Foreign Affairs

Where Is Netanyahu’s Blame for Hamas?

Only about 20 percent of Gazans are even old enough to have voted for Hamas. The Israeli PM, however, has been unambiguous in his support.

Backers of Israel’s brutal campaign against Gaza have lately been trying to justify the high civilian casualties with the talking point that Palestinians voted for Hamas. Even if we set aside how outrageously unethical it is to suggest a civilian population, half of which is children, ought to be collectively punished for its government’s actions, a number of glaring facts deflate the argument anyway.

First of all, Gaza’s population is extraordinarily young, with the median age falling somewhere between 18 and 20. Only about 20 percent of today’s Gaza residents are old enough to have voted for Hamas in the last election, which took place in January 2006. Of those, about 75 percent voted. And of those, only about 45 percent voted for Hamas. And from those you can subtract the tens of thousands who, naturally or unnaturally, have passed away since 2006. Do the math: It means that less than seven percent of those now living in Gaza voted for Hamas.

Second, the State of Israel has spent years propping up and solidifying Hamas’s rule in Gaza – mostly under the leadership of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Here’s a quick look at the damning recent history that many of today’s Israel-backers would rather the world forget.

Palestinians have not had one opportunity to vote since the General Palestinian Legislative Council elections in the West Bank and Gaza that took place in 2006. When Hamas won 74 seats to the Fatah party’s 45, it did so under the “Change and Reform” list. And “Change and Reform” is likely all that many of the Palestinians who delivered Hamas’s victory wanted. 

The election was widely seen as a protest vote against the Fatah party, which was then in power both in the West Bank and Gaza. Fatah was accused of rampant corruption and had failed to make progress on behalf of the Palestinian people in negotiations with Israel to achieve an independent Palestinian state.

What’s more, Hamas’s victory in Gaza was mixed. From the perspective of most Palestinian voters, it was also conditional. Hamas won just under 45 percent of the overall vote. In Gaza, Hamas won some electoral districts, but Fatah made a strong showing as well. And while Hamas’s victory was too weak to amount to a political mandate, a Near East Consulting opinion poll conducted immediately after the election showed huge majorities of Palestinians calling on the Islamist party to moderate its hardline, unrealistic policy toward Israel and to make a peace deal.

So it’s no surprise that Hamas’s victory was not decisive enough to be the end of the story. 

In 2007, a violent power struggle between Hamas and Fatah erupted in Gaza. In the end, Hamas took over there, but left the West Bank under the control of Fatah, which runs the Palestinian Authority (PA).

In that political division between Palestinians, Israel saw a unique opportunity to scuttle any chance of renewed negotiations toward a Palestinian state. Israel acted quickly, blockading Gaza and preventing any normal economic activity between Palestinians in the two (now somewhat distinct) jurisdictions. 

Before long, nothing and no one could go in or out of Gaza except under the strict control of Israel. And the divide between the Palestinians in the West Bank and in Gaza grew wider and deeper—ultimately amounting to a new situation that worked entirely against the interests of Palestinians and to the benefit of Israel: Two Palestinian semi-entities formed—one in the West Bank under the control of the PA, and one in Gaza under the control of Hamas.

Israel encouraged the division among the Palestinians at every opportunity. The more this new status quo could be entrenched, the easier it was for Israel to stall any real peace talks with the Palestinians to end its 58-year occupation of Palestinian territories. The excuse? That “there is no unified Palestinian authority to negotiate with.”

To deepen the divide between Palestinians and make it as close to permanent as possible, Israel even encouraged other countries, like Qatar, to support Hamas financially—thus encouraging Hamas to build its own state inside Gaza while Israel continued and sometimes ramped up its project of building illegal settlements in the West Bank.

As numerous mainstream news outlets have reported over the years, Netanyahu has gone so far as to secretly prop up Hamas by funneling millions of dollars in cash through the Qatari government.

In a widely reported comment that Netanyahu could only weakly deny, he told colleagues in 2019 that anyone “who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas.”

“Our strategy,” he reportedly explained, is “to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.”

Netanyahu hardly had to say that out loud for it to be the clearly and obviously the case.

And in a sense, the strategy has worked well for Israel, because it freed their hands to grab more Palestinian lands in the West Bank and Jerusalem and to ward off any possibility of a two-state solution and lasting peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

But in a much deeper sense, Netanyahu’s gambit has not worked well.

Today we live in the burning wake of Israel’s cynical, cruel, and foolhardy policy of oppression and control—an approach that rivals the Bush-Obama foreign policy establishment of the U.S. in its deep unpopularity and in the carnage it has brought about. 

Netanyahu has not only destroyed tens of thousands of lives—including those of the countless women and children brutally killed in Gaza—but he has empowered the very terrorists who committed atrocities against Israelis on October 7, 2023, and he has deeply damaged Israel’s standing in the international community.

The damage both to Israelis and to the Palestinian community will take decades to repair, perhaps half a century or more. 

