Israel’s record and its attitude toward Hamas have evolved over the
years. Didn’t Israel once favor it?
They not only favored it, they tried to organize and stimulate it.
Israel was sponsoring Islamic fundamentalists in the early days of
the [first] intifada [an uprising of Palestinians within Israel against
the Israeli government]. If there was a strike of students at some
West Bank university, the Israeli army would sometimes bus in
Islamic fundamentalists to break up the strike.
Sheikh Yaseen, an antisemitic maniac in Gaza and the leader of
the Islamic fundamentalists, was protected for a long time. They
liked him. He was saying, “Let’s kill all the Jews.” It’s a standard
thing, way back in history. Seventy years ago Chaim Weizmann was
saying: Our danger is Arab moderates, not the Arab extremists.
The invasion of Lebanon was the same thing. Israel wanted to
destroy the PLO because it was secular and nationalist, and was
calling for negotiations and a diplomatic settlement. That was the
threat, not the terrorists. Israeli commentators have been quite
frank about that from the start.
Israel keeps making the same mistake, with the same predictable
results. In Lebanon, they went in to destroy the threat of
moderation and ended up with Hezbollah [Iranian-backed
fundamentalists] on their hands. In the West Bank, they also wanted
to destroy the threat of moderation—people who wanted to make a
political settlement. There Israel’s ending up with Hamas, which
organizes effective guerrilla attacks on Israeli security forces.
It’s important to recognize how utterly incompetent secret
services are when it comes to dealing with people and politics.
Intelligence agencies make the most astonishing mistakes—just as
academics do.
In a situation of occupation or domination, the occupier, the
dominant power, has to justify what it’s doing. There is only one
way to do it—become a racist. You have to blame the victim. Once
you become a raving racist in self-defense, you’ve lost your capacity
to understand what’s happening.
The US in Indochina was the same. They never could understand
—there are some amazing examples in the internal record. The FBI
is the same; they make the most astonishing mistakes, for similar
reasons.
In a letter to the New York Times, the director of the [B’nai Brith’s]
Anti-Defamation League, Abraham Foxman, wrote that the Rabin
ann
(Ann)
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