#Avner Cohen

[vague-humanoid]

also it was Israel who chose Hamas

This isn’t a conspiracy theory. Listen to former Israeli officials such as Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Segev, who was the Israeli military governor in Gaza in the early 1980s. Segev later told a New York Times reporter that he had helped finance the Palestinian Islamist movement as a “counterweight” to the secularists and leftists of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Fatah party, led by Yasser Arafat (who himself referred to Hamas as “a creature of Israel.”)“The Israeli government gave me a budget,” the retired brigadier general confessed, “and the military government gives to the mosques.”“Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation,” Avner Cohen, a former Israeli religious affairs official who worked in Gaza for more than two decades, told the Wall Street Journal in 2009. Back in the mid-1980s, Cohen even wrote an official report to his superiors warning them not to play divide-and-rule in the Occupied Territories, by backing Palestinian Islamists against Palestinian secularists. “I … suggest focusing our efforts on finding ways to break up this monster before this reality jumps in our face,” he wrote.They didn’t listen to him. And Hamas, as I explain in the fifth installment of my short film series for The Intercept on blowback, was the result. To be clear: First, the Israelis helped build up a militant strain of Palestinian political Islam, in the form of Hamas and its Muslim Brotherhood precursors; then, the Israelis switched tack and tried to bomb, besiege, and blockade it out of existence.In the past decade alone, Israel has gone to war with Hamas three times — in 2009, 2012, and 2014 — killing around 2,500 Palestinian civilians in Gaza in the process. Meanwhile, Hamas has killed far more Israeli civilians than any secular Palestinian militant group. This is the human cost of blowback.“When I look back at the chain of events, I think we made a mistake,” David Hacham, a former Arab affairs expert in the Israeli military who was based in Gaza in the 1980s, later remarked. “But at the time, nobody thought about the possible results.”They never do, do they?

[asexualannoyance]

“[...] Like other movements within political Islam, the movement [Hamas] reflected a complex local reaction to the harsh realities of occupation, and a response to the disorientated paths offered by secular and socialist Palestinian forces in the past. Those with a more engaged analysis of this situation were well prepared for the Hamas triumph in the 2006 elections, unlike the Israeli, American, and European governments. It is ironic that it was the pundits and orientalists, not to mention Israeli politicians and chiefs of intelligence, who were taken by surprise by the election results more than anyone else. What particularly dumbfounded the great experts on Islam in Israel was the democratic nature of the victory. In their collective reading, fanatical Muslims were meant to be neither democratic nor popular. These same experts displayed a similar misunderstanding of the past. Ever since the rise of political Islam in Iran and in the Arab world, the community of experts in Israel had behaved as if the impossible was unfolding in front of their eyes. [...]

In 2009, Avner Cohen, who served in the Gaza Strip around the time Hamas began to gain power in the late 1980s, and was responsible for religious affairs in the occupied territories, told the Wall Street Journal, “the Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation.” Cohen explains how Israel helped the charity al-Mujama al-Islamiya (the “Islamic Society”), founded by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin in 1979, to become a powerful political movement, out of which the Hamas movement emerged in 1987. Sheikh Yassin, a crippled, semi-blind Islamic cleric, founded Hamas and was its spiritual leader until his assassination in 2004. He was originally approached by Israel with an offer of help and the promise of a license to expand. The Israelis hoped that, through his charity and educational work, this charismatic leader would counterbalance the power of the secular Fatah in the Gaza Strip and beyond. [...]

In 1993, Hamas became the main opposition to the Oslo Accord. While there was still support for Oslo, it saw a drop in its popularity; however, as Israel began to renege on almost all the pledges it had made during the negotiations, support for Hamas once again received a boost. Particularly important was Israel’s settlement policy and its excessive use of force against the civilian population in the territories. [...]

It also captured the hearts and minds of many Muslims (who make up the majority in the occupied territories) due [to] the failure of secular modernity to find solutions to the daily hardships of life under occupation. [...]

The new Israeli methods of oppression introduced during the Second Intifada—particularly the building of the wall, the roadblocks, and the targeted assassinations—further diminished the support for the Palestinian Authority and increased the popularity and prestige of Hamas. It would be fair to conclude, then, that successive Israeli governments did all they could to leave the Palestinians with no option but to trust, and vote for, the one group prepared to resist an occupation described by the renowned American author Michael Chabon as “the most grievous injustice I have seen in my life.” [...]

The obvious failure of the Palestinian groups and individuals who had come to prominence on the promise of negotiations with Israel clearly made it seem as if there were very few alternatives. In this situation the apparent success of the Islamic militant groups in driving the Israelis out of the Gaza Strip offered some hope. However, there is more to it than this. Hamas is now deeply embedded in Palestinian society thanks to its genuine attempts to alleviate the suffering of ordinary people by providing schooling, medicine, and welfare. No less important, Hamas’s position on the 1948 refugees’ right of return, unlike the PA’s stance, was clear and unambiguous. Hamas openly endorsed this right, while the PA sent out ambiguous messages, including a speech by Abu Mazen in which he rescinded his own right to return to his hometown of Safad. [...]”

—Ten Myths About Israel by Ilan Pappé, Chapter 9: “The Gaza Mythologies”, the section titled “Hamas Is a Terrorist Organization”

[psychotrenny]

It's been said before but all you people getting upset about Hamas, whether in response to recent events or more general handwringing about its nature as an Islamist organisation, should remember that Israel itself created and initially supported Hamas in order to divide Palestinian resistance and weaken the secular leftist PLO. As Avner Cohen (a former Israeli official who had worked in Gaza during the emergence of Hamas) is widely quoted as saying "“Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation". Whatever you think of the current nature of Palestinian resistance don't forget that it's as much the result of Israeli policy as any choices the Palestinians themselves made.

[henrysglock]

Hi can you plz help me to understand. My feed is mainly talking about Palestine, showing the atrocities happening, wanting Palestine to be free and I agree the Palestinian civilians should be safe and the bombings and attacks should stop. But I’m failing to see why people aren’t caring about the Israeli civilians as much? They are also being killed, many innocently at a music festival only to never return home again. But it’s like no one cares about them bc they’re they enemy! But they’re not they’re innocent people. Just like the Palestinian people are. And I kinda get the war between both but also what happened was over 70 years ago most of the people living there now weren’t there 70 years ago so why should they still be talked about as though they’re the enemy when living in Israel is all they’ve known? It shouldn’t be just swept under the rug no and I know everyone isn’t just going to stop and make up and hold hands singing songs but It’s 100% the governments problem I just don’t understand why people now are failing to sympathise with the Israeli victims? And why some Jewish people/celebs are being made out to be bad people just bc they speak up on what’s being done to their fellow Jews? Not sure if you’ve seen Brett’s ig but he’s been very vocal and if I’m honest does seem quite extreme but ppl like Noah just seem like he’s upset and worried and doesn’t want harm to come to either side but ofc he’s going to show support to Israel when he’s been there to learn more about his religion? Idk what to believe in terms of news anymore bc some seem very pro-Palestine and others pro-Israel and some switch between both every other day. It’s just all very confusing but it has made me a little sad to see not many people talking about the innocent Israelis who have lost their lives and are still in the middle of all this too… sorry if this is too much I just needed to say it to someone :/

Okay, anon, I think I know where the disconnect lies: scale.

