On October 7th, 2023, when some 2,000 armed Hamas militants infiltrated into Israeli-controlled territory by both land and air, killing some 1,200 Israelis and taking another 240 hostage, the world was horrified by this atrocity; this horror serving as the backdrop and the senseless slaughter the 'justification' for the subsequent invasion of and relentless war on the besieged Gaza Strip by the Israeli war machine under the pretense of rescuing the hostages and dealing a militarily crushing defeat to Hamas – once and for all.
Now, 300 days-and-counting into Israel's genocidal war on Gaza, and the whole world is again looking on in horror, wondering when this madness will come to an end, and at least some semblance of peace will return to the region. With over 40,000 Palestinians killed in the onslaught – roughly half of those children – since the beginning of Israel's war on Gaza, another 10,000 or more missing (likely buried under the rubble), 100% of the 2.3 million residents of the famine-stricken Gaza displaced, and over half of the Strip's infrastructure now decimated, the Gaza Strip not only lies in complete ruins but also showcases one of the most prominent, most pronounced and most shockingly horrifying examples of human-caused human suffering on the planet today. The actual death toll resulting from this onslaught is almost certainly higher, as not all deaths have been reported due to the breakdown of Gazan infrastructure and society, and is ever rising with each passing day, with an additional 90,000+ injured, and no real way to calculate the true scope of the lasting negative repercussions of this intensely tragic human suffering on such a massive scale.
Nor do these numbers take into account the inherent nature of armed conflicts to cause more indirect deaths than direct deaths, with a Lancet report published in July stating that “it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186 000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza.” This estimate suggests that the war has thus far claimed the lives of 7-8% of the entire population of Gaza, which was already prior to the war suffering in “unlivable” conditions, trapped within an open-air prison – ruled by the iron fist of Hamas from within and under brutal military siege by land, air and sea from without – ~80% of its water undrinkable, its power and much-needed humanitarian aid severely rationed and at times throughout the war denied altogether, its children suffering from PTSD; the entire ~2.3 million population ravaged by severe food and medical supply shortages, with some 70% of the population food-insecure, half of the population starving, and unemployment rates run rampant.
Not surprisingly, this severe humanitarian crisis and the plight of the besieged Gazans has been largely ignored by the whole world – at least until now. Now, as the whole world looks on in horror, wondering why, this many months into such a reckless war of destruction, a ceasefire agreement has yet to be reached, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu clearly appears to be doing absolutely everything in his power to ensure that peace does not disrupt his endless, unwinnable war – the one thing preventing his fall from power, as Bibi's wars always seem to do.
But this tragic story of human suffering is about far more than one man’s desperate bid to cling to political power at all costs, or the large-scale terrorist attack that shook the soul of Israel and triggered a genocidal war. It is the story of an ancient war being bitterly fought still today in a land of two peoples who desperately seek peace, a war that is also raging within the collective heart, mind and soul of all Mankind; the story of Israel, the story of Palestine, the story of me, the story of you, and the story of all humanity.
Upon reading the ICC Prosecutor's report that was issued following in-depth investigations – which charges three Hamas leaders along with Netanyahu and his Defense Minister Yoav Gallant with a slew of war crimes and crimes against humanity, and aligns with all of the available evidence we have about this conflict – it becomes glaringly obvious that the world is here dealing with two military forces, both of which are responsible for engaging in horrific war crimes and crimes against humanity in clear contravention of international law and every moral standard we in ‘civilized’ society claim to hold dear.
Two dark monsters if you will, these militant entities are; both of which resort to committing heinous criminal atrocities because the other monster also does the same; both pointing to the other as the true monster and themselves as the hero and God's instrument for justice, both dismissing the charges laid against them and the filing for their arrest warrants as outlandish, both pointing to the other's crimes as the truly heinous acts that should be punished.
This is but the very nature of those lost in the maze of darkness cast upon this earth from which humanity ever seeks to free herself, the cycle of violence perpetuating violence, hatred fueling hatred, and "deeper darkness adding darkness to a night already devoid of stars," as the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. so elegantly put it. But what many may not be aware of, is that these two entities are in fact but two heads of the very same monster; in much the same way that here in the US, the democratic party and republican party are but two heads of the very same corrupt establishment oligarchy, two wings of the very same imperial bird of war.
This first installment of this 3-part series tells the story of the rise of this two-headed monster; and how, working hand in hand, these two seemingly opposed heads of the selfsame monster have risen to power together, working jointly to accomplish their shared goal of preventing peace in Palestine - at all costs - as they achieved so masterfully many years ago, on a short-lived day when peace once threatened to break the decades-long status quo of the perpetual conflict between Israel and Palestine. The ongoing war on Gaza today is a result of their joint success at that time, and as one, from then until now, these two heads have grown in power until the day on which one head seized control of Gaza, and the other seized control of Israel; this present war the result of that treacherous rise of the two-headed monster, now showing its true colors boldly for the whole world to see.
A monster is born: Israel first creates Hamas
“Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation,” Avner Cohen, former Israeli religious affairs official involved in Gaza for over 20 years, explained to the Wall Street Journal in 2009.
