Netanyahu has claimed that “Hamas is responsible” for the recent murder and kidnapping of three Israeli teens. Reporting suggests otherwise. Batya Ungar-Sargon attempts to undermine those reports:
It’s entirely possible that there was some “lone cell” with no more than tenuous Hamas connections—but right now all we have is [BuzzFeed’s Sheera] Frenkel’s ambiguous anonymous source and [BBC’s Jon] Donnison’s source who believes he was misquoted as our only evidence for that proposition.
Sheera Frenkel’s new dispatch provides more info on her source:
[O]ne Israeli intelligence officer who works in the West Bank and is intimately involved in investigating the case spoke to BuzzFeed on condition of anonymity and said he felt the kidnapping had been used by politicians trying to promote their own agenda.
“That announcement was premature,” the intelligence officer said. “If there was an order, from any of the senior Hamas leadership in Gaza or abroad, this would be an easier case to investigate. We would have that intelligence data. But there is no data, so we have come to conclude that these men were acting on their own.”
Meanwhile, Max Fisher, no great friend of Netanyahu, argues that it’s not fair to claim that Netanyahu used these kidnappings as a pretext for war:
In order to say that Netanyahu blamed Hamas for the Palestinians murders in order to invade Gaza, as President George W. Bush premised his Iraq invasion on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, two things would have to be true. First, Netanyahu would have had to have planned the sequence of events from the beginning such that he would get to invade Gaza; the Middle East is rife with conspiracy theories but unless Netanyahu secretly controls Hamas, Israeli extremist gangs, and Palestinian protesters, he did not plan this. It seems much likelier that things gradually escalated out of control until both sides were sucked into war.
Second, Netanyahu would have had to have wanted to invade Gaza. You don’t devise an elaborate conspiracy to do something, after all, unless you actually want to do it. This is ultimately a question of Netanyahu’s personal internal motivation, which I will not claim to know. For whatever it’s worth, an American veteran of the Israel-Palestine peace process named Aaron David Miller wrote in the Washington Post that he believes Netanyahu did not want or seek the war. Maybe, maybe not.
If you want to get angry about something, get angry about this: Israel has for years refused to change its strategy toward Gaza and the larger Israel-Palestine conflict, even though that strategy shows zero indication of yielding sustainable peace and leads Israel to occasionally invade Gaza to weaken anti-Israel groups there.
For the record, I agree. My point is that Netanyahu’s reflexive, evidence-free, blanket condemnation of Hamas as a whole created a situation that spiraled out of control.
The Dish 