wickedness, pathology, or ideological conviction in the doer.
However monstrous the deeds were, the doer was neither monstrous nor demonic.
Evil can spread over the whole world like a fungus and lay waste precisely because it is not rooted anywhere. It was the most banal motives, not especially wicked ones which made Eichmann such a frightful evil-doer."
Arendt's reports caused an outrage. The journalist Norman Podhoretz wrote that Arendt's picture of Eichmann -
"violates everything we know about the Nature of Man."
And that went to the heart of it. Because what Arendt was implying was that human beings might not be changeable or perfectible. That anyone could do really evil, horrible things any time depending on the circumstances they found themselves in. And what was worse - that the modern world of intricate bureaucracies and bland management might make it more possible.
It was a pretty pessimistic and conservative view of human beings - and it challenged the idea that you could change the world for the better. And this dark frightening idea, born out of the horrors of twenty years before, began to worm its way into the post war optimism not just in Israel but a whole generation of liberals in Europe and America.

The discussion of the tangled, interlocked relationship between Hamas and Zionism is equally fascinating.

Abu Warda speaks like a religiously inspired anarchist...

Here are the reports of the Afula and Tel Aviv bombs. They show the shock and fear that was now gripping Israeli society. And note the politician who turns up at the end of the Tel Aviv report - Benjamin Netanyahu - he says that Rabin's concessions in the peace process have led to this.Hamas insisted that there was a perfect logic behind the civilian killings - Sheikh Yassin gave interviews saying that if they kill our civilians, then we'll kill theirs. But everyone knew that the real aim was to stop the peace process - to undermine the negotiations between Arafat and Israel.
Then in 1996 there were elections in Israel. The Prime Minister was Shimon Peres who was a veteran of the left-wing Labour Zionist movement. His opponent was the star of the newly rising right in Israel - the leader of the Likud party, Benjamin Netanyahu. He was an opponent of the peace process.
Hamas intensified their suicide bombing campaign. They claimed it was in response for the killing of their best bomb maker - called The Engineer. But in March 1996 Palestinian TV broadcast an interview with a jailed Hamas member who had been organising the bombings.
He was called Abu Warda - and he claimed in the interview that the leaders of Hamas' military wing had told him that the aim of the bombings was to make sure that Peres was defeated, and Netanyahu was elected.
"They thought that the military operations would work to the benefit of the Likud and against the left. They wanted to destroy the political process, and they thought that, if the right succeeded, the political process would stop."
Everyone was furious and all sides - Likud, Fatah, and Hamas said that Abu Warda had been forced to lie. And each blamed the other for doing it. But Netanyahu then went on to win the election by a narrow margin - and he started to do everything he could to drag his feet on the peace process.
And since then Hamas and the Israeli right have been locked together in a terrible cycle in which both shift back and forth between politics and violence in order to promote their aims. Last week's flare up in the Gaza strip was just another example of that cycle.
And at their heart those aims are deeply conservative. Both Hamas and the Israeli right are rooted in defensive ideologies that distrust change and are seeped in a deep pessimism about the ability of politics and politicians to change the world for the better. To try and prevent change both groups have increasingly turned to violence to stop things from running away from them. But it is growing increasingly desperate - because it is impossible to stop the world from changing and the growing addiction to using violence to stop change has corrupted both sides ideals.
But it cannot last. In Egypt, the new President - Mohammed Morsi was elected as a leading member of the Muslim Brotherhood. Yet this week he started acting in the very way the Islamists fear most. He used his political position to ride roughshod over democracy - grabbing power for himself.

[Adele Edisen]

Sun, January 27, 2013 6:05:26 AM
Francis A. Boyle: The United States Promotes Israeli Genocide Against the Palestinians
From: Global Research E-Newsletter <newsletter@globalresearch.ca>


The United States Promotes Israeli Genocide Against the Palestinians
By Francis A. Boyle
Global Research, January 26, 2013
Url of this article:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-united-...-2/5320559

In direct reaction to Israel provoking the Al Aqsa Intifada, on October 19, 2000, the then United Nations Human Rights Commission (now Council) condemned Israel for inflicting "war crimes" and "crimes against humanity" upon the Palestinian people, some of whom are Christians, but most of whom are Muslims.[i]

This Special Session of the U.N. Commission on Human Rights adopted the Resolution set forth in U.N. Document E/CN.4/S-5/L.2/Rev. 1, "Condemning the provocative visit to Al-Haram Al-Shariff on 28 September 2000 by Ariel Sharon, the Likud party leader, which triggered the tragic events that followed in occupied East Jerusalem and the other occupied Palestinian territories, resulting in a high number of deaths and injuries among Palestinian civilians." The U.N. Human Rights Commission said it was "[g]ravely concerned" about several different types of atrocities inflicted by Israel upon the Palestinian people, which it denominated "war crimes, flagrant violations of international humanitarian law and crimes against humanity."

