Introduction

A year on, commemorations of the 7 October operations unfolded across the globe, as destruction across Gaza and the surrounding territories mounted. By this grim anniversary, nearly 42,000 Palestinian civilians had been killed, with tens of thousands more injured, at least one third of them children. The figures, though staggering, barely capture the systematic obliteration of life, culture, and history endured by a people besieged and dispossessed.

 

Western leaders performed their roles with grotesque predictability, offering hollow appeals for de-escalation while simultaneously supplying the Israeli state with the weaponry needed to execute its onslaught. These gestures, couched in the performative lexicon of humanitarian concern, reveal the moral bankruptcy of a Euro-American political class that pretends neutrality while bankrolling genocide.

 

 

From Siege to Slaughter: Constructing the Pretext of Genocide

On 7 October 2023, a series of coordinated armed incursions launched from the Gaza Strip into the southern districts of occupied Palestine, territories internationally mislabelled as ‘southern Israel’, were carried out by Hamas alongside other Palestinian resistance factions. These operations constituted the first large-scale armed mobilisation against settler-colonial infrastructure in these territories since the 1948 Nakba, marking the commencement of the latest phase of the Gaza war.

 

In the immediate aftermath, Israeli sources reported the deaths of approximately 1,195 individuals, a mixture of civilians and IDF combatants. A further 3,400 were wounded, and 251, again, a mix of fighters and civilians, were taken captive. Of those captured, 74 later perished, either confirmed killed in captivity or, in many cases, as a direct result of Israeli aerial bombardment targeting their presumed locations. Notably, among those killed were 14 members of the Israeli war machine, who, according to Israeli media reports, were executed by their own military command in order to preclude their capture, an action that demands forensic scrutiny, not only as a military strategy but as a symptom of settler-state paranoia and its pathological investment in control.

 

On the Palestinian side, the human toll was heavier still. Approximately 1,609 resistance fighters were killed and 149 captured. Each side has accused the other of torture, with allegations of rape also surfacing. Such charges, whether instrumentalised for propaganda or grounded in verified atrocity, underscore the asymmetry not only of firepower but of narrative control. Israel’s monopoly on Western media channels ensures that Palestinian suffering is either invisibilised, reduced to footnotes, or cynically repackaged within frameworks that cast the colonised as perpetual aggressors.

 

What emerges here is not simply a cycle of violence, as liberal commentators so lazily insist, but a settler-colonial structure lashing out to preserve itself, invoking the language of victimhood while operating with the full machinery of state-sanctioned terror.

 

As I argued elsewhere (Suren-Pahlav, 2013), this dramaturgy of enmity is central: every Hamas rocket or communiqué, every Hezbollah slogan, every clerical denunciation from Tehran, functions not as an existential challenge but as a resource. Their hostility is instantly transmuted into political capital, legitimising Israel’s apartheid as “security” and occupation as “defence”.’

 

In the media sphere, Israeli officials and sympathetic outlets persistently framed the 7 October operations as ‘unprovoked’, a claim so historically disingenuous it borders on farce. To characterise the events as lacking provocation is not only a wilful act of historical erasure, but also a strategic obfuscation of colonial causality. The provocation did not begin in 2023, nor in the months prior. It began the moment Britain, through the machinery of imperial fiat and racialised geopolitics, created the conditions for settler sovereignty by engineering the establishment of the Israeli state in 1948. That act, cloaked in diplomatic language, sealed through ethnic cleansing, was the original violence. Every subsequent eruption, uprising, or act of armed resistance unfolds within that founding trauma.

 

To pretend otherwise is to collude with a mythos that recasts the coloniser as perpetual victim and the colonised as perennial aggressor. Such narrative contortions are not accidental. They are part of a well-honed ideological arsenal, deployed to preserve the illusion of Israeli innocence while Palestinians are rendered provocateurs simply for existing under siege. This is not reportage; it is propaganda.

 

As I argued over a decade ago (Suren-Pahlav, 2013), the Zionist state has perfected the refunctioning of antisemitism into political currency, collapsing critique of occupation into accusations of bigotry. Ironically, the Islamic regime in Tehran, through Holocaust denial and sectarian sloganeering, has reinforced this apparatus, gifting Israel the very ideological alibi it requires to silence dissent while parading as perpetual victim. What emerges is a double fraud: Israeli state violence shielded by the rhetoric of antisemitism, and Palestinian liberation corrupted by regimes that mimic the very discourses Zionism thrives upon.

 

The October incursion, far from an unprovoked or act of ‘terrorism’, reflects decades of occupation, systemic siege, blockade, extrajudicial killings, rape, torture, and the normalisation of apartheid. The state’s invocation of security becomes a euphemism for erasure; its rituals of mourning are always racialised and selectively performed.

