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Dave Smith on Idea that Israeli Leader Netanyahu Propped Up Hamas

Filed with Key Arguments (MOC) · Related: 60.1 Israel-Palestine · Sources, Books & Media (MOC)

  • Benjamin Netanyahu quote (TRUE)

    • Dave Smith Claims:
      • Called narrative shattering
      • 3 people verify from Likud
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      • Reddit - Dive into anything
        • Bad policy since its a misconception you can reason with an Islamist terrorist group and that they’d put the interests of their people over Jihad.
        • The left complains about a blockade already, if Netanyahu did a preliminary attack instead of allowing aid to enter through Qatar they’d say that was the reason Oct 7th happened.
    • RESEARCH
      • For years, Netanyahu propped up Hamas. Now it’s blown up in our faces | The Times of Israel
        • Prevent Abbas establishing Palestinian state
        • Increasing work permits
          • Rose to 20,000 by Jan. 2023
        • Preserve calm
        • Since 2014, Netanyahu turned blind eye to incendiary balloons and rocket fire from Gaza
        • “Israel has allowed suitcases holding millions in Qatari cash to enter Gaza through its crossings since 2018, in order to maintain its fragile ceasefire with the Hamas rulers of the Strip.”
      • Netanyahu may have used it to keep the peace, yet attempting to undermine a two-state solution may be an issue and look bad
      • Netanyahu: Money to Hamas part of strategy to keep Palestinians divided - The Jerusalem Post
        • broader strategy to keep Hamas and the Palestinian Authority separate
        • Netanyahu explained that, in the past, the PA transferred the millions of dollars to Hamas in Gaza. He argued that it was better for Israel to serve as the pipeline to ensure the funds don’t go to terrorism.
        • The Blue and White Party’s platform calls to stop allowing the transfer of funds to Hamas, calling it mafia-style “protection” payments.
        • Yisrael Beytenu leader Avigdor Liberman, who resigned as head of the Defense Ministry over Gaza policies, said on Saturday that the payments are a “miserable decision,” marking “the first time Israel is funding terrorism against itself.”
        • “We Gaza-border residents are paying the price for the lack of policy and the arrogance in facing terror,” he said.
      • In jab at Hamas, PA stops paying Gaza’s electricity bills
        • regaining a measure of control over Gaza could empower Abbas politically as Israel and the Palestinians await a widely expected push by U.S. President Donald Trump for a revival of peace efforts that stalled in 2014.
      • How Israel Secretly Propped Up Hamas - The New York Times
        • Allowing the payments — billions of dollars over roughly a decade — was a gamble by Mr. Netanyahu that a steady flow of money would maintain peace in Gaza, the eventual launching point of the Oct. 7 attacks, and keep Hamas focused on governing, not fighting.
        • The payments were part of a string of decisions by Israeli political leaders, military officers and intelligence officials — all based on the fundamentally flawed assessment that Hamas was neither interested in nor capable of a large-scale attack.
        • But Israeli intelligence officials now believe that the money had a role in the success of the Oct. 7 attacks, if only because the donations allowed Hamas to divert some of its own budget toward military operations.
        • Israeli intelligence has long assessed that Qatar uses other channels to secretly fund Hamas’ military wing, an accusation that Qatar’s government has denied.
        • Multiple Israeli governments enabled money to go to Gaza for humanitarian reasons, not to strengthen Hamas, an official in Mr. Netanyahu’s office said in a statement. He added: “Prime Minister Netanyahu acted to weaken Hamas significantly. He led three powerful military operations against Hamas which killed thousands of terrorists and senior Hamas commanders.”
        • “The conception of Netanyahu over a decade and a half was that if we buy quiet and pretend the problem isn’t there, we can wait it out and it will fade away,” said Eyal Hulata, Israel’s national security adviser from July 2021 until the beginning of this year.
        • This strategy was buttressed by repeated intelligence assessments that Hamas was neither interested in nor capable of launching a significant attack inside Israel.
        • The administrations of three American presidents — Barack Obama, Donald J. Trump and Joseph R. Biden Jr. — broadly supported having the Qataris playing a direct role in funding Gaza operations.
