hamas me no questions, i'll tell you no lies

why supporting hamas is not supporting palestine and may, in fact, be the opposite

geopolitics is a nasty business and in the end, the realpolitik of what one can do and what one will do resolves into the terrible calculus of machiavellian iron law. there is always someone ready to act horribly to get what they want or take what you have.

israel and palestine have been at odds since the former’s inception and ideas of integration have generally fallen flat. ideas of a 2 state solution come and go but never seem to come to fruition as (like many issues) not everyone wants to see them resolved. some benefit from the chafe and from the chaos and anyone who thinks there are not actors on the world stage who would wantonly sacrifice the well being and even existence of other groups upon the altar of self-interest if it got them a nickel and a stick of chewing gum might wanna brush up on their history. because that’s just not how it is.

dr strangecat

i’m not going to try to grapple with the historical “who done what to whom” of israel and palestine. it’s just too thorny and impossible to untangle. but i do want to address this idea in current currency that somehow hamas is standing up for palestine and playing the noble freedom fighter that seems bizarrely prevalent in certain circles just now.

some of it is clearly just the predictably ignorant identity politics of “if my enemy dislikes you, you must be my friend” that emerges as the dreary twaddle of those more committed to dogma than facts or sense.

it starts to get frankly ridiculous as the more idiotic of the useful idiots adopt poses increasingly devoid of sense.

but it’s also not terribly new or poignant.

this sort of sophomoric silliness has been around for ages and it’ll never go away.

“jeez, why didn’t we think of that?”

but there is a more serious and purportedly thoughtful line of pro-hamas pundit seeming to emerge around this recent round of appalling surprise attacks on civilians that added rape and parading prisoners and bodies in public to the tab of murder. the logic seems to go something like “well, this is how you have to fight an oppressor. hamas is standing up for palestine!”

but they aren’t.

that’s simply not what happened.

hamas just threw palestine under the bus in brutal fashion by committing atrocities sure to generate the most severe of reprisals. and it was not done to protect or promote palestinians. it was done to cause them instant, deadly harm because that is in the best interests of iran, the paymaster who has been calling the tune. and those interests diverge greatly from those of the palestinian people.

and we need our “intelligencia” to stop being such dupes.

as is so often the case, the truly useful question is “cui bono?”

let’s look.

many have asked incredulous questions about “why would palestine do this?” as the attacks were so obviously intended to inflame. they were spectacular (in the literal sense of creating a spectacle) using rockets and paragliders and attacking a music festival and parading rape and murder in the streets. it was obviously going to instantly evoke the most draconian responses imaginable as the IDF bombs gaza to gravel. and surely palestine must have known that. so, like WTF?

decisions have consequences

there is another line of reasoning that this just shows that “the palestinians are stupid/evil people who cannot be trusted. look at what they just did!” and it seems to hold water if one accepts the premise that “they” are somehow monolithic and “did this” but i find that explanation to be unsatisfying. from the perspective of most of the palestinian people and perhaps even most of their leaders, they did not do this.

it was done to them.

hamas is not palestine and palestine is not hamas any more than BLM is america and america is BLM and we should all be culpable for their burning of cities. sometimes factions with agendas of their own get loose and do things that very few people actually wanted, often to some ulterior aim. and i suspect that’s what we’re seeing here.

hamas has tried in vain to win the palestinian presidency for decades. they have not come close. they have managed some parliamentary wins and control it now, but as any american can attest, a 56% legislative majority in a split government (president is fatah) is hardly a mandate to speak for all.

hamas are funded and often armed and trained by iran. their leadership is dependent on this and therefore dances to the tune called by the ayatollahs. and this is where this whole imbroglio gets sinister: because if there is one thing that iran does not want, it’s israeli-saudi détente/alliance and a path to a two state system where the palestinians get a actual sovereign homeland instead of being the evergreen regional flashpoint. iran does not want this issue settled. they want it to be an issue.

so pause to consider for a moment:

what if this attack was not to help the palestinians but rather to throw them to the wolves to break up any potential deals and shore up power for iran?

because that sure seems like the odds on bet to me.

you’d have to be a special kind of stupid to engage in this sort of extreme provocation and expect “no punchbacks.” the israelis are famous for instant and severe retaliation. it’s arguably the only reason there is still an israel and the provocation here was not just extreme, but calculated to be extreme.

that is not the act of a group looking to serve the people upon whom the reprisals will fall.

but it’s exactly what one would do if the goal were to play the wrecker to regional rapprochement. bahrain and the UAE had moved to normalize relations with israel. the saudis were in talks to follow suit. this is obviously going to place all of that in jeopardy as extreme times make for extreme tribalism and it’s awfully hard for prince MBS to keep favoring israel when the TV is full of images of them blowing up palestinian buildings.

it’s bad for israel, bad for saudi, and difficult for the US. but it’s great for iran who benefits from this sort of regional instability both politically and economically.

it sure creates a calamitous flashpoint for the palestinians who got ganked out front as the sacrificial pawn though…

they are going to get creamed and this is why i think it’s important to see the distinction here between the people of the west bank and gaza and hamas and why this knee jerk of “supporting hamas is supporting palestine” is not only just plain wrong but outright dangerous. it loses the real villain and the real villainy and heaps the blame on the doorstep of many who did not deserve or want this.

so how about we stop this “hamas are noble freedom fighters” crap? this was an act of savagery calculated to induce more savagery and to harm the very people the jingoists are mistaking for the prime mover here. people are getting “robin-hoodwinked” by this phony “outlaw of the people.”

the fact is that this was an attack on the every day palestinians as well as the israelis.

in this case, this militant wing of hamas are not palestine’s protectors, they are their assailants.

worth keeping that in one’s calculus.

many US politicos have incentive to feed this facile trend around the false flag of “palestine did this” because they have some nasty culpability in funding/appeasing iran who in turn funded and trained hamas as well as the huge afghan weapons giveaway that filtered through to these attackers as well.

iran smells the weakness brought on by the US suppressing global oil over ukraine and running down the strategic petroleum reserve to worryingly low levels. they know the current regime cannot really push or sanction them right now for fear of exploding the already high pump prices that lose elections. europe is pinned as winter approaches and perhaps they will not be as lucky as last year with the weather. it’s why tehran feels impunity to move and to press. hell, we just paid them $6bn to release 5 prisoners. this is not a sign our position is strong.

the department of “MOAR WAR” seems anxious to turn this fact pattern into “so let’s bomb iran/kill their leaders/fund a coup/etc” but this seems dangerously short sighted and stupid to me. the price is always high, it never fricking works, and in the end, we wind up arming some group we’re going to fight 15 years from now. this is not “america, world cop” it’s “america world clown” setting up the next pratfall. we’ll just wind up unifying a fractious iranian populace and garnering them more regional allies and bigger profits from more expensive oil.

if you want to take power away from the ayatollahs, it’s best to do it at home. wanna solve this and defang them? drill baby, drill. an awful lot of the current global instability were seeing is around energy prices and availability as the green grift collides with geopolitics and winds up empowering folks like russia, iran, and iraq. you wanna hurt them? frack till the price of oil drops to $40/bbl. then let’s see how much cash they have to buy friends and influence people.

it’s a massively positive sum scenario, but so long as we treat drilling for oil and gas like some sort of pariah practice, pariah states will profit. the naïve green geopolitics of physics denial is a profound source of geopolitical instability. it impoverishes and hamstrings those who adopt it and cedes power to the states they profess to abhor.

this is not a basis for policy, foreign or domestic.

it’s self-harm rooted in dogmatism and ignorance.

and it’s time it stopped.