Accountability for the Gaza Genocide Can’t Focus on Netanyahu Alone

On Thursday, former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made the startling suggestion that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu might have knowingly allowed the October 7 terrorist attack by Hamas in order to shore up his own political power. Speculation along this line, of course, is not new, but it was remarkable to hear it from a distinguished world leader like Clinton, who made the allegation on Morning Joe. 

Clinton cited what she called “a bombshell” report this week from the Israeli paper Haaretz alleging that Netanyahu had been warned of the impending attack by Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed (popularly known as MBZ), the president of the United Arab Emirates and a key Israeli ally in the Middle East who had himself been tipped off by a trusted and well-connected back-channel diplomat. (Netanyahu called the Haaretz report a lie and vowed to sue the newspaper.) Clinton offered this analysis of the Haaretz report: “Either [Netanyahu] didn’t believe it or he—it’s horrible to say—he wanted to see what they could plan so that then he could come down hard, and it would enhance his position.”

Netanyahu is the single figure most responsible for the Gaza genocide, so it is difficult to be unfair to him. But in this case, Clinton’s accusation went much farther than the evidence warrants. The actual claims of the Haaretz report are damaging enough, especially if it is read in conjunction with earlier reporting in The New York Times about the warnings Israel received about the impending attack and the role the Netanyahu government played in propping up Hamas’s rule in Gaza. 

These reports add up to a picture of imperial arrogance. For decades, Israel has kept Gaza as a giant open-air prison. This condition only intensified after Israel nominally disengaged from Gaza in 2005, while in truth keeping the territory under a ferocious siege. Hamas, founded in 1988 as a militant organization, was cynically nurtured from its early days by the Israeli state as part of a divide-and-rule strategy to keep Palestinian factions warring among themselves. 

From the Israeli perspective, which included but was by no means limited to Netanyahu, Hamas was a useful if nasty subcontractor. Particularly after Hamas took power in Gaza in 2007, it could serve Israel by doing the dirty work of governing Gaza while being contained by the Jewish state through periodic bombing campaigns and assassinations (euphemistically known as “mowing the lawn”).

Based on the Haaretz article, Netanyahu’s true crime was not ignoring the warning signs of the October 7 attack but rather his delusion that the status quo in Gaza could be maintained indefinitely. Netanyahu was confident that Hamas in Gaza (and indeed all Palestinian aspirations for self-rule) could be managed. Haaretz quotes him as saying, “In Gaza, we are in the picture, we are in control. Our problem is with the West Bank, and that’s where we are also diverting forces.”

This led Netanyahu to ignore important overtures made by Hamas both before and after October 7 to reach a political settlement. 

In the Haaretz article, former CIA director William J. Burns offers an astute analysis:

The basic problem was that Hamas was looking for a “permanent end to the conflict,” as they called it…. Netanyahu was only willing to consider a “first phase” deal, but claimed he had to constantly reserve the option “to continue destroying Hamas later,” as he defined it. And that, for us, was always the challenge: How do we square this circle and manage to bring everyone back?

In other words, the core problem was that Netanyahu is fundamentally unwilling to negotiate a two-state solution. Nor is he alone in this. In the upcoming Israeli election, the main opposition leader, Gadi Eisenkot, also has no interest in negotiating a two-state solution in the near term. Neither do any other major contenders for Netanyahu’s job, including former prime ministers Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid.

If that is the case, then why the focus on Netanyahu? Hillary Clinton’s harsh comments have to be seen as a part of a political whitewashing project. Clinton is a foreign policy hawk who values Israel as a US ally. She knows that the Gaza genocide has made the US-Israel alliance unpopular, so she is trying to channel anger at one bad man. The goal is to suggest that once Netanyahu is out of the way, the alliance can return to normal. As Clinton said on Morning Joe, “I love Israel and I hate Netanyahu’s government.”