FACT CHECK: False Claim that Netanyahu Created Hamas Seeks to Explain Intel Failure

CLAIM: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is responsible for creating and supporting Hamas to thwart a Palestinian state.

VERDICT: MOSTLY FALSE: Netanyahu did not create Hamas, but Israel misjudged its intentions and failed to detect an attack.

Israelis have been focusing on the war effort, but a few attempts to trade blame for the disaster have already emerged. On Sunday, Netanyahu deleted a tweet in which he insisted that he had not been informed by the security agencies about the imminent threat of a Hamas attack — which may have been true, but the timing of his attempt to evade blame risked disrupting military unity. He erase the tweet and apologized.

Some opponents of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have been circulating a claim that he is responsible for the rise, or at least the strengthening, of Hamas as a counterweight to the Palestinian Authority.

this was a mistake of epic proportions.

hamas was and is a terrorist organization. with critical support from iran, from russia…and, before october 7, from the israel pm.

this helps explain why so many israelis are united not just in destroying hamas but also in removing…

— ian bremmer (@ianbremmer) October 29, 2023

The above appears to be based on a quote from Al Jazeera, which in turn is based on a quote from Ha’aretz, both outlets that are implacably opposed to Netanyahu. It parallels other reports based on second-hand and hostile sources that lack real credibility.

In fact, Netanyahu has been warning for years that Hamas is like ISIS, the so-called “Islamic State” or Daesh, which became notorious a decade ago for the astonishing brutality of its activities, many of which were filmed for circulation on social media.

Hamas does not exist because of Israel. It is the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, a transnational radical organization with branches across the world. It is true that when Hamas emerged in the 1980s, Israel saw it as a possible counterweight to the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which was a nationalist and terrorist organization. Israel mistakenly believed that a religious organization would be less militant and violent. That policy was rapidly dropped.

Hamas quickly established itself as a terrorist organization devoted to killing as many Israelis as possible (and, in its charter, killing Jews worldwide as well). It is devoted to the vision of a fundamentalist Islamic state. Israel soon saw it as a serious threat.

The quote from 2019 dates to a debate at the time about whether Israel should allow Qatar to fund the Hamas government in Gaza, both to prevent a collapse of basic services and as a way to convince Hamas not to attack Israel with rockets. This was a deeply controversial issue within Israel. There is no doubt that Netanyahu — and the rest of the world, which was pressuring Israel to allow the funding — was wrong about Hamas’s interest in governing Gaza rather than attempting to destroy Israel.

It is possible (though not provable) that Netanyahu defended his decision to allow the Qatari funding by arguing that Hamas was a counterweight to the Palestinian Authority. But the divisions between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas were not created by Israel and did not need Israeli encouragement. Hamas ousted the Palestinian Authority from Gaza in 2007 in a violent coup that involved throwing rivals off rooftops. Moreover, Israel was hoping to deter terror by allowing the funding — not to encourage it.

Still, it is clear that some on the far-right of Israeli politics thought the internal Palestinian divisions could be exploited. Israelis have been sharing a 2015 clip showing Bezalel Smotrich, who was then on the fringes of politics but is now the finance minister, arguing that Hamas should be supported as opposed to the Palestinian Authority for strategic reasons, because Hamas would never be viewed by the international community as a legitimate government.

Regardless, details are emerging that help explain the evident intelligence failure by Israel — and the United States — in failing to predict and prevent the devastating Hamas terror attack on October 7, in which 1,200 people were brutally murdered.

The Times of Israel notes that former Israeli cabinet minister Avigdor Liberman — one of the most controversial figures in Israeli politics — sent Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a secret memorandum in 2016 predicted an attack similar to what happened:

In 2016, then-defense minister Avigdor Liberman drafted an 11-page document warning of Hamas plans to burst through the Gaza border, overrun communities in southern Israel, staging massacres and taking hostages, excerpts show.

The document, parts of which were published by the Yedioth Ahronoth daily this morning, eerily presages many elements of the October 7 onslaught and indicates that Israeli officials had been aware for several years of the potential for such a Hamas assault, but apparently did not take the warnings seriously enough.

On Monday, the New York Times reported that Israeli signals intelligence had stopped monitoring Hamas’s hand-held radios because it seemed like a waste of time. It added: “American spy agencies in recent years had largely stopped collecting intelligence on Hamas and its plans, believing the group was a regional threat that Israel was managing.”

International pressure on Israel to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza also overlooked the fact that Hamas exploited such efforts to build its own power and its terror capabilities, especially its rocket arsenal and its network of underground tunnels.

When Netanyahu did warn the United Nations in 2014 that “when it comes to their ultimate goals, Hamas is ISIS and ISIS is Hamas,” few paid attention. And Netanyahu, as well as the military establishment that has opposed him, let down their guard.

Editor’s Note:  This story was updated to reflect a revised number on the death toll from the October 7 Hamas attack in Israel.  The Israeli government estimate of 1,400 was revised to around 1,200, according to Reuters. 

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.