How Netanyahu falsifies the news
We in the West think we’re well informed about what’s happening in Gaza. We are not. The images we see are selected. The comments we hear do not allow us to understand them. They deliberately mislead us. Any dissenting opinion is censored.
Like all wars, the one pitting the State of Israel against the Palestinian population is the subject of a media battle. The Palestinian Resistance doesn’t need to tell the story of the injustice it is fighting against: you only need to look to see. Rather, it aims to magnify one or other of its components. Israel, on the other hand, has to convince people of its good faith, which after three quarters of a century of violating international law is no mean feat.
Before the attack
Since the attack of the Palestinian Resistance on October 7, 2023, Israel has been deploying all its resources to make us believe that the attack was carried out by Hamas jihadists ; and that it knew nothing about its preparation.
The role of Hamas
However, this attack was carried out by all Palestinian factions, with the exception of Fatah [1]. Until recently, Hamas defined itself as the "Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood", as stated on all its documents. As such, it fought against the secularists of Yasser Arafat’s Fatah and George Habash’s PFLP, then against those of President Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian Arab Republic. In his eyes, they were all "enemies of God". Hamas was financed by Israel and, in Syria, its fighters were supervised by Mossad and NATO officers. However, after the Brotherhood’s failure in Egypt and their defeat in Syria, Hamas split between a section loyal to the Muslim Brotherhood, led by Khaled Mechaal and still pursuing the establishment of a worldwide Caliphate, and another that refocused on the liberation of Palestine. The latter, led by Iran, renewed its ties with Syria until its leader, Khalil Hayya, was received in Damascus by President Bashar al-Assad. It also renewed its ties with the Lebanese Hezbollah, taking part in meetings in Beirut with the latter and other components of the Palestinian Resistance.
All the components of the Palestinian Resistance had agreed to carry out a "coup de poing" operation to kidnap Israeli civilians and soldiers and exchange them for Palestinian civilians and fighters detained in Israel. The date of October 7 was chosen by Hamas alone, and the other Palestinian factions were informed only a few hours beforehand. Incidentally, Hamas fighters were in the majority compared with the Marxists of the PFLP and the members of the Axis of Resistance (united around Iran), the Islamic Jidad.
The open secret of the October 7 operation
The operation had been planned at a coordination meeting in Beirut in May. It was reported in the Lebanese press. However, while the principle, targets and modus operandi had been set, no one knew when it would take place.
The Egyptian intelligence services were the first to sound the alarm. They support the Palestinian Resistance, but fight Hamas without being able to distinguish between its two tendencies. They were not worried about the possible success of the Palestinian Resistance, but of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Intelligence Minister Kamal Abbas personally warned his Israeli counterparts [2].
Colonel Yigal Carmon, director of the Middle East Media Research
Institute (Memri), personally warned his friend, Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu, that something was up. But, according to Carmon, Netanyahu
did not listen [3].
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has produced two reports on the preparation of this attack. According to the New York Times, the second, dated October 5, was sent to the Israeli authorities. According to Corriere della Sera, the director of the Shin Bet (counter-intelligence) then called a meeting of the central directors of all security services at 8am on the 7th.
However, Israeli officials had had time to move the exceptional rave party to just outside the Gaza border, and to give leave to the forces charged with protecting it [4].
Today, many of the hostages’ families are convinced that Benjamin Netanyahu let this happen in order to justify his operation against the people of Gaza.
After the attack
Since October 7, Israel has been trying hard to make us believe that :
the Palestinian Resistance as a whole is nothing but a pack of jihadists ;
people who support the Palestinian people are anti-Semites;
The IDF video montage
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have produced a video montage using
footage filmed by the assailants, surveillance camera footage and their
own footage. The aim of the montage is to convince people that the
Palestinian Resistance is a bunch of anti-Semitic barbarians. We see
unbearable scenes of a family whose father is murdered in front of his
children. We see a jihadist trying to cut off a corpse’s head with a
shovel. But no rape, no dismemberment. We also see charred bodies, which
the viewer thinks have been burned by resistance fighters. In reality,
they were the targets of air-to-ground missiles fired by the Israeli
army who had come to arrest the attackers. The "Hannibal directive"
stipulates that soldiers must kill "terrorists" without concern for
collateral Israeli casualties.
This montage was viewed by members of the Knesset, then of the US
Congress, before being shown in the parliaments of the various Nato
member states. Only the Belgian Parliament refused to see this piece of
propaganda, without external expertise. The film was also shown to
selected journalists in various capitals.
The Israeli authorities have released only the 10 minutes below to the general public. They have assured us that they do not wish to broadcast the entire montage to the general public, out of respect for the victims. But why would a restricted audience be more respectful? In reality, it’s a question of preventing specialists from exposing her deception by asking, victim by victim, who killed her.
Demonstrations against anti-Semitism
To rally Western public opinion to its cause and put the massacre it is perpetrating in Gaza into perspective, Israel is encouraging demonstrations of support throughout the West. Since it would be impossible to call for support for an army practicing genocide live on TV screens, Mossad suggests demonstrations against the anti-Semitism displayed by Hamas.
Except that Hamas is steeped in the ideology of the Muslim
Brotherhood. It is Sunni supremacist. For a long time, it fought
primarily against Shiite and Druze Muslims. It was certainly
anti-Semitic, but as it was against all other Muslim denominations and
all other religions, no more, no less.