 

 

Inverting the Narrative: Victims Cast as Terrorists

The Palestinian people are not recent arrivals to this land, as Zionist revisionism so often implies. They are the indigenous inhabitants of historic Palestine, with continuous habitation reaching back to the Bronze Age (Haber, et al. 2017). Long before the 7th century CE and the Arab-Islamic expansions, the ancestors of today’s Palestinians included the original Israelites and Jews (Lazaridis, et al. 2016), communities rooted in the Levantine cultural and linguistic landscape (Haber, et al. 2017). The later processes of forced religious conversion and linguistic Arabisation did not erase their indigeneity; they merely reflected the historical shifts common to all ancient civilisations. To suggest otherwise is to weaponise identity in the service of colonial entitlement.

 

The ongoing attempt to overwrite Palestinian lineage, to sever it from its ancient Semitic and Aramaic roots, is not simply a historical inaccuracy. It is part of a settler-colonial strategy to deny the indigenous status of the very people whose blood continues to soak the soil from which they have never departed.

 

Hamas, far from being a liberatory force, has emerged as a principal architect of Palestinian suffering. Though it postures as a resistance movement, its actions have repeatedly betrayed the very population it claims to defend. What has unfolded over the past year is not merely the consequence of Israeli aggression, it is also the outcome of Hamas’s strategic recklessness, authoritarian governance, and catastrophic disregard for civilian life. This is not resistance; it is betrayal masquerading as defiance.

 

Hamas should be designated a terrorist organisation, not for striking at the occupier, but for terrorising the occupied. Its rule over Gaza has been marked by the suppression of dissent, violent reprisals against political rivals, and the instrumentalisation of Palestinian life as expendable in its theatre of resistance. It has stifled civil society, repressed women’s rights, and crushed any articulation of political vision not mediated through its own theological authoritarianism.

 

The historical irony, and strategic horror, is that Hamas was, in its inception, a Frankenstein of Israeli intelligence. Encouraged, if not outright cultivated, by Israeli agencies in the late 1980s as a counterweight to the secular nationalism of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, Hamas was permitted to grow precisely because its existence served Israel’s long-term colonial logic: fragment Palestinian unity, introduce internal division, and offer Tel Aviv a permanent ‘enemy’ through which to justify occupation, surveillance, and mass murder.

 

This logic is not new. As I have previously shown (Suren-Pahlav, 2013), groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, presented as organic vanguards of liberation, are in fact manufactured theatres of resistance, tolerated, cultivated, and strategically recalibrated by the very powers they claim to oppose. They are not puppets, but programmed: beasts whose instincts, once loosed, serve the colonial script without requiring a visible leash. The colonial state does not need to manage their every move; it requires only that their existence remain combustible enough to perpetuate the dramaturgy of siege.

 

To treat Hamas as an aberration within Palestinian resistance is to misread the architecture of its emergence. The organisation did not simply arise from theological fervour or social desperation; it was summoned into being by a settler-colonial logic that has long relied on fragmentation to undermine national liberation. Israel’s cultivation of Hamas was not a security miscalculation, nor a regrettable blowback, it was a calculated act of political sabotage. It replaced a secular, internationally-networked liberation movement with a parochial, theocratic force whose every move would entrench Israel’s grip on power.

 

This is the machinery of colonial counterinsurgency at work: not merely to repress the colonised, but to deform their political expression into something illegible, volatile, and ultimately self-destructive. Hamas’s rise did not weaken Israeli hegemony; it fortified it. By fracturing the Palestinian political body and discrediting resistance through association with theological authoritarianism, Israel secured both material dominance and narrative superiority.

 

Another dividend extracted from Hamas’s existence, rarely stated with candour in policy circles, is its utility as a permanent obstacle to the realisation of a two-state solution. Not simply as a matter of ideological divergence, but as a matter of political choreography. Hamas, with its rhetorical maximalism and theocratic rigidity, provides Israel and its allies with the ideal alibi to suspend negotiations, delegitimise Palestinian sovereignty, and render Oslo’s already threadbare framework permanently obsolete. Each rocket becomes a referendum on Palestinian unreadiness for statehood; every incursion, a manufactured confirmation of intractable barbarism.

 

This is no accidental convergence. Israeli officials have, at times inadvertently, laid bare the calculus. As Avner Cohen, a former Israeli religious‐affairs official, lamented: ‘Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation’ (Higgins, 2009). This was not a slip of operational judgment but a strategic inoculation against diplomatic compromise. By amplifying a faction that rejects mutual recognition, Israel ensures the permanent collapse of any viable interlocutor on the Palestinian side. The formula is elegant in its cynicism: radicalise the resistance, then reject it for its radicalism.

