How Israel Helped Spawn Hamas

Read about the forgotten history of the relationship between Russia and Hamas - the one Israel would like you to forget.

How Israel Helped Spawn Hamas

World.mic,

19 July, 2014

Today, it seems hard to imagine that Israel would harbor any generosity towards Hamas. As its tanks, planes, and ships pound Gaza, and its governing powers respond with volleys of rockets, their enmity's tragic cost is rising by the hour.

Image Credit: Getty Images. Palestinians carry the bodies of the Abu Jarad family, killed during the Israeli assault.

With a harsh war of words taking place between Israeli officials and Hamas leadership, it is difficult to imagine that Israel actually helped create Hamas.

It's a complex and long relationship that calls for a history lesson.

The story goes back to the 1960s and 70s, when Hamas was founded as an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, under the leadership and guidance of a cleric named Sheikh Ahmed Yassin.

A quadriplegic who was nearly blind, Yassin was not regarded as a threat when he set up an Islamic charity in Gaza, Mujama el-Islamiya, in 1973. In fact, he was embraced by Israel, which now had military control over Gaza after seizing it from Egypt in the Six Day War of 1967.

Image Credit: AP. Sheikh Ahmed Yassin (center), meets with members of Hamas, 1997.

As well as recognising Mujama el-Islamiya formally as a charity, Israel allowed it to set up schools, mosques and clubs, sent officials to meet Sheikh Yassin, and even arranged for him to travel to Israel for hospital treatment. Some former intelligence officers claim support extended to directly funding the emerging Islamist organisation, but they're claims both parties stridently deny.

So why did Israel tolerate, even encourage, an organization that would eventually pledge its destruction? At the time, officials believed that religious groups like Yassin's could be helpful tools against what it believed were its real enemies. The biggest threat to Israel, leaders then thought, were secular Palestinian resistance movements: groups like Yasser Arafat's Fatah, which dominated the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO).

Image Credit: AP. Yasser Arafat in 1974.

During the 1970s and 1980s, these groups did not recognize Israel as legitimate, and embraced violent means as a way to achieve Palestinian liberation. It was these movements that Israel feared – and in the face of a secular, left-wing threat, they believed Islamism might be an attractive alternative.

The benign division of resistance, it seems, did not work out as planned. While the PLO gradually laid down its arms, after the beginning of the first Intifada in 1987 Mujama el Islamiya developed into what we now know as Hamas.

That didn't mean an immediate end to ties with Israel: even after the publication of the group's charter, a document filled with anti-semitism and which pledges the destruction of the Jewish state, Israeli officials still communicated with them, apparently in ignorance of the extremist shift. But after Hamas abducted and killed two soldiers in 1989, the game was up. Israel arrested Sheikh Yassin, and sentenced him to life imprisonment.

Image Credit: AP. Sheikh Yassin in an Israeli jail cell, 1992.

It was too, late, however, to halt the growth and popularity of the new organization. Hamas continued to employ bloody tactics toward Israel, including a wave of suicide bombings which, in 1996, killed nearly 60 people. In 2006, Hamas won a democratic election, which legitimized its power.

Image Credit: Getty Images. Supporters of Hamas, 2006.

So where does the story end? If Hamas' past depended on Israel, then so does its future. The savage bombardment and ground incursion that's now underway in the Gaza Strip will of course take out Hamas operatives and important infrastructure, striking a blow to the organization in the short term. But further in the future it might just increase their strength: both the wounds of war suffered by Gazans and the militant response of Hamas is likely to boost its popularity in the Gaza Strip.

And so the cycle will continue. The strategizing and bombing of both sides has brought no end to the violence so far: it seems unlikely that it will stop the bloodshed any time soon.

Hamas History Tied To Israel

By Richard Sale

UPI Terrorism Correspondent

Information Clearing House,

18 June, 2002

In the wake of a suicide bomb attack Tuesday on a crowded Jerusalem city bus that killed 19 people and wounded at least 70 more, the Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas, took credit for the blast.

Israeli officials called it the deadliest attack in Jerusalem in six years.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon immediately vowed to fight "Palestinian terror" and summoned his cabinet to decide on a military response to the organization that Sharon had once described as "the deadliest terrorist group that we have ever had to face."

Active in Gaza and the West Bank, Hamas wants to liberate all of Palestine and establish a radical Islamic state in place of Israel. It is has gained notoriety with its assassinations, car bombs and other acts of terrorism.

But Sharon left something out.

Israel and Hamas may currently be locked in deadly combat, but, according to several current and former U.S. intelligence officials, beginning in the late 1970s, Tel Aviv gave direct and indirect financial aid to Hamas over a period of years.

Israel "aided Hamas directly -- the Israelis wanted to use it as a counterbalance to the PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organization)," said Tony Cordesman, Middle East analyst for the Center for Strategic Studies.

