What, really, is (or was) Netanyahu’s game plan?
Here is my speculation which was provoked by a headline in The Times of Israel over a report of remarks by Dan Shapiro, America’s ambassador to the Zionist state. The headline was Envoy says US will work to get Abbas back ruling Gaza after conflict over. According to the report Shapiro said in an interview with Israel’s Channel 2 News that the US wants to see Abbas’s Palestinian Authority restored to ruling Gaza and “will make efforts to bring this about.”
In 2007, at the request of American policy makers and led by Mohammad Dahlan, Abbas’s Fatah forces were planning to launch an Israeli-backed coup to remove Hamas as the elected authority in the Gaza Strip and destroy it. The coup didn’t happen because Hamas got wind of the plot and launched an Israeli-like pre-emptive strike that defeated Fatah’s forces and drove them out of the Gaza Strip.
Against that background and in the light of Shapiro’s remarks my speculation is that Netanyahu’s real game plan was the product of two hopes.
The first was that he could put Hamas out of military and political business and set the stage for the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip prison camp to be ready, however reluctantly, to accept Abbas and his corrupt and discredited Palestinian Authority (PA) as their leadership. (Netanyahu might also have thought that the task of restoring Abbas and his PA to control in the Gaza Strip would be greatly assisted by the US pouring money into its coffers for re-construction and development).
The second was the hope that once the authority of Abbas and his cronies was restored to the Gaza Strip there would be Palestinian elections which could and would be rigged to bring on Dahlan as Abbas’s successor.
Very many Palestinians believe, as I do, that Dahlan, currently in exile in the UAE and in contact with Israeli leaders as he prepares his comeback, is an Israeli asset, in which capacity he was, almost certainly, the one who administered the Israeli-supplied polonium that killed Arafat. (Abbas himself has said he believes that was the case).
It could be that in Netanyahu’s vision of the future Dahlan as Palestinian “president” would be prepared to use whatever means were necessary, including force, to compel his occupied and oppressed people to abandon their struggle in return for crumbs from Zionism’s table – a few Bantustans here and there on the West Bank which they could call a state if they wished. In other words, the Dahlan of Netanyahu’s vision would bring about a Palestinian surrender on Zionism’s terms.
I agree that’s a sick, mad scenario but it could very well be what was in Netanyahu’s mind. Am I suggesting that he is sick and mad? Yes, and one of his latest comments is surely proof of that. He said on CNN that Hamas wanted more and more Palestinians in the Gaza Strip to be killed by Israel in order to generate worldwide support for its cause and push American tv presenters into asking him tough questions. One of his actual quotes was: “They (Hamas’s leaders) want to pile up as many civilian dead as they can. They use telegenically dead Palestinians for their cause. They want the more dead, the better.”
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