The original sin: How Israel let Hamas grow
"Every paradigm is good for its own time. A good strategist asks every day whether his strategy is still valid and Netanyahu didn't do that," a former general says.
Nadav Shragai
Israel Hayom
Oct 28, 2023
Israel's policy of isolating Hamas, reinforcing the terror organization's rule in Gaza as the lesser of two evils, was nothing that Benjamin Netanyahu liked to brag about or mention in public. Over the years, he even sent occasional signals – as in an interview with Time Magazine in July 2019 – that he himself vacillated about how moral or correct this thing was.
The tragedy, as it eventually turned out, was dual: Qatar, a state that supports Hamas and maintains relations with additional terror organizations, reinforced Hamas' rule past our southern border and lubricated it with money. Israel, while seeking to fight terror, lent its consent to this dubious setup.
Many considered the arrangement an act of surrendering and paying protection money to Hamas. Whenever the funds were delayed, Hamas issued threats or fired rockets at Israel. Quiet was obtained only in fits and starts, between the rounds, but Netanyahu – who, on top of everything else, mistakenly thought and was misled into thinking that Hamas had been deterred – considered the reinforcement of Hamas over the years as a necessity in the sense of the lesser of two evils. Whenever he did speak about it publicly, he did it in measured doses.
Netanyahu's most explicit remarks about the isolation policy emerged at a meeting of the Likud faction in March 2019: "Whoever wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support strengthening Hamas and sending it money. It's part of our strategy of isolating the Palestinians in Gaza from those in Judea and Samaria."
As surprising as it sounds, that was pretty much the end of his rhetoric. A policy of silence accompanied the isolation policy. Those in Netanyahu's circle of confidants, however, explained the matter more generously.
One of these confidants was Galit Distel-Atbaryan, the future minister of information who resigned her portfolio when the war broke out. The post, many paragraphs long and now forgotten, that Distel-Atbaryan published on Facebook on May 5, 2019, should be read carefully. It lays out Netanyahu's worldview in relatively elaborate terms. In its fifth paragraph, she wrote:
"It has to be said straight up: Netanyahu wants to keep Hamas standing and he's willing to pay an almost inconceivable price for it – half of the country paralyzed, children and parents post-trauma, homes bombarded, people killed. An alley cat is holding a nuclear leopard by the balls and Netanyahu, with outrageous and almost inconceivable restraint of sorts, isn't doing the thing that's the easiest to do – to topple this organization with the mere breath of the Israel Defense Forces.
"The question is: 'Why? Why?? Why???' And Distel-Atbaryan answers: "Every house needs a porch and Israel is a house. The porch of this house is Samaria. You can get to Samaria from almost every central city in Israel, yes, even from Tel Aviv, by spitting. To make it sound better, the time it would take a three-year-old from a kindergarten on Rothschild Street to reach a safe space when a bomb is tossed at him from Samaria is the same amount of time it would take such a kid in the Gaza periphery … a few seconds."
"We weren't mistaken"
Netanyahu kept the isolation policy going and going until it blew up in his face. Maj. Gen. (Res.) Gershon Hacohen, who supported Netanyahu's position on the Hamas-Gaza issue for years, stubbornly insists even today that "We weren't mistaken." The first to emphasize the need to separate Judea-Samaria from Gaza, he says, was Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who belatedly realized the meaning of the "safe passage" between Gaza and Judea-Samaria that the Oslo people had cooked up for him.
"This super-dangerous overland link in the heart of Israel," Hacohen says, "between Erez Checkpoint and Tarkumiyya [Checkpoint], a link that never came into being due to the security menace that it posed, could not be put to rest until Hamas came to power in Gaza. When that happened, it gave us an opportunity vis-à-vis the United States of Obama and his Secretary of State, John Kerry, who were obsessed with the two-state solution, a solution that would have shoehorned us into borders of strangulation and death. The moment Hamas took over Gaza, Netanyahu could tell the US and the Palestinians: this isn't two states; it's three states. He had a case.
"Netanyahu's problem," Hacohen believes, "was that the strategy was correct until the end of the Obama era. Afterward, when we were no longer under pressure to accept a full-fledged Palestinian state, the strategy should have been re-examined and it wasn't. Netanyahu," Hacohen claims, "doesn't understand the most basic fundamental thing about strategy. He should have realized that after he'd brought about the Abraham Accords and was verging on an agreement with the Saudis, he was creating new forces of resistance.
"Every paradigm is good for its own time. A good strategist asks every day whether his strategy is still valid and Netanyahu didn't do that. In addition, two other things happened. First – the world changed. Ukraine's steadfastness against Russia gave the Palestinians an injection of encouragement. From the first day, there were calls out there: 'Let's do what Ukrainians are doing.' The Iranians also studied the war in Ukraine well and imparted its lessons to its extension in Gaza.
