Israel and Hamas: Three Lies and a Glimpse of the Truth

By Gwynne Dyer

First, three lies. The Gaza offensive has yielded “unprecedented military gains,” said Israeli Defence Minister Benny Gantz. The ceasefire on Friday amounted to a “victory” for the Palestinian people and a defeat for Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, said a Hamas official. But the ceasefire brings “genuine opportunity” for progress, said US President Joe Biden.

Biden was spouting the diplomatic tripe that is expected on these occasions, knowing that nobody over the age of 10 would take it seriously. The victory claims were also nonsense: the kill ratio was the usual twenty-to-one in Israel’s favour, but Hamas, having fired 4,000 very inaccurate rockets at Israel, still had 8,000 left at war’s end.

This was the fourth such war since 2006. As Albert Einstein allegedly remarked, “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome.”

Neither Netanyahu nor the leaders of Hamas are insane, so they must have been aiming for this outcome. Somehow, it serves both their purposes. What might those purposes be?

Netanyahu’s strategic goal is to keep all the territory west of the Jordan river, so he needs a Palestinian enemy that refuses to talk about sharing it. Hamas is that enemy. He also needed a war right now to thwart the formation of an opposition coalition that would deprive him of office and quite possibly send him to jail on corruption charges.

Hamas wanted a war, too. Its hated rival is the Palestinian Authority (PA), which ‘governs’ the West Bank under Israeli supervision. Another nicely contained little war with Israel would strengthen Hamas’s claim to be the only true voice of the Palestinian people. More importantly, it didn’t want to lose its de facto ally Netanyahu over some silly domestic peccadillo.

The ease with which the bloodshed was ended once Netanyahu and Hamas achieved their different goals gives the game away. A very cross reader of the Israeli newspaper ‘Haaretz’ put the following on a comment thread the day before the ceasefire.

“The best attainable peace agreement is for Hamas and Netty to limit killing each other to 10 days before each election or no-confidence vote, since that’s all that keeps both sides in power forever. Then stop the killing early if the polls show the incumbents ahead by over five points….”

“But to show good faith, Hamas must do three terrorist bistro-bombings the week of the election, and drive sound trucks through blaring ‘Israel must be destroyed’ at 50 decibels above the agony threshold….. It’s a win-win. Think of all the lives it would save, not to mention prison space.”

It’s most unlikely that the Israeli Prime Minister has ever had direct contact with Hamas leaders, but as Avigdor Lieberman, leader of the Yisrael Beytenu party, put it recently: “The one who nurtured Hamas and enabled it to get to where it is today is Netanyahu.” (Lieberman has served in three Netanhyahu cabinets.)

Adam Raz, co-editor of the journal ‘Telem’, wrote last week in Haaretz: “Netanyahu’s strategy is well-known, even if it’s never explicitly stated – to keep Hamas as a key player in the dispute with Israel in order to undercut the PA in Ramallah. Why? Because with Hamas there’s no talk about a negotiated solution to the conflict….”

“In recent days, the Jerusalem police haven’t made any ‘mistakes’ [in their brutal actions against Palestinian protesters at al-Aqsa mosque] – rather, they understood which way the wind was blowing. Thus, you can agree with [Haaretz journalist Amos] Harel, who wrote that the police ‘didn’t need explicit directives from above to know that they were expected to show an iron fist’….”

“At Sheikh Jarrah, Damascus Gate and the Al-Aqsa Mosque, no mistakes were made – policies were undertaken to inflame the area. (And remember, Hamas had prepared its rockets – it wasn’t a spontaneous attack on Israel.)…”

“Hamas very much fears Netanyahu’s departure and the weakening of the political line he represents. Hamas knows very well that another Prime Minister may resume cooperation with whoever is leading the PA and thereby deal a fatal blow to Hamas. So Hamas fulfilled its part of the unwritten agreement, as partners are expected to do….”

“Hamas has pushed the PA even further to the margins in recent days and strengthened its hold on Palestinian society…. In practice, the PA and Jordan have lost their hold on the ground to Hamas ….”

The war was not the result of ‘mistakes’ and poor communications between the two sides, Raz concluded. Netanyahu did not foresee the radicalisation of Arabs in the West Bank and Israel proper, but apart from that everything went as intended. The war should be seen “not as a war between enemies but as collaboration between colleagues.”

I didn’t say all that. Raz did. But I think he’s right.