Why Israel Created Hamas
Submitted by an SOTN contributor
Since the founding of Hamas in 1987, Israeli, American and Palestinian officials have repeatedly acknowledged that Israel did indeed help create and fund the Islamist group.
The point made by many of these officials is not that Israel “allowed” the rise of Hamas or that Hamas emerged in response to Israeli “occupation” of Palestine. Rather, their point was and is that Israel’s intelligence agencies actively helped create and finance the Hamas group…
More specifically, supporting the Islamist Hamas group has served several Israeli objectives at once: first, it undermined Yasser Arafat’s secular nationalist PLO; second, it helped prevent the implementation of the 1993 Oslo Accords; third, it undermined the Palestinian National Authority and isolated Gaza from the Westbank; fourth, it impeded Western support for the Palestinian cause; and fifth, it justified Israeli (counter-)attacks on Palestinian territory.
“Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas.” – Benjamin Netanyahu (2019)
“In the visible dimension Hamas is an enemy, in the hidden dimension it is an ally.”
– IDF Major General Gershon Hacohen (2019)
“Israel started Hamas. It was a project of Shin Bet.”
– Charles Freeman, US diplomat and ambassador (2006)
Hamas has continued to serve its intended purpose even after the Oslo Accords in 1993 and after Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005.
For the grand strategists, the presence of Hamas in the remaining Palestinian territories might provide, one day, the necessary pretext for a “final solution” to the Palestinian question.