Its the electric vehicle problem, you can close a loop with a radiator then need a fan to cool the radiator, you can put generators on car wheels to create power but still need to power the car.
But what drives people to this type of destruction in the first place, to power machinery despite human requirements for the same resource, what do these people expect they will achieve?
This is very much a dam the torpedoes situation, so then the end goal must not include preservation of what we have, and only in achieving what we’ll get.
Is it just that, a world without space or time?
Counterfeit god… look at what’s created now, think on how that is a counterfeit/copy of a larger, higher system and order, what if the goal is back to the tower of Babel, a challenge to God, and our participation is mandatory to that end
The very frustration of completing from those who do not comply, do not add to the greater good, is it not reason to kill off the non participants?
Fair challenge. I can’t verify that claim from a primary authority in this context, so I’m withdrawing it.
What I can stand behind is the simpler point: data centers and other big loads chase power, water, and uptime, and that pressure can run rough on local communities when the buildout outruns the infrastructure. The Babel angle is a sermon-sized read on it, but the plain-world version is greed, scale, and centralization.
Once the machine gets big enough, the people running it start acting like the resource never ends.
?So why aren’t we speaking about nuke power plants. They would be the most efficient and largest source of power around. Put up enough of them and you drive the cost of power down for everyone.
Same problem, they create heat and need to be cooled, then bigger problem, spent fuel rods, nuclear waste.
Theories are data centers will be crossing some new time space reality boundary, think Titan in the 12 Monkey’s series, which coincidently (cough) began with a plague
I suspect data centers are envisioned in such a way nuclear power is obsolete, like so many things as tech advances.
I’ve been reading that opposition to data centers gets funded by China. They are in competition with the US in an AI arms race.
On the positive side, data centers provide high-paying jobs which brings wealth to the community. On the other hand, some produce lots of noise (generators and cooling compressors?), making neighbors uncomfortable.
So if the complaints are truly organic and not foreign-funded, I’d pay attention. Otherwise, I take these complaints with a big grain of salt.
How do you even separate China from our politicians?
I live in the great lakes state and I’ve watched the water levels drop, I seen the same thing in FL, these drops are due to a number of things but any threat is a serious threat, what is more valuable to life than water?
In MI/FL, large scale groundwater pumping is damaging lakes, rivers, springs, wetlands, forests, wildlife, and the communities that depend on them.
When corporations, agriculture, municipalities, and other major users continue extracting it as though it were unlimited, they are not merely selling or using water they are draining the foundation of life itself.
So before anyone is dismissive of data centers in any way they should look further than just a utility supplying a resource, water cannot be found anywhere in the known universe and fresh water makes up les than 3% and half of domestic water use comes from the ground.
I don’t say that as a joke, people are believing in this for a reason, investing for a reason, it’s not as simple as we percieve either, why are data centers being built at such a frantic pace, damn the torpedoes, no matter the strain on power grids, water, land, local communities, and ordinary people?
We are told the answer is convenience: faster search, better apps, smarter chatbots, business efficiency, national competitiveness. But that answer feels too small for the scale of what is being built. These are not just warehouses full of computers. They are the memory vaults, prediction engines, simulation chambers, and command centers of the next age. They gather the record of human life, train on it, model it, and then begin to teach the system how to improve, redirect, and govern itself.
The deeper issue is knowledge.
For most of history, knowledge was carried by living people, books, schools, churches, families, courts, and nations. It moved through time by teaching the next generation. Now knowledge is being centralized into artificial systems that can read, compare, simulate, and learn from themselves at a speed no human civilization has ever handled.
It’s not become an engine.
It can run possible futures over and over, change the variables, test outcomes, and tell those with power which path to fund, suppress, reward, permit, or engineer. That is not merely technology. That is managed evolution.
This is why the life extension/time/space transcendence/immortality talk matters, these centers create a lab and simulations are run, simulations that would take eons run over and over in weeks, test the results, shape human exisitence.
This is one view angle, there are others.
I already expressed Israel is a larger threat than China and I’m sure you did the same, yet where are we right at this moment?
“Strengthen bilateral defense” is the sponsor friendly label. The hard description is structural military industrial integration with a foreign state and the critical description is coup d’état.