Hamas, for whatever purposes it was originally spawned by Israel to accomplish, is, nevertheless, to some degree or another, “a creature of Israel,” to quote the late Fatah/PLO leader Yasser Arafat; in much the same way as ISIS and the smorgasbord of allied fundamentalist Islamic Jihadist US-proxy militants in Syria – armed, trained and deployed by the US to overthrow President Bashar Assad's secular Syrian government – were but a creature of the CIA and its Operation Timber Sycamore; the primary difference being that Israel never directly armed Hamas or its progenitor. It did, however, intentionally permit the Jihadist Muslim Brotherhood-inspired group to arm itself, as it was a bitter enemy of the secular Palestinian Liberation Organization which Israel at the time viewed as its primary Palestinian enemy and a major threat to the Zionist plan to forever prevent the establishment of an independent Palestinian state. So it is that, in much the same way the Afghanistan Taliban is also a CIA creation that in time created serious blowback, so too is Israel responsible for creating, protecting and empowering the entity as it transformed itself into the militant powerhouse the world now knows as Hamas.
In a 1994 book, “The Other Side of Deception,” Mossad whistleblower Victor Ostrovsky contended that aiding Hamas meshed with “Mossad’s general plan” for an Arab world “run by fundamentalists” that would reject “any negotiations with the West,” thereby leaving Israel as “the only democratic, rational country in the region.”
The plan worked brilliantly, perhaps better than anyone at the time could have imagined, or at least in ways that were surely unforeseen and perhaps quite unintended. Nevertheless, at the same time, despite serving to advance the agenda of empowering and enlarging the militant Islamic fundamentalist movement among Palestinians – which was at the time nonexistent in the land of Palestine – would in turn also eventually serve to fuel and empower the equally radical fundamentalist Jewish Zionist settler movement and its own plans to foment terror in the region, consisting of literal terrorist groups, as deemed by Israel itself in those years. This would, ironically, throughout the following years in turn also destroy all prospects for and the last vestiges of a free and democratic Israel which had been a key component of the above stated Mossad plan.
It all began in the wake of the Israeli seizure and subsequent illegal occupation of Palestinian lands in 1967 in the wake of the 6-Days war, including the Gaza Strip. Before then, Egypt, which had outlawed and brutally suppressed the extremist Islamic Jihadist Muslim Brotherhood, had been in control of the Gaza Strip. But with the transfer of government control from Egypt to Israel, Muslim Brotherhood inspired radicals now began to appear, and, thanks to Israeli policy, grow and flourish.
They were, after all, seen as a counterbalance to the secular PLO which was engaged in an ongoing campaign of violence against the Israeli occupation forces at the time and into the early 1990s. One of these new leaders was a paraplegic by the name of Sheik Yassin, "who formed the Islamist group Mujama al-Islamiya, which was officially recognized by Israel as a charity and then, in 1979, as an association." In the 1980s, Mujama would officially become Hamas, but it followed in the style of the militant Muslim Brotherhood from the get go; and it wasn't long before Yassin began collecting arms. Israel was tipped off, arresting and sentencing him to 11 years in prison; but then, upon assurances he wouldn't be using the weapons against Israeli forces but only in its fight against the PLO, he was released, and from that point onward Israel knowingly permitted the group to operate freely in the Strip while arming itself and growing its ranks of Muslim extremists.
This little known history of Israel's crucial role in the rise of Hamas has also been documented by the Washington Post – 'How Israel helped create Hamas'.
“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” has by now been well-established, though the eventual results of the policies that served to put Hamas into power in Palestine – seen playing out on the world stage today – may not have been quite the intention the humans behind these policies giving rise to Hamas originally had in mind. For the dark forces which these men served, however, it was surely the intention all along.
Be that as it may, once Hamas transformed from being a Zionist “collaborator” warring against Fatah and the PLO, into Israel's apparent arch-enemy now sworn to its complete and total destruction since its charter came into being in 1988, it has remained indispensable to the Zionist Israeli plan to perpetuate endless war, keep the Palestinians divided and oppressed, and ultimately to ethnically cleanse and forcibly displace the Palestinian population from the whole historic land of Palestine. This is seen not only in official government decisions, but also the choices made by the radical fundamentalist Jewish Zionists, whose actions have also served as a giant gift to Hamas, directly fueling its rise to prominence and power within the Palestinian struggle for freedom and justice, thereby greatly tarnishing the Palestinian name in the world's eyes; all the while actively preventing the realization of peace for the very people it pretends to be fighting for - a people who desire peace just as much as the rest of us do.
Killing in the name of God: The rise of the Jewish extremists who eventually took over Israel
Meanwhile, as Yassin was gathering weapons, soldiers, influence and power in occupied Gaza, creating the fundamentalist militant movement that would soon be Hamas; a similar phenomenon was also occurring in the occupied West Bank, but here it was the founders of a fundamentalist movement of militant Jews which was at work. Following the Israeli seizure and occupation of the West Bank in 1967, an equally extremist, ultra-nationalist Jewish Zionist settler movement was born, which would soon go on to launch its own campaign of terror.