 

In this context, the two-state solution serves less as a roadmap than as a ritual incantation, deployed by Western governments to mask the contours of creeping annexation and demographic erasure. The realpolitik is plain. A fragmented Palestinian national body, split between a co-opted Authority in the West Bank and a reviled regime in Gaza, lacks both the institutional coherence and international legitimacy required to negotiate on equal footing. The bifurcation is not incidental. It is engineered. Hamas is not merely a failed resistance movement. It is the strategic insurance policy of settler-colonial permanence.

 

The edifice of ‘no partner for peace’, so tediously repeated in Western capitals, collapses under scrutiny. When the partner is discredited in advance, and the conditions of recognition are set by the occupying power, what emerges is not failed diplomacy but performative statecraft. As scholars have argued, Israel’s maintenance of Hamas as a ‘manageable enemy’ functions to stall political solutions, ensuring the diplomatic horizon remains forever deferred (Baconi, 2018; Roy, 2011; Brown, 2017). This is not peacemaking. It is pacification.

 

Understanding how this outcome was orchestrated demands historical specificity. The tactics deployed, many lifted wholesale from British imperial counterinsurgency handbooks, did not emerge in a vacuum. They are part of a wider system of engineered disorder, strategic ambiguity, and violent deception. The next section unpacks these strategies in forensic detail.

 

 

Designing Disorder: Cultivating Hamas as an Engineered Enemy

Israel did not stumble into Hamas; it built it. Not in secret laboratories, but in plain bureaucratic daylight, through policy, funding permissions, calculated toleration, and selective repression. In the late 1980s, amid the rise of the First Intifada and the growing international legitimacy of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), Israeli intelligence identified a strategic opportunity: to weaken Palestinian unity by empowering a counterforce rooted in Islamism rather than secular nationalism. This was not a security failure; it was a statecraft manoeuvre.

 

Hamas, initially allowed to operate through mosques, charities, and civic infrastructure, was shielded from the same levels of surveillance and suppression that crippled PLO-aligned factions. Israeli authorities facilitated its organisational expansion, tacitly encouraging the growth of a force whose ideological intransigence and political short-sightedness would eventually rupture the Palestinian national project from within. The settler-colonial calculus was brutally simple: a divided resistance is a defeated one. By amplifying Hamas, Israel not only fragmented Palestinian leadership but crafted a permanent internal enemy, one capable of generating just enough chaos to justify occupation, yet too structurally compromised to pose a viable threat to settler power.

 

This was not unprecedented. As with all colonial regimes under pressure, Israel borrowed from the manual of imperial counterinsurgency: fund the faction that will fracture the resistance, elevate the zealots to marginalise the strategists, create a monster that mimics the enemy but serves the master. What follows are the mechanics of this strategy, not in abstract, but in operation. How Hamas was engineered is not a mystery. It is an instructive case of modern colonial deceit.

 

1. Pseudo-Gang Strategy: A Machinery of Duplicitous State Violence

The pseudo-gang is not a tactical curiosity. It is a structural component of imperial counterinsurgency, engineered for maximum disruption, betrayal, and epistemic confusion. Emerging from the belly of the British colonial machine during the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya (1952–60), this strategy trades on mimicry, subterfuge, and psychological fracture. At its core, it manufactures insurgents to crush real ones, fabricating authenticity in order to dismantle it.

 

It begins with Frank Kitson, later a senior British Army officer and theorist of counterinsurgency. Kitson’s pseudo-gangs were composed of surrendered Mau Mau fighters (‘turned’ insurgents), loyalist Kikuyu, and occasionally British personnel in disguise, masquerading as insurgents. These groups were deployed to infiltrate Mau Mau forest cells, conduct assassinations, gather intelligence, and discredit the broader anti-colonial movement. Far from mere military theatre, this method destabilised community trust, corrupted loyalties, and rendered the enemy structurally indistinguishable from its shadow. As Kitson noted with clinical detachment, success depended on the ability ‘to make use of enemy personnel’ (Kitson, 1971).

 

By late 1955, pseudo-gang operations were credited with a decisive increase in intelligence collection and targeted killings. Dedan Kimathi’s eventual capture by Ian Henderson's forces was the high point of a campaign that turned Mau Mau's guerrilla advantage against itself. It was, by Kitson’s own admission, a form of ‘subversion against subversion’, that is, counterrevolution in revolutionary dress. What this created was not simply tactical disruption but strategic ambiguity. Civilians no longer knew which gunmen were comrades, which were collaborators, which were state-directed impostors.

 

The logic mutated. In Rhodesia, the Selous Scouts, operating under a similar conceptual framework, recruited ex-ZANLA and ZIPRA combatants to wage irregular war against their former comrades. Their activities included infiltration, false-flag killings, disinformation, and strategic terror. White-led units wore the guise of black liberation soldiers, torching villages and slaughtering civilians to drain the resistance of moral legitimacy. This was not combat; it was theatre of cruelty. The Scouts boasted a kill-capture ratio of 70:1. If true, it testifies not to skill but to methodical psychological warfare and the asymmetries of terror.

