Israel / Palestine

Here's an opinion piece in Haaretz blaming Netanyahu for the attack. He's been funding and strengthening Hamas in order to scupper the two state solution https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-10-11/ty-article/.premium/netanyahu-needed-a-strong-hamas/0000018b-1e9f-d47b-a7fb-bfdfd8f30000

Opinion | Why Did Netanyahu Want to Strengthen Hamas? Netanyahu
developed a destructive, warped political doctrine that held that
strengthening Hamas at the expense of the Palestinian Authority would
be good for Israel

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.

The purpose of the doctrine was to perpetuate the rift between Hamas
in Gaza and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank.

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 solidlydocumented. 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.