"Second – new war capabilities, let's call them 'domestic capabilities, came about; therefore, the IDF's edge steadily eroded. I've been writing about this for several years: just as everyone today has a portable phone, so everyone today can buy a drone, acquire a pilotless aircraft, and manufacture rockets and weapons. Everyone can lay hands on everything today. I handed my conclusions about the erosion of the IDF's edge due to this to the highest levels in the Army, but there they claimed it was 'political.' They wouldn't admit that it was professional."
Forgive me, but you and many others supported the policy of using Qatar – a state associated with terror organizations – to reinforce a terror organization. Doesn't Netanyahu have the steadfastness and the understanding that Hamas has to be toppled, as he promised in 2008, and that the pressures for the establishment of a Palestinian state that would endanger us have to be coped with in some other way?
"Qatar has a reasoning that says, let's use the devil for our needs. We didn't realize that the devil is smarter than we are."
What will happen now that we've realized it?
"Destroy, kill, and despoil as much of Hamas-Gaza and its accomplices as possible. If we don't hand them another Nakba [Catastrophe in Arabic], they'll win. The Gazans have to be expelled from their homes for good.
"We didn't buy quiet"
The isolation policy that Netanyahu spearheaded, the one that generations of defense ministers and chiefs of general staff (with the exception of former Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot) lined up behind, enrages the man who predicted the war five weeks before it broke out – Col. (Res.) Yigal Carmon, head of the Middle East Media Research Institute and the terrorism affairs advisor of two prime ministers, Rabin and Yitzhak Shamir. Carmon, who published his prediction of war in late August 2023, published materials back in 2018 – that were evidently too tough for the Israeli taste – concerning the real schemes behind the "marches of return" that Hamas was conducting along the fence for months and months.
Today he is furious: "Netanyahu adhered to the separation policy, which preserved and strengthened Hamas' rule. He didn't buy quiet with it, because in practice there wasn't quiet. There were rounds [of violence] and continual threat. What's more, this policy didn't really create separation because Hamas was steadily gaining strength in Judea-Samaria, too.
"According to our data," Carmon says, "the Qataris transferred a billion and a half shekels [~$400,000] to Hamas over the years, with our consent. Only a minuscule portion of it went to civilians. Hamas used most of it to build tunnels, develop its rocket array, and construct the 'metro,' the underground city.
Didn't the money come from Iran?
"No. It came from this stupid axis of Qatar–Israel. Iran provided training and coordination but it didn't put up the money. It has no money. It was under tough sanctions for years. It was Qatar's money that went for military purposes, sometimes in suitcases, sometimes through various associations and nonprofits. This reckless government deluded itself into believing that Hamas had been deterred, that Hamas thought it was important to preserve its rule and be good to the population.
"Gradually, we – first the Bennett and Lapid government, and afterward Netanyahu's – allowed thousands of workers to enter. It got to as many as 15,000–20,000 Gazans per day. Now we've figured it out: those workers were Hamas people. No one came in to work without a permit from Hamas. Hamas took part of their salary. These workers, we know now, were spies. That's how they built up their portfolio of villages and towns in the southern region that they attacked on October 7. The guileless settlements in the south also took part in this fool's paradise. My heart goes out to them. They enjoyed cheap labor and never imagined that the people they were hosting would deliver information to their executioners."
Is Qatar a terror-supporting state?
"For sure. We wrote about it hundreds of times at MEMRI. Qatar supported or maintained relations with Islamist terror organizations: the Muslim Brotherhood, Al-Qaida, the Taliban, ISIS. Trials against Qatar are underway in Europe and the United States. People who were injured brought civil suits against it.
Presidents Clinton and Bush had an intelligence affairs advisor named Richard Clarke. He revealed that the main perpetrator of the September 11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, had previously initiated two attacks that failed – to down eleven American airplanes over the Pacific Ocean and to murder the Pope during a visit of his to Manila. After these two attempts, he fled to Qatar. Clarke then said that the FBI came to arrest Khalid Sheikh Mohammad. They reported it only to the leader of Qatar, personally, and what do you think happened? The gentleman disappeared and reappeared five years later as the main organizer of the events of September 11. That's Qatar."
Q: The Government, the Army, Intelligence, the Mossad, the Shin Ben security agency– don't they know what Qatar is?
"Sure they know, but somebody put himself in charge of pooh-poohing this information. We fell in love with the slogan of 'regulating' things with Hamas. At MEMRI, we explained, five years ago, exactly where the 'marches of return' at the fence were heading.
Q: The "fence-cutters" and the "breakthrough unit"
Carmon shows me the reports from 2018 and I glance at them. They are detailed. Their bottom line is this: "Examination of the statements in Gaza from the high officials of Hamas, the organizers of the 'march of return,' its participants, and its supporters, indicates that the march was not a mere civilian grass-roots event but a demarche supported by Hamas that was meant to rupture the border fence with Israel and advance toward towns and villages inside the State of Israel.… Throughout the operation," the MEMRI researchers noted back then, "maps and aerial photographs that were published on social networks pointed the way and the area from various places in the Strip to the settlements on the Gaza periphery…."