A first step will be a complete, permanent, global rejection of Israel’s current, indefensible policy of lies and barbarism.

The post Where Is Netanyahu’s Blame for Hamas? appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics

The Hardware of Abundance

The left may adopt the branding of abundance, but the right actually brought the goods.

Credit: Steve Heap/Shutterstock

In the Atlantic, Jonathan Chait recently framed the “abundance agenda” as the latest battleground in a coming Democratic civil war—a fight not over ideas, but over power. According to Chait, the real tension is whether abundance will serve the liberal coalition or be hijacked by “corporate-aligned interests” and “libertarian donors.”

But this misses the point entirely. The most important political question about abundance isn’t who gets to claim it; it’s who actually built it. And the answer is clear: Abundance is not a progressive discovery. It’s a conservative achievement.

At the Abundance Institute, we’ve spent the past year mapping real-world policies that expand capacity across energy, infrastructure, housing, and beyond. Again and again, the pattern is clear: The builders and the branders operate in different worlds. One side clears paths. The other drafts blueprints for terrain someone else has already conquered.

Progressive abundance is a retrofit, conservative machinery dressed up in progressive aesthetics. It’s a glossy interface running on an operating system built by the right. They want to claim credit for the user interface while ignoring who built the backend. Without conservative deregulation, permitting reform, and market mechanisms that actually create supply, progressive software is just pretty wireframes with no server.

Let’s stop arguing about who owns the term and focus on who actually did the work. While progressives debated theory, Republican governors delivered results.

Spencer Cox didn’t just talk about Utah’s housing crisis—he addressed it directly. His 2022 housing legislation required cities to allow greater housing density, streamlined local approval processes, and tied compliance to transportation funding. Utah now builds new housing at one of the highest per-capita rates in the nation. I live in Utah. I’ve seen these reforms play out on the ground for years, not just in headlines, but in building permits and project approvals, and families like mine finding places to live. It’s not a vibe; it’s execution.

Montana enacted bold housing reforms known as the “Montana Miracle,” led by the unapologetically right-wing Frontier Institute. These changes legalized duplexes, triplexes, and fourplexes in most cities, allowed accessory dwelling units statewide, and replaced vague local rules with clear, objective standards. It’s a national model for how red states can embrace housing abundance—and beat the blue states to it.

Gov. Ron DeSantis transformed Florida into America’s growth engine through systematic deregulation. His Live Local Act preempted local zoning restrictions, his Complete Communities program fast-tracked infrastructure, and his regulatory reform initiative cut compliance costs by $1.6 billion annually. Florida’s population grew by 1.9 percent in 2023, six times the national average, because DeSantis created conditions where people can actually build things instead of navigating bureaucratic mazes.

Doug Burgum’s North Dakota offers the purest abundance success story. His gubernatorial administration streamlined oil and gas permitting from months to weeks, clarified property rights for mineral extraction, and eliminated redundant environmental reviews. The result? North Dakota became America’s second-largest oil producer, unemployment dropped to two percent, and the state runs budget surpluses while most others struggle with deficits.

Conservative governance provides the hardware—the foundational market infrastructure that makes abundance possible. This has become central to our work at the Abundance Institute: without institutional reform, there’s no capacity to scale. You can’t achieve digital abundance if environmental reviews block the data center. You can’t build energy abundance when transmission lines take a decade to permit.

Progressive approaches offer software—overlay programs focused on managing outcomes rather than expanding inputs. They want affordable housing but resist zoning reform that would create housing abundance. They demand clean energy while blocking the transmission infrastructure necessary to deliver it. They speak eloquently about access and equity, while maintaining regulatory thickets that ensure only well-connected developers can navigate the system.

The distinction matters because software without hardware is useless. Progressive abundance advocates can design beautiful equity frameworks, but without conservative deregulation creating actual supply in the physical world, they’re managing scarcity rather than creating abundance.

The fundamental conservative insight is that markets, not mandates, create abundance. Every abundance success story follows the same pattern: remove barriers, clarify property rights, and let producers produce. North Dakota’s energy boom, Texas’s manufacturing renaissance, and Florida’s construction surge all emerged from market-enabling reforms, not government programs.

Progressive cities like San Francisco and Seattle have some of the most sophisticated affordable housing policies in the nation, yet they also face some of the worst housing shortages. Their distribution systems are exemplary, but their production systems are completely broken. Conservative states with simpler regulatory frameworks consistently outbuild them per capita because they focus on the hardware problem: removing barriers to construction.

Many of today’s abundance evangelists championed degrowth policies a decade ago. They celebrated carbon constraints, applauded development moratoria, and argued Americans needed to consume less. When California passes SB 9 to allow duplexes statewide, progressive voices celebrate this as innovative policy leadership. But they ignore that this merely begins to undo sixty years of exclusionary zoning that progressive institutions helped construct and defend.

