The Jerusalem Post has deleted this article but thankfully it had been archived.
Everyone has already explained the contradiction in this statement, so let me just point out that what you call “peace” isn’t peace. It’s successful oppression where you simply don’t need to hear about the plight of the oppressed. Gazans were still being bombed, starve and intentionally kept on the brink of economic collapse (by Israel’s own words). West Bank people were still having their lands and homes razed and stolen and their family killed. East Jerusalem citizens (or should I say residents) were still being evicted for not paying rent on their own land. Smotrich still considered his life’s mission to be preventing the formation a Palestinian state. The most powerful man in Israel was still the same man who had crumpled peace and threw it in the trash 30 years ago. And Israelis were cheering on all this shit.
I repeat: That was not peace. That was Israel successfully hiding the oppression from Western eyes (that weren’t paying attention). Do you blame Nelson Mandela for breaking the “peace” black Africans had with the Apartheid government? What about the Irish in the Troubles?
As I see it, Hamas’s biggest victory as a resistance organization in the last 20 years was forcing Israel to be very loud about their genocidal tendencies. No quiet oppression and ethnic cleansing like what they get away with in thr West Bank. The culmination of this was October 7th, which brought Israeli oppression to the forefront of international discourse. Now whether it’s worth it is another story, but the decline in Israeli popular support in the West over the last 20 years is almost completely Hamas’s doing, along with everyone who then reported on it. Breaking the “peace” is the only way Palestinians will ever be free.