Billionaire Democratic donor George Soros once slammed the US for supporting Israel and not recognizing Hamas after the terrorist group won control of the Gaza Strip.
In a 2007 Financial Times op-ed, Soros chastised the Bush administration’s commitment to Israel, calling on the US and the Jewish state to work together with Hamas, whose forces killed more than 900 people across the Gaza border on Saturday.
A year after Hamas won an election to govern Gaza, Soros said it was wrong for the US to align itself with Israel in refuting the terrorist group’s authority and installing a blockade around the Palestinian territory.
“Israel, with strong US backing, refused to recognize the democratically elected Hamas government and withheld payment of the millions in taxes collected by the Israelis on its behalf,” Soros wrote, suggesting the move was a blunder that only caused Irsaeli-Palestinian relations to worsen.
“If Israel had accepted the results of the election, that might have strengthened the more moderate political wing,” he added. “Unfortunately, the ideology of the ‘war on terror’ does not permit such subtle distinctions.”
Israeli officials immediately condemned the election of Hamas in 2006 as the group’s primary mission is to establish a Palestinian state, with Jerusalem as its capital, through violent means.
Hamas also refused to acknowledge the existence of the Jewish state, a condition that Soros said should not have been so important to Israel.
“The sticking-point is Hamas’s unwillingness to recognize the existence of Israel, but that could be made a condition for an eventual settlement rather than a precondition for negotiations,” he wrote.
Regardless of the extremist group’s position, Soros claimed it was necessary for the US and Israel to negotiate with Hamas, and to only engage in talks with those in the West Bank would be wrong.
“Defenders of the current policy argue that Israel cannot afford to negotiate from a position of weakness. But Israel’s position is unlikely to improve as long as it pursues its current course,” the liberal donor wrote.
He went on to cite the decades of violence that have engulfed Israel and Palestine, calling on Israel to forego future military action and for America to support that idea.
“Demonstrating military superiority is not sufficient as a policy for dealing with the Palestinian problem,” Soros wrote. “It would be tragic to miss out on that prospect because the Bush administration is mired in the ideology of the war on terror.”
There, however, came no such negotiations with Hamas, with the terrorist group repeatedly striking Israel, and the Jewish state launching retaliatory attacks to take out the extremists, with the violence seeing high-scale escalations this year involving civilians.
The situation reached an unprecedented level of brutality Saturday when Hamas invaded Israel, killing hundreds of music festival attendees, destroying villages near the Gaza Strip and kidnapping about 150 people.
The weekend of violence also saw 27 Americans killed, with another 14 remaining missing.