There’s a kind of arrangement where nobody involved is paid to finish. Not because anyone in it is wicked — because nothing in the structure rewards an ending and several things reward continuation. You don’t need a conspiracy. You need incentives and time.
So let’s drop the usual argument about whether Israel wants peace. Put that way it’s a question about a nation’s feelings, and nobody can settle it — which is exactly why it gets asked.
Here is a question that can be settled. What did its governments do?
A government isn’t a mood. It’s a set of decisions, taken by named people, written down. You don’t read its intentions off its speeches. You read them off its conduct.
The money.
Four days ago TIME published an investigation built on letters between senior Israeli security officials and Qatari leaders.¹
Qatar began sending money into Gaza in 2007, after Hamas took it over. Israel wasn’t directly involved at first. By 2012, Netanyahu’s government had approved a system giving Israel a direct role. Israel helped deliver the supplies. Israel determined which families qualified. Israel disbursed funds and enabled Qatari-financed expansion of Gaza’s electricity.¹
An analysis given to Israeli ministers put the transfers at roughly $1.1 billion by 2018. In October 2018, Israel, Qatar and the UN signed an agreement financing fuel deliveries. A letter from July 2019 describes $6 million reaching twenty thousand beneficiaries — chosen by Israel — at $300 each.¹
In 2020 the head of the Mossad, Yossi Cohen, wrote to the Qataris praising their aid.¹
And about two weeks before the seventh of October 2023, the Mossad director David Barnea asked Qatar to renew the funding.¹
The Prime Minister’s office declined to comment.¹
What that policy was for.
For over a decade, successive Israeli governments did not merely tolerate Hamas’s rule in Gaza. They helped administer the arrangement that sustained it, selected who received the money, and asked for it to continue — up to the week before the attack.
One reading makes sense of that. A Hamas governing Gaza means there is no unified Palestinian leadership. No unified leadership means no partner. No partner means no negotiation. No negotiation means nothing has to be conceded, ever.
That is not a failure to find peace. That is a policy of preventing the conditions under which peace would have to be discussed.
Netanyahu’s answer.
He says the payments were meant to prevent humanitarian collapse by keeping Gaza’s civilian administration running, and he denies the remark attributed to him at a Likud meeting in 2019.¹ Published rebuttals argue the whole framing is a myth,² and they aren’t nothing.
But the humanitarian explanation has to account for the letters. You can feed a population through the UN. You do not need your own intelligence service choosing the recipients, and you do not need the head of that service writing to thank the funder. Aid does not require the Mossad. Managing a rival’s survival does.
Who pays if it stops?
The Prime Minister. The coalition that keeps him in office does not survive the end of this war, and his corruption trial is not waiting politely.
The settlement movement. The settler population in the West Bank grew from roughly 110,000 at the signing of Oslo in 1993 to around 190,000 by 2000 — nearly doubling during the process that was supposed to end it.³ Conflict adds hills; agreements subtract them.
The defense industry. And here the number isn’t mine — it’s Israel’s own Ministry of Defense. Defense exports reached $19.2 billion in 2025, a record for the fifth consecutive year.⁴ The trade press described the demand as being for “battle-tested technology.”⁵ That phrase is the business model said out loud: a weapon’s market value rises with demonstrated use.
The security establishment, whose budgets and standing rise with threat and fall with calm.
Now name one constituency with power whose position improves the day it ends.
I can’t.
What cuts against me.
This war has been expensive. The deficit ballooned, public debt climbed, and the major credit agencies downgraded Israel during 2024. Hundreds of thousands of reservists came out of the workforce. Tourism collapsed. Anyone telling you Israel is getting rich from this is wrong, and I’m not telling you that. The full numbers are in next week’s piece.
Look instead at who carries which column. The costs are public — the deficit, the rating, the small business that closed while its owner was in uniform, the family paying for all of it. The benefits sit in a small number of specific places: a coalition, a movement, an industry, a bureaucracy.
The costs are shared. The gains are not. That is the structure of every arrangement that never reaches an ending.
And the asymmetry I won’t pretend away.
Hamas is not a peace movement. It launched the seventh of October, which destroyed the very arrangement described above.
But Hamas is an armed faction governing a besieged strip. Israel is a sovereign state with an army, a treasury, an air force and allies. Treating their incentives as comparable is a way of avoiding the only question that matters: what the party holding the power chose to do with it.
So here is my conclusion, and I’ll put it plainly.
The governments of Israel have not wanted peace. Not in the sense of failing to find it — in the sense of working, deliberately and for twelve years, to prevent a Palestinian leadership with whom it would have to be made.
That is not a guess about anybody’s heart. It is what twelve years of decisions add up to, and the decisions are in writing.
I am not saying it about Israelis. My sister is one, my parents are buried there, and most of the people I grew up with want this over. I am saying it about the people who made the policy, and I am saying it because the policy is now in their own correspondence.
Ask who pays if it stops. Then read what the head of the Mossad wrote to Qatar — and what his successor asked for, two weeks before the seventh of October.
Next: people will tell you this is about money. It isn’t — and the numbers say so.
Sources
“Exclusive: Documents Show How Israel Steered Qatari Payments to Gaza,” TIME, 18 October 2026 — time.com
“The myth that Israel/Netanyahu created/funded Hamas,” JNS — jns.org
Peace Now, “30 Years After Oslo: The Data That Shows How the Settlements Proliferated Following the Oslo Accords” — peacenow.org.il
Israeli Ministry of Defense, “All-Time Defense Export Record: Israel Crosses the $19 Billion Threshold” — mod.gov.il; see also Times of Israel
“Israel defence exports hit record $19.2bn amid global demand for battle-tested technology,” Jewish News — jewishnews.co.uk