How Israel Supported Hamas Against the PLO

Introduction

Since the Hamas-led attacks in Israel on October 7, 2023, Israel has been executing a devastating assault on the civilian population of the Gaza Strip, blocking humanitarian aid, internally displacing 75 percent of Gaza’s population, systematically destroying civilian infrastructure, and otherwise bombing indiscriminately. To date, over 34,000 Palestinians have been killed, including over 9,500 women and over 14,500 children.[1] More than 10,000 additional Palestinians are missing under the rubble, and over 77,000 have been injured.[2] Children have been dying from hunger and malnutrition due to Israel’s use of starvation as a method of warfare.[3]

In a case brought against Israel by the government of South Africa, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has deemed Israel’s military operation a plausible genocide.[4] The US government under the administration of Joseph R. Biden has been absolutely complicit in Israel’s war crimes and crimes against humanity.[5]

In reporting on the situation, the US mainstream media have tended to start their timeline for reporting on October 7, with little to no historical context provided to help news consumers understand why Hamas’s armed wing would break through the armistice line fence surrounding Gaza to perpetrate what it called “Operation Al Aqsa Flood”.[6]

Editors at the New York Times even instructed journalists to avoid describing the West Bank and Gaza as “occupied territories” despite Israel being occupying power in both territories under international law, with its belligerent occupation ongoing now for nearly 57 years, leading UN bodies and international human rights organizations to describe it as an apartheid regime.[7]

Times reporters were additionally told not to use the term “ethnic cleansing” on the grounds that it is “historically charged”, even though about 80 percent of Gaza’s population are refugees or their descendants from the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestine, which was the means by which the self-described “Jewish state” came into existence.[8]

The New York Times further instructed its reporters to restrict the use of the word “genocide”, along with “slaughter” and “massacre”, on the grounds that these words are “incendiary”.[9] Meanwhile, the New York Times is fine with using the words “slaughter” and “massacre” when referring to Israelis killed by Palestinians. An analysis by The Intercept found that, in the pages of the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times, “The term ‘slaughter’ was used by editors and reporters to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 60 to 1, and ‘massacre’ was used to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 125 to 2. ‘Horrific’ was used to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 36 to 4.” In fact, The Intercept found that as the Palestinian death toll climbed, mentions of Palestinians decreased.[10]

One particularly important piece of historical context that the mainstream media unsurprisingly omit from their reporting, with it only slipping out in very rare exceptions, is how the Israeli government under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had long been effectively utilizing Hamas as a strategic ally to block any movement toward peace negotiations with the Palestinians.[11]

In fact, Hamas had been essentially nurtured by Israel since its founding in the late-1980s, at which time the Israeli government utilized the group as a counterforce to Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which had dangerously joined the international consensus in favor of the two-state solution to the conflict.[12]

A heightened threat of terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians has always been a price that Israeli leaders were willing to pay to combat the threat of peace, which poses an obstacle to the Zionist regime’s territorial aims. Indeed, Israel has depended on the threat of terrorism to justify the persistence of its occupation regime and brutal oppression of the Palestinians.