I've heard it said by eliminating all other avenues of Palestinian political expression, Netanyahu created modern Hamas.
He undermined the two-state solution and Palestinian Authority. When you do this, you back people into a corner. There's no path to peacefully making progress on anything you care about. It also conveniently gives Netanyahu a boogeyman for his own political ends.
You might argue the PA was corrupt, etc. But that status quo was far better than what exists now.
Israel gave Hamas seed funding back in the 1980s. They thought it would weaken the PLO. This was when the US funding the Taliban. Having pet Jihandis' was cool back then.
More recently, USA gave ('returned') $1.7 billion to Iran. Of course a large chunk of that has gone to Hamas and Hezbollah and numerous other interests that destabilise Israel and Western powers.
I would argue that the 2005 Israeli unilateral withdrawal from Gaza created the vacuum that allowed Hamas to grow. Palestinians and Hamas interpreted that withdrawal as a validation of their resistance strategy [0]—including suicide bombings—and it boosted their confidence in the goal of liberating all of Palestine “from the river to the sea,” which effectively means the elimination of Israel.
So no, what really happened was precisely the opposite of “eliminating all other avenues of Palestinian political expression.”
Calling the old PA-led status quo “far better” ignores how dysfunctional and destructive it was. The PA was given territory, money, and international legitimacy after Oslo, yet instead of building a transparent, functioning state, it became notorious for corruption, power struggles, and failing to deliver basic services. Worse, during that same period, suicide bombings and the Second Intifada erupted under its watch, so for ordinary Israelis, that “status quo” meant buses, cafes, and markets being blown up.
Even for Palestinians, the PA’s rule was hardly a path to peace or progress. Billions in foreign aid were stolen by elites, elections were canceled, dissent was crushed, and everyday life was marked by both authoritarianism and insecurity. So while today’s Hamas reality is undeniably worse, pretending the old PA era was some kind of lost golden path to peace overlooks that it was already a dead end for both peoples.
> Israel wasn't paying Hamas so they'd launch October 7th
Agreed. But as a close friend -- who spent years living and working in the Middle East, including Gaza, and very well connected there -- pointed out to me, it's very hard to believe that Israel, with one of the most, if not the most, heavily guarded borders in the world, with arguably the best intelligence force in the world that is very embedded in the Palestinian Territories, did not know of the attack in advance, if not the details. Think about how much Israel had to gain from letting it happen and it becomes an easy decision.
On the contrary, I think you will find that most people simply cannot comprehend the idea that Netanyahu/Israel would aid Hamas, they will think you are a conspiracy nut for stating the plain facts.
I'm not sure what the point of this is. "Do you want Hamas or the PA?" is like asking someone "do you want rotting meat or polluted drinking water?" Why are these the only two options?
The PA is a captured extension of the Israeli security state. The PA is standing by while Israeli settlers systematically kill, chase off and terrorize Palestinians on the West Bank. IOF soldiers will idly stand by while a settler just comes up with a (government-supplied) gun, shoots a 60 year old farmer and then complains to the Army that the locals are harassing them.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu defended Israel’s regular allowing of Qatari funds to be transferred into Gaza, saying it is part of a broader strategy to keep Hamas and the Palestinian Authority separate, a source in Monday’s Likud faction meeting said.
The prime minister also said that, “whoever is against a Palestinian state should be for” transferring the funds to Gaza, because maintaining a separation between the PA in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza helps prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.
By those HN guidelines, your shallow dismissal of my clear criticism is what is against the HN rules that you quote. So is your twisting of my words to a conclusion that I did not state.
Furthermore, if you're dragging out the HN guidlines, it clearly states that comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. Your comment was neither thoughtful nor substantive. Further furthermore, that document states that Hacker News should not be used for political or ideological battle - yet that is all that we see in these Israel posts that happen here every few days. The top of that document states that most stories about politics are Off-Topic. Yet HN happily drags many non-tech discussions about Israel on for over a thousand comments, whereas discussions about similar situations are completely absent from HN.
