Filed with Sources, Books & Media (MOC) · Related: 60.1 Israel-Palestine · Key Arguments (MOC)
1:23 PM · May 21, 2024 podcastmentions.com - books mentioned on podcasts
‘Dave Smith: ‘Benjamin Netanyahu’s plan was to prop up Hamas’ says Israeli leader propped up Hamas, confirmed by 3 eyewitnesses in his own party, corroborated by multiple Israeli newspapers and even The New York Times.’
3:25 PM · Jul 9, 2024 Noam Dworman
Haviv Rettig Gur snippet from podcast
10:33 AM · Jul 10, 2024 Dave Smith
Oh come the fuck on, Noam.
So, the claim is that Netanyahu, who opposes a two state solution and is even on tape bragging about the poison pills he put in the peace process, transferred money to Hamas, but it wasn’t to thwart a Palestinian state, even though he said it was. That was just him being tricky. Trying to fool right wingers. Well, I guess the strategy worked so well that he fooled just about everyone in high level government positions in Israel!
Even that hard right winger Ehud Barak was duped! “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,”
I suppose Bezalel Smotrich was in on this facade when he told the hard right wingers at Haaretz “The PA is a liability and Hamas is an asset. On the international playing field in this game of delegitimization, think about for a second, the PA is a liability and Hamas is an asset. It’s a terrorist organization. Nobody will recognize it, nobody will give it status at the ICC [International Criminal Court] and nobody will let them push resolutions at the UN [causing us to] need an American veto.”
As I criticized Coleman for in the video that you are quote tweeting, you guys always pretend that we are relying on one dubious quote from Netanyahu but that’s just not true. I just picked these two but there are dozens from across the political spectrum at the highest levels.
11:30 AM · Jul 10, 2024 Noam Dworman
Don’t “come the fuck on” me. This is the opinion of @havivrettiggur, a despiser of Netanyahu, who knows 100,000 times more about Israel and Israeli politics than you and I can ever hope to.
You should understand -as you well understand in America, that Israel has politics. Barak is to Netanyahu as Biden is to Trump. How much nuance do our leaders allow for their opponent’s positions? How fair are they when they describe each other’s policies? You should know better. And that’s without even seeing the full context of Barak’s quote. But you love quotes. And you think you can dispose of an entire thoughtful and informed argument with a quote and a few ellipses.
We know (you know) that Lapid (liberal opposition PM) kept the same policy. Why?
In fact, here is Blinken praising Lapid for allowing Qatari money into Gaza. https://timesofisrael.com/qatar-says-ready-to-start-gaza-aid-infusion-including-for-hamas-employees/
And Gantz, who once opposed it, also acceded to it when he was in an accountable position.
Here is the Israeli Policy Forum (“committed to a viable two-state solution) noting that giving Hamas incentives for calm was good policy: Acknowledging the inherent downsides in giving Hamas more opportunities to divert construction materials and to tax money that are now coming into Gaza, there are two strong arguments not only to maintain the course that the Israeli government has taken over the past year but to ease things even more. One, expanding the number of Palestinians in Gaza who benefit from Israeli entry permits, easing access to basic materials and goods, and providing more reliable electricity will make it even harder in the future for Hamas to risk having all of it rolled back for the sake of being able to assert its resistance credentials with rocket volleys that are mostly neutralized by Iron Dome anyway. The more that Gaza becomes inhabitable, the more public pressure that will build up on Hamas to keep its behavior in check, which matters even to a terrorist group that governs in a starkly authoritarian manner. https://israelpolicyforum.org/2022/08/11/proof-of-concept-for-a-better-gaza-policy/
I know you’ve got every issue figured out, and every issue is easy. Just be glad you’ll never find yourself in charge of anything. Comeuppance is something you’ll never have to worry about.
BTW, Abbas cannot make peace with Israel because (if he’s even interested) Iran/Hamas will move to kill him the second he does. In 2014, Abbas wouldn’t even respond to President Obama’s ideas. According to Condoleeza Rice, he gave President Bush the exact same treatment in 2008.
The Israeli right is concerned about a momentum that ends with Iranian rockets being launched from the hills of the West Bank and Jerusalem. Do you have a plan to prevent that? So, if they do want to prevent “unity,” even that idea, which you might disagree with, is something that deserves a more respectful consideration. You think it was ridiculous for us to imagine reforming Afghanistan right? They feel the same way about the people who wrote the PLO and Hamas charters, and pay pensions to the families of suicide bombers. Only, Israelis have their children’s lives hanging in the balance.
Don’t be so callow. The world isn’t as simple as your clever quips would have us believe.
12:12 PM · Jul 10, 2024 Dave Smith
Callow? Really Noam? So much of this can just be dismissed. “He knows more than you!” Ok great, he’s still wrong.
“I know you’ve got every issue figured out, and every issue is easy. Just be glad you’ll never find yourself in charge of anything. Comeuppance is something you’ll never have to worry about.”
