Israel created HAMAS.
Regrets among those Israeli officials who helped the creation of Hamas are well documented. For instance, Avner Cohen, a Tunisia-born Jew who was an Israeli official in Gaza dealing with religious affairs during 1970s and 1980s, lamented that “Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation”. He observed the Islamist movement take shape, muscle aside secular Palestinian rivals and then evolved into what is today Hamas — a militant group that now calls for Israel’s destruction. Cohen argued that “instead of trying to curb Gaza’s Islamists from the outset, Israel for years tolerated and, in some cases, encouraged them as a counterweight to the secular nationalists of the Palestine Liberation Organization and its dominant faction, Yasser Arafat’s Fatah. Israel cooperated with a crippled, half-blind cleric named Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, even as he was laying the foundations for what would become Hamas”. Does it mean that Hamas was clever enough to dodge shrewd Israeli intelligence service by portraying itself as a welfare and charity organisation in order to get itself establish in Gaza and then confront Israel?
Bit of bla bla here.
Furthermore, Brig General Yitzhak Segev, who was the Israeli military governor in Gaza in the early 1980s, told a New York Times reporter that he had helped finance the Palestinian Islamist movement as a “counterweight to the secularists and leftists of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Fatah party, led by Yasser Arafat (who himself referred to Hamas as ‘a creature of Israel’).” General Segev even admitted to funding Hamas himself with Israeli taxpayers’ money that was later used to kill the same people who were funding them.
One can draw two conclusions from the above discussion. One, it was purely in the Israeli interest to support and patronise first Mujama al-Islamiya and then Hamas. It also means that like the US which created and nourished various Jihadi groups in Afghanistan and elsewhere, Israel cannot escape from the responsibility of creating Hamas. Two, Hamas’ rise and surge in 1990s and thereafter the weakening of PLO and the Palestinian community strengthened Israeli occupation over West Bank and the blockade of Gaza. Hence the perpetual ordeals of Palestinians.
How and why Israel helped create Hamas?
www.reuters.com
