heywood on 1/2/2025 at 13:38
Quote Posted by Qooper
If there's enough interest in this topic, we could make a separate thread so as not to derail this one. What do you think?
It is kind of the point of this thread.
Starker on 1/2/2025 at 17:38
Quote Posted by Subjective Effect
The Gazans are poor because of their leadership that priorities spending on terror infrastructure and weapons above all else , and you know it. Those tunnels cost millions and millions. All those resources, money, manpower. Be honest with yourself and with us.
If Hamas wanted to raise everyone or of poverty they wouldn't be letting them build pools and luxury car dealerships. It's a farce.
Hamas are explicitly a terrorist organisation who took power in Gaza by killing off any political opposition after they failed to form a legitimate government. As a result, there haven't been elections in Gaza for nearly 20 years and Hamas has continued to crack down on Fatah supporters meanwhile. But Israel has also done their best to ensure that Hamas has stayed as the top dogs in Gaza by bolstering Hamas and undermining Fatah and the PA. And even before that, Israel funded the organisation that would become Hamas in order to undermine left-wing secular organisations and in general the PLO. Israel wanted to have Hamas in power, because they felt that it delegitimised any Palestinian claim for statehood.
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https://www.politico.eu/article/israel-border-troops-women-hamas-warnings-war-october-7-benjamin-netanyahu/)
[...]
Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said there was plenty of blame to go around — he described the attack as a collective failing — but put the courtship of Hamas squarely on Netanyahu.
“
In the last 15 years, Israel did everything to downgrade the Palestinian Authority and to boost Hamas,” he told POLITICO. “Gaza was on the brink of collapse because they had no resources, they had no money, and the PA refused to give Hamas any money. Bibi saved them. Bibi made a deal with Qatar and they started to move millions and millions of dollars to Gaza.”
“But we all thought we could flirt with Hamas, [that] they would behave according to our expectations of them. And it all blew up in our faces.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/oct/20/benjamin-netanyahu-hamas-israel-prime-minister)
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A long, bloody war is what Hamas and its Iranian backers - desperate to derail recent moves towards “normalisation” of relations between Israel and several of its neighbours, most crucially Saudi Arabia - yearn for. It will mean that, even if the infrastructure of Hamas is destroyed, the hatred that powers it will not be: on the contrary, it will grow in the hearts of a new, bereaved generation of Palestinians. 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.”
[...]
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https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/10/world/middleeast/israel-qatar-money-prop-up-hamas.html)
[...]
As far back as December 2012, Mr. Netanyahu told the prominent Israeli journalist Dan Margalit that
it was important to keep Hamas strong, as a counterweight to the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. Mr. Margalit, in an interview, said that Mr. Netanyahu told him that having two strong rivals, including Hamas, would lessen pressure on him to negotiate toward a Palestinian state.
[...]
Shlomo Brom, a retired general and former deputy to Israel's national security adviser, said an
empowered Hamas helped Mr. Netanyahu avoid negotiating over a Palestinian state.
“One effective way to prevent a two-state solution is to divide between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank,” he said in an interview. The division gives Mr. Netanyahu an excuse to disengage from peace talks, Mr. Brom said, adding that he can say, “I have no partner.”
Mr. Netanyahu did not articulate this strategy publicly, but some on the Israeli political right had no such hesitation.
Bezalel Smotrich, a far-right politician who is now Mr. Netanyahu's finance minister, put it bluntly in 2015, the year he was elected to Parliament.
“The Palestinian Authority is a burden,” he said. “Hamas is an asset.”[...]
As a result of Israel funneling money to Hamas and hampering any economic activity in Gaza, this makes Gazans more and more dependent on foreign aid and Hamas, since Hamas is the only one with any resources. This power dynamic is directly shaped by Israel's policies.
SD on 1/2/2025 at 19:01
Can you folks make your minds up, is funnelling aid to Gaza a necessary act of humanitarian largesse, or is it undermining the Palestinians? You can't have it both ways. If Netanyahu had adopted a more hardline stance and not let a penny through, the same people blaming Israel for the rise of Hamas would be pissing and moaning about that instead.
I think it's apparent to everyone by now that allowing Qatar to fund Hamas in exchange for it agreeing not to attack Israel, and in the hope that Hamas would (like other branches of the Muslim Brotherhood) eventually abandon terror, adopt a more reasoned stance, and be a more reliable partner for peace than the PLO, was an enormous error of judgement. But at the time it was supported by people from across the political spectrum.
Israel wasn't forcing Hamas to spend their money building a giant network of terror tunnels rather than infrastructure for civilians. It wasn't forcing their leadership to salt billions away in secret bank accounts. It wasn't forcing them to import weapons instead of things that could help them grow the economy. These are choices that they made. Nobody should be making excuses for them.
Starker on 1/2/2025 at 19:28
Nobody is making excuses for Hamas (that I know of). But Israel's policies of blockading economic activity in Gaza have brought about the result where not giving any aid to Gaza would be bringing about a humanitarian catastrophe of untold proportions. Gazans have desperately needed food, water, and medicine in the form of foreign aid precisely because they can't get any of it through trade. Of course, this has also been helping Hamas indirectly, because Hamas then didn't have to spend any of their own resources acquiring these vital necessities. Between Hamas and Israel's right wing government's policies, the people of Gaza have in effect been held hostage. However, while there's no question that Gazans should have received food and water and elementary necessities for survival, Israel should not have enabled direct funding of Hamas, because Hamas could not be trusted to use it responsibly. There was simply no guarantee Hamas wouldn't misuse these funds and even when it did use them for the intended purpose, it did it in a way to garner support for them.
Hamas carries a lot of responsibility for and deserves a lot of blame for the situation in the Gaza, but Israel helping to prop up Hamas so that it could use their actions to delegitimise and blame all Palestinians is a not insignificant part of the problem. And depriving ordinary Gazans from any other ways to improve their lives and making them dependent on Hamas and foreign aid has only exacerbated the situation and boosted Hamas's power.
Subjective Effect on 1/2/2025 at 20:02
Well it seems Israel can't win whatever it does. Again.
In that case, why did what it does matter at all?
Starker on 1/2/2025 at 20:19
Er, yes, the whole point of the criticism of Israel is that Israel's policy is not a winning strategy.
Why does the mass killing of civilians matter at all, you ask? Because it only makes matters worse, not better?
Subjective Effect on 1/2/2025 at 23:55
I don't they can have a winning strategy. I think the only thing you lefties will accept is it's destruction, and you'll consider that "justice".
Starker on 2/2/2025 at 03:20
Frankly, I don't think Israel can have a winning strategy either. It's a colonial project that seems to be doomed to fail due to its very nature and is likely fated to be trapped in endless cycles of violence, doing the same thing over and over again hoping for a different result. As such, simply maintaining the status quo hinges on continued support from the US and on Russia and China losing or at least not gaining any more power and influence. As of now, US/Europe have shown little willingness and a great deal of reluctance to stand up to either Russia or China. The US in particular seems to be taking a more and more isolationist turn while not even attempting to fix any of its internal problems and Eurpoean unity has been fraying at the edges for quite a while now.
Subjective Effect on 2/2/2025 at 05:25
How is Israel "colonial"? Lol. You people and your uberwoke bs. It doesn't make sense. You're the reason Trump is back. People got sick of this loony lefty nonsense.
Sulphur on 2/2/2025 at 06:33
Let's say for the sake of a real discussion that doesn't get stuck in partisan ad hominemising, you take Starker's argument at face value and put the word 'colonial' aside for a minute. Do you have an actual, thinking person's response to it?
