"Tens of thousands of Jews have lived in the Gaza Strip for generations, they had their homes, shops and farms there. When Israel withdrew from the area in 2005, they had to be moved from their homes, and even the bodies from the cemeteries were removed. And everyone - at least the Israeli Left - hoped that, with us no longer in control and billions of dollars flowing in from Europe and America, Gaza would become a Singapore or Dubai of the Mediterranean.
We can see that this is not what happened: Hamas took power in an otherwise democratic election - an overwhelming proportion of the Palestinians support the organization's terrorist policies.
Hamas took all the money they received from Europe and America and instead of building resorts, schools and hospitals, they built tunnel networks, crossing the border into Israel to attack Israeli communities. It has produced tens of thousands of rockets and has been shelling Israeli cities for decades. This was something that Israel's conservative side foresaw. My father also warned that Gaza would not become a Singapore or Dubai of the Mediterranean, but a hotbed of terrorism right next to the heart of Israel," Yair Netanyahu told Mandiner, in the context of his father Benjamin Netanyahu being the most vocal opponent of Israel's 2005 withdrawal from Gaza.
Speaking about the war in Gaza, he said,
the real war is between Israel and Iran.
Hamas is a tentacle of the Iranian octopus, he said. "Iran is a rogue state with the same ideology as the Islamic State and al-Qaeda. It is building nuclear weapons to destroy Israel and it says so openly. It is destabilizing the Middle East and, slowly, the whole world," he said.
Touching on the rise of anti-Semitism in Western and Northern European countries, and even in the United States, Yair Netanyahu said, "There is a phenomenon called the red-green alliance: the alliance of radical Marxists in the West with Islamists. They are united by a hatred of Israel and Judeo-Christian civilization, a hatred of Western values, a hatred of capitalism, of the free market and free economies. The hatred of Israel goes hand in hand with their hatred of the United States, Europe and Western civilization. So it is part of a much bigger phenomenon."