1,400 were killed in the attack on Israel, and that’s a horrible thing. Loss of civilian life is never a good thing.

However. Over 5,000 and counting Palestinians have been killed by the Israelis just since the Hamas attack. That’s not including the 70+ consecutive years of occupation and mistreatment continued mistreatment enacted on them by the Israeli government (It’s not something that “happened 70 years ago”, anon. It has been constant). They have been and are being driven out of their homes; their lives, livelihoods, and land are being stolen out from under them. 70 years’ worth of children have been and are being murdered or left as orphans.

Here are some numbers just since 2000:

And there is no “both sides”, here. There is no “war”, Anon, because Palestine has no army, while Israel is backed by the governments of most western countries, the US army included. They have the backing of the most powerful army in the world…against a people with no army. Palestinians, anon, are defenseless. Israel is bombing their hospitals and schools. It’s an unceasing massacre. Gaza is an open-air prison. The Palestinians cannot escape the violence.

So yes, it’s deeply unfortunate that Israeli civilians were killed, and I sympathize with those who were hurt by that attack, emotionally and/or physically…but they are not victims of genocide, here.

Palestinians are.

That is why we’re more vocal about Palestine, anon. The scales aren’t even close to the same.

This isn’t even going into the fact that Hamas was founded and funded to destabilize Palestine. To quote Avner Cohen, an ex Israeli official: “Hamas, regrettably was Israel’s creation”. Meanwhile, the current PM of Israel, Netanyahu, has said “Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering hamas and transferring money to hamas. This is part of our strategy—to isolate Palestinians in gaza from Palestinians in the west bank.”

Israel’s blood is on its own hands.

[gregor-samsung]

" Hamas divenne un attore significativo sul campo anche grazie alla politica israeliana di appoggio alla costruzione di un’infrastruttura educativa islamica a Gaza, che intendeva bilanciare la presa del movimento laico Fatah sulla popolazione locale. Nel 2009 Avner Cohen, che aveva prestato servizio nella Striscia di Gaza nel periodo in cui, alla fine degli anni ’80, Hamas iniziò a prendere il potere, ed era responsabile degli affari religiosi nei Territori occupati, dichiarò al «Wall Street Journal»: «Hamas, con mio grande rammarico, è una creazione di Israele». Cohen spiega come Israele abbia aiutato l’organizzazione benefica al-Mujama al-Islamiya (il «Centro islamico»), fondato da Sheikh Ahmed Yassin nel 1979, a diventare un potente movimento politico, da cui emerse Hamas nel 1987. Sheikh Yassin, un religioso islamico disabile e semi-cieco, fondò Hamas e ne fu il leader spirituale fino al suo assassinio nel 2004. Originariamente venne avvicinato da Israele con un’offerta di aiuto e la promessa del benestare governativo all’espansione della sua organizzazione. Gli israeliani speravano che, attraverso la sua opera di beneficenza e le sue attività educative, questo leader carismatico avrebbe fatto da contrappeso al potere di Fatah nella Striscia di Gaza e altrove. È interessante notare che alla fine degli anni ’70 Israele, gli Stati Uniti e la Gran Bretagna vedevano nei movimenti nazionali laici (di cui oggi lamentano l’assenza) il peggior nemico dell’Occidente.

Nel suo libro To Know the Hamas, il giornalista israeliano Shlomi Eldar racconta una storia affine sui forti legami tra Yassin e Israele. Con la benedizione e il sostegno di Israele il Centro islamico aprì un’università nel 1979, un sistema scolastico indipendente e una rete di circoli e moschee. Nel 2014 il «Washington Post» trasse conclusioni molto simili sulla stretta relazione tra Israele e il Centro islamico fino alla nascita di Hamas nel 1988. Nel 1993 Hamas divenne il principale oppositore degli accordi di Oslo. Mentre c’era ancora chi appoggiava Oslo la sua popolarità diminuì, ma non appena Israele cominciò a rinnegare quasi tutti gli impegni assunti durante i negoziati il supporto verso Hamas crebbe, dando nuova linfa vitale al movimento. La politica di insediamento di Israele e il suo uso eccessivo della forza contro la popolazione civile nei Territori giocarono sicuramente un ruolo importante. La popolarità di Hamas tra i palestinesi non dipendeva però unicamente dal successo o dal fallimento degli accordi di Oslo, ma anche dal fatto che l’organizzazione avesse effettivamente conquistato i cuori e le menti di molti musulmani (che sono la maggioranza nei Territori occupati) per via dell’incapacità dei movimenti laici nel trovare soluzioni all’occupazione. Come per altri gruppi politici islamici in tutto il mondo arabo, il fallimento dei movimenti laici nel creare posti di lavoro e nel garantire benessere economico e sicurezza sociale spinse molte persone a tornare alla religione, che offriva conforto e reti stabili di supporto e solidarietà. Nell’intero Medio Oriente, come nel mondo in generale, la modernizzazione e la secolarizzazione hanno giovato a pochi e hanno lasciato molti infelici, poveri e amareggiati. La religione sembrava una panacea, oltre che un’opzione politica. "

Ilan Pappé, Dieci miti su Israele, traduzione di Federica Stagni, postfazione di Chiara Cruciati, Tamu editore, 2022. [Libro elettronico]

[Edizione originale: Ten Myths About Israel, New York: Verso, 2017]

[40ouncesandamule]

https://web.archive.org/web/20150722184851/https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB123275572295011847

How Israel Helped to Spawn Hamas

By Andrew Higgins Updated Jan. 24, 2009 12:01 a.m. ET

Moshav Tekuma, Israel

Surveying the wreckage of a neighbor's bungalow hit by a Palestinian rocket, retired Israeli official Avner Cohen traces the missile's trajectory back to an "enormous, stupid mistake" made 30 years ago.

"Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel's creation," says Mr. Cohen, a Tunisian-born Jew who worked in Gaza for more than two decades. Responsible for religious affairs in the region until 1994, Mr. Cohen watched the Islamist movement take shape, muscle aside secular Palestinian rivals and then morph into what is today Hamas, a militant group that is sworn to Israel's destruction.

