Israel’s far right seems to believe that destroying Palestinian governance will afford Israel more strength. On the contrary—it is a mistake that will become expensive, bloody, and self-destructive as it accelerates the cycles of resentment and violence. And Washington, too, stands to lose a great deal by turning a blind eye to the West Bank: the PA’s collapse will remove any plausible path toward the kind of regional stabilization and effective postwar settlement on which the Trump administration has staked much of its foreign policy legacy.
And once again it will all be blamed on some manufactured lies or an Israeli funded militant group.
Probably, yes.
Personally, I suspected it was on the cards after the Hamas attack, which I always have and still think was set up, for this and other purposes.
It worked too. Got Trump elected, Syria, Hamas and Hezbollah either done or severely weakened, the Gaza Strip annexed and removed Russia from the area.
I mean yeah, Hamas itself was set up by Israel and thats not even speculation. The progress on a two state solution was going too smoothly which was not acceptable for Israels right wing, so they funded the operations of a new, more aggressive resistance group that could be used as an excuse for invasion.
From wikipedia:
And its also a fact that the higher ups in the chain of command told the border guards to stop patrolling right before the attack.
It’s a “yes, but” kind of situation. Israel absolutely funded and promoted Hamas with the idea that it would be a counterbalance to the secular PLO and cause infighting, but what ended up happening is Fatah and the Palestinian Authority became (by and large) willing compradors, while Hamas not only remained a resistance movement, but moderated their views over time.
The original Hamas charter was basically boilerplate antisemitism, blaming the Jews for the French Revolution, the Freemasons, and so-on, and stated explicitly that their fight was with the Jews. The updated charter of 2017 is completely different, in form and content the charter of a secular national liberation movement. The new charter rejects the idea that their struggle is with the Jewish people, but with the Zionist project. They still maintain Islamic framing, of course (“In the name of Allah, the most merciful”, etc.), but the actual content of their rhetoric is that of secular national liberation. They’re likewise allied with and have the support of secular resistance groups.