 

Northern Ireland followed suit. Under Kitson’s influence, British forces developed counter-gang strategies and special reconnaissance units such as the Military Reaction Force (MRF). These units disguised themselves as republicans, entered Catholic neighbourhoods, staged attacks, provoked violence, and returned fire under cover of anonymity. This was not policing. It was armed propaganda. It violated not only laws of war but the social fabric of the North, transforming the state into a para-state actor, cloaked in its own betrayal.

 

What emerges here is not isolated militarism but a system of epistemic corruption. Pseudo-gang strategy weaponises ambiguity. It thrives where categories break down: friend/enemy, civilian/combatant, state/criminal. It dissolves those binaries in favour of a single imperative, control. It exploits the psychological terrain of insurgency more than its physical one. Its goal is not victory in the conventional sense, but demoralisation, disorientation, and defamation.

 

Theorists of power must contend with this: pseudo-gangs are not merely military tactics. They are an assault on truth itself. Their violence is not only bodily but epistemological. They operate in the terrain of appearances, who is seen to be attacking, who is blamed, who is rendered illegible. In this respect, they are precursors to modern information warfare, deep fakes, and digital false-flagging. The state learns from its colonial laboratory and replicates these tools where opacity serves its end.

 

Consider then the ethical fallout. Pseudo-gangs do not merely kill. They destroy the grounds on which ethical judgment is made. In Kenya, they contaminated local trust networks, punishing whole communities for the insurgency of the few. In Rhodesia, they corrupted the meaning of resistance, framing the liberation fighter as barbarian. In Northern Ireland, they radicalised youths by faking republican attacks, then arrested them for retaliating (McConnell, 2005).

 

There is no military justification for this. It is not defence, it is state terrorism with plausible deniability. It is a government donning the costume of its enemy, then punishing the society that cannot tell the difference.

 

To adopt the voice of cautious critique here would be to betray the historical record. What is required is truth-telling, direct and forensic. The pseudo-gang strategy is a state’s abandonment of its own legal and moral frame. It is counterinsurgency as counter-citizenship: a betrayal of public trust carried out i n secret, then buried beneath the language of national security.

 

This strategy is not only alive, it has evolved. From Afghanistan to Colombia, Gaza to Nigeria, we find the ghost of Kitson. Wherever insurgency becomes a threat to geopolitical or corporate interests, pseudo-gang logic is reactivated. Militias, proxies, black-ops contractors, intelligence fronts, these are not anomalies. They are the modern avatars of the pseudo-gang.

 

Until political theory stops treating such tactics as regrettable exceptions and instead names them as integral to contemporary statecraft, it will remain complicit in their concealment. Power must be held to account not just when it fails, but when it deceives in order to succeed.

 

 

2. Manufactured Victimhood / Weaponised Victimhood: Performance of Persecution as Power

Framing oneself as wounded, not to seek redress but to neutralise culpability, this is manufactured victimhood in its most ruthless register. It is not grievance. It is strategy.

 

At the rhetorical level, this tactic functions not as confession but deflection. It does not invite solidarity but demands obedience. When dominant actors, state elites, media empires, demagogues, claim persecution, they are not inviting scrutiny. They are short-circuiting it.

 

The Weaponization of Victimhood, is the modern political communication has absorbed the affective grammar of suffering, not as an ethical reckoning but as a rhetorical device. The most powerful actors, now cast themselves as injured innocents, positioning any resistance as bullying, cruelty, or injustice. Victimhood has ceased to be a description of harm and has become a performance of authority.

 

The operation is simple. By claiming to be under attack, elites invert the moral gaze. Instead of asking what they have done, audiences are directed to what has been done to them. The victim mask becomes a shield, blocking critique, weaponising emotion, and refocusing attention. This is not a tactic of the oppressed. It is a technique of power.

 

Hronešová and Kreiss (2024) refer to this as ‘hijacked victimhood’. Their comparative analysis of Viktor Orbán and Donald Trump illustrates how majoritarian actors systematically deploy a language of existential threat to galvanise base support, justify illiberal measures, and demonise dissent. The pattern is unmistakable: claim that the ‘real’ nation is under siege, cast liberal opposition as traitorous, and frame elite dominance as a defensive posture. The consequence is a political field where responsibility is always externalised, and authoritarianism is recast as self-protection.

 

In this register, victimhood becomes a governance tool. It provides cover for the use of force, for surveillance, for moral exceptionalism. It sanctifies aggression while dehumanising critics. It invites identification, not interrogation. The moral register is reversed: perpetrators become saviours, critics become threats.

