Gen Z Is Listening to What Netanyahu Is Saying. Is Biden?
From Ezra Klein:
Asked whether they sympathize more with the Israelis or the Palestinians, 63 percent of Americans 65 and older said the Israelis. Among those aged 18 to 29, 27 percent sympathized more with Israelis.
Seventy percent of those 65 and up supported additional aid to Israel. Fifty-five percent of people 18 to 29 opposed it.
Asked whether Israel should end its military campaign, even if Hamas has not been fully eliminated, in order to spare civilians, 67 percent 18 to 29 said they should. Only 30 percent 65 and up agreed.
Asked whether Israel is seriously interested in peace, 54 percent over age 65 said it was. Fifty-nine percent 18 to 29 said it wasn’t.
This is crude, but I think there are, roughly, three generations in terms of American sentiment toward Israel. There are older Americans who knew Israel when it was young. They remember the impossibility and wonder of its creation. They remember the wars its neighbors launched to eradicate it and the seeming miracle of its survival and of all that it then built. This generation still feels Israel’s vulnerability. They still feel its possibility. This is Joe Biden’s generation. It is a great gift for Israel that it still, improbably, controls American politics.
Then there’s what I think of as the straddle generation. This is my generation. We only ever knew Israel as the strongest military power in the region. A nuclear Israel. An Israel that occupied Palestinian territories, sometimes brutally. But we also knew an Israel that seemed to be trying to find its way toward peace and coexistence. We knew the Israel of Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Barak. We saw that the collapse of the 2000 Camp David summit was met by the second intifada, by years of suicide bombers rather than years of counteroffers. We also watched Israel build settlements across the West Bank, creating a one-state reality even as it spoke of a two-state solution. Polling shows, predictably, that our views of Israel are more mixed.
Then there’s younger Americans. They know only Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel. He has, after all, been prime minister almost continuously since 2009. They know an Israel that is the strongest country in the region, by far. They know an Israel where messianic ethnonationalists serve in the cabinet. They know an Israel that controls Palestinian life and land and intends to keep it that way. They see this as simpler: a country that oppresses and a people that is oppressed. They are not entirely right — too little agency is offered to Palestinians in this telling — but they are not entirely wrong.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/26/opinion/netanyahu-biden-israel-gaza.html
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you said
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He needs to root out himself:
For years, Netanyahu propped up Hamas. Now it's blown up in our faces
The premier’s policy of treating the terror group as a partner, at the expense of Abbas and Palestinian statehood, has resulted in wounds that will take Israel years to heal from
https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-up-hamas-now-its-blown-up-in-our-faces/
For years, the various governments led by Benjamin Netanyahu took an approach that divided power between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank — bringing Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to his knees while making moves that propped up the Hamas terror group. The idea was to prevent Abbas — or anyone else in the Palestinian Authority’s West Bank government — from advancing toward the establishment of a Palestinian state.
Thus, amid this bid to impair Abbas, Hamas was upgraded from a mere terror group to an organization with which Israel held indirect negotiations via Egypt, and one that was allowed to receive infusions of cash from abroad. Hamas was also included in discussions about increasing the number of work permits Israel granted to Gazan laborers, which kept money flowing into Gaza, meaning food for families and the ability to purchase basic products.
Israeli officials said these permits, which allow Gazan laborers to earn higher salaries than they would in the enclave, were a powerful tool to help preserve calm. Toward the end of Netanyahu’s fifth government in 2021, approximately 2,000-3,000 work permits were issued to Gazans. This number climbed to 5,000 and, during the Bennett-Lapid government, rose sharply to 10,000.
Since Netanyahu returned to power in January 2023, the number of work permits has soared to nearly 20,000. Additionally, since 2014, Netanyahu-led governments have practically turned a blind eye to the incendiary balloons and rocket fire from Gaza. Meanwhile, Israel has allowed suitcases holding millions in Qatari cash to enter Gaza through its crossings since 2018, in order to maintain its fragile ceasefire with the Hamas rulers of the Strip.
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‘Buying Quiet’: Inside the Israeli Plan That Propped Up Hamas
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gambled that a strong Hamas (but not too strong) would keep the peace and reduce pressure for a Palestinian state.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/10/world/middleeast/israel-qatar-money-prop-up-hamas.html
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. During his meetings in September with the Qatari officials, according to several people familiar with the secret discussions, the Mossad chief, David Barnea, was asked a question that had not been on the agenda:
Did Israel want the payments to continue? Mr. Netanyahu’s government had recently decided to continue the policy, so Mr. Barnea said yes. The Israeli government still welcomed the money from Doha. Allowing the payments — billions of dollars over roughly a decade — was a gamble by Mr. Netanyahu that a steady flow of money would maintain peace in Gaza, the eventual launching point of the Oct. 7 attacks, and keep Hamas focused on governing, not fighting. The Qatari payments, while ostensibly a secret, have been widely known and discussed in the Israeli news media for years.
Mr. Netanyahu’s critics disparage them as part of a strategy of “buying quiet,” and the policy is in the middle of a ruthless reassessment following the attacks. Mr. Netanyahu has lashed back at that criticism, calling the suggestion that he tried to empower Hamas “ridiculous.” In interviews with more than two dozen current and former Israeli, American and Qatari officials, and officials from other Middle Eastern governments, The New York Times unearthed new details about the origins of the policy, the controversies that erupted inside the Israeli government and the lengths that Mr. Netanyahu went to in order to shield the Qataris from criticism and keep the money flowing.
The payments were part of a string of decisions by Israeli political leaders, military officers and intelligence officials — all based on the fundamentally flawed assessment that Hamas was neither interested in nor capable of a large-scale attack. The Times has previously reported on intelligence failures and other faulty assumptions that preceded the attacks. Even as the Israeli military obtained battle plans for a Hamas invasion and analysts observed significant terrorism exercises just over the border in Gaza, the payments continued. For years, Israeli intelligence officers even escorted a Qatari official into Gaza, where he doled out money from suitcases filled with millions of dollars.
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