In his online talk last week, Peter Beinart raised an interesting point about the word "proxy" in relation to the Israel-Palestine conflict. I have only mildly edited the transcript.
One very frequently in the American media will hear this word: proxy. A proxy, according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, is ‘a person authorized to act for another.’ So the idea is there is a person or an entity that has the authority. So, when you say that Hamas is a proxy for Iran, what you’re saying is that Iran is making the decisions. Hamas is basically doing its bidding and acting as an agent.
I think this completely misunderstands the relationship between Hamas and Iran. It’s true that Hamas gets weaponry from Iran, and that’s very valuable for it. And if Iran were to stop that support, that would be a significant problem for Hamas. But Hamas is not an agent or a proxy of Iran in the sense that it exists because Iran wants there to be an organization like Hamas around. Hamas exists because the Palestinians have been fighting against Israel for a very long time.
And so, if Iran were to cease to exist, Hamas would still very much exist because it is embodying this Palestinian resistance—not embodying it in ways that I would like, certainly, but embodying it, along with a range of other organizations. But Iran is not the reason that Hamas exists.
I think that one of the real dangers of this moment is [that] Israel doesn’t have a way of dealing with Hamas on its own terms. Its invasion of Gaza, which was supposed to destroy Hamas, has manifestly failed, [so then] this language of proxy becomes particularly appealing. You can locate the problem externally in Iran and say, we’re going to turn and focus our attention there. I think this is a disastrously delusional way of thinking. Even if by some miracle, you could destroy Iran or change the regime you would still not be dealing with the root of the problem, which is Palestinians.
In this desire to find a solution to Israel’s problem outside of the Palestinians, you literally then are leading yourself towards a really cataclysmic regional war that doesn’t address the root of the problem you have, and potentially creates enormous, enormous dangers.
The backstory to Beinart's talk was that he "recently came across an interview that Benjamin Netanyahu did all the way back in 1982. This was before his political career. Bibi had kind of fashioned himself as an expert on international terrorism. [In the interview he's asked], ‘What is the source of terrorism?’ And Netanyahu replies, ‘The more we look, the more we found that terrorist incidents are not just isolated. There is a major force behind most of these groups that is the Soviet Union. If you take away the Soviet Union, its chief proxy, the PLO, international terrorism would collapse.’"
The Soviet Union was "taken away," the PLO persisted, Bibi has learned nothing since, and so now he's fixated on Iran.
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