Hani Shimoni

Hi @ComicDaveSmith. This is long. I'm sorry for that. It's a real answer, not some quote-mining or Twitter-y retort. I think you're honestly challenging my point. So I'm honestly responding. Yes, Netanyahu brags that he alone prevented a Palestinian state - just as he once bragged he’d be the one to establish a Palestinian state. He also brags that his "propping up of Hamas" was a clever rightist ploy to prevent Palestinian unity. But he several times ran election campaigns on the explicit promise that he’d *topple* Hamas in Gaza. So which Netanyahu should we believe? The answer, alas, is neither. He has no specific policy. It’s political maneuvers all the way down. But here's what we can know. The policy of containing and stabilizing Hamas in Gaza is older than Netanyahu. It began with Olmert. And it was pieced together over the years as much by leftists as by rightists. Ironically, the same Ehud Barak you quoted here was Israel’s defense minister from 2009 to 2013, and was instrumental in putting this policy in place and developing the strategic thinking behind it. Before Barak thought Netanyahu was “propping up Hamas” to prevent a two-state peace, Barak was “containing Hamas” in the hope of enabling a *return* to a two-state peace. The policy itself was identical. Barak is today arguing that Netanyahu may be pursuing the same policy, but with opposite intentions. That may be, but it's the same policy nonetheless. And alas, Barak is probably the only Israeli politician who’s less trusted by the public than the wily Netanyahu, because he’s exactly the same kind of dissembling chameleon. And that’s the point. To understand Israel's containment policy, you can't start at the end, as though Israeli leaders have some unique gift to shape reality precisely to their liking and always intended this very outcome. To actually understand it, you have to put yourself in the Israeli government’s shoes back then. If you’re the Israeli government in 2009 or 2014 or 2019, what options are available to you in Gaza? Hamas is massively invested in building tunnels to make any future Israeli attack impossibly costly for Israel by forcing the IDF to go through the civilian population if it ever tries to get to Hamas. So war on any serious scale - the kind demanded by Netanyahu's far-right allies over the years - is off the table. Hamas isn't appeasable, can't moderate and has no interest in any political process. That's a consensus view among Israelis for a simple reason: Its long history of terrorist assaults on civilians *specifically* *to* *stop* *peace* *efforts*. It bombed Jerusalem buses just before the 1996 election and successfully tilted the election away from the left by the narrowest margin in Israeli electoral history, all but freezing Oslo for three years. It drove the Second Intifada’s wave of 140 suicide bombings that crashed the Camp David process and shattered the Israeli left for a generation. No serious Israeli thinks Hamas’s terrorism is about occupation. That's true even among Israelis who desperately want to end the occupation, and those who saw the first-intifada stone-throwing protestors as protesting occupation. Hamas, they understand, is different. The suicide bombings of Hamas were never about ending occupation, they were about the danger, as Hamas perceived it for two generations, that the peace process might succeed. So what are your options as a government? War in Gaza with devastating civilian costs and untenable costs for Israel? Lifting the blockade and giving Hamas free access to ally regimes’ flow of funding and resources? Or, as they finally decided, left-wing leaders and right-wing ones alike across 17 years of Israeli governments, would you pursue a containment policy that attempts to allow a Gazan economy to exist while minimizing Hamas’s capacity to prepare for never-ending war? Or put another way, would you have prevented the Qatari money from entering? Would you have risked Gaza’s economy crashing, a humanitarian crisis, and the high probability that a collapsing Hamas regime, in its desperation, might trigger a great war? No, Dave, Netanyahu’s attempt to paint his relatively moderate past as a sneaky, 13-year far-right plot is not the reality. It's a pretense meant to serve his present-day political troubles. That’s how nearly every Israeli, including in Likud, explains it. Smotrich, for what it’s worth, was being completely honest. He believes every word in that quote. One final comment: Be wary of quote-mining. You got these quotes from activists who spend their time sifting through texts to find what they need, often decontextualized and never the full picture. If I did that to Palestinian leaders, I could prove to you that they're pretty much all Nazis. Literally. No, they’re not Nazis. Nazism doesn’t explain their predicament, their opinions, their responses to the problems they face. But plenty of central Palestinian leaders and ideologues, particularly in Hamas but also in Fatah, have flirted with Nazi ideas over the years. The paper trail is long enough to convince a great many Israelis that there's a deep connection. It's still a misreading of Palestinian strategy and thinking. Quote-mining isn’t a path to understanding. It’s a path to bias confirmation. Sorry again for the length. I have more to say. Barak's actual critique of Netanyahu is more sophisticated and serious than the quote you brought. But that's for another time.