Yep. Often when countries try playing geopolitics and “help” by putting their thumbs on the scales, things spiral out of control, and they end up getting bit in the butt.
We (the United States) have whole departments of the government dedicated to tinkering in the affairs of other nations. This has been going on longer than I’ve been alive. Using the Cold War as justification, and later the war on terrorism, we have overthrown many governments and typically installed dictators in their place.
For example, Ferdinand Marco in the Philippines was propped up by us for a long time. Saddam Hussain, yep that one, was propped up by us and armed with American weapons for many years. The Taliban was also armed by the United Sates under President Reagan. Virtually every ruler in South America has been helped or actively opposed by America’s intelligence networks. Some of these rulers were assassinated by agents of our government. Look at the 1950’s and 60’s and all the involvement that we had.
Often what we did was to oppose the Soviet Union or some other faceless villain and always we spoke in terms of promoting freedom. The unspoken part was supporting our freedom, not the citizens in the countries that we tinkered with. We valued “stability” above all else. Heck, nobody in the mainstream media even acknowledges that Barack Obama and Joe Biden overthrew the government of Ukraine less than a decade ago.
Israel has been doing similar things all over the world but especially in their own backyard.
Ever since its establishment in 1987, Hamas has been at the forefront of armed resistance in the occupied Palestinian territories. While the movement itself claims continuous presence in Palestine dating back to the British mandate in 1935 and the establishment in 1946 of the Gaza branch of the Muslim Brotherhood (its mother organization based in Egypt), its rise in the 1990s and in subsequent years owes much to the manipulations of Israeli Intelligence.
Before Hamas (Arabic acronym for Islamic Resistance Movement) established full control over Gaza between 2006 and 2007, Israel had long financed and supported in various other ways the group’s rise as the dominant Palestinian force in the Strip. There is ample evidence from Israeli sources that successive governments in Jerusalem helped build this militant strain of Palestinian political Islam, not only in the form of Hamas but also, years earlier, its Muslim Brotherhood precursors.
The rise of the hardline Islamist movement in Gaza harks back to an uprising by Palestinians that started in 1987—known as the first Intifada—when Israeli leaders decided that the main threat to the country’s security came from the secular Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), led by Yasser Arafat. The Israeli campaign against the PLO in the 1980s ended up enabling the rise of both Hamas in the Gaza Strip and Hezbollah (“Party of God”) in southern Lebanon. It is particularly noteworthy that the founder of Hamas, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, was jailed by Israel in 1984 and received a 12 year sentence after the discovery of hidden arms caches, but was released just a year later.
Hamas is Israel’s Golem
… the government in Jerusalem gave him money to support the Islamists in Gaza. The objective, in the late ’80s and early ’90s, was to prevent what seemed like the growing influence of the PLO and its Fatah party. [Brigadier General Yitzhak] Segev said that the goal of aiding the Palestinian Islamist movement was to create a “counterweight” to the Arafat’s PLO.
It is noteworthy that Arafat himself referred to Hamas as “a creature of Israel.” It soon became an outright adversary of the PLO, as Israel had hoped, and Arafat understood he could no longer restrain them. Any attempt to do so merely would have eroded his standing because, due to the receding prospect of a two state solution and successive parallel waves of expansion of Jewish settlements all over the West Bank, most Palestinians wanted greater militancy.
Oh, please note in the quote above the mention of a two-state solution. It was originally proposed that both Israel and Palestine would occupy the land that you probably know as “the Holy Land”. (They were to divide the area creating two countries.) However, Israel prevented the creation of a Palestinian state, and each war has been shrinking the land controlled by the Palestinians. Also, the surrounding Arab neighbors have not wanted an influx of millions of refugees and thus the areas occupied by the Palestinians are just large refugee camps where generations of people have been confined.
The next portion of this article is even more stunning:
As late as 2019, Israel’s then as well as the current prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu urged support for Hamas, albeit for different reasons. He reportedly saw Palestinian extremism, as embodied by Hamas, as a bulwark against the two-state solution which he adamantly opposed. “Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas,” he said at a March 2019 meeting of his Likud Party. “This is part of our strategy—to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.”
In other words, only four years ago Israel’s prime minister still believed supporting strong Islamist rule in Gaza would be his bulwark against a two-state, Israel-Palestine solution.
So, Israel created Hamas and supported them as a counter to the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and used Hamas as a tool to stop a two-state solution.
Now that Hamas has bitten their master’s hand and tried to destroy Israel, the gloves have come off. Please note that Israel has been engineering this war for about six years now.
Israel has been taking land from Palestinians and creating Jewish settlements.
Here is an article from June of this year.
Israel’s hardline coalition government has approved plans for thousands of new housing units in the occupied West Bank and given the far-right finance minister sweeping powers to expedite the construction of illegal settlements, bypassing measures that have been in place for 27 years.
On Sunday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ratified the move in the cabinet, allowing pro-settler Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich to bypass the six-stage process for building settlements, which are considered illegal under international law, said Al Jazeera’s Imran Khan in West Jerusalem.
Israel to ramp up settlement expansion in occupied West Bank
The plans for the approval of 4,560 housing units in various areas of the West Bank were included on the agenda of Israel’s Supreme Planning Council that meets next week.
Various factions expressed deep concerns that the entire West Bank could soon come under Israeli control.
To approve settlement activity is a “dangerous escalation to complete the annexation of the West Bank”, the Palestinian foreign ministry said.
Hamas, which has ruled Gaza since 2007, said the move would only escalate tensions in the region, while Fatah warned that “the settlers will be removed from the West Bank as they were removed from the Gaza Strip”.
Search Israel, annexation, and West Bank if you wish to see some more info on this subject.
Folk, a look at a map is instructive. Gaza is in the southern part of Israel, the West Bank is on east side of Israel but on west bank of Jordan River, and then to the north is Hezbollah operating out of Lebanon. Israel faces the possibility of a multifront war with many nations entering the fray.
Here are a few views of Gaza. The dissenters call this military action a genocide but who are the combatants? Based on these photos, pretty much every human in Gaza is the enemy.
Meanwhile Lindsey Graham and Richard Blumenthal want to bomb Iran.
“It basically says if the war expands, if Hezbollah opens up a second front in the north against Israel in a substantial way, to overwhelm the Iron Dome, then we should hit the Islamic Republic of Iran. There is no Hamas without the Ayatollah’s support. There’s no Hezbollah without the Ayatollah’s support,” Graham said.
Senators to introduce resolution to strike Iran if Hezbollah attacks Israel
As shown above, Israel supported Hamas but gets a pass. I guess our goal is regime change in Iran and any excuse to do that is a good one for the Swamp Monsters.