Michael Crichton once noted how often he encountered a news article “so wrong it actually presents the story backward — reversing cause and effect. I call these the ‘wet streets cause rain’ stories. Paper’s full of them.” Yet, it is often the case that such articles can get the main facts right and give the attentive reader enough to make out the truth in spite of the narrative they seek to advance. For a wonderful example of a prestige newspaper doing a lot to feed a backward narrative, look no further than a recent and widely quoted article in Sunday’s New York Times by Mark Mazzetti and Ronen Bergman, with additional reporting by Maria Abi-Habib, Justin Scheck, and Adam Sella.

The Times piece is entitled “‘Buying Quiet’: Inside the Israeli Plan That Propped Up Hamas.” The simplified theme promoted by the paper in push notifications, and seized upon eagerly by critics of Israel and Benjamin Netanyahu, is that Netanyahu not only enabled Hamas to remain in power in Gaza and receive funding, but that he did so because Hamas was “a political asset” to Netanyahu and would “reduce pressure for a Palestinian state.” The Times highlights the charge of critics that this was “a cynical political agenda: to keep Gaza quiet as a means of staying in office without addressing the threat of Hamas or simmering Palestinian discontent.” While the full story is more nuanced than that, this narrative is fundamentally backward. The trouble with Netanyahu’s approach to Hamas before October 7 was not that he used Hamas for hawkish purposes, but that he fell prey to dovish instincts — and to the accumulated weight of international pressure to follow those instincts.

The appeal of the narrative stems from the persistent urge of liberals and progressives to claim that politicians on the right only win elections due to illegitimate concerns or imaginary problems. For example, it’s never legitimate for voters to want a government that addresses war, terrorism, or crime — unless it does so by changing the topic to inanimate weapons. The actual bad guys are always an overstated myth. (Sometimes, even quantifiable things such as higher prices are claimed to be a myth.) If a group like Hamas is a threat, it must be either because bad right-wingers are refusing to negotiate with it, or maybe even keeping it afloat as a foil. Thus, the synthesis between claiming that Netanyahu wanted Hamas in power for domestic political reasons and claiming that he saw them mainly as a useful way of avoiding the two-state solution that decades of peace processes have failed to deliver.

You can see this narrative at work in how prominent commentators on X/Twitter read the Times story. Ben Rhodes: “Mr. Netanyahu told him that having two strong rivals, including Hamas, would lessen pressure on him to negotiate toward a Palestinian state.” Matt Yglesias: “Hamas funding came from Qatar with explicit Israeli approval since extremist Palestinian demands reduce pressure on Israel to negotiate in good faith.” Even Jennifer Griffin of Fox News: “Please read . . . How Israel Secretly Propped Up Hamas . . . Netanyahu encouraged Qatar to deliver suitcases of money to Hamas for years as ‘protection money’ to divide the Palestinians from PA in W Bank to lessen pressure on him to negotiate a Palestinian state.”

The trouble is not the facts recounted by the Times, which are accurate and a damning indictment of Netanyahu’s strategy for dealing with Hamas and Gaza; it’s the motive the critics give for Netanyahu’s approach. As the Times correctly details:

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. . . . For years, Israeli intelligence officers even escorted a Qatari official into Gaza, where he doled out money from suitcases filled with millions of dollars. . . . The donations allowed Hamas to divert some of its own budget toward military operations. . . . Qatar’s work in Gaza during this period was blessed by the Israeli government.

The Times goes on to discuss how “Netanyahu even lobbied Washington on Qatar’s behalf” and shut down testimony about “a money-laundering operation for Hamas run through the Bank of China” when he had an opportunity in 2013 to visit Beijing as “part of an effort to strengthen economic and diplomatic ties between Israel and China.”

The problem with the narrative about Netanyahu’s hawkish motive to prop up Hamas as a phantom threat while using it to deflect the peace process is twofold. First, it relies on weak evidence to attribute it to Netanyahu, at least as his main reason for the strategy rather than, at most, a side benefit. After noting that Netanyahu denies describing such a strategy to an Israeli reporter, the Times says, “The prime minister would articulate this idea to others over the years.” No examples are citied; to the contrary, the article later admits that “Mr. Netanyahu did not articulate this strategy publicly.” When the Times says that “politicians at times talked openly about the value of a strong Hamas,” it segues immediately to a quote from Shlomo Brot, described only as “a retired general and former deputy to Israel’s national security adviser.” Unmentioned: Brot was appointed to that role during the last Labor government (under Ehud Barak), has spent the past decade as a visiting fellow at the left-wing Center for American Progress, has branded Netanyahu’s strategy in the West Bank as an “apartheid reality,” and warned in 2016 that Israel was on “most probably the path to an apartheid state.” He’s not the most objective guide to Netanyahu’s thinking. The one on-the-record endorsement of Hamas as an “asset” is from a 2015 interview with Bezalel Smotrich, now Netanyahu’s finance minister, who is one of the far-right politicians Netanyahu accepted in his cabinet in 2022 as the price of a coalition with their party. Whatever the merits of that decision, it doesn’t automatically mean that their thinking on all issues reflects Netanyahu’s.

Second, in any remotely reasonable analysis of Netanyahu’s choice to bless Qatari support for Hamas in Gaza, the effect of relieving Netanyahu from peace talks is the wet streets, not the rain. Hamas gained control over Gaza between 2005 and 2007. Netanyahu, who ended his first term as prime minister in 1999, was leader of the opposition party from 2006 until he returned to the top job in 2009. Inheriting the reality of Hamas as a governing authority, he had three options: accommodation, deterrence, or regime change. It is obvious in retrospect that nothing but regime change would stop Hamas from attacking Israel, and it was obvious to some critics at the time. But given the massive international headwinds that Israel has faced in trying to remove Hamas from power after October 7 — to the point where we are told by Netanyahu’s critics that he should keep sending money, water, and power to Gaza even while besieging it — it should be undeniable that Israel would have faced a nearly impossible task in avoiding international pressure if it had attempted to do so before Hamas had committed an atrocity that spectacular. Even the Times acknowledges that the dovish pressure on Netanyahu to accommodate Hamas came not only from Doha and Beijing but from Washington and Turtle Bay: “The administrations of three American presidents — Barack Obama, Donald J. Trump and Joseph R. Biden Jr. — broadly supported having the Qataris playing a direct role in funding Gaza operations.” While Netanyahu was out of office in 2021, then-prime minister Naftali Bennett agreed with the Qataris and the United Nations to having the UN step in as an intermediary between Qatar and Hamas.

That left deterrence and/or accommodation, and Netanyahu pursued both strategies simultaneously, with the “mow the grass” strategy of limited incursions into Gaza in response to specific provocations, coupled with the Qatari money spigots and other forms of aid and comfort. Again, there were critics at the time who thought Netanyahu was being foolhardy — the Times cites as a chief example Avigdor Lieberman, who resigned in protest in 2018 — but this was mainly a hawkish critique, and as the Times acknowledges, at root it was rejected by Netanyahu because he underestimated the threat of Hamas, and overestimated the possibility that appeasement, foreign aid, and governing responsibility would dull the savagery of Hamas. Given tremendous external incentives to buy these dovish errors, as well as the domestic political benefits of a populace that saw Netanyahu as the man who was already keeping them safe, he fell into a terrible trap. But that trap was not that he rejected the path of peace — it was that he failed to see the inevitability of war. He folded his umbrella, and then the rains came.