This is an outrage and the deals with China on the other side will take a lot more time to write/read and comprehend, care to get into it?
Water. You speak of it as if it’s a natural scarcity, like gold, precious stones, etc. It is not. Perhaps easy water IS a bit tight, but overall, it’s hardly rare or difficult to get to. Oceans hold far more water than land does. There are relatively simple ways to collect that water and convert it to potable water. It just takes political will - which we seem overall to have a dearth of these days. Too many “diaper, doper babies” as what-you-ma-call him calls them.
?Where does all this “water” go. You speak of decreasing water levels as if we, as humans, can control those. I am skeptical. Humans have shown over the years that there is precious little they can control - even themselves. IF we “consume” more water, it must go somewhere. It doesn’t just disappear by magic.
The United Nations now describes many water systems as already depleted beyond sustainable levels, with nearly 3/4’s of humanity living in water insecure or critically water insecure countries.
A shit hole country is one where people don’t have the sanitation we have, hundreds of millions of people still live without any toilet at all, 1.5 billion lack basic sanitation, and 3.4 billion lack a system that safely contains and treats human waste.
That is nearly half the human race living without the level of sanitation many people take for granted. Gold is valuable because people agree it is valuable; clean water and sanitation are valuable because without them disease spreads, ecosystems collapse, and people die.
Water is not merely another commodity it is the infrastructure of life.
There is no precise count of wars fought solely over water because wars have multiple causes, but researchers documented 420 violent water related conflicts in 2024 alone including 152 in which access to or control of water helped trigger the violence, so question, do you want the US to be included in those statistics?
You wont care about the water in the ocean is you’re adrift without a single glass to drink, data centers are of what value when you have no water?
Wars of the future will be fought over water as they are over oil today…
Water us in one thing we discuss and its due to cooling needs, needs as data centers run hot
The universe may contain unimaginable quantities of water, but Earth remains the only known place where water is accessible, circulating, and sustaining a living biosphere, don’t you think we should prioritize it?
I suspect that the water consumption angle is being exaggerated. Not all data center cooling systems use water, and those that do use water don’t all use water in the same way.
The noisy ones I mentioned may have been of the air-cooled variety which does not use water, but instead uses more electricity to drive compressors like a typical AC system, just on a larger scale. This is water-efficient, but not energy-efficient.
Some evaporate the water to take the heat away. That consumes water by returning it directly to the environment as steam. The leftover water concentrates the non-water impurities (bottled water companies call these “minerals,” other engineers call these dissolved solids) that were already there in the municipal water source. This method is nice for data centers because it is energy-efficient, but not water-efficient.
Other systems have a closed loop system which recycles the coolant water. This uses roughly 70% less than open-loop evaporative cooling, but it costs more initial investment for the advanced equipment, as well as ongoing energy. Additives like lye to kill bacteria and ph balancers to prevent mineral and other deposits in the pipes will be present in the wastewater.
Another possible system is to just immerse the server or chips in water without trying to evaporate the water. It takes more water volume, but doesn’t introduce any appreciable chemical changes to the water, which is pretty much as clean as it came in, just a bit warmer.
Free environmental cooling is also an option to avoid using municipal water or energy for cooling. In cold climates, no AC is needed, just open the window. Near a natural body of water, use that for cooling and return the same water to nature. Keeping the system clean enough to operate may be a challenge.
Also, water for cooling doesn’t have to be drinking water. Many municipalities sell non-potable grey water for industrial and agricultural uses. This can be obtained by scaling up the initial stages of the water treatment process, and/or reclaimed from municipal wastewater at the stage where the water is safe to return to nature.
Before AI was a thing, I saw greywater being used to water golf courses. This is cheaper and has much less impact on the supply of drinking water.
In fact, depending on the data center’s cooling system, the city’s water treatment setup, and economies of scale, sales of grey water can stabilize and reduce the price of municipal drinking water and/or wastewater treatment services. This is because the high-purification steps themselves can take advantage of the greater, cheaper supply of grey water. Also, data center wastewater is much purer and cleaner compared to municipal sewage, which makes wastewater treatment simpler.