Conservative governors understood the value of abundance long before it became fashionable, and their states are reaping the benefits. But conservatives face a strategic risk: if the right doesn’t aggressively reclaim and expand the abundance narrative, progressives will successfully retrofit conservative achievements with their own branding.

If the abundance agenda is the site of an intra-left civil war, it’s only because the left showed up late to a party hosted and catered by the right. The future doesn’t belong to the ones who talk. It belongs to the ones who build.

The post The Hardware of Abundance appeared first on The American Conservative.

Culture

Let the Bad Times Roll

Two cheers for corruption.

Credit: Nola Artistry/Shutterstock

Yes, officer, I was in New Orleans’ French Quarter last month when those 10 youthful hooligans made their great escape, but if I did anything to assist them in their getaway it was, I assure you, unintentional. How, in all that Bourbon Street mayhem, is one to distinguish illegality from lawful carousing, anyway? How, moreover, is one to tell the difference in any other parts of that notoriously raffish city?

That’s my alibi, or would be, if one were required. I cannot say I endorse what those scofflaws did, but it would be disingenuous to deny that I admire their ingenuity. They managed to rip a toilet from a cell, opening a hole in the wall behind it, and squeeze through the hole. They used towels for protection when they propelled themselves over a barbed-wire fence, ran across an interstate highway and made their getaway. They made it, some of them, to the Vieux Carre where I was, before being apprehended. For seven hours, no one at the Orleans Parish Justice Center even knew they were gone. I also admire the graffiti they left at the scene of the crime: “To Easy LOL” and “We Innocent.” Others, at press time, remain at large, more about whom in a minute.

Law enforcement has never been New Orleans’ strong suit. That “wonderful, grand old Babylon,” as A. J. Liebling called it, has been corrupt and its civic leaders comically incompetent forever. “Times are not good here. The city is crumbling into ashes. It has been buried under taxes and frauds and maladministrations so that it has become a study for archaeologists.” Lafcadio Hearn wrote that in the 1870s, adding this kicker: For all that corruption and incompetence, “it is better to live here in sackcloth and ashes than to own the whole state of Ohio.” Even at its worst (who even remembers Buz Lukens?), the Buckeye State doesn’t hold a roman candle to Louisiana.

And that is part of the Big Easy’s charm. Some cities take themselves too seriously. New Orleans is not one of them. Back in 2016, when a 30-foot-wide crater opened up on Canal Street near one of the casinos—a crater the city seemed unable to repair—hundreds of citizens showed up to celebrate “Sinkhole de Mayo.” 

The more time I spend in New Orleans, the more convinced I become that so-called “good government” is overrated. Honesty in elected officials and efficiency from their hirelings is the impossible dream of high-minded reformers, and I’m increasingly persuaded that their  pursuit does more harm than good. The endless layering on of rules and regulations, as government meddles in more and more aspects of our lives, places an insupportable burden on our public servants.  This expansion of duties and areas of involvement makes it more and more difficult, of course, to get anything done. 

A good bribe, well timed and well placed, can cut through a lot of nonsense. There are downsides, of course, but burdening public officials with endless reams of paperwork can, in its own way, invite problems. I am well aware that locals who lived through Katrina and suchlike calamities might disagree, but inefficiency can have its own piquant charm.  

While I do not condone what the hardy souls who escaped from jail did, I was encouraged by what a local jackanapes named Don Keibels reports in his Neutral Ground News. Keibels claims that the two escapees who remain at large are themselves running for public office, and—while they have surely made mistakes in the past—I will try not to hold these youthful indiscretions against them.

They have added “political hopefuls” to their rap sheets, Keibels reports. Their joint campaign announcement appeared “on a balled-up napkin stuck to the wall of an unnamed gas station bathroom using what appeared to be chewed gum and possibly old ketchup.”

“We’ve been on the run long enough to know how this city works,” the escapees said, and they are running—jointly—for mayor. 

They scrawled a second announcement on a discarded pizza box left at the doorstep of Neutral Ground News, saying their experience “navigating alleyways, dodging locals and media, and slipping through institutional cracks makes them uniquely qualified to lead a city that practically runs on the same mechanics.” And they make a good case: “Running from the law prepared us to run the city. If past mayors could get in and get away with so much, this is clearly where we belong.”

Here, again, is Keibels:

They acknowledge they aren’t the only candidates with questionable backgrounds but emphasize they’re the only ones who are already proven crooks. “You know our resumes. You’ve already seen the mugshots. We’re part of a long, proud tradition of New Orleans leadership that voters won’t have to question. You already know what you’re getting…As mayor, we plan to travel extensively…ideally to places without extradition treaties.”

I’m in. They have the experience, the ingenuity and the courage. I’ll cast my ballot for them, even though I will have to do so from 1,000 miles away. 

The post Let the Bad Times Roll appeared first on The American Conservative.

With a raconteur’s gift of gab, Simon Ford waxes nostalgic on how he built a world-class gin brand 

​With a raconteur’s gift of gab, Simon Ford waxes nostalgic on how he built a world-class gin brand