Instead of trying to curb Gaza's Islamists from the outset, says Mr. Cohen, Israel for years tolerated and, in some cases, encouraged them as a counterweight to the secular nationalists of the Palestine Liberation Organization and its dominant faction, Yasser Arafat's Fatah. Israel cooperated with a crippled, half-blind cleric named Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, even as he was laying the foundations for what would become Hamas. Sheikh Yassin continues to inspire militants today; during the recent war in Gaza, Hamas fighters confronted Israeli troops with "Yassins," primitive rocket-propelled grenades named in honor of the cleric.

Last Saturday, after 22 days of war, Israel announced a halt to the offensive. The assault was aimed at stopping Hamas rockets from falling on Israel. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert hailed a "determined and successful military operation." More than 1,200 Palestinians had died. Thirteen Israelis were also killed.

Hamas responded the next day by lobbing five rockets towards the Israeli town of Sderot, a few miles down the road from Moshav Tekuma, the farming village where Mr. Cohen lives. Hamas then announced its own cease-fire.

Since then, Hamas leaders have emerged from hiding and reasserted their control over Gaza. Egyptian-mediated talks aimed at a more durable truce are expected to start this weekend. President Barack Obama said this week that lasting calm "requires more than a long cease-fire" and depends on Israel and a future Palestinian state "living side by side in peace and security."

A look at Israel's decades-long dealings with Palestinian radicals -- including some little-known attempts to cooperate with the Islamists -- reveals a catalog of unintended and often perilous consequences. Time and again, Israel's efforts to find a pliant Palestinian partner that is both credible with Palestinians and willing to eschew violence, have backfired. Would-be partners have turned into foes or lost the support of their people.

Israel's experience echoes that of the U.S., which, during the Cold War, looked to Islamists as a useful ally against communism. Anti-Soviet forces backed by America after Moscow's 1979 invasion of Afghanistan later mutated into al Qaeda.

At stake is the future of what used to be the British Mandate of Palestine, the biblical lands now comprising Israel and the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza. Since 1948, when the state of Israel was established, Israelis and Palestinians have each asserted claims over the same territory.

The Palestinian cause was for decades led by the PLO, which Israel regarded as a terrorist outfit and sought to crush until the 1990s, when the PLO dropped its vow to destroy the Jewish state. The PLO's Palestinian rival, Hamas, led by Islamist militants, refused to recognize Israel and vowed to continue "resistance." Hamas now controls Gaza, a crowded, impoverished sliver of land on the Mediterranean from which Israel pulled out troops and settlers in 2005.

When Israel first encountered Islamists in Gaza in the 1970s and '80s, they seemed focused on studying the Quran, not on confrontation with Israel. The Israeli government officially recognized a precursor to Hamas called Mujama Al-Islamiya, registering the group as a charity. It allowed Mujama members to set up an Islamic university and build mosques, clubs and schools. Crucially, Israel often stood aside when the Islamists and their secular left-wing Palestinian rivals battled, sometimes violently, for influence in both Gaza and the West Bank.

"When I look back at the chain of events I think we made a mistake," says David Hacham, who worked in Gaza in the late 1980s and early '90s as an Arab-affairs expert in the Israeli military. "But at the time nobody thought about the possible results."

Israeli officials who served in Gaza disagree on how much their own actions may have contributed to the rise of Hamas. They blame the group's recent ascent on outsiders, primarily Iran. This view is shared by the Israeli government. "Hamas in Gaza was built by Iran as a foundation for power, and is backed through funding, through training and through the provision of advanced weapons," Mr. Olmert said last Saturday. Hamas has denied receiving military assistance from Iran.

Arieh Spitzen, the former head of the Israeli military's Department of Palestinian Affairs, says that even if Israel had tried to stop the Islamists sooner, he doubts it could have done much to curb political Islam, a movement that was spreading across the Muslim world. He says attempts to stop it are akin to trying to change the internal rhythms of nature: "It is like saying: 'I will kill all the mosquitoes.' But then you get even worse insects that will kill you...You break the balance. You kill Hamas you might get al Qaeda."

When it became clear in the early 1990s that Gaza's Islamists had mutated from a religious group into a fighting force aimed at Israel -- particularly after they turned to suicide bombings in 1994 -- Israel cracked down with ferocious force. But each military assault only increased Hamas's appeal to ordinary Palestinians. The group ultimately trounced secular rivals, notably Fatah, in a 2006 election supported by Israel's main ally, the U.S.

Now, one big fear in Israel and elsewhere is that while Hamas has been hammered hard, the war might have boosted the group's popular appeal. Ismail Haniyeh, head of the Hamas administration in Gaza, came out of hiding last Sunday to declare that "God has granted us a great victory."

Most damaged from the war, say many Palestinians, is Fatah, now Israel's principal negotiating partner. "Everyone is praising the resistance and thinks that Fatah is not part of it," says Baker Abu-Baker, a longtime Fatah supporter and author of a book on Hamas.

A Lack of Devotion

Hamas traces its roots back to the Muslim Brotherhood, a group set up in Egypt in 1928. The Brotherhood believed that the woes of the Arab world spring from a lack of Islamic devotion. Its slogan: "Islam is the solution. The Quran is our constitution." Its philosophy today underpins modern, and often militantly intolerant, political Islam from Algeria to Indonesia.

After the 1948 establishment of Israel, the Brotherhood recruited a few followers in Palestinian refugee camps in Gaza and elsewhere, but secular activists came to dominate the Palestinian nationalist movement.

At the time, Gaza was ruled by Egypt. The country's then-president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, was a secular nationalist who brutally repressed the Brotherhood. In 1967, Nasser suffered a crushing defeat when Israel triumphed in the six-day war. Israel took control of Gaza and also the West Bank.

"We were all stunned," says Palestinian writer and Hamas supporter Azzam Tamimi. He was at school at the time in Kuwait and says he became close to a classmate named Khaled Mashaal, now Hamas's Damascus-based political chief. "The Arab defeat provided the Brotherhood with a big opportunity," says Mr. Tamimi.

In Gaza, Israel hunted down members of Fatah and other secular PLO factions, but it dropped harsh restrictions imposed on Islamic activists by the territory's previous Egyptian rulers. Fatah, set up in 1964, was the backbone of the PLO, which was responsible for hijackings, bombings and other violence against Israel. Arab states in 1974 declared the PLO the "sole legitimate representative" of the Palestinian people world-wide.

The Muslim Brotherhood, led in Gaza by Sheikh Yassin, was free to spread its message openly. In addition to launching various charity projects, Sheikh Yassin collected money to reprint the writings of Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian member of the Brotherhood who, before his execution by President Nasser, advocated global jihad. He is now seen as one of the founding ideologues of militant political Islam.