This Jewish Zionist settler movement(s), known as Gush Emunim ('block of the faithful') and Eretz Yisrael ('Greater Land of Israel'), “is based largely on the teachings of Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook,” the NYT relates; and was nothing less than an ultra-nationalist religious cult composed of supremacist Jews and aspiring terrorists espousing hate and inciting racism wherever they went. It seeks to restore the 'nation of Israel' to what it sees as its biblical borders, extending from the Jordan River to the Red Sea and encompassing all of historic Palestine, leaving no room or possibility for a two-state solution to the decades-old conflict, nor for an independent Palestinian state of any kind.
As for Yehuda Kook, according to Karma Ben-Johanan, writing in The Jewish Quarterly Review in 2016,
He saw himself as a warrior "fighting our lengthy war, the Lord's war with Amalek, a war of erasing from under the heavens, a war of blotting out all memory." (via Wikipedia)
According to this theology, Arabs are viewed as 'Amalek', God's eternal enemy which the Jews are divinely obligated to destroy. Israel's Netanyahu government sees itself as waging this so-called 'holy war' in its ongoing genocidal assault on Gaza; and Netanyahu himself, during a televised speech made in the wake of the October 7 attack, in a statement which would set the tone for the duration of the war and referred to by many around the world as an "explicit call to genocide," said: "You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible," at the same time declaring his genocidal assault on the Palestinians of Gaza to be a "holy mission."
The Bible as we have it does in fact include an explicit command to commit a genocide against the Amaleks or Amalekites, found where King Saul and his army is commanded to utterly wipe out Amalek, by killing ever single man, woman, child, baby, and even their livestock.
https://x.com/elivalley/status/1718710810069860507
Rabbi Kook, although preaching a modicum of tolerance and restraint that the movement he gave birth to would soon abandon, nevertheless taught his followers that if the Palestinians whom this settler movement sought to further displace and purge from their long-native land resisted their "just cause," that they must be violently persuaded. As one former Kook student explains:
He compared [our situation] to a man who was forcefully expelled from his home, which others seized and trespassed upon. That is exactly what happened to us. Rav Kook stressed that the Arabs had, and have, absolutely no national right to the land. If they deny the justice of our cause, and choose to go to war against us, we must persuade them – he said – with our tanks.
So, while preaching that the Palestinians were welcome to peacefully coexist with its Zionist occupiers if they accepted the "justice of [their] cause," that cause was, according to Kook and the movement he gave birth to, to build a Jewish supremacist theocracy, not a free democracy affording equal rights to all. And so, being later built upon this model, Israel has become a racist, genocidal, apartheid occupation-state.
The irony and hypocrisy of such a doctrine of course being that the ultra-nationalist Jews here are comparing their own situation and cause to the very situation and cause of the Palestinians, which they themselves are responsible for causing, while simultaneously denying the justice of the identical Palestinian cause. The primary difference being the expulsion of the Jews from that land took place a whopping 2,000 years ago, and came about at the hands of the Roman Empire, not the Palestinians they are now murdering and displacing themselves.
According to Rabbi Kook and those who would follow in his footsteps; rather than studying Torah and patiently awaiting for their Messiah to establish the expected Kingdom of Israel as so many classical and anti-Zionist Jewish Rabbis taught, the anticipated coming of the Jewish Messiah could instead be brought about by first militantly establishing that theocracy themselves.
As the New York Times would later put it: “The debate over the settlements in the occupied territories in part reflects the struggle over the vision of Israel between the secular left and the right-wing Zionism generally known as Revisionism.”
One of the most prominent early Rabbis of the movement was Meir Kahane, who both founded the militant Jewish Defense League in 1968 and later the Kach party, which would become a hotbed for Jewish terrorism for years to come. Many Rabbis, branches, offshoots, political parties and leaders would arise out of this movement, including the Jewish Underground; later officially deemed a terrorist organization by Israel, and responsible for a number of terrorist attacks through the years.
“Zionism came into being to create a Jewish state,” Kahane said in an interview with The Times in 1985, five years before he was assassinated by a gunman in New York. “Zionism declares that there is going to be a Jewish state with a majority of Jews, come what may. Democracy says, ‘No, if the Arabs are the majority then they have the right to decide their own fate.’ So Zionism and democracy are at odds. I say clearly that I stand with Zionism.” - The New York Times Magazine, 'The Unpunished: How Extremists Took Over Israel'
The long and bloody story of how this once fringe group of extremist Jewish Zionist settlers eventually all but took over the entire state of Israel – linked above – with the final takeover only now recently beginning to reach its final completion with the rise of Netanyahu's current far-right coalition to power at the turn of the present decade, is extremely illuminating and well worth the lengthy read.
This new movement was composed of the ultra-nationalist block of ideologically driven messianic Jewish Zionist settlers intent on ushering in their vision for a Jewish theocracy, which ascribed to this fundamentally racists and supremacist ideology steeped in violence and hatred – not only of Palestinians, but also of the secular-Zionist democratic state of Israel. During the 1970s, it began embarking on a quest to illegally settle the occupied West Bank, starting with a large settlement in Hebron at an abandoned military base, and expanding its illegal settlement project from there.