Fall in line with what exactly? Living under military occupation? Denied statehood by having their borders controlled? Being forcibly relocated out of Gaza?
As the GP said, there needs to be an actual alternative.
Not sure what you mean by "military occupation". The military was for the most part not in Gaza itself. Not all borders were controlled (why do they even want to cross over to Israel?).
Israel is here to stay. Gazans need to an accept that and try to progress towards civilized society. And Hamas definitely needs to go.
The people of Gaza fighting a terrorist group is also lunacy. They shouldn't be held responsible and if Israel can't fight Hamas without overwhelming causing suffering to the people of Gaza they shouldn't.
do you happen to have a link to a helpful YouTube video tutorial on how to organize a coup against a terrorist state while starving to death in the middle of a total occupation?
> There Palestinians simply preferred hamas and terrorism over the PLO.... They need to commit to non violence between themselves before it's possible to commit to non violence with their enemies.
Hamas won 44% of the vote and then, as you noted, they murdered their political opposition. For this, everybody in Gaza should suffer both under a terrorist group running their lives and Israel bombing them?
Improve the living conditions of the average person so they're more interested in watching the next football game instead of taking vengeance for their murdered father.
> can understand why desperate people, whose land is increasingly stolen, whose rights are increasingly abused, and who cannot see their lives improve would turn (or be turned) to an organisation who would ultimately commit such abhorrent acts
I can't. It doesn't work and makes you the bad guy. Even if just temporarily, that's enough for the other side to exploit. It's always been enough for the other side to exploit. Terrorism has a terrible track record for a reason.
That said, I challenge the premise. Palestinians didn't vote for October 7th. They didn't vote to suspend elections. They voted to kick Fatah out.
I can understand why desperate people, whose land is increasingly stolen, whose rights are increasingly abused, and who cannot see their lives improve would turn (or be turned) to an organisation who would ultimately commit such abhorrent acts.
There are a lot of examples of really bad stuff happening to groups of people over the centuries, very few of them have resorted to October 7 levels of horror.
I'm not Jewish, but the soviets did some really horrific shit to our family, and we actually lost all our land, our whole livelihoods and strangely, no one in our family killed women or children over it. We never resulted to terrorism to deal with the issue. We did get our land back in the 90s though.
I can guarantee you that if the Palestinians / Hamas didn't do October 7, they would be in a much better position than they are now. 99% of people lost the ability to feel sympathy for them after that. Which is why Israel can basically make the plans. Most of the world just gave up.
Comparison of two peoples occupation and suffering and response to it is quite unfair.
And you act as if Oct 7th is the be all and end all of the story of the Palestine/Israel. "Oct 7th levels of horror". I won't excuse Hamas for what they did, but worse levels of horror have been inflicted on the Palestinian people. It's odd you ignore those levels or are ignorant to them. Just saying.
And you say 99% of people lost the ability to feel sympathy. I'll dispute that because the sane among us don't blame civilians for the actions of a paramilitary organisation gone wild. But let's pretend you're right. Isn't it ironic then that the world has so strongly turned against Israel now? (at least in the UN and your average people).
I'll contend that Israel may have destroyed Gaza, but in so doing they have destroyed their reputation and brought ill and hatred to their people now for a generation.
I'll defend Jews always as many have stood side by side with those against what's happening in Israel. But Israel has made their lives harder. Israel's actions have now made it much, much easier for the crazy people among us to do crazy things (c.f. today's Manchester, UK synagogue terrorist attack).
The way you conflate upwards of 150.000 slaughtered civilians (numbers directly from Isreali military sources - who are being ethnically cleansed according to UN experts, with Hamas is sinister and beyond dark, especially when you also completely ignore 75 years of Israeli violence and occupation before october 7.
Yeah the over thirty thousand dead kids really shouldn't have "done" october 7, a response done by completely different people to decades of violence, it was so stupid of them.
This is vile and incredibly dehumanising if not straight up violently racist.