Mr. Cohen, who worked at the time for the Israeli government's religious affairs department in Gaza, says he began to hear disturbing reports in the mid-1970s about Sheikh Yassin from traditional Islamic clerics. He says they warned that the sheikh had no formal Islamic training and was ultimately more interested in politics than faith. "They said, 'Keep away from Yassin. He is a big danger,'" recalls Mr. Cohen.

Instead, Israel's military-led administration in Gaza looked favorably on the paraplegic cleric, who set up a wide network of schools, clinics, a library and kindergartens. Sheikh Yassin formed the Islamist group Mujama al-Islamiya, which was officially recognized by Israel as a charity and then, in 1979, as an association. Israel also endorsed the establishment of the Islamic University of Gaza, which it now regards as a hotbed of militancy. The university was one of the first targets hit by Israeli warplanes in the recent war.

Brig. General Yosef Kastel, Gaza's Israeli governor at the time, is too ill to comment, says his wife. But Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Segev, who took over as governor in Gaza in late 1979, says he had no illusions about Sheikh Yassin's long-term intentions or the perils of political Islam. As Israel's former military attache in Iran, he'd watched Islamic fervor topple the Shah. However, in Gaza, says Mr. Segev, "our main enemy was Fatah," and the cleric "was still 100% peaceful" towards Israel. Former officials say Israel was also at the time wary of being viewed as an enemy of Islam.

Mr. Segev says he had regular contact with Sheikh Yassin, in part to keep an eye on him. He visited his mosque and met the cleric around a dozen times. It was illegal at the time for Israelis to meet anyone from the PLO. Mr. Segev later arranged for the cleric to be taken to Israel for hospital treatment. "We had no problems with him," he says.

In fact, the cleric and Israel had a shared enemy: secular Palestinian activists. After a failed attempt in Gaza to oust secularists from leadership of the Palestinian Red Crescent, the Muslim version of the Red Cross, Mujama staged a violent demonstration, storming the Red Crescent building. Islamists also attacked shops selling liquor and cinemas. The Israeli military mostly stood on the sidelines.

Mr. Segev says the army didn't want to get involved in Palestinian quarrels but did send soldiers to prevent Islamists from burning down the house of the Red Crescent's secular chief, a socialist who supported the PLO.

'An Alternative to the PLO'

Clashes between Islamists and secular nationalists spread to the West Bank and escalated during the early 1980s, convulsing college campuses, particularly Birzeit University, a center of political activism.

As the fighting between rival student factions at Birzeit grew more violent, Brig. Gen. Shalom Harari, then a military intelligence officer in Gaza, says he received a call from Israeli soldiers manning a checkpoint on the road out of Gaza. They had stopped a bus carrying Islamic activists who wanted to join the battle against Fatah at Birzeit. "I said: 'If they want to burn each other let them go,'" recalls Mr. Harari.

A leader of Birzeit's Islamist faction at the time was Mahmoud Musleh, now a pro-Hamas member of a Palestinian legislature elected in 2006. He recalls how usually aggressive Israeli security forces stood back and let conflagration develop. He denies any collusion between his own camp and the Israelis, but says "they hoped we would become an alternative to the PLO."

A year later, in 1984, the Israeli military received a tip-off from Fatah supporters that Sheikh Yassin's Gaza Islamists were collecting arms, according to Israeli officials in Gaza at the time. Israeli troops raided a mosque and found a cache of weapons. Sheikh Yassin was jailed. He told Israeli interrogators the weapons were for use against rival Palestinians, not Israel, according to Mr. Hacham, the military affairs expert who says he spoke frequently with jailed Islamists. The cleric was released after a year and continued to expand Mujama's reach across Gaza.

Around the time of Sheikh Yassin's arrest, Mr. Cohen, the religious affairs official, sent a report to senior Israeli military and civilian officials in Gaza. Describing the cleric as a "diabolical" figure, he warned that Israel's policy towards the Islamists was allowing Mujama to develop into a dangerous force.

"I believe that by continuing to turn away our eyes, our lenient approach to Mujama will in the future harm us. I therefore suggest focusing our efforts on finding ways to break up this monster before this reality jumps in our face," Mr. Cohen wrote.

Mr. Harari, the military intelligence officer, says this and other warnings were ignored. But, he says, the reason for this was neglect, not a desire to fortify the Islamists: "Israel never financed Hamas. Israel never armed Hamas."

Roni Shaked, a former officer of Shin Bet, Israel's internal security service, and author of a book on Hamas, says Sheikh Yassin and his followers had a long-term perspective whose dangers were not understood at the time. "They worked slowly, slowly, step by step according to the Muslim Brotherhood plan."

Declaring Jihad

In 1987, several Palestinians were killed in a traffic accident involving an Israeli driver, triggering a wave of protests that became known as the first Intifada, Mr. Yassin and six other Mujama Islamists launched Hamas, or the Islamic Resistance Movement. Hamas's charter, released a year later, is studded with anti-Semitism and declares "jihad its path and death for the cause of Allah its most sublime belief."

Israeli officials, still focused on Fatah and initially unaware of the Hamas charter, continued to maintain contacts with the Gaza Islamists. Mr. Hacham, the military Arab affairs expert, remembers taking one of Hamas's founders, Mahmoud Zahar, to meet Israel's then defense minister, Yitzhak Rabin, as part of regular consultations between Israeli officials and Palestinians not linked to the PLO. Mr. Zahar, the only Hamas founder known to be alive today, is now the group's senior political leader in Gaza.

In 1989, Hamas carried out its first attack on Israel, abducting and killing two soldiers. Israel arrested Sheikh Yassin and sentenced him to life. It later rounded up more than 400 suspected Hamas activists, including Mr. Zahar, and deported them to southern Lebanon. There, they hooked up with Hezbollah, the Iran-backed A-Team of anti-Israeli militancy.

Many of the deportees later returned to Gaza. Hamas built up its arsenal and escalated its attacks, while all along maintaining the social network that underpinned its support in Gaza.

Meanwhile, its enemy, the PLO, dropped its commitment to Israel's destruction and started negotiating a two-state settlement. Hamas accused it of treachery. This accusation found increasing resonance as Israel kept developing settlements on occupied Palestinian land, particularly the West Bank. Though the West Bank had passed to the nominal control of a new Palestinian Authority, it was still dotted with Israeli military checkpoints and a growing number of Israeli settlers.