Mossad has therefore sometimes used another argument: Arab immigrants
support Hamas and are therefore anti-Semitic. European states should
take steps to protect their Jewish populations.
The Washington demonstration therefore denounced above all the alleged barbarity of Hamas, while the Paris event focused on the fight against anti-Semitism. But neither was a full house. The Washington event was boycotted by many Jewish associations. Only 200,000 people attended, most of them Christian Zionists. People came more to hear televangelist John Hagee than to see the President of the State of Israel, Isaac Herzog. The one in Paris was opened by the Prime Minister and all her predecessors, the presidents of the three assemblies and all their predecessors, and the president of the Constitutional Council and his predecessors. But only a few tens of thousands of people stood behind them. Two notable absentees were Foreign Affairs Minister Roland Dumas (also a former President of the Constitutional Council) and Dominique de Villepin (also a former Prime Minister). They have distinguished themselves as resistors to imperialism, and thus to the US and Israeli governments.
For decades, Israel has accused anti-Semites of hiding behind a façade of anti-Zionism. Gradually, it is confusing the two concepts. However, European anti-Semitism is a form of xenophobia that began under the Roman Empire, continued under the Catholic Church and was prolonged under Nazism. It consists of accusing all Jews collectively of insurrection, of having killed Christ or of degenerating the Aryan race. Anti-Zionism, on the other hand, is the political view that Jewish nationalism should not be placed at the service of a colonial project. Today, most American Jews are anti-Zionists, while the majority of European Jews are Zionists.
French Senator Stéphane Le Rudulier (Republican) has just tabled a bill to increase the penalties for insulting or inciting hatred or violence against the State of Israel. Apart from the fact that it is hard to see why these offences would be more serious in this case than in others, it should be remembered that in 1975, the world was shaken by a debate on the nature of Zionism. The Organization of African Unity asserted that "the racist regime in occupied Palestine and the racist regime in Zimbabwe and South Africa have a common imperialist origin, that they form a whole and have the same racist structure, and that they are organically linked in their policy designed to oppress the dignity and integrity of the human being". Similarly, the Organization of Non-Aligned Countries described Zionism as "a threat to world peace and security, and called on all countries to oppose this racist and imperialist ideology". Finally, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution calling Zionism "a form of racism and racial discrimination" [5].
Only the UN resolution was repealed, in 1991, in order to help Israel implement the resolutions of the Madrid Conference on Palestine. The other two texts are still in force, and in view of Israel’s failure to implement the Madrid decisions, as well as all the international texts on Palestine, the question of reinstating resolution 3379 has been raised several times.
The staging of the Al-Shifa hospital
It was against this backdrop that the IDF staged the discovery of Hamas’s military HQ, beneath Gaza’s largest hospital. A public relations officer told us that weapons had been found on site and, from a rope tied to a chair leg, that an underground shelter had housed hostages.
While the public debates whether this evidence is convincing or not, they forget the history of this hospital. It was built in 1983 by Israel [6]. The IDF has all the plans. The Mossad installed Hamas in the basement when it was fighting against Fatah. Later, the hospital became a meeting place for Hamas officials and foreign journalists. But all this does not make it an arsenal or a military HQ.
In the current episode of the Israeli-Palestinian war, the IDF accused Hamas of digging tunnels under the hospital. They initially decided to destroy it with penetrating bombs to reach its depths. But in view of the objurgations of the World Health Organization, the IDF admitted that their objective did not legitimize razing a hospital to the ground. So they brought back their evacuation order and surrounded it. 2,300 people - patients, nursing staff and refugees - surrendered to the Israeli army, which ruthlessly searched them.
It was only two days after carrying out the assault that the IDF claimed to have discovered the Hamas military headquarters beneath Al-Shifa Hospital. In reality, the images they released clearly show that a well, near the hospital, led to galleries, but absolutely not that these led to a room that could serve as headquarters.
The shootings, the power cuts and the search of the hospital having caused many deaths, the IDF brought a dozen incubators which cannot function, precisely because of the power cuts, as reported by Reuters and the BBC. However, the Mossad is serving a useful purpose, as the BBC has apologized to its viewers for not reporting the incubator donations and the presence of Hebrew-Arabic translators.
Roger Lagassé
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[1] “Israeli military censorship hides the truth from you”, by Thierry Meyssan, Translation TheAltWorld, Voltaire Network, 1 November 2023.
[2] «Egyptian General Intelligence Director supposedly warned Netanyahu about ’something fierce from Gaza’», Smadar Perry, YNetNews, October 10, 2023. «What went wrong? Questions emerge over Israel’s intelligence prowess after Hamas attack», Tia Goldenberg, Associated Press, October 9, 2023.
[3] «L’ex 007 Carmon: «Ho avvertito dell’attacco di Hamas, Netanyahu non ha ascoltato. I servizi hanno agito tardi», Federico Fubini, Corriere della Sera, 23 novembre 2023.
[4] "C.I.A. Reports Contained General Warnings of Potential Gaza Flare-up", Julian Barnes, Adam Entous, Edward Wong & Adam Goldman, New York Times, November 13, 2023.
[5] « Résolution 3379 de l’Assemblée générale de l’ONU », ONU (Assemblée générale) , Réseau Voltaire, 10 novembre 1975.
[6] «Top Secret Hamas Command Bunker in Gaza Revealed», The Tablet, July 9, 2014.
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