Israel Cabinet 7 for and 7 against toppling Arafat....plus Israel Turns Palestinian Towns into Prisons

[Hakki Alacakaptan]

This technicality suggests that Israel believed Hamas to be an non-violent
opium for the Palestinian masses. Israel could not have been blind to the
fact that Hamas had "evolved from cells of the Muslim Brotherhood" (UPI -
http://www.vny.com/cf/News/upidetail.cfm?QID=162747), which had massacred 32
Alawi cadets in Syria in 1979, assassinated Sadat in 1981, and staged a
bloody uprising in the Syrian town of Hama in 1982. Moreover, Sheikh Yassin,
the leader of Hamas, was arrested and sentenced with 5 of his followers to
9-13 years in 1984 for possession of 60 rifles, and released one year later
in a prisoner exchange with the PLO.

In fact, it was most probably this violent streak that made Hamas so
attractive to Israel after Arafat renounced terrorism in 1985. Israel needed
an intransigeant Palestinian adversary in order to implement the Allon plan,
whereas Arafat was forcing Israel to negotiate an equitable peace.

Hamas's "abrupt" conversion to violence in 1988 was one-upmanship with the
PLO, which had reacted to the spontaneous intifada by quickly organizing the
United National Leadership of the Uprising. Israel waited more than one
year, until the first Hamas attack, to ban the organization and arrest its
leaders. Ever since, Hamas has unerringly played into Israel's hand by
sabotaging the peace process and falling for every Israeli provocation.
Every bloody Hamas attack has served to advance the Israeli right, and some
of the attacks are uncannily timed to win Likud elections, sabotage peace
initiatives, etc.

So although your technicality is factually correct, it could not be further
from the truth.

Hakki

 || -----Original Message-----

 || From: Michael Pollak

 ||

 ||

 || On Mon, 3 Dec 2001, Cian O'Connor wrote:

 ||

 || > Is it true that Mossad backed Hamas in the early days to discredit the

 || > PLO? I've often seen this stated, but never actually seen any evidence

 || > to back this up.

 ||

 || It is basically true and well known, and several cites follow below.

 || There just two technicalities to keep in mind.

 ||

 || (1) What Israel in fact backed was Sheik Yassin's Gaza chapter of the

 || Muslim Brotherhood, an organization that goes back to the 30s.

 || Yassin, a

 || quadraplegic cleric, set up the Gaza chapter in the early 70s,

 || and Israel

 || backed it in the 80s.  During the period they backed it, it was

 || a service

 || organzation attached to mosques and universities.  They were completeley

 || non-violent and almost completley non-political.  Sheik Yassin's

 || conversion to the use of violent means was extremely abrupt.  The first

 || intifada traumatized him, and within 3 months he had set up a military

 || organization to resist it.  Sheik Yassin is still Hamas's

 || spiritual leader

 || today.

 ||