The longer this settler program continued, and the more the extremist wing of the settler movement grew, the more violent its settlers became; with adherents frequently bullying, harassing, threatening, and attacking native Palestinians in myriad ways; targeting and damaging their homes, farms and trees for example. Despite these settlements being technically illegal under both international and Israeli law, however, the Israeli government mostly turned a blind eye and did little to prevent it; until eventually, under increasing control of the ultra-nationalist right-wing political sector, it began openly encouraging and endorsing the illegal settlement expansion outright.
Today, with the Israeli military and police now working hand in hand with the private settler militias, the perpetrators of this illegal settler program frequently demolish Palestinian homes and forcefully throw the natives off of their land, sometimes razing to the ground entire villages at a time. This is the reality Palestinians in the occupied Israeli territories endure on a daily basis, thanks to the 'Greater Israel Project' here launched by these fundamentalist Jewish Zionist extremists.
The movement was during the 80s already fast gaining momentum, drawing more and more political support from within the Israeli far-right and among zealous young orthodox Jews as well. Beginning in 1980, the movement unleashed a violent wave of terror upon the West Bank, initiated with a multi-pronged terrorist attack targeting the Palestinian mayors of three separate West Bank towns; in which a series of car bombs were detonated, blowing the legs off of one mayor, the foot off of another, but missing the third. Then, in a 1983 attack, members of the Jewish Underground armed with machine guns and grenades stormed the Islamic College in Hebron, killing three students and injuring over 40 more.
Several additional large-scale terrorist plots of this decade were thwarted, including "an attempt the same year to bomb five Arab buses in East Jerusalem and an unsuccessful 1984 plot to blow up the Dome of the Rock mosque on Temple Mount." Such violence both fueled and was fueled by violence carried out by the equally extremist Islamic Jihadist Hamas movement and its own terrorists.
As illegal settlements continued to grow and expand, slowly taking over the West Bank, the violence associated with the settler movement ebbed and flowed through time, but never fully ceased throughout the years; with two additional high-profile attacks that would forever change the course of history soon to be carried out in the following decade. All in the name of God, of course. In the face of such insanity, we must begin to wonder, along with Jose Saramego:
The day Palestine almost saw peace, and the dark forces that prevented it
In a seemingly unlikely and miraculous series of events that greatly shook up the status quo, both in Israel and among the Palestinians, the very real prospect of a permanent resolution to the conflict that had plagued Israel-Palestine for decades appeared, seemingly out of nowhere. And for a brief moment in time, the peace so desperately desired by the majority of Israelis and Palestinians alike appeared brightly on the horizon as a beacon of hope; beckoning humanity to arise from the darkness which held her in bondage to the vicious cycle of violence begetting violence, and to tread the path of peace, even in the face of those hellbent on preventing it.
The tragic story of how fundamentalist religious extremism – like a cancer being spawned within Israeli and Palestinian society alike – managed to kill the peace that was dawning in the heart of Man and to then spread through society like a plague and infect the whole land of Israel-Palestine with its toxic poison. It also illuminates both the power of peacemaking and the lengths the dark forces that would prevent peace on this planet are willing to go in order to perpetuate war, even in the name of God, and offers valuable insight into the current Gaza war and why it continues to rage on after so many months still today.
In the late 1980s, the First Intifada or Palestinian uprising erupted. The mass uprising was more or less nonviolent at first; characterized by mass protests and demonstrations, wide scale civil disobedience and some rioting at first, with numerous 'clashes' between armed Israeli forces and Palestinians throwing stones; but becoming increasingly violent in time as the unrest continued into the early 1990s. It was in the midst of this ongoing unrest when Israeli leadership for the first time begrudgingly opened up to a dialogue with PLO negotiators, and Arafat conceded to negotiating a two-state peace plan, a first for both sides.
Following the election of Yitzhak Rabin as Israeli Prime Minister in 1992 and the subsequent Arafat-Rabin negotiations – with the two parties signing the historic Oslo Accords on the White House lawn in that momentous occasion in the fall of 1993 – the peace plan quickly began to collapse following a deadly terrorist attack carried out by the Jewish Zionist settler Baruch Goldstein at a Hebron mosque in the West Bank, when he opened fire on a crowd of hundreds of unsuspecting peaceful Palestinian Muslim worshipers as they prayed, just five months after the signing of the Accords.
The date of the Hebron massacre that would change history had no doubt been carefully chosen; it was carried out during the Jewish festival of Purim and the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. The mass murder came to an end with Palestinians disarming and beating him to death.
Both sides of the decades-long conflict had made serious concessions in order to come to an agreement and establish the 5-year peace plan; the Palestinian side recognizing Israel's right to exist along with the previous UN resolutions to that effect, conceding some 80% the land it considered rightfully theirs and Arafat prohibiting all PLO terrorism and Palestinian violence; while the Israeli side for the first time officially recognized the PLO as the official representative of the Palestinians, and promised “Israeli withdrawals from Gaza and part of the West Bank, of elections for Palestinian self-governance and of a permanent resolution, based on the principle of land for peace in U.N. Resolution 242.”