        • Avigdor Lieberman, months after becoming defense minister in 2016, wrote a secret memo to Mr. Netanyahu and the Israeli military chief of staff. He said Hamas was slowly building its military abilities to attack Israel, and he argued that Israel should strike first.
          • Israel’s goal is “to ensure that the next confrontation between Israel and Hamas will be the final showdown,” he wrote in the memo, dated Dec. 21, 2016, a copy of which was reviewed by The Times. A pre-emptive strike, he said, could remove most of the “leadership of the military wing of Hamas.”
          • Mr. Netanyahu rejected the plan, preferring containment to confrontation.
        • Shin Bet, the country’s domestic security service, would monitor the list of recipients to try to ensure that members of Hamas’s military wing would not directly benefit.
        • “For Netanyahu, there is only one thing that is really important: to be in power at any cost,” he said. “To stay in power, he preferred to pay for tranquillity.”
        • All sides reached a compromise: United Nations agencies would distribute the Qatari money rather than Mr. Emadi. Some of the money went directly to buy fuel for the power plant in Gaza.
        • Just weeks before Hamas launched the deadly Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, the head of Mossad arrived in Doha, Qatar, for a meeting with Qatari officials.
      • Netanyahu: Don’t accuse me of boosting Hamas with Qatari money – POLITICO
        • “It’s a big lie that I wanted to build [up] Hamas. Ridiculous,” Netanyahu said in an interview with Axel Springer, POLITICO’s parent company. “You don’t go to war three times with Hamas or do major military operations if you want to build up Hamas.”
        • “Gaza was on the brink of collapse because they had no resources, they had no money, and the PA refused to give Hamas any money. Bibi saved them. Bibi made a deal with Qatar and they started to move millions and millions of dollars to Gaza.”
        • Netanyahu on Tuesday, however, dismissed those charges, claiming he only allowed Qatari money to flow into Gaza to avoid a humanitarian catastrophe, not to strengthen the arm of the administration there.
          • “We wanted to avoid a civilian humanitarian collapse — disease, rampant hunger and other things that would have created an impossible humanitarian situation,” he said. “That’s why successive Israeli governments allowed this money to go in, not in order to strengthen Hamas. We didn’t want to strengthen Hamas at all. We wanted to weaken it and degrade its capabilities as far as we could.”
      • A Brief History of the Netanyahu-Hamas Alliance - Israel News - Haaretz.com
        • Thus, Netanyahu indirectly funded Hamas after Abbas decided to stop providing it with funds that he knew would end up being used for terrorism against him, his policies and his people. It’s important not to ignore that Hamas used this money to buy the means through which Israelis have been murdered for years.’
        • In parallel, from a security standpoint, since Operation Protective Edge in 2014, Netanyahu has been guided by a policy that almost completely ignored the terrorism of the rockets and the incendiary kites and balloons. Occasionally, the media has been exposed to a dog-and-pony show, when such weapons were captured, but not more than that.
        • Netanyahu’s nightmare was the collapse of the Hamas regime – something that Israel could have expedited, albeit for a difficult price. One of the proofs for this claim was given during Operation Protective Edge.
          • At the time, Netanyahu leaked to the media the contents of a presentation that the military had made to the security cabinet laying out the potential repercussions of conquering Gaza. The premier knew that the secret document, which noted that occupying Gaza would cost the lives of hundreds of soldiers, would create an atmosphere of opposition to a widespread ground invasion.
          • Let this sink in. Netanyahu leaked a “top secret” document in order to thwart the military and diplomatic position of the cabinet, which sought to defeat Hamas with various means. We should heed what Avigdor Lieberman told Yedioth Ahronoth, in an interview published just before the October 7 assault, that Netanyahu “continuously thwarted all the targeted assassinations.”
        • Egypt and the United States supported reconciliation and worked to achieve it. Netanyahu totally opposed the idea, asserting repeatedly that “reconciliation between Hamas and the PLO makes achieving peace harder.” Of course, Netanyahu didn’t pursue peace, which wasn’t on the agenda in any way back then. His position only served Hamas.
