Friday, December 27, 2024
From Ian:
How the international community funds the Hamas war machine
How the international community funds the Hamas war machine
Eyal Ofer has been following the funding methods of Hamas and other terrorist organizations for years, collecting data and writing about his findings. He told JNS that Hamas’s financial conduct has not changed in a significant way over the years. If before the war it extorted 25% from luxury car dealers, today in the midst of war it extorts money from wheat merchants.Seth Mandel: It’s Against the Rules to Win
“Hamas is present everywhere in the Gaza Strip: the police, humanitarian associations, actors in the private and public sectors, the contractors’ union—Hamas is networked within and across Gaza. You can’t just vacuum Hamas out, it is everywhere,” he said.
In a tweet that went viral on Sunday, he wrote that “Hamas operates like a mafia and a clan-based enterprise: one brother is in the military wing, another in the police force, they ensure the sister works for UNRWA, a noncombat-profile cousin becomes a driver for an aid organization, an uncle gets a government position, another cousin is a ‘journalist’ for Al Jazeera, and the grandmother is added to the list of welfare recipients.”
The claim that Iran provides 70% of Hamas’s funding is “nonsense,” he wrote. “In extreme cases, Iran provides 5-10% of Hamas’s funding. The vast majority of Hamas’s funding comes from its ability to funnel money that the world sends to the Palestinian Authority (and other Gaza charitable causes) and Gaza for its own purposes.”
As an example, he attached a document from the P.A.’s Municipal Development and Lending Fund (MDLF), a semi-governmental urban development fund, highlighting the receipt of some $3 million from the government of Belgium in 2023 for a project named, “Promotion of Green Services and Climate Action in Local Governance—Green Gaza.”
“What are the chances that Hamas’s regime in Gaza will manage to place its members or their relatives among the beneficiaries of this Belgian grant? In my opinion: 100%. … Multiply this story by 200, and you’ll see how Hamas is funded,” Ofer said.
The money-laundering scheme
Ofer further explained that Hamas’s chief financial problem is not raising money inside Gaza, but transferring its accumulated cash out of the region.
The primary currency in the Gaza Strip is the Israeli shekel. During the war, Hamas acquired a monopoly on cash in Gaza, with local banks largely unserviceable. Ofer told JNS that it is impossible to assess how much cash Hamas currently holds.
“Hundreds of millions, maybe even one to two billion shekels. It extracts money from the population by force, which is how it continues to pay salaries to its operatives [and recruit new fighters], but also how it established itself as the monopoly on the supply of money,” he said.
“Many Gazans today receive direct donations from abroad, transferred via Western Union, the banks, cryptocurrencies like USD Coin, Vodafone Cash Wallet [a mobile app], GoFundMe, monthly stipends from the P.A., U.N. humanitarian agencies such as UNICEF. All these transfers are deposited in bank accounts, and their holders need to convert them into cash—whether the deposit is in dollars or shekels. Who do they go to for cash? Hamas.”
The Islamist organization developed an entire industry of non-banking ATMs, Ofer explained. The Gazans transfer to Hamas their dollars or shekels and Hamas provides them with cash, though with “unbelievably” high fees, he said. “The fees started at 15% and have reached more than 30% in areas with greater scarcity,” he added. “This is how Hamas manages to launder money to unknown accounts.”
Ofer could not say with certainty that all money changers in Gaza are Hamas operatives, but noted that it is hard to imagine a regular person moving about in the Gaza Strip with hundreds of thousands of shekels in cash without fear.
The broken Gaza fallacy
In 1850, French economist Frédéric Bastiat published an essay titled “That Which Is Seen, and That Which Is Not Seen.”
In it, he described what became known in the field of economics as the “broken window fallacy.” The conceptual framework notes that while it is seen that a child breaking a shopkeeper’s window, for example, will provide the glazier with work to repair the window, what is not seen is the aggregate growth of the economy through alternative work had the window not been broken (such as the shopkeeper purchasing a new pair of shoes).
The Palestinian case may demonstrate a similar fallacy. That which is seen is the reconstruction of Gaza after every war, believing that this helps the Palestinians. That which is unseen is letting the Palestinians deal with the consequences of war alone, having to choose whether to abandon their ideological battle against Israel or continue on their path to destruction.
“The Palestinians know that after every round of fighting, the round of reconstruction begins,” Ofer said, adding that this causes perverse economic incentives.
“If the Qataris come in and propose rebuilding a city that was destroyed in the previous war and was now destroyed again, a private contractor has two jobs, not one. The Hamas government cuts its share from the contractor, the residents who received contributions and everyone else in the chain of rehabilitation,” he noted.
According to Ofer, many of the regular economic metrics that economists use, such as GDP, are irrelevant in the case of Gaza, because a huge section of its economy is nonproductive.
“There is no question that Gaza, in great percentages, is a charity-based economy. A private sector emerges out of these donations, but the nucleus of the economy, maybe 40% to 50%, is based on external donations that fund Gaza’s welfare [programs] and the public sector,” he told JNS.