Unable to uproot a now entrenched Islamist network that had suddenly replaced the PLO as its main foe, Israel tried to decapitate it. It started targeting Hamas leaders. This, too, made no dent in Hamas's support, and sometimes even helped the group. In 1997, for example, Israel's Mossad spy agency tried to poison Hamas's exiled political leader Mr. Mashaal, who was then living in Jordan.

The agents got caught and, to get them out of a Jordanian jail, Israel agreed to release Sheikh Yassin. The cleric set off on a tour of the Islamic world to raise support and money. He returned to Gaza to a hero's welcome.

Efraim Halevy, a veteran Mossad officer who negotiated the deal that released Sheikh Yassin, says the cleric's freedom was hard to swallow, but Israel had no choice. After the fiasco in Jordan, Mr. Halevy was named director of Mossad, a position he held until 2002. Two years later, Sheikh Yassin was killed by an Israeli air strike.

Mr. Halevy has in recent years urged Israel to negotiate with Hamas. He says that "Hamas can be crushed," but he believes that "the price of crushing Hamas is a price that Israel would prefer not to pay." When Israel's authoritarian secular neighbor, Syria, launched a campaign to wipe out Muslim Brotherhood militants in the early 1980s it killed more than 20,000 people, many of them civilians.

In its recent war in Gaza, Israel didn't set the destruction of Hamas as its goal. It limited its stated objectives to halting the Islamists' rocket fire and battering their overall military capacity. At the start of the Israeli operation in December, Defense Minister Ehud Barak told parliament that the goal was "to deal Hamas a severe blow, a blow that will cause it to stop its hostile actions from Gaza at Israeli citizens and soldiers."

Walking back to his house from the rubble of his neighbor's home, Mr. Cohen, the former religious affairs official in Gaza, curses Hamas and also what he sees as missteps that allowed Islamists to put down deep roots in Gaza.

He recalls a 1970s meeting with a traditional Islamic cleric who wanted Israel to stop cooperating with the Muslim Brotherhood followers of Sheikh Yassin: "He told me: 'You are going to have big regrets in 20 or 30 years.' He was right."

[survivingcapitalism]

AMY GOODMAN: I waned to ask you if you could talk about Israel’s involvement in Hamas gaining power. In 2009, Avner Cohen, a former Israeli religious affairs official who worked in Gaza for over 20 years, told The Wall Street Journal, quote, “Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation.” Another former Israeli official, Brigadier General Yitzhak Segev, said he was given a budget to help finance Islamist movements in Gaza to counter Yasser Arafat and his Fatah movement. Another former Israeli military official, David Hacham, said, quote, “When I look back at the chain of events, I think we made a mistake. But at the time, nobody thought about the possible results.” Your response, Tareq Baconi?

TAREQ BACONI: Well, the origins of that is really Hamas emerged as an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood chapter in the Gaza Strip. And the Muslim Brotherhood chapter was not a political party. It was a social party. And its operations in the Gaza Strip and throughout the Palestinian territories were actually granted licenses by Israeli occupying forces at the time, so there was a license for the Muslim Brotherhood chapter to operate openly in the Gaza Strip. When Hamas was established in 1987 and became a political party and a military party that was engaged in active resistance against Israel’s occupation, the policies within the Israeli government shifted, and obviously it became less open to allowing Hamas to function. However, that did not deter Israeli authorities from encouraging and promoting divide-and-rule tactics between the Islamist national movement, so Hamas, and secular nationalism around Fatah. And this has always been a tactic that the colonial forces have used globally, and obviously Israeli colonialism is no different. So it has directly and implicitly attempted divide-and-rule policies.

This really turned and came to a head in 2007, when Hamas, after winning democratic elections in 2006, rose to power, and the Israeli authorities, along with the U.S., attempted to initiate a regime change operation, which facilitated a civil war between Hamas and Fatah and allowed Hamas to take over the Gaza Strip. Since then, Israeli authorities have actively embraced the idea that Hamas would be accepted as a governing authority in the Gaza Strip. Now, part of the calculus in that is because of Gaza’s 2 million Palestinians. This is a demographic issue. Israel wanted to sever the Gaza Strip from the rest of historic Palestine in order to reinforce its claim that it’s a Jewish-majority state. By getting rid of 2 million Palestinians, two-thirds of whom are refugees demanding return, Israel can claim to be both a Jewish state and a democracy and restructure what is its apartheid regime. Now, in order to do that, it acquiesced to maintaining Hamas in governance, and it claimed that it placed a blockade around the Gaza Strip because Hamas was in power. And obviously this was bought in the international community, using what we were just talking about, the idea that Hamas is a terrorist organization, axis of evil, and, therefore, that this blockade makes sense.

What policymakers don’t understand is that Israel has engaged in blockades around the Gaza Strip and attempted to get rid of the population in the Gaza Strip long before Hamas was even established as a party. But with Hamas’s takeover of the Gaza Strip, this created a perfect fig leaf for Israel to maintain the Gaza Strip as a separate strip of land. And to do that, it had to acquiesce and, in some ways, even enable Hamas to maintain its position as a governing authority there. And this also further reinforced its efforts to try to maintain division among the Palestinian leadership and play divide-and-rule policies between the PA and Hamas.

[theculturedmarxist]

What do you know about Hamas?

That it’s sworn to destroy Israel? That it’s a terrorist group, proscribed both by the United States and the European Union? That it rules Gaza with an iron fist? That it’s killed hundreds of innocent Israelis with rocket, mortar, and suicide attacks?

But did you also know that Hamas — which is an Arabic acronym for “Islamic Resistance Movement” — would probably not exist today were it not for the Jewish state? That the Israelis helped turn a bunch of fringe Palestinian Islamists in the late 1970s into one of the world’s most notorious militant groups? That Hamas is blowback?

This isn’t a conspiracy theory. Listen to former Israeli officials such as Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Segev, who was the Israeli military governor in Gaza in the early 1980s. Segev later told a New York Times reporter that he had helped finance the Palestinian Islamist movement as a “counterweight” to the secularists and leftists of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Fatah party, led by Yasser Arafat (who himself referred to Hamas as “a creature of Israel.”)

“The Israeli government gave me a budget,” the retired brigadier general confessed, “and the military government gives to the mosques.”

“Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation,” Avner Cohen, a former Israeli religious affairs official who worked in Gaza for more than two decades, told the Wall Street Journal in 2009. Back in the mid-1980s, Cohen even wrote an official report to his superiors warning them not to play divide-and-rule in the Occupied Territories, by backing Palestinian Islamists against Palestinian secularists. “I … suggest focusing our efforts on finding ways to break up this monster before this reality jumps in our face,” he wrote.