In operative paragraph 1 of its 19 October 2000 Resolution, the U.N. Human Rights Commission then:

"Strongly condemns the disproportionate and indiscriminate use of force in violation of international humanitarian law by the Israeli occupying Power against innocent and unarmed Palestinian civilians...including many children, in the occupied territories, which constitutes a war crime and a crime against humanity;..."

And in paragraph 5 of its 19 October 2000 Resolution, the U.N. Human Rights Commission:

"Also affirms that the deliberate and systematic killing of civilians and children by the Israeli occupying authorities constitutes a flagrant and grave violation of the right to life and also constitutes a crime against humanity;..."

Article 68 of the United Nations Charter had expressly required the U.N.'s Economic and Social Council to "set up" this U.N. Commission (now Council) "for the promotion of human rights." This was its U.N.-Charter-mandated job.

The reader has a general idea of what a war crime is, so I am not going to elaborate upon that term here. But there are different degrees of heinousness for war crimes. In particular are the more serious war crimes denominated "grave breaches" of the Fourth Geneva Convention. Since the outbreak of the first Intifada in 1987, the world has seen those heinous war crimes inflicted every day by Israel against the Palestinian people living in occupied Palestine: e.g., willful killing of Palestinian civilians by the Israeli army and by Israel's criminal paramilitary terrorist settlers. These Israeli "grave breaches" of the Fourth Geneva Convention mandate universal prosecution for the perpetrators and their commanders, whether military or civilian, including and especially Israel's political leaders.

Let us address for a moment Israel's "crimes against humanity" against the Palestinian peopleas determined by the U.N. Human Rights Commission itself, set up pursuant to the requirements of the United Nations Charter. What are "crimes against humanity"? This concept goes all the way back to the Nuremberg Charter of 1945 for the trial of the major Nazi war criminals in Europe. In the Nuremberg Charter of 1945, drafted by the United States Government, there was created and inserted a new type of international crime specifically intended to deal with the Nazi persecution of the Jewish people:

Crimes against humanity: namely, murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population, before or during the war, or persecutions on political, racial or religious grounds in execution of or in connection with any crime within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal, whether or not in violation of the domestic law of the country where perpetrated.

The paradigmatic example of "crimes against humanity" is what Hitler and the Nazis did to the Jewish people. This is where the concept of "crimes against humanity" originally came from. And this is what the U.N. Human Rights Commission (now Council) determined that Israel is currently doing to the Palestinian people: crimes against humanity.

Expressed in legal terms, this is just like what Hitler and the Nazis did to the Jews. That is the significance of the formal determination by the U.N. Human Rights Commission that Israel has inflicted "crimes against humanity" upon the Palestinian people. The Commission chose this well-known and long-standing legal term of art quite carefully and deliberately based upon the evidence it had compiled.

Furthermore, the Nuremberg "crimes against humanity" are the historical and legal precursor to the international crime of genocide as defined by the 1948 Genocide Convention. The theory here was that what Hitler and the Nazis did to the Jewish people was so horrific that it required a special international treaty that would codify and universalize the Nuremberg concept of "crimes against humanity." And that treaty ultimately became the 1948 Genocide Convention.

Article II of the Genocide Convention defines the international crime of genocide in relevant part as follows:

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

© Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

As documented by Israeli historian Ilan Pappe in his seminal book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006), Israel's genocidal policy against the Palestinians has been unremitting, extending from before the very foundation of the State of Israel in 1948, and is ongoing and even intensifying against the 1.6 million Palestinians living in Gaza as this book goes to press.