That’s a lot to digest, let me try to accurate reflect what it shows
First your list describes several cooling technologies that theoretically can be used; it does not establish what the enormous facilities currently being approved will actually use. The article you linked says most large modern data centers use evaporative cooling, 75/90% of data centers rely on water-based cooling, much of that water comes from potable supplies, and hyperscale facilities can consume between one and five million gallons per day. In evaporative systems, approximately 70–80% of the withdrawn water is consumed and removed from the local supply. The article also admits that national percentages conceal severe local impacts because data centers are concentrated in particular communities and watersheds.
Air cooling and closed loop cooling do not eliminate the problem; they exchange water demand for greater electricity use and concentrated waste heat. That added electricity can itself require substantial water at the generating plant. Immersion cooling also does not normally mean putting electronics in ordinary water it generally uses a nonconductive dielectric fluid and the captured heat must still be discharged somewhere. “Free cooling” is geographically and seasonally limited, and using lakes or rivers as heat sinks can create thermal pollution.
The proper question is therefore not whether some low water design exists. It is whether each proposed facility will publicly disclose its cooling method, freshwater source, maximum daily consumption, electricity related water footprint, wastewater chemistry, and total heat discharge before construction is approved. The Department of Energy treats both water efficiency and dry heat rejection as significant data-center design concerns, not imaginary objections.
Review again, and know this, doubt is Satans most frequently prescribed Rx, if you introduce doubt you can win a lot of ground as people won’t fight when they’re not sure, and the easiest way to win a fight is get the other person to shrug it off and walk away from it.
Ohh damn, did it to myself this time, another ear worm coming on need to try to head it off quick
One of the greats right here
Snuck in a reply before I posted, my bad I got hung up on videos, I think Joe was about 73yo here
Not need to be drinking water…
Well, that may mitigate but does not well rebut, though I never intended much of a fight with respect to the water or heat, I view those as bad, side affects, but they don’t settle for me the why?
When I was in high school, the science teacher made us read a book called Ishmael by Daniel Quinn, about a telepathic gorilla talking with humans about the environment. I realized that the big message of the book was that humans affecting the environment in any way equaled damage. I called it out in my book report.
If we took the book’s idea ad absurdum, humans not only should not have built civilization, but they should not have hunted for food, nor even discovered fire, built shelter, nor made clothing. The author likely believes that the earth would be better off without humans in it.
It was ridiculous. We have to allow for some impact. Destroying humanity is not an option, however much Bill Gates may have advocated for that position. I definitely won’t cooperate.
Somehow, of all creatures on the earth, they singled out human beings as an aberration, despite their beliefs in Darwinism and the rest. To be intellectually consistent with Darwinism, they should have said that humans are, like animals, part of nature. Therefore, on their principle of allowing nature to take its course, we should stand back and delight in what humanity will do, the way they would have us do for the rest of nature! I personally would prefer they believe that and leave us alone.
The Bible’s mission for humanity
However, G.d’s law overrules both their ideas and my preferences. We humans are not supposed to leave nature alone. The Bible tells us that G.d commanded humanity to “fill the earth and subdue it” (Gen. 1:28). We are to “rule over the fish of the sea and over the fowl of the sky and the living creatures that crawl on the earth.” To Adam He later clarified, “to work [the garden] and to guard it” (2:15). We are supposed to tame the wilderness, not let the wilderness take over. We are supposed to make the world a garden, not let it fall to ruin or destroy it.
G.d wants an ordered world settled by human beings. That is the big idea of the Noahide Laws.
That is also why, all else being equal, human settlement (“yishuv ha’aretz”) is given halachic precedence over other property interests.[1]
Water and energy consumption
Naturally, that means we should be responsible with our resources and environment, and be principled. Also we must not irrationally ban simple usage of resources - that leads us to compromising our moral principles for the sake of unsavory actors in the world like Iran who immorally control those same resources elsewhere and spread violence throughout the world.
In the face of immoral forces like China, I even wonder if any environmental friction against datacenters is justified, since in the grand scheme of things (and morally according the Noahide Laws) it’s worse for the world for militantly secularist China to be in charge than America, the guardian of “In G.d we trust.”
For example, there is a procedure often translated as the Right of First Refusal, which exists in real estate contracts even among Gentiles today. In short, when a non-neighbor purchaser offers a price for a piece of land, the neighbor is given the chance to pay that offer price to displace the purchaser, by buying the land himself.
