In the past 24 hours, two reports out of Israel have pointed to a striking conclusion: that the failure to prevent Hamas’s murderous assault on southern Israel rests in significant part with the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
First, the Washington Post’s Noga Tarnopolsky and Shira Rubin wrote a lengthy dispatch on the many policy failures that allowed Hamas to break through. They find that, in addition to myriad unforgivable intelligence and military mistakes — especially shocking given Israel’s reputation in both fields — there were serious political problems. Distracted by both the fight to seize control over Israel’s judiciary and their effort to deepen Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Netanyahu and his cabinet allowed military readiness to degrade and left outposts on the Gaza border in the south unmanned.
“There was a need for more soldiers, so where did they take them from? From the Gaza border, where they thought it was calm … not surprising that Hamas and Islamic Jihad noticed the low staffing at the border,” Aharon Zeevi Farkash, the former head of the Israel Defense Forces’ military intelligence, said in comments reported by the Post.
Second, a columnist at Israel’s Ha’aretz newspaper unearthed evidence that Netanyahu has intentionally propped up Hamas rule in Gaza — seeing Palestinian extremism as a bulwark against a two-state solution to the conflict.
“Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas,” the prime minister reportedly said at a 2019 meeting of his Likud party. “This is part of our strategy — to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.”
These exact comments have not yet been confirmed by other sources. But the Times of Israel’s Tal Schneider wrote on Sunday that Netanyahu’s reported words “are in line with the policy that he implemented,” which did little…
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