As Pappe's analysis established, Zionism's "final solution" to Israel's much-touted and racist "demographic threat" allegedly posed by the very existence of the Palestinians has always been genocide, whether slow-motion or in blood-thirsty spurts of violence. Indeed, the very essence of Zionism requires ethnic cleansing and acts of genocide against the Palestinians. In regard to the latest 2008-2009 Israeli slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza so-called Operation Cast-lead U.N. General Assembly President Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann, the former Foreign Minister of Nicaragua during the Reagan administration's contra-terror war of aggression against that country, condemned it as "genocide."[ii]

Certainly, Israel and its predecessors-in-lawthe Zionist agencies, forces, and terrorist gangshave committed genocide against the Palestinian people that actually started on or about 1948 and has continued apace until today in violation of Genocide Convention Articles II(a), (b), and ©. For over the past six decades, the Israeli government and its predecessors-in-lawthe Zionist agencies, forces, and terrorist gangshave ruthlessly implemented a systematic and comprehensive military, political, and economic campaign with the intent to destroy in substantial part the national, ethnical, racial, and different religious (Jews versus Muslims and Christians) group constituting the Palestinian people.

This Zionist/Israeli campaign has consisted of killing members of the Palestinian people in violation of Genocide Convention Article II(a). This Zionist/Israeli campaign has also caused serious bodily and mental harm to the Palestinian people in violation of Genocide Convention Article II(b). This Zionist/Israeli campaign has also deliberately inflicted on the Palestinian people conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction in substantial part in violation of Article II© of the Genocide Convention.

Article I of the Genocide Convention requires all contracting parties such as the United States "to prevent and to punish" genocide. Yet to the contrary, historically the "Jewish" state's criminal conduct against the Palestinians has been financed, armed, equipped, supplied and politically supported by the nominally "Christian" United States. Although the United States is a founding sponsor of, and a contracting party to, both the Nuremberg Charter and the Genocide Convention, as well as the United Nations Charter, these legal facts have never made any difference to the United States when it comes to its blank-check support for Zionist Israel and their joint and severable criminal mistreatment of the Palestinianstruly the wretched of the earth!

The world has not yet heard even one word uttered by the United States and its N.A.T.O. allies in favor of R2P/humanitarian intervention against Zionist Israel in order to protect the Palestinian people, let alone a "responsibility to protect" the Palestinians from Zionist/Israeli genocide. The United States, its N.A.T.O. allies, and the Great Powers on the U.N. Security Council would not even dispatch a U.N. Charter Chapter 6 monitoring force to help "protect" the Palestinians, let alone even contemplate any type of U.N. Charter Chapter 7 enforcement actions against Zionist Israel which are actually two valid international legal options for R2P/humanitarian intervention! The doctrine of "humanitarian intervention" and its current "responsibility to protect" transmogrification so readily espoused elsewhere when U.S. foreign policy interests are allegedly at stake have been clearly proven to be a sick joke and a demented fraud when it comes to stopping the ongoing and accelerating Zionist/Israeli campaign of genocide against the Palestinian people.

Rather than rein in the Zionist Israeliswhich would be possible just by turning off the funding pipelinethe United States government, the U.S. Congress, the U.S. media, and U.S. taxpayers instead support the "Jewish" state to the tune of about 4 billion dollars per year, without whose munificence this instance of genocide and indeed conceivably the State of Israel itself would not be possible. Without the United States, Israel is nothing more than a typical "failed state." In today's world genocide is permissible so long as it is done at the behest of the United States and its de jure allies in N.A.T.O. or its de facto allies such as Israel.

I anticipate no fundamental change in America's support for the Zionist/Israeli ongoing campaign of genocide against the Palestinians during the tenure of the Obama administration and its near-term successors, whether neoliberal Democrats or neoconservative Republicans. Tweedledum versus Tweedledee.

What the world witnesses here is (yet another) case of bipartisan "dishumanitarian intervention" or "humanitarian extermination" by the United States and Israel with the support of the N.A.T.O. states, against the Palestinians and Palestine. While at the exact same time these white racist cowards and hypocrites preach R2P/humanitarian intervention in order to subjugate Libya, now Syria, and perhaps someday soon Iran.

As Machiavelli so astutely advised The Prince in Chapter XVIII of that book:

"...one who deceives will always find one who will allow himself to be deceived."[iii]

On these dissentient points, this law professor rests his case against the doctrines of "humanitarian intervention" and its imperialist transformation into the demagogic "responsibility to protect."

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