How Netanyahu Propped up Hamas. How Hamas Damaged the Palestinian National Liberation Movement.

(This is the second of a three-part series. The other articles can be found in Part 1 and Part 3.)

By Argiris Malapanis and Geoff Mirelowitz

November 29, 2023 — The gruesome October 7 Hamas attack gave an opening to the Israeli regime to wage the current war with popular backing — diminishing the political space for action by supporters of the Palestinian struggle inside Israel and the occupied territories. The first part of this series detailed the ways in which Tel Aviv has unleashed such a catastrophe — a new Nakba — in Gaza.

The Hamas attack itself, however, was a consequence of long-standing Israeli government policy — the subject of this article.

NEWS ANALYSIS

Adam Raz, an Israeli historian, documented this in detail in an essay in the October 20 Israeli daily Ha’aretz, A Brief History of the Netanyahu-Hamas Alliance.

“The MO [modus operandi] 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 [PA],” Raz wrote.

“For the last 14 years, while implementing a divide-and-conquer policy vis-a-vis the West Bank and Gaza,” he continued, Netanyahu “has resisted any attempt, military or diplomatic, that might bring an end to the Hamas regime.”

Raz cited the Israeli prime minister’s own words.

During a March 2019 meeting of Likud members of the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, where the subject of transfer of funds to Hamas was under discussion, Netanyahu insisted, “Whoever opposes a Palestinian state must support delivery of funds to Gaza because maintaining separation between the PA in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza will prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.”

Two months later, a Channel 13 News Israel tweet quoted former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak telling a Kuwaiti newspaper: “Netanyahu isn’t interested in a two-state solution. Rather, he wants to separate Gaza from the West Bank, as he told me at the end of 2010.”

Thus, Israeli government policy toward Gaza included allowing transfers of cash from Qatar, rather than bank deposits, which could be traced more easily; the import of a wide array of goods, particularly construction materials; and periodic releases of Palestinian prisoners. These steps allowed Hamas to build up its military apparatus and provide a minimum of services to Gaza’s population, Raz asserted.

‘Mowing the grass’

The Israeli policy has also included periodic brutal, but limited, military assaults on Gaza — in 2008-2009, 2012, 2014, 2018, and 2021 — which top Israeli officials have cynically referred to as “mowing the grass” or “taking out the trash.” In all these conflicts, however, Tel Aviv refrained from re-occupying Gaza or challenging the rule of Hamas in the territory.

Gen. Gershon Hacohen, a prominent Israeli right winger, made things crystal clear in a May 2019 interview with the online magazine Mida, Raz noted in his Ha’aretz essay. “When Netanyahu didn’t go to war in Gaza to defeat the Hamas regime [in 2018], he basically prevented Abu Mazen from establishing a united Palestinian state,” Hacohen said at the time.

Mahmoud Abbas, also known as Abu Mazen, is the Palestinian Authority president.

“We need to exploit the situation of separation created between Gaza and Ramallah,” Hacohen continued, referring to the West Bank city where the PA is centered. “It’s an Israeli interest of the highest level, and you can’t understand the situation in Gaza without understanding this context.”

“Netanyahu’s entire policy since 2009 has sought to destroy any possibility of a diplomatic agreement with the Palestinians,” Raz explained. “It’s the theme of his rule, which depends on the continuation of the conflict.”

Netanyahu’s policy of keeping Gaza under the control of Hamas also found expression in “his determination to thwart any political reconciliation between the PA — Fatah in particular — and Hamas,” Raz continued. “A prominent example is Netanyahu’s behavior in late 2017, when talks between Fatah and Hamas were actually taking place.

“A fundamental disagreement between Abbas and Hamas,” Raz said, concerned the “Islamist group’s military being subordinate to the PA. Hamas agreed that the PA would return to running all civilian matters in Gaza but refused to yield its arms.

“Egypt and the United States supported reconciliation and worked to achieve it,” wrote Raz. “Netanyahu totally opposed the idea, asserting repeatedly that ‘reconciliation between Hamas and the PLO makes achieving peace harder.’ Of course, Netanyahu didn’t pursue peace, which wasn’t on the agenda in any way back then. His position only served Hamas.”

Since the Oslo accords Israel signed with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in the 1990s, Netanyahu has been the leading exponent of the dominant Israeli ruling class policy that allows no possibility of even a watered-down version of a two-state solution, or any form of Palestinian self-determination.

Many supporters of Israel now acknowledge this dangerous reality. A November 14 opinion piece by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman is one such example. An ardent supporter of Zionism, Friedman now opposes Netanyahu. “And have no illusion,” Friedman wrote, “Netanyahu is offering only one vision right now: Seven million Jews trying to govern five million Palestinians in perpetuity — and that is a prescription for disaster for Israel, America, Jews everywhere and America’s moderate Arab allies.”

