I reported on Netanyahu green-lighting Gaza aid - but there's more to the story
A news article I wrote in 2019 has been fueling a conspiracy theory about Israel's war with Gaza. The truth is much more banal - but still dangerous.
A couple of days after Hamas committed its genocidal rampage in Israel’s South, I started getting questions in tweets and e-mails from people asking about an article I wrote for The Jerusalem Post four-and-a-half years ago titled "Netanyahu: Money to Hamas part of strategy to keep Palestinians divided.”
The article has been pulled out of context to assert some kind of conspiracy or a partnership of convenience between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas. That is false. The reality is much more banal – but still dangerous. The policy that the prime minister defended in 2019, trying to appease Hamas with foreign funding, was one that a long series of top security officials and even Netanyahu’s rivals upheld, which made Israel complacent and vulnerable ahead of the Oct. 7 attack.
In 2019, Hamas regularly launched projectiles, including incendiary balloons, to try to set Israel’s south on fire. Asked why he would permit Qatar to send aid to the Hamas-run Gaza Strip even as Israeli agricultural land was burning, Netanyahu defended the policy. The first reason he gave was that, if Israel is the pipeline for the funds, it could better ensure that the money went to humanitarian causes.
The second reason is the one that received attention in the last month: “Whoever is against a Palestinian state should be for” allowing aid to go to Gaza, thus strengthening Hamas, my source said, paraphrasing Netanyahu. The prime minister told his party’s lawmakers that driving a wedge between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas helps prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.
My sources for the article still do not want to go on the record four years later. I can say that a Knesset member gave me the information and that another person who was in the room confirmed it at the time.
This secondhand quote has been rewritten and twisted and posted all over social media to fuel conspiracy theories that Israel was funding Hamas, or created Hamas. One French TV journalist asked to interview me about the war and proceeded to only ask questions about this line of Netanyahu’s thinking, even going so far as to cynically argue that the prime minister paid Hamas off to help him electorally.
Neither Israel nor Netanyahu funded Hamas. What Netanyahu referred to in March 2019 was allowing humanitarian aid to go into the Gaza Strip and helping provide energy to its residents – the very same things that its critics, some friendly and many not, demand Israel do now. Most of the Qatari money was meant to pay Israel to provide gas for Gaza’s power plant. Some went to poor families, and $10-15 million – the infamous “suitcases of cash” – went to pay salaries for civil servants in the Hamas-run government.
The rest of the 2019 article is notable because of what we know in 2023. It features criticism from the Blue and White Party led by Benny Gantz — now a minister in Netanyahu’s War Cabinet — then-opposition lawmaker and eventual Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, and others. Gantz’s party called the payments “protection,” like the kind paid to the mafia, and Bennett campaigned in the election that year on being tougher on Hamas than Netanyahu.
Both have served as defense minister under Netanyahu since then, and neither made any serious attempt to change policy. Gantz was chief of staff of the IDF in 2012, when the policy of letting aid money flow into Hamas-controlled Gaza began, and defense minister in 2020-2022 as it continued. Bennett was defense minister in 2019-2020, and, most importantly, prime minister in 2021-2022, when he claimed to have "stopped the suitcases of cash to Gaza” – but that is true in only the most literal sense. Hamas still received all of the money.
Even those like Gantz and Bennett, who said in their election campaigns that the money strengthens Hamas and does not deter it from attacking Israelis, did not stop the flow of funds once they had the power to make a change —whether as ministers with Netanyahu as premier or not. And Netanyahu, at the top of the pyramid for all but a year and a half of the 11 years in which the thinking that Hamas could be paid off was dominant, carries the ultimate responsibility.
The problem was that so many Israeli politicians and military leaders from 2012 onwards ultimately supported sending “protection” payments to Gaza. They were captive to groupthink, insistent that if Hamas was facilitated in its role of governing Gaza and there was enough money coming in from Qatar and Gazans working in Israel, they would be busy enough or happy enough doing that and attack Israel less.
Israel’s leaders were party to a paradigm whose failings are now tragically apparent, with over 1,200 civilians brutally murdered and 239 taken hostage by Hamas in a massive attack that the terrorist group secretly planned while Israel was allowing it to receive tens of millions of dollars each year.
Whether Netanyahu’s motivation was to keep the Palestinians divided or to simply try to pay off Hamas to stop attacking Israel ultimately is not important. What matters is that the deeply flawed assumptions permeated the thinking of Israel’s top security officials, leaving the IDF and political leaders complacent and Israelis vulnerable to a brutal attack.
The investigation that will inevitably follow this war will have to uncover how the Jewish state and its leaders failed at their most basic task, to make sure this never happens again.
I’m sending this to you on Day 36 of the war. I have a lot I want to share with you, my subscribers, but not a lot of time to for extra writing, since I have to hold down the fort on the home front while my husband is on reserve duty.
For those who have not yet subscribed to Jewish Insider’s Daily Kickoff, here’s some of the work I’ve done in the past month - much of which, I’m proud to say, was ahead of the curve on what have since become some of the big stories of this war:
The Israeli government and Biden administration offered differing ideas for the Palestinian Authority’s role in a post-Hamas Gaza over the weekend, with Israel seeking “security control” and a senior Israeli official cautioning that the PA wants to “destroy” Israel, while Secretary of State Tony Blinken stressed Washington’s intent to center the PA in conversations about the future of the Palestinian enclave.
“No one has any illusions about the Palestinians,” the senior Israeli official told Jewish Insider. “The Palestinian Authority wants to destroy the Jewish state in stages and politically, and Hamas wants to do it violently and abruptly.”
If the Netanyahu government calculated that the strategic outreach to Russia and China — even in the face of consternation from allies — would bear diplomatic fruit when Israel needed it, the countries’ reactions to Oct. 7 proved to be a cold slap in the face. In the wake of Hamas’ terror rampage, in fact, Israel’s relations with Beijing and Moscow have worsened.
As Len Khodorkovsky, a deputy assistant secretary of state in the Trump administration who dealt with Iran sanctions and issues relating to China, put it: “Israel tried to have it both ways: reap the benefits of its friendships with the U.S. and the West while flirting with Russia and China.”
South Africa’s Jewish community is on a collision course with the country’s government, following official expressions of solidarity with Hamas after the terrorist group massacred more than 1,400 people in Israel on Oct. 7.
Pretoria announced that it would recall all of its diplomats from Israel on Monday in protest of the war with Hamas and threatened to expel Israeli Ambassador to South Africa Eliav Belotsercovsky — a move that came after the government said Israel has no right to defend itself using military means. Naledi Pandor, South Africa’s international relations minister spoke on the phone last month with Hamas head Ismail Haniyeh and traveled to Tehran to meet with her Iranian counterpart, as well as President Ebrahim Raisi, in recent weeks.
Domestically, South Africa’s government has been lashing out at supporters of Israel, threatening the leadership of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBD), the umbrella organization that represents the more than 50,000 members of the country’s Jewish community, for criticizing what it said in a recent statement was Pretoria’s “ill-considered, immoral and ultimately self-defeating stance.”
I did some interesting interviews with Israel’s former national security adviser Eyal Hulata, who warned that Israel will run out of time in this war faster than it thinks, and Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee member and ex-ambassador to the UN Danny Danon, who said Israel will continue the war even if the UN Security Council tells it not to.
This article, about a pro-Israel influencer spreading disinformation while letting people think he still works for Netanyahu, went pretty viral.
For those still looking for a way to help Israel, the high school I attended in New York is ordering items that IDF soldiers need, and sending them to Israel. You can buy them on Amazon.
Stay safe. Am Yisrael Chai!
Lahav