Netanyahu's 'Strange Alliance' With Hamas Has Run its Course, Israeli Scholar Says
Netanyahu's 'Strange Alliance' With Hamas Has Run its Course, Israeli Scholar Says
Netanyahu was facing mounting pressure due to his push for a sweeping judicial overhaul in Israel
Both Hamas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu face their downfalls after the current genocide in Gaza, after using each other for years to keep a grip on power, The Washington Post noted on Sunday.
“From the beginning, Hamas vowed to destroy Israel and, in his 2009 campaign, Netanyahu vowed to destroy Hamas. What happened instead was a decade and a half of uneasy coexistence, during which Netanyahu’s serial governments and Hamas’s leaders found each other useful for their own purposes,” the article stated.
TRENDPOST: Norman Finkelstein, one of the foremost scholars on Palestine, said in an undated video that Netanyahu’s government needs a violent Hamas to maintain its effort to steal more land from the Palestinians.
“Of course, the last thing that Netanyahu wants is a reasonable Hamas,” he said. “That’s a disaster for Israel because the moment that Hamas starts to behave reasonably, then the pressure begins to be exerted on Israel, ‘Well, they’re being reasonable, why don’t you negotiate and end the conflict,’ which is the one thing Israel doesn’t want…not that it doesn’t want to end the conflict, it doesn’t want to end the occupation. And it needs an ‘extremist Hamas’ in order to justify its gradual absorption, its incremental annexation of the occupied Palestinian territories.”
Adam Raz, an Israeli historian, told the paper, “It’s a strange alliance that has run its course, Hamas will not be the government of Gaza. And I think we can assume that Netanyahu is nearing the end of his political career.”
Netanyahu has refused to admit to any shortcomings and told reporters last week that if Israel does not snuff out terrorists in Gaza, Western states will be targeted next.
“We have to win to protect Israel. We have to win to safeguard the Middle East. We have to win for the sake of the civilized world. That’s the battle we’re fighting, and it’s being waged right now. There is no substitute for that victory,” he told Fox News’s Sean Hannity.
Yair Lapid, the former Israeli prime minister and ad pitchman, called on his successor to step down because the Israeli government is “not functioning.”
“We need change—Netanyahu cannot continue to be prime minister. We cannot allow ourselves to conduct a prolonged campaign with a prime minister that the public has no faith in,” he said, according to The Times of Israel.
Lapid said the coalition will “sit [in government] under another candidate from the Likud,” the paper said.
The paper noted on Saturday that the Netanyahu-led coalition that won “64 seats in the November 2022 elections would crash to just 45 seats in the 120-strong Knesset were elections held today.”
Channel 12, which conducted the poll, noted that prime ministers historically see a boost in support during wars, but this broke from tradition.
The Times of Israel cited an opinion poll by the Maariv newspaper on Saturday that found 80 percent of Israelis believe Netanyahu should “publicly accept responsibility for the staggering failures that led to the devastating October 7 onslaught.”
TRENDPOST: Netanyahu, who was facing mounting pressure due to his push for a sweeping judicial overhaul in Israel, was told repeatedly that a major attack was looming but brushed off the warnings for the months before the 7 October Hamas attack.