Hamas, ISIS and ... Benjamin Netanyahu?
Cynical pragmatism can carry its own risks
President Biden in his address this past Wednesday on the Israel-Gaza conflict gave Hamas the rhetorical status of a prime enemy in what we used to call the GWOT (global war on terrorism): “Hamas committed atrocities that recall the worst ravages of ISIS, unleashing pure unadulterated evil upon the world.”1
It doesn’t get much worse than “pure unadulterated evil”!
Few would disagree with that characterization for Hamas’ October 7 deadly attack on Israeli civilians.
But Good vs. Evil declarations are always problematic in foreign policy, since any kind of compromise with, or even analysis of the motives of “pure unadulterated evil” can only be bad. Or evil, in the Manichean version that Biden used.
To his credit, Biden did offer this advice:
But I caution this: While you feel that rage, don’t be consumed by it.
After 9/11, we were enraged in the United States. And while we sought justice and got justice, we also made mistakes.
Dani Bar On looks at the polemical claim that Hamas in Gaza is like ISIS, the Islamic State. He emphasizes that it’s important to actually try to understand one’s enemies, including Hamas:
One of the biggest failings, many of them believe, is the Israeli public’s profound ignorance about the environment it lives in. Today, as in 1973, says Dr. Michael Milshtein, the Israeli public just doesn’t know its enemy – its statements, power dynamics, factions and intrigues. The public doesn’t have even minimal proficiency in history and doesn’t speak basic Arabic. As a result, it projects its own logic on the other.
In an almost prophetic piece published in Haaretz just two weeks before the Hamas attack, Milshtein wrote that “learning the language and culture of the other is no less important than sophisticated logic, which is usually based on Western mindsets, or on technological supremacy centering on artificial intelligence and Big Data … relying on [wrong] assumptions tends to end in a traumatic surprise that requires a hasty response, inevitably from an inferior strategic position.”2 [my emphasis]
Natanyahu and Hamas: a cynically practical relationship with “pure unadulterated evil”
So what are we to make of the following assertion of Jonathan Freedland?
Not for nothing did the scholar Hussein Ibish write this week: “In trying to fulfil the pledge to ‘eliminate Hamas’, Israel could well deliver everything Hamas is counting on.”
That notion might seem counterintuitive and yet, when it comes to Netanyahu himself, it is unexpectedly on-brand. Prime minister for most of the last 15 years, Netanyahu has been an enabler of Hamas, building up the organisation, letting it rule Gaza unhindered – save for brief, periodic military operations against it – and allowing funds from its Gulf patrons to keep it flush. Netanyahu liked the idea of the Palestinians as a house divided – Fatah in the West Bank, Hamas in Gaza – because it allowed him to insist that there was no Palestinian partner he could do business with. That meant no peace process, no prospect of a Palestinian state, and no demand for Israeli territorial concessions.
None of this was a secret. In March 2019, Netanyahu told his Likud colleagues: “Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas … This is part of our strategy – to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.”3
It’s true. Israel boosted Hamas for years against the rival Palestinian group, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which runs the West Bank government, the Palestinian Authority.
This is not some kind of “gotcha” point. Cynically pragmatic alliances are nothing new in international politics!
Tal Scheinder describes it this way in The Times of Israel:
For the last 14 years, while implementing a divide-and-conquer policy vis-a-vis the West Bank and Gaza, “Abu Yair” (“Yair’s father,” in Arabic, as Netanyahu called himself while campaigning in the Arab community before one recent election) has resisted any attempt, military or diplomatic, that might bring an end to the Hamas regime. In practice, since the Cast Lead operation in late 2008 and early 2009, during the Olmert era, Hamas’ rule has not faced any genuine military threat. On the contrary: The group has been supported by the Israeli prime minister, and funded with his assistance. When Netanyahu declared in April 2019, as he has after every other round of fighting, that “we have restored deterrence with Hamas” and that “we have blocked the main supply routes,” he was lying through his teeth.
