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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   42879 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 8, 2025

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Well that's tough for the Qataris then. If you're going to fund proxies to try to militarily destroy another nation, that nation might decide they don't want to play by your particular rules of engagement.

The Qataris that funded Hamas with explicit Israeli approval.

For years, the Qatari government had been sending millions of dollars a month into the Gaza Strip — money that helped prop up the Hamas government there. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel not only tolerated those payments, he had encouraged them.

During his meetings in September with the Qatari officials, according to several people familiar with the secret discussions, the Mossad chief, David Barnea, was asked a question that had not been on the agenda: Did Israel want the payments to continue?

Mr. Netanyahu’s government had recently decided to continue the policy, so Mr. Barnea said yes. The Israeli government still welcomed the money from Doha.

I want off of Mr. Netanyahu's wild 4d chess ride. So his goal is to preserve Hamas and deny a possible peaceful resolution?

So why exactly did the Israelis support this policy?

Israelis generally likely wouldn't, but Netanyahu and co use Hamas as a justification (especially to their domestic opposition) to refuse to negotiate in good faith let alone negotiate a longer-term political solution to the conflict, e.g., a two state solution which is the preferred and endorsed "solution" by the overwhelming vast majority of the world for many decades and, at the time, a sizeable portion of Israelis. Netanyahu and co can claim they have no "viable partner for peace" as long as Hamas is in control.

It's important to remember, Netanyahu and co very nearly lost that battle when Yitzhak Rabin was elected PM in 1992 on making peace and who genuinely engaged in dialogue with the Palestinians to work towards a lasting peaceful political solution with the Oslo Accords and Peace Process. Or he was until he was assassinated.

Additionally, Netanyahu and co think of Hamas as not being particularly dangerous; Israel would simply need to go in and "mow the grass" from time to time to keep them beaten down.

So they constantly serve as a placeholder who murder any upstart rivals and prevent a more palatable (to negotiate with) group coming to the front in the Gaza strip as well as prevent a united group across the Strip and the West Bank.

The article is paywalled. Nevertheless, I may be misinformed on this.

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