They didn’t listen to him. And Hamas, as I explain in the fifth installment of my short film series for The Intercept on blowback, was the result. To be clear: First, the Israelis helped build up a militant strain of Palestinian political Islam, in the form of Hamas and its Muslim Brotherhood precursors; then, the Israelis switched tack and tried to bomb, besiege, and blockade it out of existence.

In the past decade alone, Israel has gone to war with Hamas three times — in 2009, 2012, and 2014 — killing around 2,500 Palestinian civilians in Gaza in the process. Meanwhile, Hamas has killed far more Israeli civilians than any secular Palestinian militant group. This is the human cost of blowback.

“When I look back at the chain of events, I think we made a mistake,” David Hacham, a former Arab affairs expert in the Israeli military who was based in Gaza in the 1980s, later remarked. “But at the time, nobody thought about the possible results.”

They never do, do they?

[eretzyisrael]

A controlled trial suggests that these non-nutritive sweeteners affect the human gut microbes and may alter glucose metabolism; the effects vary greatly among individuals

Non-nutritive sweeteners – also known as sugar substitutes or artificial sweeteners – are supposed to deliver all the sweetness of sugar without the calories. But a controlled trial conducted by Weizmann Institute of Science researchers, published today in Cell, suggests that contrary to previous belief, such sweeteners are not inert: They do have an effect on the human body. In fact, some can alter human consumers’ microbiomes – the trillions of microbes that live in our gut – in a way that can change a person’s blood sugar levels. And the effects these sweeteners produce vary greatly among different people.

The research was led by Dr. Jotham Suez, a former graduate student of Elinav’s and now principal investigator at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and Yotam Cohen, a graduate student in Elinav’s lab; it was conducted in collaboration with Prof. Eran Segal of Weizmann’s Computer Science and Applied Mathematics and Molecular Cell Biology Departments.

"Our trial has shown that non-nutritive sweeteners may impair glucose responses by altering our microbiome, and they do so in a highly personalized manner"

The changes induced by the sweeteners in the gut microbes were closely correlated with the alterations in glucose tolerance. “These findings reinforce the view of the microbiome as a hub that integrates the signals coming from the human body’s own systems and from external factors such as the food we eat, the medications we take, our lifestyle and physical surroundings,” Elinav says.

“Our trial has shown that non-nutritive sweeteners may impair glucose responses by altering our microbiome, and they do so in a highly personalized manner, that is, by affecting each person in a unique way,” Elinav says. “In fact, this variability was to be expected, because of the unique composition of each person’s microbiome.”

Adds Elinav: “The health implications of the changes that non-nutritive sweeteners may elicit in humans remain to be determined, and they merit new, long-term studies. In the meantime, it’s important to stress that our findings do not imply in any way that sugar consumption, shown to be deleterious to human health in many studies, is superior to non-nutritive sweeteners."

Study participants included Dr. Rafael Valdés-Mas, Uria Mor, Dr. Mally Dori-Bachash, Dr. Sara Federici, Dr. Niv Zmora, Dr. Avner Leshem, Dr. Melina Heinemann, Raquel Linevsky, Maya Zur, Rotem Ben-Zeev Brik, Aurelie Bukimer, Shimrit Eliyahu Miller, Alona Metz, Ruthy Fischbein, Olga Sharov and Dr. Hagit Shapiro from Elinav’s lab; Drs. Sergey Malitsky and Maxim Itkin from Weizmann’s Life Sciences Core Facilities Department; Dr. Noa Stettner and Prof. Alon Harmelin from Weizmann’s Veterinary Resources Department; and Dr. Christoph K. Stein-Thoeringer from the Microbiome & Cancer Division, German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ).

[scary-movies-on-netflix]

"The Zone of Interest" (2023): response to a terrible movie review

I don't usually do media criticism, but this "review" of "The Zone of Interest" (2023) has irked me since reading it in March. You'll excuse me whilst I rant about it a bit, ok?

Director Jonathan Glazer’s acclaimed movie “The Zone of Interest” recently won two Oscars — for best international feature film and for sound. Steven Spielberg has declared it to be the best Holocaust film since his own “Schindler’s List” came out in 1993. In his Oscar acceptance speech, Glazer, who is himself Jewish, invoked the Holocaust to criticize Israel’s military actions in Gaza. His speech drew some praise but also criticism from the Jewish community — including from the movie’s executive producer, Danny Cohen. But in some important respects, the film is even more troubling than Glazer’s speech.

Got it. This isn't really about the movie. It's about the fact that Jonathan Glazer dared to criticize the ongoing humanitarian disaster in Gaza. The author of this piece, this hit piece, is Peter Rutland. He's a professor of some sort at "Wesleyan University." As far as I can tell, he's never written a movie review before. He has written some other op-eds for CNN, including at least one acknowledging grievances on both sides of the Gaza conflict. That's actually a more measured statement than you'll see from most pundits these days, so the one-sidedness of this movie review is just confounding.

Let's continue:

The film documents the mundane life of the family of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss (played by Christian Friedel) and his wife, Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), while the atrocities themselves are kept out of sight behind the concentration camp wall. It was inspired by the 2014 novel “The Zone of Interest” by Martin Amis, the enfant terrible of English letters whose works use satire as a vehicle for reveling in money, sex and power. What the satiric movie “Saltburn” does for the English upper class, “The Zone of Interest” is doing for National Socialism. While the evil of Nazism is an abstraction in the movie, out of sight and out of mind, viewers are invited to identify with the daily life of the family Höss. The lush images of the film convey an idyllic family life, with an immaculately clean house and bountiful garden. The Nazis loved their children and their pets. They played the piano.

The audience is not being "invited to identify with" the Höss family. We are being invited to pierce through their self-deception. Their existence is not "idyllic." Herr Höss is cheating on his wife. Frau Höss is brittle and mean. The children (the boys at least) are traumatized. The family has material wealth, including a "lush" garden and "immaculately clean house," but that's produced on the backs of slave labor. These are fairly obvious points. Frau Höss's mother understood (which is why she snuck out in the middle of the night), but this is apparently too obscure for Rutland to grasp.

Glazer has explained that his goal was to show that the perpetrators of the Holocaust were not monsters but humans, just like us. It could have happened anywhere: to anyone, by anyone. Viewers are invited to consider that as we go about our mundane lives, evil is taking place somewhere behind a wall, which we chose not to look over.

Yes! That's the point! Atrocities aren't committed by monsters. They're committed by people. Actual people.

But the whole idea of making a Nazi pastoral film is historically misleading and frankly offensive. As Israeli film critic Avner Shavit has pointed out, Glazer has managed to make a film about the Holocaust in which we never see any Jews.

