Hamas and Netanyahu: two sides of a counterfeit coin
Pedro Scuro Neto
“There is no news”, Umberto Eco tells us, “journalists are the ones who create it”. He also comments on “the drastic drop in print media sales, and the saturation of the market in which traditional journalism must compete with less formal or unprofessional modalities”. From which I conclude that since “people don’t need newspapers (because) they can tell lies by themselves” (as a Brazilian song goes), Internet users took on the task and bad journalism became increasingly 'democratic'.
Not surprisingly, very few of us seem to be aware of this transformation. Consequently, Eco points out: we trust the everyman’s electronic media “because we don't know how to differentiate accredited sources from nonsense ones – just think about websites on plots or absurd stories: they have incredible following, from Internet users to influential people who take the web seriously”. [https://www.academia.edu/36573715/Luta_Anticorrup%C3%A7%C3%A3o_Arca_dos_Insensatos]
The Hamas-Israel War is the case in point, since what is portrayed by the corporate and everyman’s electronic media reflects extremely poorly the realities of the region and much less the structural forces that are leading the Middle East to disaster.
In stark contrast to the standard narrative, the war is a contentious ‘manna from heaven’ to Likud, the political party founded in 1973 by Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon in an alliance with several right-wing organisations. In power since 1996 and after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, the party has contributed to the expansion and military training of Hamas, an Arabic acronym for the Islamic Resistance Movement.
Back in the 1960s, the precursor of Hamas, Al Mujamma al Islami (‘The Islamic Center’), has established the presence of the Muslim Brotherhood in the Palestinian territories through a set of charities in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. In 1987, a group of its activists organised Hamas, a formal Palestinian branch of the Brotherhood, that has ever since labelled itself as “one of the wings of the Moslem Brotherhood in Palestine”, but just as Likud, “a universal organisation” structured transnationally.
One of Hamas’ adherents was the wheelchair-bound Sheik Ahmed Yassin, its future leader that has concentrated the Mujamma’s activities on religious and social services. Oddly enough, Israeli authorities actively supported the rise of militarised Hamas, during the time when their main antagonist was Yasser Arafat and his Palestinian Liberation Organization.
Those days, the Islamists affiliated with Egypt’s banned Muslim Brotherhood were allowed to operate almost freely in Gaza, assisting Israel in its repression of PLO operatives in the occupied territory. During that time, Sheik Yassin was jailed on a 12-year sentence, but not surprisingly released only a year later.
Around the same time, Netanyahu made his first mark, representing the new generation of Israeli politicians trained by American PR experts and his former employer, the Boston Consulting Group. Serving as Israeli ambassador to the U.N. he authored a book offering lessons on “how democracies can defeat domestic and international terrorists”.
Right after that, 1988 amid the first intifada/uprising Hamas finally made clear that it refused the existence of the Israeli state and launched a campaign of attacks against civilians. When the peace process began between Yitzhak Rabin and Arafat, Sheik Yassin was again in prison, this time sentenced for life. However, as soon as Netanyahu became prime minister, Yassin was released “on humanitarian grounds”. Even more surprising, after Yassin was expelled to Jordan, Netanyahu allowed him to return to Gaza as a hero in late 1997. Until his killing in 2004, he initiated a wave of suicide attacks against Israelis.
In 2007, after Hamas’ election victory that rankled both the West and Fatah, the group took over and began administering Gaza, leading both Israel and Egypt to impose a strategy of total blockade. But this was not all. In March 2019, following perhaps the lessons exposed in his book, Netanyahu told Likud’s Knesset members that “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”.
Nevertheless, before the global pandemic, Gazan Palestinians organised widespread protests demanding Israel to end the blockade and address the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. This made Likud in desperation to revert Netanyahu’s plan in favour of a novel and ‘final solution’. Hence, the preference for the ‘Dahiya Doctrine’, outlined by former IDF Chief Gadi Eizenkot in the 2006 Lebanese War and in the 2008-09 Gaza War. It’s premiss is the destruction of civilian infrastructures of “hostile regimes.”
“What happened in the Dahiya quarter of Beirut in 2006 will happen in every village from which Israel is fired on… We will apply disproportionate force on it and cause great damage and destruction there. From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages, they are military bases… This is not a recommendation. This is a plan. And it has been approved.”
From the perspective of international law, the ‘doctrine’ is nothing but ‘state terrorism’, and in the view of U.N. a “carefully planned” assault “to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population”.
Thus, in July Netanyahu had no alternative but to make unambiguously clear that his government would no longer bolster Hamas, but “crush” any Palestinian statehood ambitions, using the principles drawn by Eizenkot, now a minister without portfolio in war cabinet of the former BCG consultant on defeating terrorism.
In the first six days of the war Israel dropped six thousand bombs on Gaza – almost the number the U.S. used in Afghanistan in one year. To understand the intensity of such bombing, it suffices to know that Afghanistan is almost 1,800 larger than the besieged Palestinian enclave. Israel is going by the book – no longer Netanyahu’s but that of Eizenkot, the new Messiah.
“The two-state solution is no longer possible” (Tzipi Hotovely, Israeli ambassador to the United Kingdom, last week).
Pedro Scuro (academia.edu)
