Netanyahu and Hamas: A symbiotic relationship that costs Israel dearly

 

Associated Press interviews Mousa Abu Marzouk in US detention. Source: YouTube

By James M. Dorsey

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Hamas political bureau member Mousa Abu Marzouk knows a thing or two about Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s decades-long support for the group.

In fact, Mr. Abu Marzouk is Exhibit A.

Thanks to Mr. Netanyahu, Mr. Abu Marzouk operates from the luxury of Doha instead of rotting in an Israeli jail since 1996 when Mr. Netanyahu first became prime minister.

In a move never adequately justified, Mr. Netanyahu, in his first year in office, dropped a request by his predecessor, Shimon Peres, for Mr. Abu Marzouk's extradition from the United States, where he was a resident.

US authorities arrested Mr. Abu Marzouk after putting him on a terrorism watch list. Various Hamas leaders, including Ahmed Yassin, the group’s founder, were in Israeli prisons at the time.

With the Israeli extradition request withdrawn, the United States deported Mr. Abu Marzouk to Jordan in exchange for him giving up his US residency.

By sparing Mr. Abu Marzouk, Mr. Netanyahu, Israel's longest-serving prime minister, elevated to new heights the symbiotic relationship between hardliners on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian divide. Their actions helped one another sabotage compromise resolutions of their perennial dispute.

As a result, Mr. Netanyahu will likely go down in history as the leader whose misguided, self-serving policies damaged the Jewish state the most.

Israel’s post-Gaza war investigation of the failures that enabled last year’s October 7 Hamas attack will inevitably hold Mr. Netanyahu accountable.

In the ultimate analysis, that may be the key driver of Mr. Netanyahu’s warmongering.

That is what “truly has many Israelis’ blood aboil: (Mr. Netanyahu) simply has an overpowering personal interest in the mayhem continuing so as to buy time after the Oct. 7 debacle, until people forget or still bigger tragedies occur,” said Dan Perry, a pro-Israel pundit with little regard for the prime minister.

In the year before the October 7 attack, Israeli security chiefs warned Mr. Netanyahu that his efforts to hollow out Israeli democracy with his controversial judicial reforms and focus on supporting militant West Bank settlers risked making Israel vulnerable to attack.

The judicial overhaul pursued by Mr. Netanyahu sparked a ten-month-long political crisis involving unprecedented protests. The crisis opened a deep social divide and prompted some army reservists to reconsider obeying duty call-ups.

Mr. Netanyahu adopted the template of Middle Eastern autocrats who at times used Islamists as an anti-dote against Arab nationalists and the left by shielding Hamas to keep the Palestinian polity divided and block a compromise resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that would involve the creation of an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel.

Like Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, who was assassinated by jihadists in 1981, or Saudi Arabia, whose decades-long funding of ultra-conservatives contributed to the rise of Al Qaeda, Mr. Netanyahu’s instrumentalisation of Hamas blew up in his face with the October 7 attack.

In the assault, Hamas killed some 1,200 people, mostly civilians and non-combatants, and kidnapped 250 others. It was the worst attack against Israel since Egypt and Syria launched the 1973 Middle East war.

So far, Mr. Netanyahu has refused to accept responsibility for military, intelligence, and political failures that prevented Israel from pre-empting the attack.

Adam Raz’s book cover

In a Hebrew-language book published earlier this year, historian Adam Raz suggests that Mr. Netanyahu’s divide-and-rule approach towards the Palestinians wrongly convinced Israel’s political and military elite that Iran and its non-state Arab allies rather than the Palestinians posed the greatest threat to the country’s security.

The willingness of the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco in 2020 to establish diplomatic relations with Israel without Israel yielding on settlements on occupied lands and Palestinian rights compounded the misperception and hubris.

In Israeli minds, Iran and its non-state Arab allies, particularly Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite militia, replaced Hamas and other Palestinian militants as the foremost threat to the Jewish state’s national security.

Even so, Mr. Raz argues that Hamas still serves Mr. Netanyahu’s purpose, even if he insists on continuing the Gaza war until Israel destroys the group politically and militarily.

 

The prolonged fight justifies Israel’s continued military presence in Gaza and the prime minister’s quest for a forever war that prevents a two-state compromise.

Hamas’s survival justifies Mr. Netanyahu’s willingness to entertain a ceasefire in Lebanon but reject an end to the fighting in Gaza, even if the two battlefields are comparable.

“The same logic that guides the Lebanon negotiations – Israel's enemy has been crippled and weakened but not totally destroyed, and now it's time to end the fighting…is just as relevant in the case of Gaza,”  noted Haaretz journalist Amir Tibon.