How Hamas set back the Palestinian liberation movement

“Palestinian and international anger about the appalling suffering being visited upon the innocent 2.1 million residents of Gaza is understandably focused on Israel,” wrote Hussein Ibish in an article in the November 1 issue of The New Republic, The Palestinian People Should Be Enraged at Both Israel and Hamas.

Ibish, a journalist born in Beirut, Lebanon, is a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, D.C.

“Yet it is essential to register the depth of Hamas’s guilt, because they intentionally provoked this disaster to benefit their own political fortunes, not the Palestinian national movement, let alone the well-being of the Palestinian people,” Ibish continued.

“Honestly recognizing and acknowledging the atrocious nature of Hamas’s betrayal of the Palestinian people and national movement on and since October 7 in no way excuses Israel for its own myriad depredations and abuses,” Ibish emphasized.

“Well over 90 percent of the Gaza population are refugees and their descendants from southern Israel who were displaced in 1947–48 and are barred from ever returning to their homes. Since 1967, Israel has maintained an extraordinarily repressive and predatory occupation in East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip,” he wrote.

“In the West Bank, the Israeli focus has been evolving from intensive colonial settlement to preparation for large-scale annexation, quite possibly accompanied by mass expulsions.

“And in Gaza, since 2007,” Ibish continued, “Israel has maintained what many have rightly called an open-air prison — with occupation forces keeping a tight grip on the coastal waters, the airspace, the electromagnetic spectrum, and all places of ingress and egress except one small crossing controlled by Egypt — governed on the inside by a fanatical gang of particularly nasty inmates.”

Hamas was founded in 1987 by Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, Ibish noted. Since then, he argued, its goal has been first to divide the Palestinian liberation movement and to eventually take over its leadership from the PLO.

Hamas sought to rebrand the Palestinian struggle for a homeland from a mass, secular national liberation movement to a religious crusade. A holy war that would lead to the destruction of Israel and its replacement by an Islamist Palestinian State, in which Hamas’s interpretation of Islam would be the state religion.

Vehemently anti-communist and bourgeois nationalist from the start, in 2006 Hamas took control of Gaza after Israel had withdrawn its troops from the territory the previous year during an ebb of the Palestinian liberation struggle.

The PLO had led the Palestinian struggle for national self-determination since the late 1960s. After Yasser Arafat and the organization he led, Fatah, won the PLO leadership, the PLO advocated Israel’s replacement with a democratic, secular Palestine where, it said explicitly, Jews and Arabs could live together with equal rights on the same lands. This perspective won wide support among Palestinians, the Arab masses, and worldwide.

Subsequent events dealt setbacks to the Palestinian struggle. Under these circumstances, and faced with Israeli intransigence, the PLO shifted its position, recognizing Israel and accepting the compromise of a “two-state” solution. This was registered in the Oslo Accords of 1993 and 1995 between the PLO and Israel. But the accords themselves and ensuing events registered further blows to the quest for Palestinian statehood.

That was the backdrop to the last Palestinian elections held 17 years ago, in 2006, in the West Bank and Gaza. The Palestinian Authority, led by Fatah, easily won the national vote but lost the legislative elections in Gaza to Hamas.

Following that election, Hamas took control of Gaza by force and violence. In 2007 Hamas launched a war against Fatah and other Palestinians, executing some, taking some prisoner, and expelling others.

The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PHCR) issued a report titled “Black Days in the Absence of Justice: Report on Bloody Fighting in the Gaza Strip from 7 to 14 June 2007.” The PHCR report said, “This latest round of fighting took the lives of 161 Palestinians, including 41 civilians. This figure includes 7 children and 11 women. Additionally, at least 700 Palestinians were wounded.”

Hamas has ruled Gaza ever since with an iron grip.

Many Gazans do not trust Hamas

As a result, and contrary to Israeli government claims, many Palestinians in Gaza do not support Hamas.

“We find in our surveys that 67 percent of Palestinians in Gaza had little or no trust in Hamas in that period right before the attacks,” said Amaney Jamal, dean of Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs.

Jamal, 52, is a Palestinian American born in California and brought up in her family’s native Ramallah, West Bank. She is one of the driving forces behind the Arab Barometer, which conducts surveys and polling in the region, including in Gaza where fieldwork concluded on the eve of the attacks on Israel.

The latest Arab Barometer was undertaken in Gaza, where 399 people were surveyed, and the West Bank, where 790 were polled, from the end of September to October 6. Its findings were published in the journal Foreign Affairs.

Jamal said many respondents described Hamas as “corrupt” and “authoritarian.”

“Seventy-five percent said in the previous 30 days, they could not afford to feed their households. So again, this is an impoverished society, a society that is basically saying the Hamas-led government has some levels of corruption,” said Jamal.

