Extremists are drawn to each other. Their Messianic worldviews, their brutal methods, their low regard for civilian lives, and their total rejection of peace and co-existence, makes them brothers more than enemies. If Hamas did not exist the leadership of Israel would have to invent it before tomorrow morning to continue to justify its illegal occupation of Palestinian land. Photo Source: AFP.
"In March 2014, Netanyahu acknowledged that the number of rocket attacks from Gaza in the previous year was the “lowest in a decade.” The shock of the three Jewish teenagers kidnapped on June 12 led to widespread official calls for collective punishment, 1500 building searches, and some 500 arrests in the West Bank in the following two weeks, even though the government had every reason to believe that the teenagers were dead and that a group antagonistic to Hamas was behind the kidnappings. The clear purpose was to disrupt the accession of Hamas to the Palestinian “national consensus” government in early June.
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But Israel was wrong to attempt the disruption of the unity government, the terms of which required Hamas to subordinate itself to the far more conciliatory platform of the Palestinian Authority. It was deeply cynical for Netanyahu to use the kidnapping and death of the three teenagers as a cover for that purpose. In no way can the formation of the unity government be seen as a threat that would justify the war that Israel has fought.
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The announced purpose of Israel’s war has been to destroy Hamas, but its result will in all probability be to destroy Abbas. Perhaps that was after all the real intention of Netanyahu and his war cabinet: the extremists invariably seek to undermine the moderates." - David C. Hendrickson, "The Thrasybulus Syndrome: Israel’s War on Gaza" The National Interest, July 29, 2014.
"When Hamas, in effect, accepted the notion of participation in the Palestinian leadership it in effect acknowledged the determination of that leadership to seek a peaceful solution with Israel. That was a real option. They should have persisted in that. Instead, Netanyahu launched a campaign of defamation against Hamas, seized on the killings of three innocent Israeli kids to immediately charge Hamas having done it without any evidence, and has used that to stir up public opinion in Israel in order to justify this attack on Gaza which is so lethal. I think he is isolating Israel, he endangering it's future, and I think we ought to make it very clear that this is a course of action which we thoroughly disapprove and which we do not support, and which may compel us and the rest of the international community to take some steps of legitimizing Palestinian aspirations perhaps in the UN." - Zbigniew Brzezinski.