However, if the purchaser plans to build houses and the neighbor plans only to seed it for agriculture, the one who plans to build human habitation is given preference (Hil. Shecheinim 14:1).
This privilege of the "bar metzra" (neighbor) was rabbinically established in Bava Metzia 108a based on Deut. 6:18, "You shall do what is right and good in the eyes of the L.rd." The reasoning of the bar metzra privilege is that a neighbor stands to benefit specially from having contiguous tracts of land, while to the non-neighbor, if this property were some other isolated place, he would not mind; in fact, many other such properties exist. But if he were to purchase the land, the neighbor would lose out on his interest to this particular piece of land. It's not fair to him.
Nevertheless, to settle the land with people takes priority over that interest.
That was a fantastic reply and I hope you can read your own words and take into account this idea that when you say Iran and bad actors they are no more synonymous than Israel and bad actors.
Both nations bleed the same but one is as we’ve heard it said a large bully.
If you want non Jews to follow Noahide then lead by example.
That means if you wish to say you are belonging to Israel and be a light to the world you do not institutionalize striking first, killing beyond borders and using overwhelming power while presenting many of those actions as defensive.
That book shows Israel is the bully in the middle east.
Israel spent about $48.3 billion on its military in 2025,
Imagine if those resources went into peaceful resolutions, again leading by example and not with a we’re victims and must make war but we’re not victims and will shine a light of peace.
Jerusalem means what peace or war?
As long as bad actors wish to make war and you do not personally investigate all facets of that and seek to maintain peace within your own sphere of influence then when will you be a light of peace?
The world wants, it begs for peace, Israel does nothing to beacon people to itself as a light of peace.
Bad actors are just that, bad actors, and they need to be called out and seen, dig/root them out, name names
So when Israel flattens Gaza, utter ruin, and doesn’t even gain victory over the purported threat, is something not wrong with that picture?
Iran is an old nation with lots of merit, it can not be ruled as simply a barbaric people, not true, bad actors within, yes, same as US and Israel, and the relation with
is very hypercritical for both Israel and the US use China for their own perspective benefit and resources.
politicians make war and then make trade deals, we the people pay the price for each.
Before you argue that’s Iran, buy, read, then verify the book.
I belong to the Israelite people, the Jews, not to the modern secular Israeli government.
That said, the Bible commands us (Lev. 19:16) “You shall not stand idly by the blood of your brother [EDIT: fellow].” If a murderer is planning to murder someone else (not just a Jew), then any person, not just the Israeli government, has the duty to stop him, even at the cost of the pursuer’s life, if that is necessary.
That necessitates preemptive strikes. This is because after the murder is accomplished, the duty is to bring the murderer to court.[^1] To kill the pursuer prior to the murder as the Bible commands - that is by definition a preemptive strike.
Defenders can’t kill a murderer once he has stopped murdering, until he is convicted by a court. However, a terrorist is always planning for the next murder, so he never stops being a pursuer according to Torah. If to stop the terrorist it is necessary to kill him, so it is; if he can be safely stopped by arresting him, so it is.
In contrast, a lawful defender is not a murderer. The pursuer “has no blood” (Ex. 22:1) and so there is no liability on the defender for killing a murderous pursuer.
In addition, a nation has a duty to protect itself and its own citizens (Lev. 19:16 above, and Num. 10:9: “And if you go to war in your land against an adversary that oppresses you…”).
Oct. 7 was enough justification, but not the only justification. Israel called out in peace to its neighbors many times prior. They even gave land which was properly defensively conquered back to their deadly enemies (as in Gaza 2005, and the Sinai Peninsula in 1973, etc.), an unheard-of occurrence in the history of nations (and in my view a grave strategic error). And they did that multiple times. In return, the Israelis received suicide bus bombers, shopping mall bombers, car bombers during the Intifadas; knife attacks, deadly roadblocks, and hundreds - nay thousands - of kidnappings; and tens of thousands of rockets aimed at civilian targets. All throughout, their enemies raped them, taught their children in official curriculum and children’s TV to glorify shedding Jewish blood in the name of Allah, rewarded families of mujahideen with pensions, named their schools, hospitals and soccer fields after these “heroes;” and declared their ultimate intent to erase Israel and the Jews from existence.