This week, Mr. Netanyahu told a parliamentary committee he would reject any ceasefire involving a complete Israeli withdrawal from Gaza.

Israel’s military command and intelligence chiefs believe a withdrawal is needed to free some 100 hostages still held by Hamas, as does a majority of Israelis.

Credit: BBC

A weekend poll showed 69 per cent of Israelis favoring a deal with Hamas to return the remaining hostages in exchange for an end to the Gaza war. Fifty-two per cent identified politics, i.e. Mr. Netanyahu, as the major obstacle to a deal.

“Don't make the mistake of thinking – even now – that as long as Netanyahu and his present government are responsible for making decisions, the Hamas regime will collapse… Sustaining Hamas is more important to Netanyahu than a few dead kibbutzniks,” Mr. Raz has argued for the past year.

Kibbutzniks are members of Israeli collective settlements bordering Gaza whom Hamas fighters killed or kidnapped in the October 7 attack.

In his book, whose English title would read ‘The Road to October 7: Binyamin Netanyahu, the Production of the Endless Conflict and Israel’s Moral Degradation,’ Mr. Raz documents how the prime minister’s support of Hamas kicked into high gear in 2009, going far beyond asking Qatar in 2017 to fund the group’s civic operations in Gaza.

Returning as prime minister in 2009 after a ten-year hiatus, Mr. Netanyahu restricted the Israeli military’s cooperation with the security forces of Palestine President Mahmoud Abbas’ internationally recognised, West-Bank-based Palestinian Authority (PA) in confronting Hamas.

Almost a decade later, Mr. Netanyahu asked Qatar to significantly increase its modest funding to prevent the collapse of the Hamas government after Mr. Abbas stopped paying Gazan government salaries, even though Hamas expelled the Authority and the president’s Al Fatah movement in a bloody power grab in 2006.

In addition, Mr. Netanyahu encouraged Qatar to move from bank transfers to cash payments involving a car carrying US$30 million in suitcases entering Gaza once a month through the Rafah Crossing that separates the Strip from Egypt.

Mr. Netanyahu is “the father of the concept of strengthening Hamas,” said retired Major General.Gadi Shamani, a former commander of the military’s Gaza Division.

“The MO of Netanyahu’s policy since his return to the Prime Minister’s Office in 2009 has and continues to be, on the one hand, bolstering the rule of Hamas in the Gaza Strip, and, on the other, weakening the Palestinian Authority,” Mr. Raz noted.

“When Netanyahu declared in April 2019…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…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,” Mr. Raz added.

”Netanyahu knew that Hamas was not going to use the money for the welfare of Gaza’s children or for modernising the Strip, but rather for building tunnels and purchasing weapons, turning Gaza into a Spartan state at war with Israel. Yet still, he did it for the sake of eliminating the possibility of a two-state solution,” Mr. Raz said.

In doing so, Mr. Netanyahu and assassinated Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar did each other’s bidding. Both men opposed ending the conflict in anything but a zero-sum game, rejected a two-state solution, and dealt in death to achieve their goals.

“Revenge is the logic of Sinwar and Netanyahu,” Mr. Raz said.

Yahya Sinwar’s ‘calculated risk’ note. Credit Yediot Ahranot

In a 2018 Hebrew-language note to Mr. Netanyahu’s then-national security advisor, Meir Ben-Shabbat,  Mr. Sinwar, who learned Hebrew during his 22 years in Israeli prison, appeared to call the suitcase arrangement a “calculated risk.”

Mr. Sinwar was one of 1,027 Palestinians released from prison in 2011 on Mr. Netanyahu’s watch in exchange for Hamas-held Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.

Mr. Raz and senior Israelis, including former Prime Minister Naftali Bennet, former Deputy Prime Minister Avigdor Lieberman, and former Defense Minister Benny Gantz, charged that Mr. Netanyahu would go to any length to ensure Hamas's survival.

In one instance during the 2014 Gaza war, the former officials said Mr. Netanyahu sought to prevent an invasion of the Strip by leaking the military’s top-secret presentation to the security Cabinet of its potential consequences.

Last year, Mr. Lieberman accused Mr. Netanyahu of blocking targeted assassinations of Hamas leaders.

Source: X

A slew of former political leaders, military commanders, and intelligence chiefs, including Ehud Barak and Gadi Eisenkot, have echoed assertions of Mr. Netanyahu’s enabling of Hamas over the past year.

Speaking to lawmakers of his Likud party in 2019, Mr. Netanyahu defended his policy. “Whoever opposes a Palestinian state must support the transfer of funds from Qatar to Hamas,” Mr. Netanyahu said.

Dr. James M. Dorsey is an Adjunct Senior Fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, and the author of the syndicated column and podcast, The Turbulent World with James M. Dorsey.