For over a decade, Netanyahu has lent a hand, in various ways, to the growing military and political power of Hamas. Netanyahu is the one who turned Hamas from a terror organization with few resources into a semi-state body. Releasing Palestinian prisoners, allowing cash transfers, as the Qatari envoy comes and goes to Gaza as he pleases, agreeing to the import of a broad array of goods, construction materials in particular, with the knowledge that much of the material will be designated for terrorism and not for building civilian infrastructure, increasing the number of work permits in Israel for Palestinian workers from Gaza, and more. All these developments created symbiosis between the flowering of fundamentalist terrorism and preservation of Netanyahu’s rule.4 [my emphasis]
Now Netanyahu’s ploy has come back to bite Israel hard.
He has stressed his image as the protector of Israel against Palestinians. But, contrary to what one would normally expect in a country that had received as shock like the October 7 attack by Hamas, Netanyahu doesn’t seem to be getting a huge rally-round-the-flag boost in his popularity. In fact, his failure to anticipate that attack and his government’s perceived lack of preparedness in responding to it is added to his very unpopular attempt at what critics call a “constitutional coup” to drastically undercut the independence of Israel’s judiciary.
The basic concept for Israel becoming involved in promoting Hamas was a kind of the-enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend calculation. The PLO was the most popular political force representing the Palestinians. Promoting a more radical, Islamist group like Hamas, which was one of many spinoffs from the Muslim Brotherhood, was meant (from Israel’s viewpoint) to divide the Palestinians.
By agreeing to the Oslo Accords of 1993 - which provided President Bill Clinton with one of his most iconic photo ops, the PLO signaled its willingness to pursue a “two-state” solution, long the policy preference of the US. But not of hardliners and the settler movement in Israel. “Although the goal of the accords was to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by May 1999, the complexities that underlay decades of hostilities ultimately derailed the process and left the most challenging issues to smolder in the 21st century.”5 [my emphasis]
Yitzhak Rabin, Bill Clinton, Yasser Arafat (1993)
As Adam Roz describes it:
For the last 14 years, while implementing a divide-and-conquer policy vis-a-vis the West Bank and Gaza, “Abu Yair” (“Yair’s father,” in Arabic, as Netanyahu called himself while campaigning in the Arab community before one recent election) has resisted any attempt, military or diplomatic, that might bring an end to the Hamas regime. In practice, since the Cast Lead operation in late 2008 and early 2009, during the [Prime Minister Ehud] Olmert era [2006-2009], Hamas’ rule has not faced any genuine military threat. On the contrary: The group has been supported by the Israeli prime minister, and funded with his assistance. When Netanyahu declared in April 2019, as he has after every other round of fighting, that “we have restored deterrence with Hamas” and that “we have blocked the main supply routes,” he was lying through his teeth.
For over a decade, Netanyahu has lent a hand, in various ways, to the growing military and political power of Hamas. Netanyahu is the one who turned Hamas from a terror organization with few resources into a semi-state body. Releasing Palestinian prisoners, allowing cash transfers, as the Qatari envoy comes and goes to Gaza as he pleases, agreeing to the import of a broad array of goods, construction materials in particular, with the knowledge that much of the material will be designated for terrorism and not for building civilian infrastructure, increasing the number of work permits in Israel for Palestinian workers from Gaza, and more. All these developments created symbiosis between the flowering of fundamentalist terrorism and preservation of Netanyahu’s rule.6 [my emphasis]
Israelis have good reason to question the competence of Bibi Netanyahu in security matters!
To add what should be obvious: none of this justifies illegal actions by Hamas in killing civilians.
Natanyahu and peace in Israel-Palestine are mutually exclusive things
It’s also obvious that in looking at this situation, everyone should be aware of what a nasty piece of work Benjamin Netanyahu is. The many Israelis who have been actively protesting his “constitutional coup” against the independent judiciary are very aware of it.