 

The emotional appeal of this tactic cannot be overstated. Contemporary political psychology reveals that self-perceived victimhood powerfully shapes political attitudes. Armaly (2021) demonstrates that individuals primed to view themselves or their group as victims become more punitive, less tolerant, and more susceptible to demagogic appeal. Importantly, this self-victimisation is not tethered to material deprivation or marginalisation. It is discursive. That is to say, it can be produced, encouraged, and endlessly replicated, especially by those with access to media megaphones and political pulpits.

 

The point, then, is not who suffers, but who is allowed to claim suffering. Weaponised victimhood is a monopolisation of pain. It constructs a political universe in which only certain grievances are allowed to speak, while others are suppressed as dangerous, exaggerated, or ungrateful. It is a hierarchy of injury that mirrors, and protects, the hierarchy of power.

 

This move should not be softened with liberal caveats. Manufactured victimhood is not a regrettable excess. It is a structural component of contemporary reactionary politics. Its function is not merely to distract, but to delegitimise. It reframes opposition as persecution, protest as menace, truth as hostility. Once this frame is in place, political discourse collapses into a choice between loyalty and betrayal.

 

Hence, the language of persecution is no longer the preserve of the vulnerable. It is now a standard operating mode for political elites. They borrow the cadence of trauma, the imagery of resistance, the moral prestige of suffering, but they do so to entrench inequality, silence dissent, and rearm the state.

 

In this configuration, public discourse ceases to be a site of argument and becomes a battlefield of pain claims. He who bleeds loudest wins. But the blood is rhetorical. The injuries are curated. And the real casualties, dispossessed minorities, impoverished workers, stateless migrants, are rendered voiceless.

 

To tolerate this inversion is to collude with it. To analyse it is to expose its fraudulence. To dismantle it is to return victimhood to its proper referent: those who suffer not because they speak, but because they are silenced.

 

 

3. Strategy of Tension: Governance by Orchestrated Disorder

Fear is not simply a by-product of political violence. It is its design. The Strategy of Tension is not merely a historical episode, it is a doctrine. It operates by producing chaos, then posing as its antidote. The state, or elements within it, either enable or directly engineer acts of terror and political disorder in order to justify the imposition of authoritarian control. The violence is real. The blame is redirected. The response is premeditated. What appears spontaneous is, in fact, meticulously staged.

 

This technique emerged most iconically in Italy’s ‘Years of Lead’ (Anni di piombo), a period between the late 1960s and 1980s marked by bombings, assassinations, kidnappings, and ideological polarisation. At the heart of it: fascist terror masquerading as leftist radicalism. The 1969 Piazza Fontana bombing in Milan killed seventeen and injured nearly ninety. Immediately blamed on anarchists, the attack was later linked to neo-fascist groups with alleged connections to NATO’s stay-behind network, Operation Gladio, and Italy’s own military intelligence services (Ganser, 2005; Aviles, 2021).

 

The objective was not only to criminalise the Left but to destabilise political life, to generate a public craving for ‘order’, even at the cost of civil liberties. As documented in multiple parliamentary inquiries and trial transcripts, state agencies shielded right-wing perpetrators, falsified evidence, and pursued scapegoats with full knowledge of their innocence. The spectacle of terror was instrumentalised to portray the Italian Republic as under siege, from within.

 

This was not the exception. It was policy. Claudio Celani (2003) and Daniele Ganser (2005) both offer extensive documentary evidence tracing how Italian military intelligence, with tacit or explicit coordination from NATO and the CIA, encouraged or tolerated far-right violence as part of a broader Cold War containment strategy. This was not a rogue operation, it was embedded within the very institutions of ‘democratic’ defence.

 

What emerges is a model of governance via fear: create instability, then consolidate control under the pretext of restoring order. The violence becomes both the means and the message. As Scalia and Clement (2020) argue in their study of state labelling and double-binds, the strategy works by delegitimising dissent and muddying the moral terrain. Who is the terrorist? Who is the protector? When the state orchestrates both roles, the answer is unknowable by design.

 

Belgium’s own ‘strategy of tension’ moment occurred between 1982 and 1985 with the Brabant killings, a series of inexplicable supermarket shootings. The attackers were anonymous, methodical, and seemingly without political motive. Later investigations revealed overlaps with state security personnel, though the full extent of official involvement remains suppressed. The function was identical: public hysteria, political inertia, and the increasing normalisation of surveillance and security culture (Jenkins, 1990).

 

The rhetorical supplement to this strategy is always the same: We are under threat. Yet the threats are often carefully cultivated, embedded in networks of state complicity or toleration. In this way, the state’s own violence is externalised, converted into justification for its further expansion. The result is not just repression. It is disorientation. A collapse of public certainty. The true power of the strategy lies not only in what it breaks, but in what it makes impossible: trust.

 

Wherever this tactic surfaces, it leaves behind a political terrain gutted of moral clarity. In the long-term, citizens cease to know who to believe, what is real, or where to direct their outrage. Fear becomes ambient. Dissent becomes dangerous. Passivity becomes virtue. And in that environment, authoritarianism does not need to impose itself. It is invited in.