In all objective measures of life quality, gaza was better off occupied by Israel, both compared with before 67 (Israel's occupation made Gaza prosper relative to when it was controlled by Egypt), and compared with after hamas took over and forced Israel to isolate gaza increasingly in order to deal with the terrorism from Gaza.
The only thing gaza didn't have under Israeli occupation was democratic election. And guess what, they didn't have that after the occupation stopped either. They don't have it in most Arabic countries either.
> Funny how literally every written record of history agrees the Jews are the people of Israel, but the Arabs don't.
Why do people keep bringing this up as if it matters? Every piece of land has had someone living on it for the last 10,000 years, how does it matter that some group lived there in like 500 bce then a jewish tribe came in and then later some other tribe came in and so on.
There's no mormon land/state, or sikh, or uygur or a dozen other religions. What makes this religion so special that they should be allowed to conquer another nation to take their land for their own?
At some moment in time, the first human built a house there, then sometime later some other people showed up then sometime later the israeli tribe conquered the land then the romans conquered it and so on until some muslim tribe conquered it and then in 1950 or whenever the current people conquered it.
Which one of those groups is supposed to have some kind extra special entitlement to live there?
I feel like you could say Ukraine were backed into a corner, multiple times, they didn't resort to October 7 levels of horror either. In fact, there is not a single documented case where they have attacked civilians or civilian infrastructure.
So while I'm not closed to the idea that Netanyahu is a bad man. I find it hard to rationalize the actions of the people who were "backed into a corner"?
> Ukraine were backed into a corner, multiple times, they didn't resort to October 7 levels of horror either
While I personally condemn Hamas's tactics and don't recognize their political legitimacy, Ukraine has billions in modern military equipment, including tanks and fighter planes. They have conventional military options Palestinians could only dream of.
Ukraine has also been supplied with intelligence, weapons and materiel from other countries in Europe, with which they also share land borders, as well as the United States. Palestinians can't even get food from Egypt, their immediate neighbor.
> there is not a single documented case where they [Ukraine] have attacked civilians or civilian infrastructure.
It must further be observed that Israel has likely killed over 100,000 civilians and miles of civilian infrastructure, even as they enjoy the upper hand economically and militarily. Whatever damage Hamas has done to Israel, Israel has retaliated far out of proportion to Palestinian civilians, in a way that is judged calculated to be genocidal.
While I personally condemn Hamas's tactics and don't recognize their political legitimacy, Ukraine has billions in modern military equipment, including tanks and fighter planes. They have conventional military options Palestinians could only dream of.
It's funny because until they started winning, it was basically, "they're done in 3 days", now it's, oh they have billions in equipment etc.
Here's a question for you, why didn't Hamas have that? Why didn't the rest of the world send them more aid and weapons aid? Hmm strange.
If you were in an "open air prison" (silly term, but ok), would your next move be to raid a peace and love festival and slaughter kids ? Just wondering?
Thats a weird framing. It seems more like an escalation of an already violent clash than Pro Ukrainian protestors burning a building full of Pro russians alive intentionally.
>A 'United Ukraine' rally was attacked by pro-Russian separatists where Stones, petrol bombs and gunfire were exchanged. The pro-Ukraine protesters then moved to dismantle a pro-Russian protest camp in Kulykove Pole, causing some pro-Russian activists to barricade themselves in the nearby Trade Unions House. Shots were fired by both sides, and the pro-Ukraine protesters attempted to storm the building, which caught fire as the two groups threw petrol bombs at each other.
Abhorrent. Not only in the crime but that "although several alleged perpetrators were charged, there has yet to be a trial."
But also, that's forty-eight dead. The fiasco started after "a 'United Ukraine' rally was attacked by pro-Russian separatists." And this was criminality by a protest group (in predominantly pro-Russian territory, no less) not any party claiming to govern Ukraine.
He undermined the two-state solution and Palestinian Authority. When you do this, you back people into a corner. There's no path to peacefully making progress on anything you care about. It also conveniently gives Netanyahu a boogeyman for his own political ends.
You might argue the PA was corrupt, etc. But that status quo was far better than what exists now.