The agreement was monumental, reached only because Rabin and Arafat had both agreed to set the past aside and work together to move forward towards peace and a lasting resolution to the conflict. Rabin and Arafat awkwardly shook hands in front of President Bill Clinton, two strong leaders of their own causes which had for so long been fought with violence and bloodshed, now making the symbolic gesture of reconciliation in front of the entire world. The world watched as two former men of war had been transformed into powerful peacemakers. Both men would later be awarded with the Nobel Peace Prize for their critical role in the historic feat they had helped to pull off.
Rabin declared: “We the soldiers who have returned from the battle stained with blood, we who have fought against you, the Palestinians, we say to you today in a loud and clear voice: ‘Enough of blood and tears! Enough!’” Arafat said much the same.
The stage for peace was set like never before, but the new agreement posed a serious threat to the extremist settler movement, viewed not only as a threat to their settlements but far more importantly as a threat to their fanatical religious aspirations to create a Jewish theocracy entirely free of Arabs, and democracy for that matter; and which, it hoped, would cover the entire historic land of Palestine, 'from the river to the Sea', what was perceived to be the biblical borders of ancient Israel – also known as 'Greater Israel' or 'the Greater Israel Project.'
It was also a threat to Hamas and its growing Islamic Jihad movement which refused to recognize the existence of a state of Israel at all; and so, despite the 6-year Intifada and PLO-sanctioned violence coming to an end, a fresh wave of Hamas-backed violence ensued. Without popular support, however, it wouldn't be able to derail the peace process on its own; it needed the help of its counterpart on the Israeli side to shatter the new prospect of peace into bits and pieces once and for all.
The Hebron massacre not only signaled the beginning of the end of the Oslo peace process along with all hope of lasting peace in the region for decades to come, but was also the spark which ignited an explosion within the ranks of this once isolated and fringe movement needed, to propel its growth and expansion to the point of one day eventually becoming the dominant political force of Israel, entirely replacing the fledgling secular-Zionist democracy Israel had once been, or at least aspired to be under leftist leadership of the Labor Party.
It was the teachings of Rabbi Kahane to which Baruch, affiliated with the Kach party, later to be outlawed, ascribed. Following the mass murder, Goldstein immediately became a hero among Israel's far-right and the Jewish Zionist settler movement, inspiring much illegal settler expansion and waves of violent terror in the Israeli and Palestinian territories for decades to come; violence that continues unabated to this day; seen carried out both by ever increasingly bold settlers in the West Bank as well as in Israel's current genocidal war on Gaza. Not only did this mass murder garner much support for and lead to an explosion among the ranks of the fundamentalist Jewish Zionist settler movement, it caused the very same phenomenon among the fundamentalist Islamic Jihad movement among Palestinians with Hamas at its helm.
“The violence immediately brought about a significant rise in support for Hamas that was...sufficient to give Hamas the strength it needed to be able to carry out large-scale violence to destroy whatever [peace] was being achieved” through the Oslo Accords; Khalil Shikaki, professor of political science and director of the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in Ramallah, and panelist in a discussion on the failure of Oslo moderated by the New York Times, relates. Indeed, local papers at the time reported an immediate and widespread upsurge in Arab violence against Israelis, as well as violent crackdowns on Palestinians in the occupied territories and vows of vengeance coming from “radical Palestinian groups” presumably associated with Hamas, in the wake of the Hebron massacre.
From the Israel State Archives, it is relayed that at a media conference the next day, Rabin emphasized that: “Goldstein had not only killed innocent Palestinians while praying, but while doing so had joined Hamas and Islamic Jihad with the aim of killing the peace process.”
In the months leading up to the massacre, Baruch's association with extremist settler groups and his deadly intentions were made known to Israeli authorities, while Israeli Security Services had been monitoring his activity during which time he had been flagged by agents as a security risk, though never officially listed among 'wanted' extremists. Nevertheless, all of these warnings were ignored, while the soldiers tasked with guarding the Hebron Mosque permitted Goldstein to enter with his service weapon and multiple magazines, despite a ban on carrying ammunition into the Mosque then in effect.
The massive Israeli security failure that led to this tragedy was a result, not only of fanatical religious extremism, but also of “Israel's systematic failure to enforce the law,” reflective of a deeply flawed government system deeply rooted in prejudice and inequality.
“The cabinet, the prime minister,” [Ami Ayalon, the head of Shin Bet from 1996 to 2000] says, “they signal to the Shin Bet that if a Jew is killed, that’s terrible. If an Arab is killed, that’s not good, but it’s not the end of the world.”
Since that fateful day, thousands of Jewish settlers have, in truly twisted fashion, visited Goldstein's grave to honor, commemorate and celebrate their iconic hero; where engraved upon his tombstone are the words: “A saint with clean hands and a pure heart.” Hundreds of such newfound devotees flocked there to do the same in the weeks immediately following the mass murder. Baruch had inspired a cult-like following, among them a teenager who frequently visited his grave and in time began bringing others along with him; and who would, in short order, begin to rise among the ranks of the extremist settler movement and eventually emerge as a prominent far-right political voice and Israeli leader; presently an Israeli member of Parliament in Netanyahu's far-right coalition.
