A lot of people on X are talking about the fact that Israel paid Hamas. They say Netanyahu made Hamas. Now Netanyahu is crying about Hamas. You know, what’s that all about? He has no standing. Let’s look at the actual history.
The Soviet Union essentially created the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1964 to delegitimize Israel with this secular nationalist movement, when Israel refused to turn communist. Essentially, Israel was looking for a way to counter powerful Russia and the powerful PLO. And so it chose this sheikh, this Ahmed Yassin guy, who had a network of charitable institutions.
The strategy that Israel used was directly out of the American playbook. The CIA and the Mossad were using Cold War techniques, and the idea was to fracture the base. So Yassin would be the religious one; Arafat would be the secular nationalist one. And there wouldn’t be a real entity to negotiate with to get to a state—which, of course, the pretext for the state was to destroy Israel.
So this went on. Yassin turned out to be an Islamist hiding weapons in the mosques, and Israel unfortunately continued to allow the situation to continue without a really good alternative. The wake-up call was October 7th. Now Hamas became a deadly enemy—beyond deadly—that had to be eliminated. There was no more stasis. There was no more thinking that they could be bought off, that having them govern the Gazans would be enough for them, that they could be bribed, whatever it was. They were an imminent threat.
And so the other problem is that the quote-unquote Palestinians have developed this very real identity around Islamism, around this idea that they must destroy Israel for their version of religion to make sense. This isn’t something that Jared Kushner can buy off with economic development. This requires a different answer—a religious one.
Writing by Dr. Dannielle Blumenthal 