“When we ask people, who do you blame?… we thought that the number-one culprit was going to be Israel because of the blockade. But most people cited Hamas corruption, more so than they cited the Israel blockade,” Jamal continued.

“This is especially important because of the (erroneous) argument that all of Gaza supports Hamas, and therefore all of Gaza should be held accountable for the actions, atrocious actions of Hamas.”

Hamas’s profound cynicism

“Hamas’s cynicism is so profound that it’s no exaggeration to call it [the October 7 attack] an intentional human sacrifice of thousands of Palestinians in a desperate bid to increase the organization’s decades-long quest for dominance of the national movement,” Ibish said.

Leading up to its October 7 pogrom, Hamas faced no serious challenge from within in governing Gaza, but its leadership felt growing international isolation. This included the decline of its parent movement, the Muslim Brotherhood, in Arab countries; a slowdown in the flow of funds from Qatar; a greater focus of the Palestinian struggle in the West Bank, where Hamas’s influence is limited; and the prospect of a diplomatic agreement between Israel and Saudi Arabia, such as those concluded with other Arab states in the past several years.

“Palestinians and their supporters need to face the reality that Hamas has intentionally engineered a massive national calamity,” Ibish said, to get out of the corner to which its leadership felt it was being relegated.

Recent statements by Hamas leaders provide ample evidence of this assertion.

“Israel is a country that has no place on our land,” Hamas official Ghazi Hamad told the Lebanese news outlet LBCI in late October, according to a translation of his remarks the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) released November 1.

“We must remove that country,” he continued.

“We must teach Israel a lesson, and we will do this again and again,” Hamad emphasized, referring to the October 7 massacre.

Asked about whether Hamas anticipated or weighed the toll on Palestinian civilians from Israel’s reaction, Hamad said cynically: “Will we have to pay a price? Yes, and we are ready to pay it. We are called a nation of martyrs, and we are proud to sacrifice martyrs.”

A strategy of mass martyrdom

The horrible carnage Israel is now inflicting on Palestinians is not the regrettable outcome of a big miscalculation. Quite the opposite, Hamas leaders told the New York Times in early November. They explained they waged their October 7 attack on Israel because they believed the Palestinian cause — or more accurately Hamas’s place in the Palestinian struggle — was slipping away, and that only violence could revive it.

“We succeeded in putting the Palestinian issue back on the table, and now no one in the region is experiencing calm,” Khalil al-Hayya, a member of Hamas’s top leadership body, told the Times in Doha, Qatar.

“I hope that the state of war with Israel will become permanent on all the borders, and that the Arab world will stand with us,” Taher El-Nounou, a Hamas media adviser, told the Times.

These frank statements clearly outline Hamas’s strategy: Pogroms that target Israeli civilians coupled with mass martyrdom that sacrifices the lives of thousands of Palestinians — ultimately tens of thousands or more — who have not chosen this course or volunteered to give up their lives for it.

Instead of being participants in a mass struggle, the Palestinian people are thus turned into bystanders in their own pursuit of a homeland, unwilling martyrs sacrificed to Hamas’s quest for a theocracy.

This is how Hamas has divided and set back the Palestinian movement.

Until this is successfully countered by a different political strategy — as the PLO practiced from the late-1960s to the early 1990s, or the program of non-racialism and strategy of mass action the African National Congress relied on as it led the democratic revolution in South Africa to victory^[1] — the Palestinian movement will likely remain in a dead end.

We do not draw an equal sign between Hamas and the Israeli regime. Israel is far more powerful and has demonstrated again, in its response to October 7, that it can match and exceed the savagery of Hamas.

As Marxist scholars Isaac Deutscher and George Novack explained decades ago, Zionism has transformed the Jewish people from what was once an oppressed minority in other countries into an oppressor nationality in Israel.

But there is a mirror image of false and dangerous political appeals made by both Hamas and Tel Aviv.

Hamas says support for the legitimate resistance of the Palestinian people requires embracing its reactionary methods and leadership. Israel and its supporters insist that opposition to Jew hatred requires unqualified support for aggressive Zionist policies. Each claim is wrong, and both should be rejected. Support for either can only lead to new disasters for Palestinians and Jews.

One sign pointing in the right direction is a recent poll in Israel, conducted on October 10, three days after the Hamas massacre, by researchers at Hebrew University. The survey showed that 80% of Palestinian citizens of Israel opposed the Hamas attacks. No such statistics exist yet for attitudes of Palestinians in the occupied territories for obvious reasons.

(This was the second of a three-part series. The other articles can be found in Part 1 and Part 3.)

NOTES

[1] For more information see Nelson Mandela Speaks: Forging a Democratic, Nonracial South Africa. The author, Nelson Mandela, was the central leader of the African National Congress from the late 1940s until his death in 2013. He served as South Africa’s president from 1994 to 1999.

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