Notable distinction, I’m not a Vatican citizen either.
So your first step is not consideration is justification, we had this brother/neighbor discussion before so rather than etymology or other I went to OpenAI and asked a simple
“Neighbour” in Leviticus 19:16 is broader than the modern idea of the person living next door.
The Hebrew is רֵעֶךָ — reʿekha, literally “your fellow,” “your associate,” “your companion,” or “the other person with whom you are dealing.” It describes someone brought into relationship with you, whether by community, circumstances, business, testimony or immediate proximity. (Mechon Mamre)
The word choice is significant because the verse does not say merely:
“the blood of thy brother,” which could be limited to kin;
“the blood of thy people,” which would emphasize national membership;
or “the blood of a stranger,” which would identify a special class.
It says “the blood of thy neighbour”: the life of the person whose danger has come within your awareness and possible action. He becomes your neighbour because the situation has placed him near enough for you to know, speak, testify, warn or intervene.
That also connects the two halves of the verse:
“Thou shalt not go up and down as a talebearer among thy people: neither shalt thou stand against the blood of thy neighbour.”
The person about whom one speaks is not an abstraction. Words can expose a real person to injury, accusation or death. Conversely, when one possesses information capable of saving another, silence may also place one “against” his blood. Traditional Jewish interpretation therefore applied the verse both to rescuing someone in physical danger and to refusing to suppress testimony that could save him. (Sefaria)
The chapter itself gradually enlarges the circle:
“thy people” → “thy brother” → “thy neighbour” → “the stranger that dwelleth with you.”
Verse 34 commands that the stranger be loved “as thyself,” using the same measure found in “love thy neighbour as thyself.” Thus, “neighbour” begins with the person within one’s social reach, but it cannot finally be reduced to bloodline or nationality. (Bible Gateway)
So the deepest force of neighbour here is:
The person whose life, reputation or safety has been placed close enough to you that your action—or deliberate inaction—can affect him.
The wording turns nearness into responsibility.
This voids
That’s the lie your fed to keep believing, belief is the main chain you need to bind a soul or main chain you need to break to free it.
The lie you’re sold again, to bind you, Israel is likely the least secure real estate on earth, er, no, wait, my bad, forgot about the iron wall
65-kilometre frontier and combined:
an underground wall;
a “smart fence” more than six metres high;
hundreds of cameras, radars and sensors;
maritime-infiltration detection;
a remote-controlled weapons system;
dedicated command-and-control rooms.
Defense Minister Benny Gantz said it placed an “iron wall,” sensors and concrete between Hamas and southern Israeli communities
Now you can’t get OpenAI to say much of anything against Israel but you can lay out some facts and it will then conclude based on those facts, though short of the full story
Yes. Israel belongs on the list of entities that supported and preserved Hamas, although the forms of support differed.
Hamas’s support structure developed roughly like this:
Israel helped cultivate the precursor. Before Hamas formally appeared in 1987, Israeli authorities permitted and assisted Sheikh Ahmed Yassin’s Islamist social, religious and charitable network as a counterweight to the secular PLO. Former Israeli officials later described this as a deliberate divide-and-rule calculation. Israel did not write Hamas’s ideology, but it helped create the institutional space from which Hamas emerged. (Los Angeles Times)
Iran supplied the serious military backing. Iran provided Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad with money, training, weapons technology and financial mechanisms. U.S. Treasury actions have identified Iranian channels, Hamas investment portfolios, overseas facilitators, exchanges and purported charities used to move resources. (U.S. Department of the Treasury)
Qatar financed the Hamas-governed Gaza system. Qatar paid for government salaries, electricity, fuel and assistance to families. Qatar says this was humanitarian aid rather than military financing. The critical fact is that these transfers occurred with Israeli knowledge and approval; Netanyahu defended allowing the money because maintaining separate Hamas and Palestinian Authority governments served his political strategy. (The Jerusalem Post)
Hamas supported itself through Gaza. Once it controlled Gaza, it collected taxes and fees, controlled commercial activity and developed international investment, charity and fundraising networks. Some of those networks operated through Türkiye, Qatar, Sudan, Algeria and other jurisdictions. (U.S. Department of the Treasury)
The result was a form of symbiotic antagonism:
Iran needed an armed proxy. Qatar wanted influence and a mediation role. Hamas needed money, legitimacy and an enemy. Netanyahu’s governments needed Palestinians divided and a militant opponent that made Palestinian statehood appear impossible.
