Al-Qalam 
Hamas wants to destroy Israel, right? But as Mehdi Hasan shows in a new video on blowback, Israeli officials admit they helped start the group.
WHAT DO YOU know about Hamas? That it’s sworn to destroy Israel? That
it’s a terrorist group, proscribed both by the United States and the European
Union? That it rules Gaza
with an iron fist? That it’s killed hundreds of innocent Israelis with rocket,
mortar, and suicide attacks?
But did you also know that Hamas — which is an Arabic acronym for “Islamic
Resistance Movement” — would probably not exist today were it not for the
Jewish state? That the Israelis helped turn a bunch of fringe Palestinian
Islamists in the late 1970s into one of the world’s most notorious militant
groups? That Hamas is blowback?
This isn’t a conspiracy theory. Listen to former Israeli officials such as
Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Segev, who was the Israeli military governor in Gaza in the early 1980s.
Segev later told a New York Times reporter 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.”)
“The Israeli government gave me a budget,” the retired brigadier general
confessed, “and the military government gives to the mosques.”
“Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation,” Avner Cohen, a former
Israeli religious affairs official who worked in Gaza for more than two
decades, told the Wall Street Journal in 2009. Back in the mid-1980s, Cohen
even wrote an official report to his superiors warning them not to play
divide-and-rule in the Occupied
Territories, by backing
Palestinian Islamists against Palestinian secularists. “I … suggest focusing
our efforts on finding ways to break up this monster before this reality jumps
in our face,” he wrote.
They didn’t listen to him. And Hamas, as I explain in the fifth installment of
my short film series for The Intercept on blowback, was the result. To
be clear: First, the Israelis helped build up a militant strain of Palestinian
political Islam, in the form of Hamas and its Muslim Brotherhood precursors;
then, the Israelis switched tack and tried to bomb, besiege, and blockade it
out of existence.
In the past decade alone, Israel
has gone to war with Hamas three times — in 2009, 2012, and 2014 — killing
around 2,500 Palestinian civilians in Gaza
in the process. Meanwhile, Hamas has killed far more Israeli civilians than any
secular Palestinian militant group. This is the human cost of blowback.
“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.”
They never do, do they?