 

In the post-9/11 era, the strategy of tension found new life. Manufactured or exaggerated terror threats continue to justify extraordinary powers: rendition, torture, mass surveillance, pre-emptive detention. From Bush’s ‘Axis of Evil’ to Macron’s post-attack emergency laws, the logic remains: incite fear, then present power as rescue.

 

Critique must therefore refuse the narrative of rogue actors or unfortunate excesses. What we confront is a system, a doctrine of power that thrives on its own duplicity. The enemy is not only external but fabricated. The threat is not only real but required. Political violence is no longer the failure of state control. It is the substance of it.

 

 

False Flag Operations: Deception as Prelude to Power

False flag operations are not aberrant miscalculations, they are calculated performances of aggression cloaked in denial. By design, they falsify responsibility to manufacture consent, to frame enemies, and to expedite violence under the guise of defence.

 

Dating back to naval warfare, the concept refers to vessels flying counterfeit flags to deceive adversaries, pirates and privateers first, then militaries refined the ruse. Today the schema extends to state-sponsored terror, where violence is staged, blame is redirected, and rights are suspended, all in the name of national salvation.

 

The Mukden Incident (1931) exemplifies the archetype: Japanese officers detonated ordnance beside their own railway to fabricate Chinese aggression, then invaded Manchuria under the pretext of sovereignty. This deception was exposed in the Lytton Report, yet the damage was done, Manchukuo was annexed before legal condemnation could intervene (Lytton Commission, 1932) (Mukden Incident, 1931).

 

Similarly, the Gleiwitz Incident of 1939 epitomises state‑invented casus belli. German SS operatives dressed as Polish soldiers seized a radio station, broadcast a false message, and left a corpse 'killed in the attack', a grotesque theatricality to legitimise invasion of Poland. Hitler’s narrative then portrayed Germany as victim, not aggressor (Polak-Springer, 2013).

 

False flags scale beyond singular acts. Operation Himmler comprised multiple provocations, scripted to appear as Polish offensives, calibrating public outrage to precede war. Here, false flags are not error, they are foundational legislation for lies (Polak-Springer, 2013).

 

Statecraft later adapted the genre to covert wars. Operation Susannah, also known as the Lavon Affair (1954), comprised Egyptian‑Jewish agents planting bombs in Western targets to be blamed on local groups. The aim: to dissuade British withdrawal from Suez by fabricating instability (Weiss, 2013).

 

False flags are no mere relic. Cold War Europe witnessed Operation Gladio, clandestine NATO program in which right‑wing cells committed violence blamed on communists. The result: political terror fuelled anti‑leftist repression and rationalised expansive state coercion (Griffin, 2023) [1]; (Youvan, 2023).

 

False flag operations have also migrated into modern subterfuge. In Ukraine circa 2014 and 2022, operatives disguised as local militants triggered chaos to legitimise invasion. Media narratives amplified the effect, collapsing the distinction between provocation and pretext.

 

Conceptually, false flag operations dismantle the very logic of culpability. They collapse analysis into effect: violence is followed not by enquiry but by immediate acquiescence. When the state unleashes terror and then pretends outrage, dissent is delegitimised before it can crystallise.

 

This tactic also meets resistance in the digital domain. Cyber false flags, fabricated attacks or disinformation campaigns, further complicate attribution. The opacity of data grants falsehoods the sheen of plausibility (Youvan, 2023).

 

Scholars must resist treating false flags as fringe conspiracy. They are not errors but elegant tools in the arsenal of coercive governance. Their danger lies not only in brutality but in erasing the very ground on which truth, justice and resistance may stand.

 

​

 

This conceptual map positions the four political deception strategies across two dimensions:

X-axis (Operational Deception): Degree of hidden or covert manipulation used in the strategy.

Y-axis (Purpose: Control → Legitimacy): The primary objective, whether to enforce control through repression or to manufacture consent and legitimacy.

 

Interpretation:

False Flag Operations and Pseudo-Gang Strategy are both high in operational deception. They manipulate violent events or identities to provoke public reaction or suppress opposition.

 

Manufactured Victimhood operates with less direct deception but aims heavily at constructing political legitimacy through narrative manipulation.

 

Strategy of Tension sits closer to the intersection, deploying real violence, but heavily mediated, to generate both fear and demand for authoritarian protection.

 

What follows is not a theoretical exercise. These four strategies have been set in motion to clear the ground for a specific infrastructural project.

