>However, there is a very strong consensus amongst progressive Israeli
>journalists and historians that this is the case.
>
>In Righteous Victims, historian Benny Morris (Ben Gurion University in Beer
>Sheba) explains that up through the late eighties, the Israeli military and
>government allowed Hamas untrammelled access to funding because it believed
>that Hamas was anti-nationalist.
>
>In Drinking the Sea at Gaza, Ha'Aretz editor Amira Haas discusses how the
>Israelis backed the Islamic Brotherhood (from which Hamas emerged) as an
>anti-nationalist, anti-communist opposition organization to the PLO.
>
>At many other points, both Morris and Hass discuss official Israeli support
>of the organization as a non-political rival to the PLO, until Hamas emerged
>and established its military wing and an anti-Israeli covenant modelled
>after the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the late 1980s.
Doug