What the fuck does that mean and how does it not also apply to you? Are you in charge of something?
Yes, I love quotes. You got me! That’s a totally reasonable cop out for quotes from Israeli leaders across the board admitting to what they were doing.
The bottom line is this: Israel has had a blockade of Gaza for 18 years. They limit the cookies, potato chips, antibiotics and anesthesia that can come in, all because they claim it has “duel use.”
But suitcases full of cash to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars going straight to Hamas is fine. No “duel use” there!
Why would Israel do this? Well, they all tell you in their own words: it was to thwart the creation of a Palestinian state. But there I go loving quotes again.
This isn’t me being simplistic or claiming to know everything. I’m not suggesting anything is “easy” You are just defending the indefensible because you start from the conclusion that Israel is justified and work backwards from there.
12:16 PM · Jul 10, 2024 Dave Smith
Yep, you either have to prop up a terrorist organization or slaughter the civilian population. It’s unfortunate that those are the only two conceivable options.
12:33 PM · Jul 10, 2024 Noam Dworman
I don’t think his lays a finger on me. You avoid every one of my key logical points.
As for me “justifying” something, I had no idea what his answer was going to be. I’ve actually never heard him do anything but criticize Netanyahu before. So even that completely misses.
He makes a lot of factual and logical assertions, why not refute them with evidence? Barak, Netanyahu’s political nemesis and adversary, echoing your criticism, in a quote without context, is not the kind of counter-argument that’s appropriate to such a detailed case. Especially when, as a Netanyahu critic, @havivrettiggur he’s offering an “admission against interest” (as the lawyers say), and therefore might have more credibility than the critique of a political foe/counterpart in a long and well-known rivalry.
Invite Haviv for an interview, he’ll be tougher than @RealCandaceO (Who you never quote these days!)
12:52 PM · Jul 10, 2024 Noam Dworman
The phrase “prop up” implies an intervention into something that would otherwise fall. Is it your position, after 9 months of this war, that Hamas would have fallen if only Israel had been tougher?
With aid, perhaps we’re propping up Ukraine. But are we propping up Israel?
1:19 PM · Jul 10, 2024 Noam Dworman
https://haaretz.com/israel-news/2019-01-08/ty-article/.premium/israeli-defense-officials-reject-calls-to-halt-flow-of-qatari-funds-into-gaza/0000017f-e9bb-da9b-a1ff-edffad8b0000
https://timesofisrael.com/mossad-said-to-asks-qatar-to-keep-funneling-cash-to-gaza-in-deescalation-effort/
Here @ComicDaveSmith more evidence that the policy was accepted all across the Israeli government, intelligence, and defense sectors.
1:23 PM · Jul 10, 2024 Noam Dworman
At least when you make these arguments, @ComicDaveSmith have the intellectual forthrightness to explain that Netanyahu’s policy was supported all across the Israeli political spectrum. As I understand it, it was the far-right that needed the most cajoling (they were the ones who wanted Gaza to suffer).
1:35 PM · Jul 10, 2024 Dave Smith
Noam, why are you mixing these non points with personal insults? Wow, some defense officials and Mossad agreed with Netanyahu’s plan to fund Hamas. How am I being intellectually dishonest by not mentioning that?
Also, again, you’re just wrong. Many right wingers AND liberals rejected the idea of propping up Hamas because, ya know, it’s fucking insane.
11:41 AM · Jul 4, 2024 WikiLeaks
”Israel would be happy if Hamas took over Gaza because the IDF could then deal with Gaza as a hostile state” - Israeli Defense Intelligence Chief Amos Yadlin in 2007
https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/07TELAVIV1733_a.html
3:51 PM · Jul 10, 2024 Haviv Rettig Gur
Hi @ComicDaveSmith.
This is long. I’m sorry for that. It’s a real answer, not some quote-mining or Twitter-y retort. I think you’re honestly challenging my point. So I’m honestly responding.
Yes, Netanyahu brags that he alone prevented a Palestinian state - just as he once bragged he’d be the one to establish a Palestinian state. He also brags that his “propping up of Hamas” was a clever rightist ploy to prevent Palestinian unity. But he several times ran election campaigns on the explicit promise that he’d topple Hamas in Gaza.
So which Netanyahu should we believe?
The answer, alas, is neither. He has no specific policy. It’s political maneuvers all the way down. But here’s what we can know. The policy of containing and stabilizing Hamas in Gaza is older than Netanyahu. It began with Olmert. And it was pieced together over the years as much by leftists as by rightists.
Ironically, the same Ehud Barak you quoted here was Israel’s defense minister from 2009 to 2013, and was instrumental in putting this policy in place and developing the strategic thinking behind it. Before Barak thought Netanyahu was “propping up Hamas” to prevent a two-state peace, Barak was “containing Hamas” in the hope of enabling a return to a two-state peace. The policy itself was identical.
Barak is today arguing that Netanyahu may be pursuing the same policy, but with opposite intentions. That may be, but it’s the same policy nonetheless. And alas, Barak is probably the only Israeli politician who’s less trusted by the public than the wily Netanyahu, because he’s exactly the same kind of dissembling chameleon.