Israel's support for Hamas "was a direct attempt to divide and dilute support for a strong, secular PLO by using a competing religious alternative," said a former senior CIA official.

According to documents United Press International obtained from the Israel-based Institute for Counter Terrorism, Hamas evolved from cells of the Muslim Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in 1928. Islamic movements in Israel and Palestine were "weak and dormant" until after the 1967 Six Day War in which Israel scored a stunning victory over its Arab enemies.

After 1967, a great part of the success of the Hamas/Muslim Brotherhood was due to their activities among the refugees of the Gaza Strip. The cornerstone of the Islamic movements success was an impressive social, religious, educational and cultural infrastructure, called Da'wah, that worked to ease the hardship of large numbers of Palestinian refugees, confined to camps, and many who were living on the edge.

"Social influence grew into political influence," first in the Gaza Strip, then on the West Bank, said an administration official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

According to ICT papers, Hamas was legally registered in Israel in 1978 by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the movement's spiritual leader, as an Islamic Association by the name Al-Mujamma al Islami, which widened its base of supporters and sympathizers by religious propaganda and social work.

According to U.S. administration officials, funds for the movement came from the oil-producing states and directly and indirectly from Israel. The PLO was secular and leftist and promoted Palestinian nationalism. Hamas wanted to set up a transnational state under the rule of Islam, much like Khomeini's Iran.

What took Israeli leaders by surprise was the way the Islamic movements began to surge after the Iranian revolution, after armed resistance to Israel sprang up in southern Lebanon vis-a-vis the Hezbollah, backed by Iran, these sources said.

"Nothing provides the energy for imitation as much as success," commented one administration expert.

A further factor of Hamas' growth was the fact the PLO moved its base of operations to Beirut in the '80s, leaving the Islamic organization to grow in influence in the Occupied Territories "as the court of last resort," he said.

When the intifada began, Israeli leadership was surprised when Islamic groups began to surge in membership and strength. Hamas immediately grew in numbers and violence. The group had always embraced the doctrine of armed struggle, but the doctrine had not been practiced and Islamic groups had not been subjected to suppression the way groups like Fatah had been, according to U.S. government officials.

But with the triumph of the Khomeini revolution in Iran, with the birth of Iranian-backed Hezbollah terrorism in Lebanon, Hamas began to gain in strength in Gaza and then in the West Bank, relying on terror to resist the Israeli occupation.

Israel was certainly funding the group at that time. One U.S. intelligence source who asked not to be named said that not only was Hamas being funded as a "counterweight" to the PLO, Israeli aid had another purpose: "To help identify and channel towards Israeli agents Hamas members who were dangerous terrorists."

In addition, by infiltrating Hamas, Israeli informers could only listen to debates on policy and identify Hamas members who "were dangerous hard-liners," the official said.

In the end, as Hamas set up a very comprehensive counterintelligence system, many collaborators with Israel were weeded out and shot. Violent acts of terrorism became the central tenet, and Hamas, unlike the PLO, was unwilling to compromise in any way with Israel, refusing to acquiesce in its very existence.

But even then, some in Israel saw some benefits to be had in trying to continue to give Hamas support: "The thinking on the part of some of the right-wing Israeli establishment was that Hamas and the others, if they gained control, would refuse to have any part of the peace process and would torpedo any agreements put in place," said a U.S. government official who asked not to be named.

"Israel would still be the only democracy in the region for the United States to deal with," he said.

All of which disgusts some former U.S. intelligence officials.

"The thing wrong with so many Israeli operations is that they try to be too sexy," said former CIA official Vincent Cannestraro.

According to former State Department counter-terrorism official Larry Johnson, "the Israelis are their own worst enemies when it comes to fighting terrorism."

"The Israelis are like a guy who sets fire to his hair and then tries to put it out by hitting it with a hammer."

"They do more to incite and sustain terrorism than curb it," he said.

Aid to Hamas may have looked clever, "but it was hardly designed to help smooth the waters," he said. "An operation like that gives weight to President George Bush's remark about there being a crisis in education."

Cordesman said that a similar attempt by Egyptian intelligence to fund Egypt's fundamentalists had also come to grief because of "misreading of the complexities."

An Israeli defense official was asked if Israel had given aid to Hamas said, "I am not able to answer that question. I was in Lebanon commanding a unit at the time, besides it is not my field of interest."

Asked to confirm a report by U.S. officials that Brig. Gen. Yithaq Segev, the military governor of Gaza, had told U.S. officials he had helped fund "Islamic movements as a counterweight to the PLO and communists," the official said he could confirm only that he believed Segev had served back in 1986.

The Israeli Embassy press office referred UPI to its Web site when asked to comment.