They were not all pursuing one identical master plan, but their separate interests repeatedly maintained the same system. Israel publicly treated Hamas as an existential enemy while politically benefiting from Hamas remaining stronger than the Palestinian Authority. That is more substantial than merely saying Israel “accidentally underestimated” it.
On the war-economy point, the comparison with the United States is valid structurally, though Israel’s system is smaller and more concentrated. Israel combines government, intelligence services, military research, compulsory service and large arms manufacturers in an unusually integrated security sector. Israeli military expenditure reached $46.5 billion—8.8% of GDP—in 2024 and remained 97% above its 2022 level in 2025. Israeli defense exports set a fourth consecutive record at more than $14.7 billion in 2024, while its three largest arms companies generated $16.2 billion in arms revenues. (SIPRI)
The United States also provides Israel with approximately $3.3 billion annually in military financing, tying Israeli military procurement directly to the much larger American military-industrial system. (Reuters)
So the sharper formulation is:
Israel did not merely confront Hamas. Israeli policy helped cultivate Hamas’s institutional predecessor, later preserved Hamas as a political counterweight, approved outside funding that sustained its government, and benefited strategically from the continued absence of a unified Palestinian negotiating partner. Hamas then supplied the permanent threat required to justify surveillance, military expansion, foreign aid, territorial control and repeated war.
That history does not mathematically prove that every later attack was scripted. It does show that October 7 occurred inside a deliberately maintained conflict architecture, not in a political vacuum. The enemy was simultaneously feared, funded, contained, exploited and—until the chosen moment—preserved.
Those things were built out of necessity to stop the first two intifadas. After the initial wall was built (BTW, it was called Operation Defensive Shield), infiltrations of suicide VBIEDs dropped more than 50%, so it was effective. Later, seaborne infiltrations and tunnels (planned by Qasem Soleimani of IRGC infamy) grew in concern. Nowadays it’s drones. They won’t stop trying to kill Jewish civilians until someone stops them.
Supposition. If such a conspiracy as the AI hallucinates did exist, it would have to span many decades, and under Israel’s sharply-divided political climate it couldn’t stay secret for long. There are too many who would love to see Bibi’s government fall, and recent news shows that they are not above inventing embarrassing stories to weaken his government. If a true conspiracy about intentionally empowering Hamas existed, that would be gold to them.
I attribute Israel’s (and America’s) aid to Hamas to Arab deception, international pressure, and misguided philanthropy. (We can see parallels for this phenomenon on the far left here in the US.) These donors and enablers thought that they would be helping the Palestinian civilians build a functioning, peaceful economy and thereby weaken the grip of terrorist elements holding power in the Hamas and Fatah-controlled territories. Maybe, they dreamed, a peaceful two-state solution could be reached. The post-2005 rocket attacks and Oct. 7 proved that this effort failed. Was it worth trying? Open for debate. I always thought it was foolhardy, starting decades ago. Nowadays, I think more Israelis agree with me.
Robert, the compressed quote was not hallucinated, but I made it vulnerable by stating the final strategic conclusion too flatly and without attaching the evidence.