And that’s the point. To understand Israel’s containment policy, you can’t start at the end, as though Israeli leaders have some unique gift to shape reality precisely to their liking and always intended this very outcome. To actually understand it, you have to put yourself in the Israeli government’s shoes back then.
If you’re the Israeli government in 2009 or 2014 or 2019, what options are available to you in Gaza?
Hamas is massively invested in building tunnels to make any future Israeli attack impossibly costly for Israel by forcing the IDF to go through the civilian population if it ever tries to get to Hamas. So war on any serious scale - the kind demanded by Netanyahu’s far-right allies over the years - is off the table.
Hamas isn’t appeasable, can’t moderate and has no interest in any political process. That’s a consensus view among Israelis for a simple reason: Its long history of terrorist assaults on civilians specifically to stop peace efforts. It bombed Jerusalem buses just before the 1996 election and successfully tilted the election away from the left by the narrowest margin in Israeli electoral history, all but freezing Oslo for three years. It drove the Second Intifada’s wave of 140 suicide bombings that crashed the Camp David process and shattered the Israeli left for a generation.
No serious Israeli thinks Hamas’s terrorism is about occupation. That’s true even among Israelis who desperately want to end the occupation, and those who saw the first-intifada stone-throwing protestors as protesting occupation. Hamas, they understand, is different. The suicide bombings of Hamas were never about ending occupation, they were about the danger, as Hamas perceived it for two generations, that the peace process might succeed.
So what are your options as a government? War in Gaza with devastating civilian costs and untenable costs for Israel? Lifting the blockade and giving Hamas free access to ally regimes’ flow of funding and resources?
Or, as they finally decided, left-wing leaders and right-wing ones alike across 17 years of Israeli governments, would you pursue a containment policy that attempts to allow a Gazan economy to exist while minimizing Hamas’s capacity to prepare for never-ending war?
Or put another way, would you have prevented the Qatari money from entering? Would you have risked Gaza’s economy crashing, a humanitarian crisis, and the high probability that a collapsing Hamas regime, in its desperation, might trigger a great war?
No, Dave, Netanyahu’s attempt to paint his relatively moderate past as a sneaky, 13-year far-right plot is not the reality. It’s a pretense meant to serve his present-day political troubles. That’s how nearly every Israeli, including in Likud, explains it.
Smotrich, for what it’s worth, was being completely honest. He believes every word in that quote.
One final comment: Be wary of quote-mining. You got these quotes from activists who spend their time sifting through texts to find what they need, often decontextualized and never the full picture.
If I did that to Palestinian leaders, I could prove to you that they’re pretty much all Nazis. Literally.
No, they’re not Nazis. Nazism doesn’t explain their predicament, their opinions, their responses to the problems they face. But plenty of central Palestinian leaders and ideologues, particularly in Hamas but also in Fatah, have flirted with Nazi ideas over the years. The paper trail is long enough to convince a great many Israelis that there’s a deep connection. It’s still a misreading of Palestinian strategy and thinking.
Quote-mining isn’t a path to understanding. It’s a path to bias confirmation.
Sorry again for the length. I have more to say. Barak’s actual critique of Netanyahu is more sophisticated and serious than the quote you brought. But that’s for another time.
6:01 PM · Jul 10, 2024 Dave Smith
Hi Haviv, thanks for responding. There’s a lot here so let’s narrow it down for now. Let’s focus on the time period roughly from 2007-10/7/23.
Your claim is that the strategy of transferring money directly to Hamas was for appeasement, to make sure Gaza wasn’t a humanitarian disaster and the economy didn’t collapse. My claim is that the money was transferred to keep Hamas in power so that the Palestinians would be divided and the talks of a Palestinian state would die. Let’s examine both.
The problem with your claim seems to be that Gaza was already a humanitarian disaster. The economy had already crashed and directly due to Israeli policy. There was a blockade on Gaza for this entire period. All types of aid was prevented from going in, as you know. Sugar, potatoes, antibiotics, anesthesia as well as much more, was all turned away because Israel claimed it had “dual use.”
Do brief cases filled with cash to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars not have “dual use?” How is that not the most dangerous aid coming in? If the goal was just avoiding a humanitarian catastrophe, why not allow the much safer aid from global humanitarian groups to come in?
This clearly doesn’t make sense. It’s the riskiest strategy to achieve the goals you claim, but it makes perfect sense if the goal is to keep Hamas in power. I also have in my favor that THEY ADMIT IT!
I understand your point about quote mining. It can be used in a dishonest way. The same is true for dismissing damning quotes as “quote mining.”
If you had a confession from a murderer, my guess is you would submit it to the court as major evidence and not dismiss it as quote mining.
As far as putting myself in the position of the Israeli government, yeah it’s difficult. Dominating, occupying and blockading a group of people for 60 years has its challenges.
MY THOUGHTS