This young man was Kach member Itamar Ben Gvir, who in recent years has been dubbed both “Israel's Kingmaker” and “Minister of Chaos,” presently Netanyahu's Minister of National Security and leader of the Jewish supremacist Kahanist Jewish Power party – Otzma Yehudit. He has through the years been indicted, at least 50 times, on a variety of charges, and has been convicted of incitement to racism and supporting a terrorist organization. He is also notorious for the picture of his hero Baruch Goldstein, which famously hung on his living room wall for years, until it was removed when he was elected to the Israeli Parliament in 2021.
He was also at the center of the coordinated incitement campaign against Rabin that arose in the wake of Goldstein's mass murder – incitement to assassinate Rabin, that is. In October of 1995, amid a growing number of calls for Rabin's murder among Kahanist extremist settlers and religious 'death sentences' imposed upon him by far-right Rabbis of the fundamentalist settler movement – in the form of death curses and by marking him as a 'Rodef', that is a murderous 'pursuer' on the trail of a Jew who must be put to death in order to protect the would-be victim – along with mounting suspicion among Israeli Security Services operatives tasked with monitoring the extremist groups of an actual conspiracy to assassinate Rabin in the works; Ben Gvir appeared on Israeli Television, speaking to cameras with a Cadillac ornament he claimed was ripped off of Rabin's car during a recent anti-Oslo demonstration, declaring: “We got to his car, and we’ll get to him, too.”
That same month, as the Washington Monthly relays, on the eve of Yom Kippur, “a group of Israelis led by Avigdor Eskin gathered outside the home of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin,” where, wrapped in prayer shawls and chanting in Aramaic, placed upon Rabin an ancient kabbalistic death curse called Pulsa da-Nura or 'Lashes of Fire', which chant concluded with the words: “Put to death the cursed Yitzhak,” followed by a threefold damnation.
The next month, on November 4, 1995, Rabin was dead; assassinated at the conclusion of a massive pro-peace rally held in support of the Oslo peace plan, shot to death as he was leaving the rally by a young radicalized Jewish Zionist by the name of Yigal Amir, who proudly acknowledged his guilt to investigators immediately following his arrest, claiming he had been acting directly upon the orders of God himself.
Throughout the year, Shin Bet had issued countless warnings, one after another, but to no avail. What was at first mere incitement appeared to have morphed into a more definite plan designed to end with Rabin's assassination.“This was no longer a matter of mere incitement, but rather concrete information on the intention to kill top political figures, including Rabin,” Hezi Kalo, a senior Shin Bet official who oversaw the division responsible for these investigations, told New York Times Magazine reporters.
That there was a wider conspiracy to assassinate Rabin is almost certain, as it turned out Amir was not working alone; his brother was eventually also arrested and convicted, having been intimately involved in planning the murder, a plan that had been in the works for more than a few weeks; this being at least the third such assassination attempt made by Amir.
Investigators appeared at first certain that the conspiracy was more far reaching than this, however, and arrested at least eight other suspects in the immediate aftermath of the assassination. They were also on the trail of still others, they said, including a group of rabbis suspected of inciting and encouraging the murder. When pressed on the issue, Amir eventually said enough that investigators were able to identify two of the rabbis. But they were never arrested, as the attorney general argued that such incitement could not be linked directly to the act of murder itself. Nevertheless, as per the NYT, one moderate rabbi among the extremist settlers around him, who claimed to have intimate knowledge of the rabbis involved who were sympathetic to “The new Jewish underground that killed Mr. Rabin,” as the NYT puts it, was so disgusted with the incitement and the subsequent assassination that he threatened to publicly oust them all if they did not resign from their duties.
Rabbi Ben Nun, who is threatening to expose the rabbis involved unless they resign their religious posts, warned, "there are people still calling certain people pursuers, invoking the law of pursuer about Shimon Peres."
...
He demanded that the rabbis resign their positions by the end of the mourning period, which will come Sunday, or else he would identify them. And, he suggested, they were prominent. "These are not weeds or wild growths, these are great authorities," he said.
The NYT goes on to reference information suggesting that the “alleged terrorist cell” behind the assassination “seemed to have developed from a more militant offshoot of Rabbi Kahane's Kach organization called Eyal.
Amir was known to be closely associated with the leader of Eyal, Avishai Raviv, who was arrested under charges of conspiracy to commit murder, and, as it was eventually discovered, also a Shin Bet informant with the code name of Champagne. He and the other suspects were shortly thereafter released, however, the investigation quickly coming to a close, with the authorities officially concluding that Amir and his brother had been working alone.
Raviv later testified that he was aware of Amir's frequent allusions to the 'bin rodef' rulings made by the extremist rabbis, but that he never identified him to his handlers because “nobody took [him] seriously," explaining: “It’s common in our circles to talk about attacking public figures.” The tragic incident again appears to be largely a result of a failure on the part of Israeli Security Services, the Israeli justice system hindering the work of those genuinely attempting to infiltrate extremist Jewish Zionist settler groups and prevent and rout out Jewish extremism from Israel's midst, as well as the supremacist ideology of these same extremist groups actively promoting their hate-filled, violent rhetoric and intentions.
