Skip to main content

Hamas: Israel's fatal creature

 
Another cycle of blood is taking place in Gaza after Hamas' latest attacks on Israeli civilians. And the retaliation by the Israeli Apartheid state is expected, as always, disproportional, as much more Palestinian civilians will pay the price with their lives. As if the life in Gaza Strip has not been already unbearable due to the Israeli brutality under one of the worst Israeli prime ministers ever.
 
But how many people know that Hamas has been actually empowered by Israel itself? Intercept's Mehdi Hasan tells the story about how Israel helped create Hamas:
 
Hamas, which is the acronym for an Arabic phrase meaning Islamic resistance movement, was founded in 1987 at the start of the first Palestinian Intifada, or uprising against the Israeli occupation, but its roots were planted much earlier. 

The Hamas founder, Sheik Ahmed Yassin, was a half blind disabled Palestinian cleric and member of the Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood had been repressed by the Egyptians in Gaza prior to 1967, but once the Israelis invaded and occupied the Strip, they didn't just turn a blind eye to these Islamists, they encouraged them. The Israelis (especially right-wing Israelis), wanted to undermine the power of the dominant Palestinian political force at that time, the nationalist PLO, at the heart of which was the secular Fatah party of Yasser Arafat.
 
By empowering Sheik Yassin and the Muslim Brotherhood, Israeli leaders thought they could divide and rule the occupied Palestinians, play them off against each other - secular nationalists against religious Islamists. 

So, in 1978 when Yassin wanted to officially register his Islamic Association, which was basically the precursor to Hamas, the Israelis were only too keen to help Yasin built and grew a network of Islamist social institutions across Gaza, including schools and clubs and mosques. And Israel helped fund some of those projects. 

Most American politicians have no clue about any of this, although the former Republican congressman, Ron Paul, once made this point on the floor of the house: "Hamas was encouraged and really started by Israel because they wanted Hamas to counteract Yasser Arafat." Arafat himself told an Italian newspaper: "Hamas is a creature of Israel". He even claimed that former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin admitted as much to him calling it a fatal error.
 
Brigadiere Yitzhak Segev, who is the Israeli military governor in Gaza, told a New York Times reporter that he helped finance the Islamic movement: "The Israeli government gave me a budget", he said, and the military government gives to the mosques. 

Colonel David Hacham, who worked in Gaza in the late 1980s as an Arab affairs expert in the israeli military, has admitted that the original sin was Israeli support for Yassin in the late 70s. "But at the time", he has argued, "nobody thought about the possible results."  Well, Avner Cohen did. Cohen was the Israeli official who was responsible for religious affairs in Gaza for more than two decades, and who now says: "Hamas to my great regret is Israel's creation." He actually wrote an official report to his superiors in the mid-1980s warning them not to play 'divide and rule' in the occupied territories, and calling on Israel to "break up this monster before this reality jumps in our face", but no one else on the Israeli side really took the possibility of blowback seriously at that time.

Hamas has since killed far more Israeli civilians than any secular Palestinian militant group and its leaders have been pretty viciously anti-Israeli and even anti-Semitic in their rhetoric. Sheik Yassin would eventually be assassinated by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza.
 
Israel was actually nudging and winking at Yassin and Co, building them up as a rival to Arafat's Fatah. The die was cast for blowback that they decided to double down on, when they assassinated Yassin. 

The inconvenient truth is that Hamas is in part a creature of Israel's own making. An enemy that Israel spent more than 20 years helping to build up and then spent the next 20 years  -  the past 20 years, trying to bomb besiege and blockade out of existence. 

The three Gaza wars fought by Israel against Hamas since 2008, killed around 2,000 Palestinian civilians and a dozen Israeli civilians. That's the real human cost of blowback. David Long, a former Middle East expert at the US State Department under Ronald Reagan, told journalist Robert Dreyfuss: "I thought the Israelis were playing with fire, I didn't realize they'd end up creating a monster, but I don't think you ought to mess around with potential fanatics."
 
It's a lesson both the Israelis and the Americans never seem to learn though. And as usual, innocent people - in this case Palestinians and Israelis - continue to lose their lives as a result.  

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Trump's tariffs: A unique opportunity for BRICS and the Global South to fully escape from dollar tyranny

globinfo freexchange   Does Trump know what he is doing? Well, yes and no. While many interpretate his latest move, mostly as an attempt to halt China, his main goal is to give the final blow to the neoliberal order on behalf of his oligarchs .  From this perspective, Trump's unprecedented decision to decide mass tariffs against almost everyone, was an act of strategic hit against the global free market neoliberalism, with the financial capital  at its top. And that's because this dominant-for-almost-half-century system, identifies restrictions and protectionism as major threats against its own existence. In other words, Trump acted as a commander of the capitalist faction that wants to beat its neoliberal rivals and put itself in charge, through a new transformation of capitalism into a 21st century corporate feudalism.   Concerning China, Trump's move may have some negative impact on its economy for a while, since China has chosen to partially play by the rule...