The complex relationship of Hamas - an offshoot of the larger Islamist movement, the Muslim Brotherhood - and the Israelis is part of a larger and longer history of the US and Israel encouraging Islamist parties to offset left-secular movements in the Arab world like the Baath movement in Iraq and Syria.7
But Netanyahu’s approach to security has always been to emphasize his role as the protector of Israeli Jewish citizens while pursuing policies that that make both peace impossible in pursuit of Israeli control of the occupied territories. Yuval Diskin, a former head of the Israeli domestic intelligence service Shin Bet, wrote of Netanyahu’s policies back in 2014:
The illusion that “price tag” attacks are just a few slogans on the walls and not really racism; the illusion that everything can be solved with a little more force; the illusion that the Palestinians will just accept all that we are doing in the West Bank and not respond, despite their rage, frustration and worsening economic situation; the illusion that the international community will not impose sanctions on us; that Israel's frustrated Arab citizens will not ultimately take to the streets over the lack of treatment of their problems; and the Israeli public will keep submissively accepting the government's incompetent response to the social gaps that its policies have only worsened, when corruption continues to eat away at all that is good, and so on and so on.8
Diskin concluded with a grave warning that there could still be worse to come.
Anyone who thinks that this can be sustained is making a huge mistake. What has been happening in recent days could be much worse - even if the situation temporarily calms down. Do not be fooled for one moment, because the massive internal pressure will still be there, the combustible fumes in the air will not dissipate, and if we do not dispel them, there will be an even more serious situation.
Later that year, Netanyhu’s government launched Operation Pillar of Defense, i.e., a dramatic military operation in Gaza.
In 2005, Israel removed the Jewish settlements there and included what the Israeli government likes to call a “withdrawal” from Gaza.9 It did withdraw the Israeli settlements and the forces protecting them. But Gaza is still officially an occupied territory and Israel is responsible for administering it under international law. Something to keep in mind when Israeli spokespeople right now talk about how Hamas is responsible for governance in Gaza.
Remarks by President Biden on the October 7th Terrorist Attacks and the Resilience of the State of Israel and its People - Tel Aviv, Israel 10/18/2023. White House website. <https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2023/10/18/remarks-by-president-biden-on-the-october-7th-terrorist-attacks-and-the-resilience-of-the-state-of-israel-and-its-people-tel-aviv-israel/> (Accessed: 2023-21-10).
Bar On, Dani (2023): Is Hamas Really Like ISIS? Experts Explain. Haaretz 10/19/2023. <https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-10-19/ty-article-magazine/.highlight/is-hamas-really-like-isis-experts-explain/0000018b-493f-d1fd-a59f-edbfbe090000#:~:text=Other%20experts%20agree%20that%20the,the%20population%20in%20other%20ways.> (Accessed: 2023-20-10).
Freedland, Jonathan (2023): Warning: Benjamin Netanyahu is walking right into Hamas’s trap. The Guardian 10/20/2023.<https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/oct/20/benjamin-netanyahu-hamas-israel-prime-minister> (Accessed: 2023-21-10).
Schneider, Tal (2023): For years, Netanyahu propped up Hamas. Now it’s blown up in our faces. Times of Israel 10/08/2023. <https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-yearsnetanyahu-propped-up-hamas-now-its-blown-up-in-our-faces/> (Accessed: 2023-20-10).
Editors (2023): Oslo Accords. Britannica Online 10/08/2023. <https://www.britannica.com/topic/Oslo-Accords> (Accessed: 2023-21-10).
Raz, Adam (2023): A Brief History of the Netanyahu-Hamas Alliance. Haaretz 10/20/2023. <https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-10-20/ty-article-opinion/.premium/a-brief-history-of-the-netanyahu-hamas-alliance/0000018b-47d9-d242-abef-57ff1be90000> (Accessed: 2023-20-10).
Dreyfuss, Robert (2005): Devil’s Game: How the United States helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam, esp. 190-213 (Israel’s Islamists”). New York: Henry Holt & Co.
Azuly, Moran (2014) Diskin: Delusional government brought us to this security deterioration. Ynet News 05/07/2014. <https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4538232,00.html> (Accessed: 2023-21-10).
Edited to clarify the 2005 date of the “withdrawal” from Gaza.