Netanyahu’s Danse Macabre with Hamas

Mark Cramer

Media experts are trotting out the usual suspects in speculations about where Hamas received financing to conduct its savage attack on Israeli civilians. Iran, Hezbollah and Syria are the leading candidates.

However, in the American media, one Hamas funding source has been largely ignored: Israel.

Traditionally, the Israeli press has been more open than western media about uncomfortable truths.

Let’s look to Haaretz, Israel’s version of the New York Times. Here’s a Haaretz quote from Israel’s perpetual motion machine, right-wing prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu:

“Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas,” he told a meeting of his Likud party’s Knesset members in March 2019. “This is part of our strategy — to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.”

The more conservative Times of Israel corroborates the danse macabre between the Israeli government and Hamas in an Op Ed article, whose title gives away the content: “For years Netanyahu propped up Hamas. Now it’s blown up in our faces” (8 October 2023), penned by Tal Schneider.

“For years, the various governments led by Benjamin Netanyahu took an approach that divided power between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank — bringing Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to his knees while making moves that propped up the Hamas terror group.

“The idea was to prevent Abbas — or anyone else in the Palestinian Authority’s West Bank government — from advancing toward the establishment of a Palestinian state.”

The same article should give American media speculators a prime suspect in who has been financing Hamas.

“Meanwhile, 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.”

Most of the time, Israeli policy was to treat the Palestinian Authority as a burden and Hamas as an asset. Far-right MK Bezalel Smotrich, now the finance minister in the hardline government and leader of the Religious Zionism party, said so himself in 2015.”

In fairness to Mr. Netanyahu, who faces separate criminal charges of corruption, the idea of propping up Hamas to prevent a Palestinian state, dates back to the very origins of Hamas, long before Netanyahu became Israel’s perceived hope for security.

“Regrets among those Israeli officials who helped the creation of Hamas are well documented. For instance, Avner Cohen, a Tunisia-born Jew who was an Israeli official in Gaza dealing with religious affairs during 1970s and 1980s, lamented that ‘Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation’.” (See: “How and why Israel helped create Hamas: Not many people are aware if the fact that it was Israel which had helped the creation of Hamas as a counter to PLO” by Dr. Moonis Ahmar, The Express Tribune, a Pakistani newspaper, May 30, 2021.)

Sporadically, reputable American news sources from both right and left have corroborated this historical fact, including Andrew Higgins, “How and Why Israel Helped to Create Hamas,” Wall Street Journal (30 May 2021) and Mehdi Hasan, “Blowback: How Israel Helped Create Hamas,” The Intercept (19 February 2018).

Surely the American State Department was aware that Israel’s hypocritical talk of a two-state solution has been a cynical ticket for the Zionist state to receive American military assistance along with an automatic American veto of any Security Council resolution against illegal Israeli settlements and war crimes.

And surely Hamas itself was well-aware of its proto-medieval alliance in the danse macabre with Israel because of the common cause to block the two-state solution.

If Netanyahu goes to prison on corruption (fraud and bribery) charges, he will sleep well in his cell, knowing that the danse macabre with Hamas did indeed prevent a Palestinian state.

(Mark Cramer is the author of If Thoreau had a Bicycle: The Art of the Ride.” He holds a PhD in literature and history.)