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.

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