HOW ISRAEL CREATED HAMAS

Hamas - an Arabic acronym for “Islamic Resistance Movement” - would probably not exist today were it not for the security agencies of the Jewish state.

Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Segev, the Israeli military governor in Gaza in the early 1980s, told the New York Times 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.”

In the past 14 years since 2009, Israel has gone to war with Hamas three times: 2009, 2012, and 2014. Over the three wars, the IDF has killed an estimated 2,500 Palestinian civilians in Gaza in the process.

All signs now indicate that the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is prepared to wage a protracted battle in the battered Gaza Strip as it seeks to crush the capabilities of the Islamist militant group Hamas.

Netanyahu wants to wholly destroy the Palestinian enclave, as he told the people of Gaza to “get out of there” last night - as if the several million people penned up inside 135 square miles surrounded on all sides by the IDF have any way to do so.

This is all the result of 56 years of Israel working to thwart any progress toward the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank, which all international parties have said for all those years is the only way to build a basis for lasting peace in the region.

The current fighting obscures Hamas's curious history. The Islamist organization whose militant wing rained rockets on Israel this weekend has the Jewish state to thank for its existence.

Hamas was launched in 1988 in Gaza at the time of the First Intifada, with a charter now infamous for its anti-Semitism and its refusal to accept the existence of the Israeli state.

But for more than a decade before that, Israeli authorities - primarily the Mossad intelligence agency - actively enabled the rise of Hamas.

In the 1970s, Israel's main enemy was the late Yasser Arafat's Fatah party, which formed the heart of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). Fatah was secular in the mold of other revolutionary, leftist guerrilla movements waging insurgencies elsewhere in the world during the Cold War. PLO operatives in the occupied territories faced brutal repression at the hands of the Israeli security state.

At the same time, the activities of Islamists affiliated with Egypt's banned Muslim Brotherhood were openly allowed in Gaza. This was a radical departure from when the Gaza Strip was administered by the secular-nationalist Egyptian government of Gamal Abdel Nasser. In 1966, Nasser had executed Sayyid Qutb, one of the Brotherhood's leading intellectuals.

The Israelis saw Qutb's adherents in the Palestinian territories, including the wheelchair-bound Sheik Ahmed Yassin, leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza, as a useful counterweight to Arafat's PLO.

Mossad was the first Israeli organization to recognize the potential value of Yassin, whom the PLO at one time deemed a "collaborator," and Gaza's other Islamists.

Israel's military-led administration in Gaza provided Yassin with the funds to set up a wide network of schools, clinics, a library and kindergartens. Out of this, Sheikh Yassin formed the Islamist group Mujama al-Islamiya, which was officially recognized in 1977 by Israel as a charity and in 1979, as an approved “community association.” The Islamists frequently attacked secular and leftist Palestinian movements, including Fatah, but the Israeli military avoided getting involved, even when Mujama al-Islamiya activists stormed the Red Crescent charity's headquarters in Gaza.

Israel also endorsed Yassin’s establishment of the Islamic University of Gaza, which the Israeli government and security services now regard as a hotbed of militancy. The university was one of the first targets hit by Israeli warplanes in the 2008-9 Operation Cast Lead - the last time the IDF intervened in Gaza.

Israel jailed Yassin in 1984 on a 12-year sentence after the discovery of hidden arms caches, but he was released a year later, since the Israelis were more worried about the activities of the PLO Mujama al-Islamiya became Hamas in 1987, when four Palestinians were killed in a traffic accident involving an Israeli driver. The events that followed, the Palestinian uprising against Israel's West Bank and Gaza occupation known as the First Intifada, led Yassin and six other Palestinians to found Hamas as an offshoot of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood. The director of Mossad argued that allowing Hamas to operate in Gaza and the West Bank would divert the support of religious opponents of Israel from the PLO. It was the classic “divide and conquer” of every occupying force.

Israeli military and intelligence was still focused on Fatah, and continued to maintain contacts with Gaza Islamic activists. Numerous Islamist leaders, including senior Hamas founder Mahmoud Zahar, met with Yitzhak Rabin as part of "regular consultations" between Israeli officials and Palestinians not linked to the PLO.

Hamas carried out its first attack against Israel in 1989, abducting and killing two soldiers. The Israel Defense Forces immediately arrested Yassin and sentenced him to life in prison, and deported 400 Hamas activists, including Zahar, to South Lebanon, which at the time was occupied by Israel. Those expelled had their identification papers confiscated and were bussed through the Israeli security zone in southern Lebanon, and released at the Zamraya crossing. Each deportee was given $50. On their arrival the Lebanese authorities refused to allow them any further into Lebanon and they set up camp on the mountainside at Marj al Zuhur. Amongst those deported were around 100 sheikhs, imams, muezzins, qadi and other religious figures. During this time Hamas built a relationship with Hezbollah, which was in the process of taking over control of southern Lebanon.

Eventually, the tables were turned in the Mossad. After Israel's formal recognition of the PLO and the start of what we now know as the peace process in the 1993 Oslo Accords, Hamas became the Israelis' bete noire. Hamas refused to accept Israel or renounce violence and became the leading institution of Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation, which, far beyond religious ideology, is the main reason for its continued popularity among Palestinians.

Yassin was killed in an Israeli airstrike in 2004. In 2007, after a Hamas election victory that rankled both the West and Fatah, the Islamist group took over Gaza, which led to strict Israeli blockades and the grinding cycle of conflict that is once more repeating itself.

“When I look back at the chain of events, I think we made a mistake,” David Hacham, a former Arab affairs expert in the Israeli military who was based in Gaza in the 1980s, later remarked. “But at the time, nobody thought about the possible results.”

Just like Victor Frankenstein (“that’s Frrahhnkkkensteen...”), who didn’t think about the possible results when he created his monster in Mary Shelley’s book.

This is how you “fuck around and find out.”

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