Ofer added that Israel lacks “political wisdom. Instead of disengaging from Gaza, we keep opening more and more crossings into the Strip in the hope that the world will see us as enlightened rulers. At the start of the war, all aid came through the Rafah Crossing border with Egypt. Israel should have stated: That’s it Gaza, from now on, you work with Egypt. You are not our problem anymore.”
This is an important window into how much the foreign-policy debate in America has deteriorated. Ukraine and Israel were the invaded parties. There is no argument over this—it’s not unclear who started either war, even if we debate about the chosen casus belli in each case. Even those who offer insipid justifications for Putin’s and Hamas’s actions implicitly accept that those actions marked the beginning of the current wars.Brendan O'Neill: This year, Israel showed us what anti-fascism really means
It is, then, genuinely insane to compare Ukraine and Gaza this way. What Ukraine and Gaza actually have in common at the moment is solely that they are, to different degrees, “losing” these wars. A “win” for Ukraine is generally defined by Kyiv as retaining all its territory. That was possible at one time, had the Biden administration and Western Europe provided the support Ukraine needed and deserved at the outset of the war, though now it appears unlikely.
Gaza, meanwhile, was doomed from the start because even a Hamas victory—which would mean its outlasting of Israel’s determination and its accumulation of enough international support to hold its legitimacy as rulers of Gaza—would be a disaster for Gazan civilians. Hamas essentially rigged the Gaza Strip to blow up, then lit the fuse, because it had already built a second Gaza for itself underground. But Hamas is on the ropes as well, bringing some measure of justice for what the terror group has done to Gaza and to Israel.
And that is Israel’s crime: winning a war it didn’t start.
The Times does its best to play along. “The Israeli military, supplied with American weapons, has killed more than 45,000 Palestinians and destroyed most of Gaza, according to officials in the strip and satellite images,” reads the report.
Of course, even if you accept Hamas’s overall numbers, it is still untrue that the IDF has killed 45,000 Palestinians. The Times is taking a Hamas lie and pushing it to its absolute limits, but there is no method of counting that gets you to this number unless you blame Israel for every single natural death in Gaza and for those killed by Hamas and other terror groups.
Nor is there any context to those long-debunked “stats.” Hamas has not surrendered, so the war goes on. Israel is continuing to win the war that Hamas started and is perpetuating. Should Israel simply stop fighting a war that the enemy carries on?
Never mind, we know the answer.
In the future, when humanity comes to its senses, 2024 will be seen as a watershed year in the battle against fascism. More fascist-adjacent killers and loons were bumped off over the past 12 months than in any other year in my lifetime. From the leader of an army of anti-Semites that tells its followers to buy cheap knives and ‘cut off the heads of Jews’ (Yahya Sinwar) to the spiritual head of a self-styled ‘Party of God’ that longs to excise those ‘cancerous’ Jews from the Middle East (Hassan Nasrallah), it’s been a rough year for neo-fascist nuts. And about time, too.
2024 is the year anti-fascism grew up. For years, ‘anti-fascism’ was the weekend hobby of bored rich kids. To say the masked wimps of ‘antifa’ gave anti-fascism a bad name is an understatement. They dragged its name into the gutter. Under their black-clad purview, anti-fascism entailed little more than shouting ‘BITCH’ at women who don’t want to see dicks in their changing rooms, weeping on the campus lawn whenever Ben Shapiro showed up, and having fisticuffs with working-class people who voted for Trump. The men of the Normandy landings and the International Brigades will have turned in their graves at the sight of these toytown radicals throwing milkshakes at ‘rednecks’ and calling it anti-fascism.
Now, thankfully, anti-fascism means something again. Largely courtesy of Israel’s war on the Jew-hating belligerents at its borders, a real fight with fascism has replaced the neurotic street theatrics of the affluent activist class that falsely called itself anti-fascism. Sure, these people might have slapped Richard Spencer once, but the IDF has throttled entire movements that were founded with the expressly fascistic intention to kill Jews and erase their homeland.
This year we bid adieu to Yahya Sinwar, the head of Hamas in Gaza; the man widely suspected of being the architect of 7 October, the worst mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust. It seems likely that Mohammed Deif was also hurried off this mortal coil by the IDF. He was the leader of the al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, which did so much of the raping and butchering on 7 October.
Many other Hamas gunmen were despatched – up to 17,000. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that this gutting of an army whose founding covenant committed it to a ‘very great and very serious… struggle against the Jews’ is better anti-fascism than emptying a can of soup on gender-critical activist Posie Parker. Hamas has made good on its genocidal loathing countless times in recent years, murdering hundreds and hundreds of Jews on buses, in nightclubs, at music festivals, in their own homes. Israel’s war on Hamas, in defiance of the faint-hearted bourgeoisie of the Western world who’ve spent the past year cravenly calling on the Jewish State to cease fire, is a blow to modern fascism and a boon for humanity.
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