Many conspiracy theories have since been circulated in Israeli circles, some seemingly quite a bit further 'out there' than others; and perhaps the true extent of the conspiracy will never be known. But, in the grand scheme of things, it is perhaps all but irrelevant, as anyone with half a brain can see exactly who and what is ultimately responsible for such senseless acts of violence and terror. At the end of the day, the dark forces responsible for the Hebron massacre are the same dark forces responsible for the Rabin assassination, and these forces will stop at nothing in their ceaseless plot to prevent peace and perpetuate war upon this planet.
The unfortunate assassination of Yitzhak Rabin ultimately looks to have been the last big nail in the coffin of the peace plan process that seems to have been the best and last real chance for a lasting resolution to this endless conflict and hope for peace in the land of Israel-Palestine. As it is, Benjamin Netanyahu was elected Prime Minister in 1996; the final remnants of the peace deal soon fell apart, officially dying in 1998 when the 5-year process officially came to an end; and the rest is history. The fundamentalist Jewish Zionist settler movement which had, with the help of its fundamentalist counterparts in the Islamic Jihad movement of Hamas, effectively dashed to pieces all hopes of peace; and now, 30 years later, with Hamas in control of Gaza and the supremacist Jewish Zionists in control of the Israeli government, this two-headed fundamentalist warmongering monster from hell has finally gotten the all-out 'holy war' it has always sought.
And Netanyahu himself, for reasons that appear far more political than ideological, is front and center of the madness, as he so often seems to be. Unsurprisingly, then, Israel under Netanyahu's leadership has continued to feed both heads of this two-faced monster and fuel its growth.
Strategic Israel-Hamas Alliance continues, with Netanyahu at the helm
In 2012, Netanyahu told an Israeli reporter “that it was important to keep Hamas strong,” and in 2019, in a meeting with members of his Likud party, the PM reiterated that “bolstering Hamas” was “a part of our strategy,” the strategy of “anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state and prevent peace, that is.
It is a strategy leading only to perpetual war that appears destined to end in only one way, with only one single state between the river and the sea. The only question being whether that single state is a Palestinian state, a Zionist state, or perhaps something else altogether if both heads of this monster were to somehow be cut off at once.
Indeed, as the NY Times reveals, “an empowered Hamas helped Mr. Netanyahu avoid negotiating over a Palestinian state.”
“One effective way to prevent a two-state solution is to divide between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank,” Shlomo Brom, a retired general and former deputy to Israel’s national security adviser said in an interview. The division gives Mr. Netanyahu an excuse to disengage from peace talks, Mr. Brom said,
While Israeli MP Bezalel Smotrich bluntly declared in 2015 that: “Hamas is an asset.”
The Zionist strategy of empowering Hamas in order to perpetuate Palestinian division, an endless war with the armed faction, and prevent progress towards a lasting peace plan and the establishment of an independent Palestinian state was multi-faceted and perhaps even more devious than it may at first appear.
“For 14 years, Netanyahu's policy was to keep Hamas in power,” Adam Raz explains in an op-ed for Israel's Haaretz newspaper headlined 'A Brief History of the Netanyahu-Hamas Alliance'; while “the pogrom of October 7, 2023,” the deadly 'surprise' Hamas attack which led directly to his war on Gaza, “helps the Israeli prime minister preserve his own rule.”
That war seems to be the only thing keeping Netanyahu in power these days is no secret in Israel, all the more so with this particular war, being the Prime Minister has been indicted on corruption charges by his own government and has been losing popularity among Israelis for quite some time now. The extremist far-right majority coalition he has put together and joined hands with in order to retain power in recent years is surely a part of his homeland woes.
The fact that the October 7 attack was the crucial ingredient necessary to justify the current war on Gaza of an unprecedented nature cannot be overlooked. This inconvenient truth is particularly noteworthy considering the massive 'surprise' attack was really no surprise at all, or at least it surely never should have been.
October 7 ‘surprise attack’ no surprise at all
Despite Hamas taking a number of actions which on the surface may have appeared to indicate a newfound desire for peace in the months leading up to the unprecedented deadly incursion into Israel, particularly a highly unusual level of restraint in the face of numerous Israeli provocations, Hamas made no secret of its intentions.
In a public speech given at a rally in Gaza on December 14, 2022, Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar delivered a bold message to Israel, declaring: "We will come to you in a roaring flood. We will come to you with endless rockets, we will come to you in a limitless flood of soldiers...like the repeating tide." Detailed plans for the coming attack were at the time already both well established and also in the hands of Israeli intelligence services, code-named “Jericho Wall” by the Israeli side.
Just shy of nine months later, in the daring operation dubbed 'Al Aqsa Flood', hundreds of Hamas fighters poured into Israeli territory on motorcycles, pickup trucks and paragliders, after first disabling the border fence security cameras; overrunning the single Israeli tank in the area and then variously storming over half a dozen Israeli military bases in the region and rampaging through nearby settlements and a rave before finally returning to Gaza with some 240 hostages; having killed nearly 1,200 Israelis – soldiers and civilians alike without discrimination. And if it weren't for the Israeli intelligence indicative of the coming attack in the year leading up to this massacre, one could be forgiven for imagining this onslaught truly came as a surprise to the Israeli military-intelligence apparatus and leadership.