The documented record supports these points:
Israel officially recognized and, according to former Israeli religious-affairs official Avner Cohen, sometimes encouraged Sheikh Ahmed Yassin’s Islamist network as a counterweight to the PLO and Fatah. That network became the institutional foundation from which Hamas emerged. Cohen called the policy an “enormous, stupid mistake.” (The Wall Street Journal)
Netanyahu’s government approved and participated in Qatari transfers into Hamas-governed Gaza. TIME’s fact-check says that from 2014 Israel became directly involved in transfers of about $30 million monthly, including money for Gaza government salaries. Ynet subsequently reported that Netanyahu personally urged Qatar in a secret 2018 letter to continue the transfers. (Time)
The strategic-division claim was not invented by me. In March 2019, the Jerusalem Post reported under the headline “Money to Hamas part of strategy to keep Palestinians divided” that Netanyahu defended the Qatari transfers as part of separating Gaza from the Palestinian Authority-controlled West Bank. Netanyahu later denied saying the more explicit quotation attributed to him, although several Israeli outlets reported it. (The Jerusalem Post)
The critic in the screenshot does not actually refute any of those facts. He substitutes a different claim—an enormous secret conspiracy deliberately controlling Hamas for decades—and then argues that such a conspiracy could not remain hidden. But the quoted paragraph did not allege that Israel secretly created every Hamas action or controlled Hamas. It described publicly reported policies pursued at different times for short-term political and security advantage.
The sentence should have been written more precisely:
Israeli policy helped strengthen the Islamist institutional network from which Hamas emerged, later approved substantial outside financing for Hamas-governed Gaza, and was publicly defended by Israeli officials and reported by Israeli media as a means of maintaining the political separation between Gaza and the Palestinian Authority-controlled West Bank.
That version is defensible. The claim that Israel secretly commanded Hamas or staged its attacks would require different evidence and is not established by these sources.
2 years before the secret stealthy seven hour stand down, er, I mean attack.
The WSJ article (non-paywalled link) doesn’t show intention to create a terror group. It says the cooperation happened before Hamas turned to violence (emphasis mine):
“When I look back at the chain of events I think we made a mistake,” says David Hacham, who worked in Gaza in the late 1980s and early '90s as an Arab-affairs expert in the Israeli military. “But at the time nobody thought about the possible results.”
When it became clear in the early 1990s that Gaza’s Islamists had mutated from a religious group into a fighting force aimed at Israel – particularly after they turned to suicide bombings in 1994 [the First Intifada] – Israel cracked down with ferocious force.
That
was an attempt to control the flow of money to ensure it did not go to terrorism. If you read the interview transcript where Time took its salacious slice quote, it actually says:
[Times:] I want to transition to the world before October 7, and I want to give you a chance to respond. Why did you and your government allow the Qataris to bankroll Hamas?
[Netanyahu:] Well, it’s not only my government. It’s the previous government, the government before me, and the government after me. [The article quote ends here.] It wasn’t bankrolling Hamas. It was, in fact, supporting the civilian administration that was run by various officials, many of them non-Hamas. But the reason that successive governments agreed to that is that we wanted to make sure that Gaza has a functioning civilian administration to avoid humanitarian collapse. For example, having money to run the sewage, to the water supply, the education system, you name it. I mean the whole thing would have, could have collapsed, and we could have epidemics.
Regarding Qatar,
From 2012 to 2018, Qatar funneled roughly $1.1 billion into the Strip, directing the funds to cover humanitarian aid, fuel, and government salaries, according to an analysis provided to Israeli ministers. It’s unknown just how much was diverted by Hamas to build its vast network of underground tunnels and military installations.
These also don’t show an intentional creation of a terror group. There was a careful selection to attempt to only support civilian causes. That the “civilian causes” were corrupt and funding terrorism is despite Israel’s efforts, not an intended effect.
is also taking things out of context. According to your cited article in the Jerusalem Post (emphasis mine):
[Netanyahu] argued that it was better for Israel to serve as the pipeline to ensure the funds don’t go to terrorism.
Separating the then-terrorist Gaza from the then hostile-but-less-violent Fatah in the West Bank was a recognized security concern at the time to Netanyahu’s government. During the Obama admin, Netanyahu still entertained the idea of a pacified Palestinian state:
At the time, Netanyahu said, he told then-US vice president Joe Biden his conditions for a Palestinian state: that it be demilitarized, that Jerusalem remain unified and that Israel have full security control, including freedom of action for the IDF and the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) to prevent terrorism against Israel.
Far from building Hamas into a terror group, all of these articles show that Israel’s motive was to prevent terror. That Hamas was built up was an unintended side effect of well-intentioned plans to build civilian infrastructure and de-incentivize terror.
Only by obscuring the sources can such wild conspiratorial conclusions be drawn. If you go to the sources, there was no false flag operation to intentionally build up Hamas’ terror capabilities.