In one of the posts that MEMRI quoted in its report, a Hamas operative wrote, among other things: "… The moment the thousands cross the border and pour into Israel – bulldozers should arrive and remove the barbed-wire fence." The links that MEMRI attached to the document lead to large numbers of video clips. One of them belongs to members of the "fence-cutting" unit. In additional footage, that of the "breakthrough unit," you see masked young people roaring on motorcycles toward the fence and cutting it with wire cutters.
Q: Did you show these materials to Intelligence?
"It was all open to them, too, but they had a fixation. The conventional wisdom was that it's nothing. It was a crime – I have no other word to define it – to deny and disregard and soft-pedal things that Hamas itself was publishing. It verges on a lack of basic understanding of our situation vis-à-vis Hamas, vis-à-vis the Palestinians."
Q: What did they lack to gain this basic understanding?
"They lacked the willingness, and maybe they still lack it today, to acknowledge that part of the Arab world has not made peace with our existence; that some are preparing to fight us. Oslo blew up in our faces and now, too, the "ingenious" separation policy of funding a terror organization by means of a terror state."
Q: Is Qatar a terror state?
Qatar is the head of the snake. It's a disaster. To cooperate with it is to tango with terror. Qatar is where the Al Jazeera incitement channel has its headquarters. In London, there's another network – Al 'Araby – of our old friend Azmi Bishara. It also has correspondents in Israel. It's a mobilized enemy media. It broadcasts notices from the military commanders of Hamas. On the first day of the war, both networks broadcast [head of Hamas armed wing] Muhammad Deif's speech about the beginning of the war. Right then, we should have shut down both of them for good and thrown their people out of here. By the way – they haven't shut down Al Jazeera yet despite the talk; they only said they would."
Carmon, unlike some of his peers, now believes that the aerial pummeling of Gaza should continue, even for months, and that entering the Strip on the ground should be avoided. We don't know what's awaiting us there, he says: "We isolated [Hamas], we also injected money, and now we're going to send our soldiers into the underground 'metro' that was built with this money?"
Carmon urges the government to take two steps concurrently: "Publicly inform the abductees' families, the countries around the world, and all the international organizations that Israel is prepared to release all the Hamas terrorists, down to the last one, in return for all the abductees. This is our bargaining chip. We've been holding them for such a moment. It's not a Schalit deal of one for 1,000. It's the redemption of more than 200 abductees, many of them civilians. We'll deal with the terrorist murderers later, and we have the ability to deal with them provided we're determined and won't treat them the way we treated the Yahya Sinwar (the head of the Hamas in Gaza) gang, which was released in the Schalit deal.
"If we give such a notice and Hamas refuses, which it might, then we should reduce Gaza to a pile of rubble. Leave its inhabitants as refugees in tents for years. Concurrently, there's no need to beg the rulers of Qatar to mediate. Instead, we should generate the kind of massive pressure on Qatar that our intelligence services know how to apply, in order to turn it into a country where no foreigner will go. This will bring Qatar to an end, and then we will see all the abductees return."
Carmon has been an outsider for years, a real professional in his field – terror and the Arab world – of the sort to whom the system doesn't listen. Perhaps now it'll be worth listening to at least some of his advice. Several weeks ago he proved, not for the first time, that he knows what he's talking about by coming out with a prediction of war in September–October.
Netanyahu is responsible for the misconception and its outcomes. He is its father, mother, and guardian. But to be fair, it must be noted that almost all of Israel's highest political and military officials, Right and Left, and most of the media, too, lined up behind the separation policy, either as a systematic worldview or by acquiescing in it. Almost all of them backed Netanyahu when he refrained from crushing Hamas by land; almost all of them belittled the Hamasi threat. No one – even Carmon – predicted a menace of the dimensions, cruelty, and scale of this.
The former government minister Haim Ramon, who backed Netanyahu publicly in his legal affairs, urged the Prime Minister to resign and go home this week. He, too, however, noted for the sake of fairness that, in the Hamas context, the "the whole political system was 'Bibi-ist' because since 2009 all the political leaders, Coalition and Opposition, adopted the misconception of coexistence and supported it wholeheartedly." This includes Yaalon and Barak, who, he says, "are now shirking their immense responsibility for strengthening Hamas."
Thus it seems, after the Disengagement and the Schalit deal, Netanyahu's separation policy and his conception of preserving Hamas, backed by many, form the third side of the triangle that made a decisive contribution to the infrastructure of evil and the rapid growth of Hamas-Gaza until the massacre of the Seventh of October.
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