In fact, however, as detailed by the NY Times, Israel had obtained incredibly detailed plans of the coming attack more than a year before this violent 'flood' was unleashed upon her people. The upper echelons of the Israeli military and intelligence services apparently disregarded the widely circulated and detailed battle plan, which “Hamas followed with shocking precision,” as merely aspirational, “considering it too difficult for Hamas to carry out,” and officially determining “that an attack of that scale and ambition was beyond Hamas’s capabilities.”
“It is not yet possible to determine whether the plan has been fully accepted and how it will be manifested,” read a military assessment reviewed by The Times.
If that was at first the conclusion, however, it surely shouldn't have been once Israeli intelligence documented Hamas training exercises fully matching plans detailed in the extensive blueprint. “I utterly refute that the scenario is imaginary,” a veteran analyst in Israel's Unit 8200 wrote in an email exchange with her Colonel who dismissed the warning. “It is a plan designed to start a war,” she added, “It’s not just a raid on a village.”
The analyst then spread her intelligence findings further, warning a group of other intelligence experts of her fears, reminding them of the surprise Arab attack plan of 1973, whereby similarly discounted intelligence led to a surprise attack by Syrian and Egyptian forces. Her warnings were continually dismissed, and so the “plans designed to start a war” did just that, giving both Hamas and the Zionist leadership the all-out war both factions wanted, and which Netanyahu had been seeking for years.
At the same time:
The plan also included details about the location and size of Israeli military forces, communication hubs and other sensitive information, raising questions about how Hamas gathered its intelligence and whether there were leaks inside the Israeli security establishment.
In a separate NYT piece headlined 'The Secrets Hamas Knew About Israel’s Military', the authors describe how Hamas had “extraordinary awareness of Israel’s secrets and weaknesses,” that its fighters “knew exactly how to find the Israeli intelligence hub” it targeted, — and how to get inside,” also revealing that it “had a surprisingly sophisticated understanding of how the Israeli military operated, where it stationed specific units, and even the time it would take for reinforcements to arrive.”
This massive intelligence failure in turn has unnerved many officials and analysts, who, as the authors put it, “have questioned how the Israeli military — renowned for its intelligence gathering — could have inadvertently revealed so much information about its own operations.”
And given the long history of the Mossad and Israeli military forces at times fomenting war with deception and false flag attacks – such as the murderous Israeli aerial assault on the USS Liberty during the 6-Days War which took the lives of dozens of US sailors and nearly led to US bombers dropping a small nuclear warhead on Egypt – freethinking humanity cannot discount the possibility that dark and devious forces deep within the Israeli military-intelligence-security apparatus intentionally leaked these military and security secrets and sensitive information in order to help create the very scenario that would trigger a long sought war; desired by leadership within both the Israeli and Hamas factions.
It is not unreasonable to wonder if on some level and to some degree this tragedy was in fact a joint Mossad-Hamas operation carried out on behalf of the 'Netanyahu-Hamas alliance', and/or whether certain Israeli forces were responsible for intentionally ignoring what they surely should have known was a coming attack that would rock the soul of Israeli society; as part of a strategy that would give both Netanyahu the war he so desperately needed to stay in power and the Israeli far-right extremist settler movement the opportunity to take the next giant leap forward in its colonial settler program rooted in endless war, ethnic cleansing and forcible displacement of the Palestinian population.
All of the red flags suggesting the ominous possibility are indeed present. And so, while the world may never know whether the 'Al Aqsa Flood'/'Jericho Wall' attack was a result of arrogant hubris on the part of a vastly superior military force utterly incapable of believing that a vastly militarily inferior enemy was capable of successfully executing such a massive multi-faceted military operation on its own soil, or a far more deceptive and devious plot to foment war, the result is the same. The Netanyahu government and Hamas both got the desired war needed to bolster their own political power, and, as in all violent wars, it is humanity who has paid the price; and she continues to this day to pay dearly indeed for the crimes of her dark masters.
No matter how one interprets the unprecedented events of October 7, one inconvenient fact also remains: “There is a need...to conclude unequivocally: The pogrom of October 7, 2023, helps Netanyahu, and not for the first time, to preserve his rule, at least in the short term,” that is, for at least as long as the war continues.
And so it is that this madness marches on, for many reasons no doubt; not least of which include the radical religious fundamentalism underlying this decades-long conflict, and the a desire to retain political power and control at all costs by a power-hungry two-headed monster from hell.
Stay tuned for the next installment in this series; where I document, in the words of Israeli leaders themselves, a clear intent to commit genocide and war crimes from the very start of this war on Gaza; and how this rampant dehumanization is spreading through Israeli society and western Zionist circles, even to the point of institutionalizing torture on a massive scale and bringing the 'only democracy in the Middle East' to the brink of total collapse, perhaps even threatening civil war.
