Just weeks before Hamas launched the deadly Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, the head of Mossad arrived in Doha, Qatar, for a meeting with Qatari officials.For years, the Qatari government had been sending millions of dollars a month into the Gaza Strip — money that helped prop up the Hamas government there. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel not only tolerated those payments, he had encouraged them.
The money from Qatar had humanitarian goals like paying government salaries in Gaza and buying fuel to keep a power plant running. But Israeli intelligence officials now believe that the money had a role in the success of the Oct. 7 attacks, if only because the donations allowed Hamas to divert some of its own budget toward military operations. Separately, Israeli intelligence has long assessed that Qatar uses other channels to secretly fund Hamas’ military wing, an accusation that Qatar’s government has denied.
“Money is fungible,” said Chip Usher, a senior Middle East analyst at the C.I.A. until his retirement this year. “Anything that Hamas didn’t have to use out of its own budget freed up money for other things.”
As far back as December 2012, Mr. Netanyahu told the prominent Israeli journalist Dan Margalit that it was important to keep Hamas strong, as a counterweight to the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. Mr. Margalit, in an interview, said that Mr. Netanyahu told him that having two strong rivals, including Hamas, would lessen pressure on him to negotiate toward a Palestinian state.The official in the prime minister’s office said Mr. Netanyahu never made this statement. But the prime minister would articulate this idea to others over the years.
READER COMMENTS
Ahmed Fares
Dec 11 2023 at 6:04pm
The “money is fungible” argument, which is true, from the Iraqi oil-for-food program (even uses the same phrase).
This from another article making the same point:
Scott Sumner
Dec 12 2023 at 7:00pm
Excellent post. These “pact with the devil” approaches often backfire. Another example is when the US supported Saddam’s Iraq in its war with Iran, even though Iraq was the aggressor.
TMC
Dec 14 2023 at 2:32am
This might be a good time to discuss the Obama and Biden’s administrations’ funding of Iran and Iran’s support of international terrorism.
David Henderson
Dec 14 2023 at 9:53am
Good point about fungibiity.
But they didn’t fund Iran. My understanding is that they returned funds that the Iranian government owned. If you confiscated $1,000 from me and later returned it, it would be incorrect to say that you funded me.
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