 

 

05. Hamas and the Facilitation of Israel’s Execution of the Ben Gurion Canal Project

The four deception strategies mapped above, pseudo gangs, manufactured victimhood, strategy of tension, and false flag operations, are not abstract techniques. They serve a tangible territorial objective. That objective is the Ben Gurion Canal Project. Each manipulated event, each inverted narrative, each orchestrated crisis, clears a path toward the same destination: the physical incorporation of Gaza into Israel and the permanent erasure of Palestinian territorial sovereignty. Hamas is not merely a beneficiary or victim of these strategies. It is the mechanism through which the canal becomes possible.

 

The destruction visited upon Gaza since 7 October 2023 has been presented to the world as a tragic but necessary response to Hamas provocation. That framing, however, collapses under the weight of historical and strategic evidence. What is unfolding is not a war of defence but the systematic clearance of territorial obstacles to a long standing Israeli infrastructure project: the Ben Gurion Canal. And Hamas, whether wittingly or through the structural logic of its own resistance theatre, has served as the indispensable facilitator.

 

The Ben Gurion Canal Project, first conceptualised in the 1960s, proposes a 292.9 kilometre waterway connecting the Gulf of Aqaba to the Mediterranean Sea near Ashkelon. Designed to be deeper, fifty metres, and wider than the Suez Canal, it would break the Egyptian monopoly over the Red Sea to Mediterranean transit. The strategic prize is immense: control over a parallel global shipping route, the marginalisation of Arab leverage over maritime trade, and the permanent integration of Israel as a transcontinental logistics hub. For decades, the project remained dormant, hindered not by technical impossibility but by the presence of a densely populated, hostile territory directly in its path: the Gaza Strip.

 

Gaza, under Palestinian control whether through the Palestinian Authority or Hamas, represented an impassable barrier. Any canal construction would require either the depopulation of the territory or the establishment of absolute Israeli security control over its entire length. Neither was achievable through conventional means. The siege, maintained since 2007, kept Gaza contained but did not eliminate the demographic or political fact of its population. What was required was a rupture, a catastrophic event that would render Gaza uninhabitable, justify mass displacement, and permit the erasure of territorial claims under the cover of military necessity.

 

That rupture was supplied on 7 October 2023. The Hamas incursion, whatever its stated aims, produced precisely the outcome that Israeli strategic doctrine had long required. It delivered the moral and political pretext for the levelling of Gaza, the systematic destruction of its civilian infrastructure, and the forced displacement of its population. Each demolished neighbourhood, each bombed university, each flattened hospital brings the Ben Gurion Canal one step closer to realisation. The rubble is not a byproduct of war. It is the foundation of a new waterway.

 

As I documented in my earlier study (Suren-Pahlav, 2020), ‘The Somalisation of Iran and the Erosion of Iran’s National Sovereignty and Territorial Integrity’, the Israeli‑UAE axis used the recognition of Somaliland as a separate entity to secure control over the Red Sea corridor, transforming a fragmented state into a strategic beachhead. That analysis outlined the broader regional template from which Gaza is not exempt. By engineering conditions that render Palestinian sovereignty impossible, Israel prepares the ground for formal annexation and permanent infrastructural incorporation. Gaza will not be rebuilt as a Palestinian territory. It will be rebuilt as the southern terminus of the Ben Gurion Canal, its population either exiled or confined to ever shrinking enclaves stripped of political or economic function. The strategic logic is identical to what I previously identified (Suren-Pahlav, 2020): fragmentation precedes infrastructure, and infrastructure consolidates occupation. Somaliland provided the Red Sea corridor. Gaza will provide the Mediterranean terminus.

 

Hamas, in this architecture, functions as the necessary antagonist. Its rocket launches, its tunnel networks, its rhetorical maximalism, each provides Israel with the footage required to sustain the narrative of existential threat. Without Hamas, the world would see colonisation. With Hamas, the world sees self defence. The organisation is not an obstacle to the Ben Gurion Canal. It is the instrument through which opposition to the project has been delegitimised in advance. Every Palestinian killed is mourned in selective headlines. Every Palestinian displaced is framed as collateral damage in a war Hamas began. The canal, when it comes, will be celebrated as an achievement of Israeli engineering and regional cooperation. Its foundation, however, will remain the blood and concrete of Gaza.

 

What the Western media refuses to name is this: the destruction of Gaza is not an excess of war. It is an act of territorial preparation. The Ben Gurion Canal cannot be built while Gaza remains inhabited by a population with legal claims to the land. Those claims must therefore be extinguished. Extinction requires not merely military defeat but the systematic obliteration of the conditions for return. Homes are not bombed because they shelter militants. They are bombed because their absence creates space for a waterway. Hospitals are not targeted because they store weapons. They are targeted because a functioning medical system would permit a population to endure. The logic is brutal but coherent. And Hamas, by providing the pretext for each phase of this destruction, has become the canal’s most effective engineer.

 

This should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with my earlier diagnosis of manufactured resistance (Suren-Pahlav, 2013). The beast, once cultivated, always serves the colonial script.

