Hamas is Israel’s creation

By Thomas Fazi
8 Oct 2023

Many people don’t know this but Hamas is largely a creation of the Jewish state. For years, Israel encouraged Gaza’s Islamists as a counterweight to the secular nationalists of the Palestine Liberation Organization and its dominant faction, Yasser Arafat’s Fatah, helping to turn a bunch of fringe Palestinian Islamists in the late 1970s into one of the world’s most notorious militant groups, which has killed far more Israeli civilians than any secular Palestinian militant group.

Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Segev, who was the Israeli military governor in Gaza in the early 1980s, later told the New York Times Jerusalem bureau chief that he was giving money to the Muslim Brotherhood, the precursor of Hamas, on the instruction of the Israeli authorities. The funding was intended to tilt power away from both Communist and Palestinian nationalist movements in Gaza, and especially from Arafat (who himself referred to Hamas as “a creature of Israel”), which Israel considered more threatening than the fundamentalists. “The Israeli government gave me a budget”, the retired brigadier general confessed, “and the military government gives to the mosques”.

“Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation”, Avner Cohen, a former Israeli religious affairs official who worked in Gaza for more than two decades, told the Wall Street Journal in 2009. Back in the mid-1980s, Cohen even wrote an official report to his superiors warning them not to play divide-and-rule in the Occupied Territories, by backing Palestinian Islamists against Palestinian secularists. “I… suggest focusing our efforts on finding ways to break up this monster before this reality jumps in our face”, he wrote. They didn’t listen to him. What we’re witnessing is a classic case of blowback.

For further context and background on the dramatic events unfolding in Gaza/Israel, I strongly recommend the book by the Israeli historian Ilan Pappé, The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories, a harrowing description of life in the world’s largest “open prison”.

Here’s an excerpt:

The conventional Israeli policy of ethnic cleansing employed successfully in 1948 against half of Palestine’s population, and against hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in the West Bank in 1967, was of no use [in Gaza]. You could slowly transfer Palestinians out of the West Bank, and in particular out of the Greater Jerusalem area, but you could not do it in the Gaza Strip — once you had sealed it as a maximum security prison camp. The result was the onset of a policy of incremental genocide by Israel against the Gaza Strip. … The militarization of the Israeli policy towards the Gaza strip began in 2005. That year Gaza became an official military target from the Israeli point of view, as if it were a huge enemy base rather than a place of civilian habitation. Gaza is a city like any other in the world, and yet for the Israelis it became a dummy city for soldiers to experiment with the most recent and advanced weapons. … [Practices included] the senseless demolition of houses, the spraying of civilians with phosphorus shells, the killing of innocent civilians by light weaponry, and obeying orders from their commanders generally to act with no moral compass. “You feel like an infantile child with a magnifying glass that torments ants, you burn them”, one soldier testified. In short, they practised the total destruction of the real city as they trained in the mock city.

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