First of all, "the idea of making a Nazi pastoral film" might indeed be "frankly offensive," but art has no obligation to make you feel good about anything. Good art challenges you and forces you to consider strange perspectives. Sometimes it might offend you! Second, why is "the idea of making a Nazi pastoral film" "historically misleading?" The Nazi government had an entire government ministry dedicated to pumping out propaganda, including pastoral films.

The second point (that "Glazer has managed to make a film about the Holocaust in which we never see any Jews") is just boring and tendentious. Peter Rutland, people have multiple senses. No, we don't see any Jews. We hear them. Their suffering is ever present. The film was praised for its sound design, which included and highlighted the horrors being inflicted upon the Jews. Apart from that, yes, Peter Rutland, you actually could make a Holocaust movie without any Jews in it. (Has Peter Rutland seen "Conspiracy" (2001)?) That's called art.

Likewise, in a 45-minute discussion of the film by the cast and crew at the Cannes Film Festival in May, the question of Jews never came up. Instead, producer James Wilson talked about how white racism and colonialism were driven by beliefs “that were very similar to the ideas that were propagated by National Socialism in the 1930s.” An audience member saw connections to the “Don’t say gay” law in Florida.

This point has nothing to do with the movie. Peter Rutland, pedant, is just upset about the statements made during one press conference. Again, this is not a movie review. It's a hit piece.

But the Holocaust happened to the Jews, at the hands of the Nazis and their collaborators, and its specificity should not be diluted into a general meditation on the banality of evil.

The Holocaust happened to the Jews. This is not disputed. This movie does not make light of that fact. But Peter Rutland continues, "its specificity should not be diluted into a general meditation on the banality of evil." Why not? No, really. Why not?

Peter Rutland is once again demonstrating that he's angry about Glazer. Instead of complaining directly about Glazer, he bitching about a movie he clearly doesn't understand. I'm actually questioning whether he understands art at all. The Holocaust "should not be diluted into a general meditation" on things. Really? "Schindler's List" (1993) is a movie about the Holocaust and a meditation on the nature of evil. No movie needs Peter Rutland's permission to be about multiple things at once.

The movie’s conceit is not a particularly clever or original take on history. The fact that the guards had happy moments during their time at the camp was vividly revealed by the photo album of deputy commander Karl-Friedrich Höcker that was donated to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2007.

I don't really care for Peter Rutland's thoughts on what's "clever or original." He sounds like a bore and, as explained above, barely seems to understand the nature of art.

Glazer is echoing elements of the “banality of evil” argument laid out in Hannah Arendt’s “Eichmann in Jerusalem.” In his 1961 trial, Adolf Eichmann’s defense was that he was just a bureaucrat carrying out orders. But Arendt was wrong. Due to the release of long-hidden tapes that started to become available in the 2010s that the Nazi official made while in exile in Argentina, we now know that Eichman, the chief logistics officer of the Holocaust, was an ideological zealot deeply committed to National Socialism.

Peter Rutland misspelled Eichmann's name. Ha ha.

For some time scholars have studied “banal nationalism”: the expression of national identity in everyday life. But there was nothing banal about the Holocaust. Indeed, the film implies that Höss was just doing his job. But Höss was not just a bored bureaucrat and family man. He was a fanatical Nazi who had joined the party in 1922 and was sent to jail for participating in a political assassination the following year.

What even is the point of these two paragraphs? Peter Rutland realizes that isn't actually Höss on the screen, right? This is a work of fiction. Moreover, this doesn't diminish the point that people committed the Holocaust. People like, yes, Höss. They weren't literal monsters. They were men and women with jobs and families and pets. I went to a museum in Erfurt, Germany, where they built the furnaces for the death camps. They were designed by engineers, built by workers of various types, and then delivered by truck or train by drivers. That's the "banality of evil": regular people mindlessly and unquestioningly performing all the little necessary acts that it takes to produce industrial-scale evil.

People need to be reminded that this capacity for evil can exist inside them. We can't just assume that this evil will never emerge, hope for the best that we can keep it inside. It's always going to be a struggle to control this side of our nature.

“The Zone of Interest” is rather tedious as a film. It barely has a plot, and the conversations and daily routines are repetitious. Several scenes will leave viewers confused, such as the one where Höss finds a jawbone while fishing in the river and drags his kids out of the water. I would not have known what was happening except I had previously read in a review that there are supposedly human remains being dumped in the river.

Peter Rutland's article is rather tedious as a movie review, because it's not a movie review. This man does not understand film.

Likewise, the local girl going out at night to leave food for the camp inmates (based on a true story) will have mystified most of the audience. The scene will have pleased the Polish authorities who helped to produce the film, since it portrays the Poles as helping the Jews. Yes, some Poles did heroically help Jews. But some joined in pogroms, or betrayed Jews in hiding to the Germans. These grim facts have been documented by historian Jan Gross, provoking intense controversy in Poland. No sign of that in this film.

This is a ludicrous complaint. Did Peter Rutland run this by anyone before sending it to CNN? Did any editor at CNN suggest that maybe a movie doesn't have to address every single historical point that could be possibly be raised about a particular time period? This is a tightly-constructed movie about a specific set of characters, but now he wants it to suddenly expand in scope to address how some Poles were collaborators of the Holocaust. Does Peter Rutland raise this same complaint about every movie he sees? Did he watch "Schindler's List" and seethe that it didn't include information about Polish collaborators? Did he watch the beginning of "Saving Private Ryan" (1998) and rage that it didn't focus enough on the brave Canadian soldiers fighting on Juno beach? I doubt it. He just wants to whine about this movie because he disagrees with some statements by Glazer.

There is a long history of fascination with the aesthetics of the Third Reich, as in the films of Leni Riefenstahl. Back in 1975, Susan Sontag wrote a perceptive essay condemning the fetishization of Nazi paraphernalia. “The Zone of Interest” will certainly appeal to those who admire the aesthetics of Nazism: the striking uniforms, the distinctive “fashy” (short for fascist) haircuts, the nice animals. It will also appeal to people who like gardening.

This movie is a meditation on character and memory, but Peter Rutland repeatedly demonstrates that he doesn't understand that. He collapses everything to a mere celebration of aesthetics, because, based on everything he's written, he only comprehends the surface details of what he's seeing on the screen, and even that comprehension is clouded by his personal animosity toward Glazer.

But viewers who want insights into the tragic history of the Holocaust should look elsewhere.

This is a pathetic. Peter Rutland offers no insights into this movie. This is a political op-ed disguised (poorly, I might add), as a "movie review." Both the author and CNN should be ashamed for publishing this piece of shit.

[pedroan2]

David Omar Cohen: Trezladar el ladino kon Avner Perets// Amsterdam, Olanda

[wildmonkeysects]

Israel created Hamas

Did Netanyahu tell his new Ketamine addicted neo-nazi friend that Israel funded Hamas in the late ‘70s, as an attempt to divide Palestine?