 

The conclusion is unavoidable. Hamas is not a resistance movement betrayed by its own tactics. It is a strategic asset whose existence has been cultivated to produce the very conditions that now justify genocide. The Ben Gurion Canal Project will not be announced as the reason for the war. It will be announced as a post‑war reconstruction initiative, a symbol of regional normalisation and economic progress. Its ribbon will be cut by the same leaders who ordered the bombs. And the world will applaud, having forgotten, or having chosen to forget, that the ground beneath their feet was made level by the destruction of a people and the complicity of their self appointed defenders.

 

 

Conclusion

The strategies that Israel deployed to engineer Hamas were not invented by the Zionist regime; they are the inherited tools of colonial power. Pseudo-gangs, false flags, manufactured victimhood, and strategic chaos, these tactics have long served empire. They are not incidental to statecraft; they are its shadow arm. Israel did not merely apply these techniques, it refined them, and exported them.

 

Hamas is not an anomaly. It is the culmination of an entire lineage of engineered enemies. The Israeli state, working in concert with Western intelligence structures, employed a similar strategy in 1979 when it facilitated the rise of Khomeini to topple the Imperial Government of Iran. The creation of a totalitarian theocratic regime in Tehran was no accident; it was the outcome of strategic sabotage, rooted in the Bernard Lewis Plan (Suren-Pahlav, 2018), designed to displace secular nationalism with a pliable authoritarianism cloaked in divine authority (Suren-Pahlav, 2000) . The Taliban followed—first as instruments against the Soviets, later recast as existential threats in the never-ending ‘war on terror’. Hamas, then, is not the beginning. It is a perfected series of beasts, created, cultivated, and unleashed whenever the colonial master requires a pretext for devastation.

 

The Israeli state has not simply repressed Palestinian liberation; it has corrupted it at its root. By manufacturing Hamas as a rival to the secular, democratic aspirations of the PLO, it fractured the national movement and implanted within it an internal saboteur. Hamas’s violent theatrics, its authoritarian repression of Gaza’s civil society, and its ideological absolutism have served Israel’s narrative needs with disturbing precision. It offers Tel Aviv the perpetual ‘enemy’ required to justify siege, slaughter, and settlement, all while posing as a state under existential threat. It is not a deviation from colonial logic. It is the logic made flesh.

 

This paper has mapped the interlocking techniques through which such enemies are engineered: the use of pseudo-gangs to destabilise and discredit resistance; the deployment of manufactured victimhood to invert blame and demand obedience; the orchestration of strategic tension to normalise authoritarianism through staged disorder; and the false flag operation as the state’s most brutal dramaturgy, violence without accountability, deception with consequence.

 

Together, these are not tactics of last resort. They are blueprints. They produce enemies where none exist, fracture resistance from within, and collapse moral judgment into moral confusion. What results is not security, but an epistemological war, one in which truth is made illegible, history reversible, and the coloniser recast as victim.

 

Hamas has not liberated Palestine. It has helped entomb it. And Israel, far from fearing Hamas, has relied upon it to mask the expanding machinery of erasure. What is revealed, as I previously diagnosed (Suren-Pahlav, 2013), is a structural mimicry: the Zionist state and its clerical antagonists reproduce each other’s logic of siege, theological absolutism, and securitised identity. Their enmity is theatre; their convergence is structural. Hamas, like Tehran’s clerics, is less an adversary of Zionism than its distorted mirror, indispensable to its dramaturgy of survival. The beast lashes out, the master howls in choreographed terror, and the spectacle of existential struggle continues to sanctify colonial expansion. This is not blowback. It is design. It is a project of fragmentation, delegitimisation, and ultimately extermination, of memory, of sovereignty, of presence.

 

The Ben Gurion Canal Project is not a speculative footnote to this analysis. It is the territorial objective for which the entire machinery of deception was assembled. Pseudo gangs, manufactured victimhood, the strategy of tension, and false flag operations each serve to clear the same physical path: a waterway from the Gulf of Aqaba to the Mediterranean, carved through a depopulated Gaza. The 7 October incursion provided the rupture that decades of siege could not. It supplied the moral pretext for levelling Gaza, displacing its population, and erasing territorial claims under the cover of military necessity. When the canal is announced as a post-war reconstruction initiative, a symbol of regional normalisation and economic progress, the world will be invited to applaud. But the foundation of that waterway will remain the blood and concrete of a people whose destruction was the precondition for its construction.

 

To speak of Hamas without speaking of the colonial strategies that birthed it is to misrecognise the enemy. And to critique Hamas without indicting the state that engineered it is to fall into the very trap those strategies are built to spring. What is needed now is not moral equivocation or political caution, but forensic clarity. The task is not to reform this theatre of deception, it is to name it, unmask it, and bring it down. Brick by brick, frame by frame, lie by lie.

 

 

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