Deranged euroclowns want to revive a nazi-origin project!

globinfo freexchange   Behind the ridiculously cartoonish latest spot of the EU that gives "instructions" to the European citizens on how to deal with a major crisis during the first hours, lies a secret desire.    The deranged euroclowns of the crypto-fascist extreme center , are trying to build up a condition of consent inside the minds of Europeans, which is related to their biggest wet dream: an autonomous imperialist European army. The idea was not born suddenly because of Trump's hostile attitude against his own allies. From the early 50s, pan-European networks of neo-Nazis were created. In May 1951, the European Social Movement (MSE) was founded in Malmö, Sweden. Essentially, it was about projecting the ideology of the German SRP on a pan-European level. The MSE, which would remain active until the 1980s, proclaimed the need for Europe to emancipate itself from the divisive tutelage of the USA and the USSR, called for the defense of the “European race” against th...

Netanyahu BRAGS About Genocide - And Our Media COVERS IT UP

Owen Jones  

Google Imports Ex Israeli Spies, The Genocide Resumes, Cruel Britannia

by Nate Bear   Part 2 - The genocide resumes   The day before the Wiz deal, Israel resumed its genocide of Gaza with an unhinged bloodthirsty rampage, the deadliest twenty-four hours in the last nearly eighteen months of genocide. A high bar had been set, and it was cleared. They attacked at night, itself an act of utter cowardice and sadism, and slaughtered hundreds as they slept in tents. In tents. Close to one hundred babies and young children were killed. The overall death toll exceeds 400 and is rising. As expected, there is not a flicker of condemnation from world leaders, many of whom are arming Israel with the weapons and intelligence it needs for genocide. The British air force spent the ceasefire period gathering intelligence on Palestinians and feeding it to Israel so they could restart the mass murder efficiently.  The genocide is the end of the west. It destroys any claim to moral superiority over Russia, China, Iran or any of the officially designated bad g...

Exporting Genocide: Gaza Burns as Repression Comes Home

BreakThrough News   Rania Khalek hosts a special live episode of Dispatches with Ali Abunimah, executive director of The Electronic Intifada and author of The Battle for Justice in Palestine . They dive into Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, the global silence enabling it, and why this brutal new phase was always Zionism’s endgame. From U.S.-funded fascism abroad to rising repression at home, nothing is off the table.  

Professor at Center of Columbia University Deportation Scandal is Former Israeli Spy

The professor at the center of the Columbia University deportation scandal is a former Israeli intelligence official, MintPress News can reveal. Mahmoud Khalil, a recent graduate of the university’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), was abducted by Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) Saturday for his role in organizing protests last year against Israel’s attack on Gaza. Khalil’s dean, Dr. Keren Yarhi-Milo, head of the School of International and Public Affairs, is a former Israeli military intelligence officer and official at Israel’s Mission to the United Nations. Yarhi-Milo played a significant role in drumming up public concern about a supposed wave of intolerable anti-Semitism sweeping over the campus, thereby laying the groundwork for the extensive crackdown on civil liberties that has followed the protests.   by Alan Macleod   Part 4 - Defending Israel, Destroying Free Speech Longtime readers of MintPress News will be less surprised than many to ...

April 1st 1957: the day Western mainstream media officially became masters of propaganda through a seemingly innocent April Fools' Day joke

globinfo freexchange  In 1957, BBC conducted a very interesting experiment. The spaghetti-tree hoax was a three-minute hoax report broadcast on April Fools' Day 1957 by the BBC current-affairs programme Panorama , purportedly showing a family in southern Switzerland harvesting spaghetti from the family "spaghetti tree". At the time spaghetti was relatively little known in the UK, so that many Britons were unaware that it is made from wheat flour and water; a number of viewers afterwards contacted the BBC for advice on growing their own spaghetti trees. Decades later, CNN called this broadcast " the biggest hoax that any reputable news establishment ever pulled ". This "innocent" farce showed dramatically the unimaginable power of TV and the mainstream media to shape massively the minds of millions. Earlier, Freud's young nephew, Edward Bernays, had set the foundations of modern propaganda. It is worth to add that the te...

Will the Trump Shock prove as momentous as the Nixon Shock?

Yanis Varoufakis  

Israeli Newspaper PROVES Netayanhu Planned Genocide

Owen Jones