Haaretz article on why Netanyahu bolstered Hamas. Now what was that about October 7th, that it didn't happen in a vacuum?
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www.haaretz.com
There’s no doubt that in the immediate and short term, the reasons behind the disgraceful mishap of inconceivable scope that led to the Hamas army’s unhindered takeover of more than 20 Israeli communities near the Gaza border that dark Simchat Torah day involve an embarrassing military and intelligence failure.
Of course, they also involve the criminal neglect of the affairs of state by an indicted prime minister who is feverishly preoccupied with finding ways to escape trial. And the price is the destruction of the existential foundations of Israeli society and of the country.
But the deep roots of the feasibility of the murderous assault by the Islamist nationalist phalangists from the prison that is Gaza on Israeli citizens should actually be sought in an earlier period of Benjamin Netanyahu’s time in office as prime minister – prior to his criminal trial
and his alliance with nationalist Kahanists and the judicial coup, back when he was considered “level-headed” and “rational” and “responsible.”
That’s because since he took office as prime minister a second time in 2009, that same Netanyahu developed and advanced a destructive, warped political doctrine that held that strengthening Hamas at the expense of the Palestinian Authority would be good for Israel.
The purpose of the doctrine was to perpetuate the rift between Hamas in Gaza and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. That would preserve the diplomatic paralysis and forever remove the “danger” of negotiations with the Palestinians over the partition of Israel into two states – on the argument that the Palestinian Authority doesn’t represent all the Palestinians.
That flawed strategy turned Hamas from a minor terrorist organization into an efficient, lethal army with highly trained, dehumanized stormtroopers, bloodthirsty killers who mercilessly slaughtered innocent Israeli civilians including women, children and the elderly.
This is solidly documented. Between 2012 and 2018,
Netanyahu gave Qatar approval to transfer a cumulative sum of about a billion dollars to Gaza, at least half of which reached Hamas, including its military wing. According to the Jerusalem Post, in a private meeting with members of his Likud party on March 11, 2019, Netanyahu explained the reckless step as follows: The money transfer is part of the strategy to divide the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. Anyone who opposes the establishment of a Palestinian state needs to support the transfer of the money from Qatar to Hamas. In that way, we will foil the establishment of a Palestinian state (as reported in former cabinet member Haim Ramon’s Hebrew-language book “Neged Haruach”, p. 417).
In an interview with the Ynet news website on May 5, 2019, Netanyahu associate Gershon Hacohen, a major general in reserves, said, “We need to tell the truth. Netanyahu’s strategy is to prevent the option of two states, so he is turning Hamas into his closest partner. Openly Hamas is an enemy. Covertly, it’s an ally.”
In a tweet on May 20, 2019, Channel 13 quoted Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak saying: “Netanyahu isn’t interested in the two-state solution. Rather, he wants to separate Gaza from the West Bank, as he told me at the end of 2010.” Mubarak said that during an interview with the Kuwaiti daily Al-Anba.
It’s worth dwelling on the horrifying significance of these remarks. An Israeli prime minister himself knowingly and calculatingly cultivated one of Israel’s most bitter and fanatic foes, an enemy whose declared aim is to destroy the country.
And he did it to prevent the horror scenario from his standpoint of a return to Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. Netanyahu recklessly gambled on the lives of Israelis, and in fact, last Shabbat, more than 1,000 of them paid the price of that foolish gamble with their lives.
“This government has blood, rivers of blood, on its hands,” Iris Leal justifiably wrote in Haaretz this week, (Haaretz, Oct. 8). But one should acknowledge and clearly and explicitly state that, on the Israeli side, the person bearing the fundamental responsibility for the killing of more than a thousand Israelis by Hamas is Benjamin Netanyahu – its covert ally, as Maj. Gen. Cohen put it, but also an effective and essential one for the Palestinian religious nationalist terrorist organization, at least between 2012 and 2019.
Thanks to the funneling of millions of Qatari dollars to Gaza, with Netanyuhu’s repeated approval as part of a deliberate and malicious policy aimed at nothing other than burying the two-state solution, Hamas acquired inordinate military capabilities within a relatively short time. And that resulted in the current situation, which as I write, has taken the lives of about 1,000 Israelis.
With the end of the hostilities, when it comes, one may hope that a state commission of inquiry to investigate the events surrounding the Simchat Torah massacre – an unprecedented slaughter of Jews in their own country – would be convened. One of the main issues that the commission should investigate is Netanyahu’s long-term policy of strengthening Hamas.