An opinion, history and commentary about the Israel-Hamas war

The NYT published an interesting opinion by Palestinian journalist Dalia Hatuqa: 

This War Did Not Start a Month Ago

For Palestinians, this type of systematic violence is nothing new.

To many inside and outside this war, the brutality of Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks was unthinkable, as has been the scale and ferocity of Israel’s reprisal. But Palestinians have been subject to a steady stream of unfathomable violence — as well as the creeping annexation of their land by Israel and Israeli settlers — for generations.

If people are going to understand this latest conflict and see a path forward for everyone, we need to be more honest, nuanced and comprehensive about the recent decades of history in Gaza, Israel and the West Bank, particularly the impact of occupation and violence on the Palestinians. This story is measured in decades, not weeks; it is not one war, but a continuum of destruction, revenge and trauma.

Since the 1948 Nakba — in which entire Palestinian villages were wiped off the map and the modern state of Israel was established — Palestinians have endured a subjugation that has defined their daily lives. For decades, we have been reeling from Israel’s military occupation, as well as a succession of deadly invasions and wars. The wars of 1967 and 1973 helped shape the modern geography and geopolitics of the area, with millions of largely stateless Palestinians split between Gaza and the West Bank. In Gaza, often referred to as the world’s largest open-air prison, Palestinians are prohibited from entering or leaving, except in incredibly rare circumstances.  

This history has been absent from much of the discourse surrounding the Israel-Hamas war, as though the attacks of Oct. 7 were completely arbitrary. The truth is, even in times of relative peace, Palestinians are second-class citizens in Israel — if they are deemed citizens at all. According to Israeli law, Palestinians do not have the right to national self-determination, which is reserved for Jewish citizens of the state. A variety of laws restrict Palestinians’ right to movement, governing everything from where they can live to what personal identifications they can hold to whether or not they can visit family members elsewhere.

What resonates with me is the assertion that history and nuance is often absent from people’s thinking. The attacks of Oct. 7 were not completely arbitrary, IMHO. Israel knowingly and intentionally supported the creation and maintenance of Hamas in its cynical, successful effort to prevent the creation of a peaceful Palestinian state. 

Hamas is blowback?

As far as I can tell, Israel’s role in creating and supporting Hamas is historical fact, not my opinion. But that version of history is contested by many Israelis. The Intercept writes:

BLOWBACK: HOW ISRAEL WENT FROM 

HELPING CREATE HAMAS TO BOMBING IT

But did you also know that Hamas — which is an Arabic acronym for “Islamic Resistance Movement” — would probably not exist today were it not for the Jewish state? That the Israelis helped turn a bunch of fringe Palestinian Islamists in the late 1970s into one of the world’s most notorious militant groups? That Hamas is blowback?

This isn’t a conspiracy theory. Listen to former Israeli officials such as Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Segev, who was the Israeli military governor in Gaza in the early 1980s. Segev later told a New York Times reporter that he had helped finance the Palestinian Islamist movement as a “counterweight” to the secularists and leftists of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Fatah party, led by Yasser Arafat (who himself referred to Hamas as “a creature of Israel.”)

“The Israeli government gave me a budget,” the retired brigadier general confessed, “and the military government gives to the mosques.”

“Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation,” Avner Cohen, a former Israeli religious affairs official who worked in Gaza for more than two decades, told the Wall Street Journal in 2009. Back in the mid-1980s, Cohen even wrote an official report to his superiors warning them not to play divide-and-rule in the Occupied Territories, by backing Palestinian Islamists against Palestinian secularists. “I … suggest focusing our efforts on finding ways to break up this monster before this reality jumps in our face,” he wrote.

This short Israeli video casts the role of Israel as more a matter of mistakes and judgment errors in the creation and rise of Hamas, than a purely cynical attempt to keep the Palestinian people divided. The speaker here points to the analogy of the US inadvertently creating the Taliban. The final lesson drawn here is that you cannot control radicals because they will eventually make you pay.

One other source, Analyst News, makes these comments:

What you might not know is that this same group was actually created in part by Israel itself. While it may sound like a conspiracy theory, it’s actually a well-documented, open secret that Israel has helped finance and prop up Hamas for years.

“We need to tell the truth,” Israeli major general Gershon Hacohen, an associate of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said in a 2019 TV interview. “Netanyahu’s strategy is to prevent the option of two states, so he is turning Hamas into his closest partner. Openly Hamas is an enemy. Covertly, it’s an ally.”

Understanding Israel’s strategy in doing so can help us read through the lines of the Israeli government’s rhetoric on Hamas’s barbarism. It also helps illuminate Netanyahu’s vision for the region — and his ultimate endgame.  

In a 2019 Likud party meeting, Netanyahu gloated to his compatriots: “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.”

And an Israeli Ministry of Intelligence document published by +972 magazine on Oct. 30, 2023 makes it even more explicit. In it, officials refer to the option of the Palestinian Authority taking control of Gaza as the worst possible outcome — because it would remove “one of the central obstacles preventing the establishment of a Palestinian state.”

Indeed, Netanyahu has been intent on keeping the Palestinians divided under two ruling groups: the diplomatically successful Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and the militant Hamas in Gaza. (The Palestinian Authority, led by the vestiges of the PLO, was created as an interim self-governing body meant to pave the way for an independent Palestinian state, but that has not happened.)

So long as these two groups are divided, Israel has cover to avoid negotiating with the Palestinian Authority on the grounds that the group doesn’t represent all Palestinians.  

In a 2015 interview, Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich explained that Hamas’s militancy, and therefore its illegitimacy on the world stage, was a boon for his government’s political strategy.

“The Palestinian Authority is a burden, and Hamas is an asset,” Smotrich said. “It’s a terrorist organization, no one will recognize it, no one will give it status at the [International Criminal Court], no one will let it put forth a resolution at the U.N. Security Council.”

It seems that no matter how one spins it, history indicates that at best, Israeli governments miscalculated and made major judgement errors about Hamas. At worst, it is mostly responsible for the cynical, intentional creation and existence of Hamas as a means to prevent the creation of a peaceful Palestinian state. 

Q: Is Hamas mostly a creature of (i) Israeli government bad judgment errors, (ii) cynical Israeli divide and conquer politics, or (iii) something else, e.g., completely independent of Israeli government involvement?