There's more than a grain of truth in what Levianon's saying,
Well too bad the People of Gaza didn't know that Hamas was created and funded by Israel. Hamas works for Israel.
Originally Posted by Levianon17
Like maybe a dump truck load of truth. In recent years, I don't believe the Israeli government has directly funded Hamas. But Netanyahu's government has been happy to see Arab governments like Qatar's send money Hamas' way. Netanyahu doesn't want a two state solution, and some of his coalition partners, who represent Israeli settlers on the West Bank, want one even less. As such they have used Hamas as a counterweight to the Palestinian Authority (PA). Now it's come back to bite them in the ass.
This is an excerpt from an editorial in the New York Times,
Netanyahu Led Us to Catastrophe. He Must Go.
....Blindness to the danger from Gaza has a longer history, though, and is rooted in a strategic choice that has guided Mr. Netanyahu since his return to power in 2009. (He first held office from 1996 to 1999.) Nearly two years before, Hamas seized control of the Gaza Strip, splitting the nascent Palestinian polity in two. The president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, and his Fatah movement retained their limited power in autonomous areas of the West Bank. Though Mr. Abbas has never reached a two-state agreement with Israel, he has consistently favored that outcome.
Mr. Netanyahu clearly chose to see the split as positive, as a way to foster Gaza’s independence from the West Bank and to weaken the Palestinian Authority. In 2019, for instance, he explained why he allowed the Hamas regime in Gaza to be propped up with cash from Qatar rather than have it depend on a financial umbilical cord to the West Bank. He told Likud lawmakers that “whoever is against a Palestinian state should be for” the Qatari funding, as paraphrased by a source who was present. Given Hamas’s rejection of Israel’s existence and the lack of a single Palestinian voice, a two-state agreement seemed impossible — allowing Israel to go on ruling the West Bank, as Mr. Netanyahu clearly prefers.
That view is widely shared on the Israeli right. In a 2015 interview Mr. Smotrich argued that Palestinian terrorist attacks at the time were mostly isolated and “atmospheric” — in other words, political theater but not a strategic danger. The real threat, he said, was on the diplomatic front from Mr. Abbas. For Israel, he concluded, “the Palestinian Authority is a burden, and Hamas is an asset.”
That’s why, despite the regular rounds of fighting between Israel and Gaza, Mr. Netanyahu allowed Hamas to continue entrenching its rule. Reconquering Gaza, I stress, was never a practical or moral option, and Israel’s ability to push for Palestinian reunification had limits. But under Mr. Netanyahu, the country evaded opportunities to do so when Hamas was isolated and weak. Bringing Gaza back under the Palestinian Authority was apparently never part of the prime minister’s agenda. Hamas was the enemy and, in a bizarre twist, an ally against the threat of diplomacy, a two-state solution and peace.
....The present-day mistake rested on greater hubris: believing that Hamas could be safely managed in order to maintain and deepen occupation of the West Bank indefinitely.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/18/o...rael-gaza.html
Excerpts from an article in the Times of Israel,
For years, Netanyahu propped up Hamas. Now it’s blown up in our faces
The premier’s policy of treating the terror group as a partner, at the expense of Abbas and Palestinian statehood, has resulted in wounds that will take Israel years to heal from
For years, the various governments led by Benjamin Netanyahu took an approach that divided power between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank — bringing Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to his knees while making moves that propped up the Hamas terror group.
The idea was to prevent Abbas — or anyone else in the Palestinian Authority’s West Bank government — from advancing toward the establishment of a Palestinian state.
Thus, amid this bid to impair Abbas, Hamas was upgraded from a mere terror group to an organization with which Israel held indirect negotiations via Egypt, and one that was allowed to receive infusions of cash from abroad....
Meanwhile, Israel has allowed suitcases holding millions in Qatari cash to enter Gaza through its crossings since 2018, in order to maintain its fragile ceasefire with the Hamas rulers of the Strip....
Most of the time, Israeli policy was to treat the Palestinian Authority as a burden and Hamas as an asset. Far-right MK Bezalel Smotrich, now the finance minister in the hardline government and leader of the Religious Zionism party, said so himself in 2015.
According to various reports, Netanyahu made a similar point at a Likud faction meeting in early 2019, when he was quoted as saying that those who oppose a Palestinian state should support the transfer of funds to Gaza, because maintaining the separation between the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza would prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-ye...-in-our-faces/
Here's an article from 2019, in the Jerusalem Post, in which Netanyahu claims with respect to Qatari funds, "we know it's going to humanitarian causes." Yeah, right. This post is getting lengthy, so I'll just post the link.
https://www.jpost.com/arab-israeli-c...divided-583082
Haaretz has done a lot of reporting on this too, but you have to sign up for an account.