        • Netanyahu knew, Barak added, “that it’s easier with Hamas to explain to Israelis that there is no one to sit with and no one to talk to. If the PA strengthens… then there will be someone to talk to.”
      • Top Secret: In a 2018 letter, Netanyahu asks Qatar to fund Hamas
        • The 2014 war in Gaza was the turning point. The U.S., UN, Israel and Qatar decided soon after the war to set up a new system in which $30 million would be delivered to the coastal strip by Doha each month. Some $10 million was to buy fuel from Israel, needed to operate Gaza’s power station, $10 million to pay the salaries of government employees, and the final $10 million was to be given in $100 stipends to some 100,000 Gazan families in need.
        • Until 2018, Qatari funds were not given to Gaza on a regular basis and delivered only occasionally with approval from Israel and the Palestinian Authority. “The PA said it would no longer agree to fund Hamas and rather than let the terror group collapse, Israel decided on an alternative route for its funding,” says Dr. Udi Levi, who was the Mossad official charged with fighting the funding of terror until 2016. “That was part of Israel’s policy to buy quiet. Hamas demanded that the $30 million per month would be delivered directly to the ruling faction. It was naïve to believe Hamas would provide the money to the population in Gaza.”
        • Then-U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Steve Mnuchin, who was in charge of finance for the campaign to reelect Donald Trump and who is Jewish, agreed to a request from Netanyahu and sent an additional letter to Doha, this time from Washington, in effect, ensuring Qatar that the funding of Hamas would not be considered funding terror.
        • Ultimately the letters from Netanyahu and Mnuchin satisfied the Qataris and the first instalment in cash was delivered on November 8, 2014, and the rest is history that is still unfolding.
      • Qatar sent millions to Gaza for years – with Israel’s backing. Here’s what we know about the controversial deal | CNN
        • When did the Qatari payments start?
          • In 2018, Qatar began making monthly payments to the Gaza Strip. Some $15 million were sent into Gaza in cash-filled suitcases – delivered by the Qataris through Israeli territory after months of negotiation with Israel.
          • The payments started after the Palestinian Authority (PA), the Palestinian government in the Israeli occupied West Bank that is a rival of Hamas, decided to cut salaries of government employees in Gaza in 2017, an Israeli government source with knowledge of the matter told CNN at the time.
          • The PA opposed the Qatari funding at the time, which Hamas said was meant for the payment of public salaries as well as medical purposes.
          • Israel approved the deal in a security cabinet meeting in August 2018, when Netanyahu was serving his previous tenure as premier.
          • Even then, Netanyahu was criticized by his coalition partners for the deal and for being too soft on Hamas.
      • The long and bitter relationship between Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas : NPR
        • Al-Omari advised the Palestinian negotiating team back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when serious talks were taking place. Hamas, he recalled, repeatedly undermined those talks.
        • “Every time we would make progress in negotiations, Hamas would blow up a bus or a cafe,” he said.
        • There have been no serious negotiations for a long time. Hamas has controlled Gaza for 17 years, and Netanyahu has been Israel’s prime minister for more than 13 of the past 15 years.

  • “I have no partner in peace”

    • 1979 - Camp David with Egypt
    • 1988 - Yasser Arafat rejected terrorism
      • Recognized Israel right to exist 67 borders
      • Right to Gaza and West Bank
      • Ultimate compromise
      • Original UN partition plan rejected by Arabs for good reasons
        • 56% land to Jews, and 90% of landowners are Arab
      • Accepting 22% now
    • 90s - Oslo Accords
      • 1996 - Netanyahu prime minister
      • A Clean Break - A New Strategy for Securing the Realm
        • Written to Netanyahu not US Presidents
        • Clean break from peace strategy
        • Agreements with broader Arab world instead of P.
        • Recommended regime change in Iraq
        • Seems so much that people find one letter or quote and then base an entire conspiracy around it, that one letter is more important than a ton of contradictory evidence

  • The Israeli Lobby book

  • AIPAC

  • Bush letter

  • Bankroll Israel