Did he forget mention the Hannibal Directive, and that Israeli Apache helicopters fired guns and missiles at anything that moved, including fleeing Israelis on Oct 7?

I hear crickets.

“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.

[msclaritea]

Israel's Quest for Yellowcake: The Secret Argentina-Israel Connection, 1963-1966 | Wilson Center

Israel’s Quest for Yellowcake: The Secret Argentina-Israel Connection, 1963-1966

US State Department Insisted that Uranium Sales Required Safeguards to Assure Peaceful Use but Israel Was Uncooperative and Evasive About the Yellowcake's Ultimate Use

William Burr, National Security Archive, and Avner Cohen, James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey institute of International Studies (MIIS), editors. Also see the Foreign Policy companion piece to this research update, "Israel's Secret Uranium Buy: How Argentina Fueled Ben-Gurion's Nuclear Program."

During 1963-64, the Israeli government secretly acquired 80-100 tons of Argentine uranium oxide (“yellowcake”) for its nuclear weapons program, according to US and British archival documents published today for the first time jointly by the National Security Archive, the Nuclear Proliferation International History Project and the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey institute of International Studies (MIIS). The US government learned about the facts of the sale through Canadian intelligence and found out even more from its Embassy in Argentina. In response to US diplomatic queries about the sale, the government of Israel was evasive in its replies and gave no answers to the US's questions about the transaction.

Argentina is the third-largest economy in Latin America with a GDP of US$632.24 billion in 2022 and a population of 46.9 million spread among 23 provinces as of January 2023. It is considered one of the most urbanized nations in the world with approximately 92 percent of the population concentrated in urban areas. Nearly 46 percent live in Buenos Aires (Capital and Province) and another 20 percent is distributed in the provinces of Córdoba, Santa Fe, and Mendoza. The country has a talented and educated workforce, but its population has experienced economic turbulence over the last 75 years.

The economic outlook in Argentina remains challenging as unfavorable climatic conditions continue to affect the agricultural sector, from which most of the Central Bank reserves are generated, adding more pressure on an economy that was already in recession because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The country saw positive GDP growth in 2021 (10.4 percent) and in 2022 (5.2 percent), however, other indicators provide a wider lens to view the challenging economic environment. The poverty rate remains high at almost 40 percent and accumulated inflation has already surpassed 113 percent in July 2023. The Argentine peso depreciated approximately 33 percent against the U.S. dollar between 2022 and 2023. As of September 21, 2023, the official exchange rate is US$1:AR$366.64, while the unofficial exchange rate is US$1:AR$740.

Despite slowing economic activity and erosion of local purchasing power, U.S.exports of goods and services to Argentina increased 55 percent in 2022. U.S. exports totaled US$19.68 billion and imports from Argentina to the United States were US$9.75 billion. As a result, the U.S. recorded its tenth consecutive trade surplus, valued at approximately $9.9 billion, and was the third largest trading partner of Argentina. Almost 90 percent of U.S. merchandise exports are used in local industry and agriculture, including chemicals, industrial supplies and materials, petroleum & coal products, and oil & gas equipment. Information & communication and travel services (for all purposes including education) are the top service export categories by the United States to Argentina. Leading Argentine exports to the United States include crude oil & gas, processed foods, chemicals, and agricultural products. Travel and transport are the leading service exports from Argentina to the United States.

The United States is Argentina’s top foreign direct investor, totalling US$131.6 billion in the last 10 years. There are more than 300 U.S. companies present in Argentina, some whose presence dates back more than 100 years. Despite the current macroeconomic challenges, there are significant opportunities for U.S. companies in energy, mining, health, agriculture, information technology, and safety & security, among others. U.S. companies are widely respected in Argentina for their good business practices, transparency, corporate social responsibility, high quality, and good customer service.

[roa-hshs24]

    Unity is something that everybody desires, it is what makes us live in harmony and put our fears of war away. Living in peace and not having to worry about the uneasiness that conflict brings puts our state of mind into tranquility. Sadly, our world has yet to find peace as darkness starts to prevail and tranquility starts to shatter as another war broke out between Israel and Palestine recently October 2023.

On October 7, 2023, a surprise attack was done by Hamas, a militant Islamist Group. In the middle of the Supernova Music Concert, they executed an unexpected attack sending paragliders with deadly weapons on their hands that took away multiple innocent lives. Hamas fighters stormed through cities and towns across the border of the Gaza Strip, causing violence by killing and taking dozens of hostages. One day after the Israeli cabinet responded and declared war against Hamas. (Center for Preventive Action)

These two countries aren’t strangers to each other as they have been fighting for a long time. Diving into their history will provide information and context on what happened to their past that ultimately led to many wars including the one happening right now.

The dispute between Israel and Palestine originated in the 19th century when Jews that are living abroad came back to what is now Israel. The Jordanians took over the land between 1948 and 1967 that being said Israelis are claiming that it’s theirs again.

On 1948 the Arab-Israeli a war broke out when Israel declared itself as an Independent state and following that announcement leads into five Arab nations Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria invaded territories inside the old Palestinian Mandate.  The war ended in 1949 and Israel won dividing the territory into 3 parts, the state of Israel, the West Bank (of the Jordan River), and the Gaza Strip. (Us Department of State)   Over the course of years, Six-Day War happened and it took place on June 5-10 1967. Israel and Arab had a war that only last six days. In those six days. Israel won four times its initial amount of territory over those six days, beat three Arab armies, and rose to the top military position in the area. Israel underwent a dramatic transformation during the conflict, going from a country that saw itself as a survivor to an occupier and regional powerhouse. (Avner Cohen).  In 1987 Hamas was created and controlled the Gaza Strip since 2006.

Israel and Palestine fought a lot of battles and up until this day, they still haven’t resolved the conflict that is going on between them.

References:

[quietrebelsofgenesis]

Trying to sum this up. According to Merriam-Webster Dictionary, a Semite is “a member of any of a number of peoples of ancient southwestern Asia including the Akkadians, Phoenicians, Hebrews, and Arabs.” AND ARABS. Palestinians are Arabs. Therefore, Israel’s attacks on Palestinians are ANTISEMITIC.

Hamas was created by Israeli officials to attack members of the Palestinian Liberation Organization. Avner Cohen stated, “Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation.”

Judaism and Zionism are two different things. Zionists support the existence of a Jewish state, ie, Israel. Some Jewish people oppose Israel and their destruction and colonization of Palestine. You can support the Jewish people AND express opposition to Israel. You can speak out on the inhumane acts committed against Palestinians, especially those in Gaza.

Don’t believe me? Look it up.