> They also cowrote "Israel's Lebanon War". Their book on the Intifida has
> an interesting chapter on Hamas, saying the following:
>
> "In large part this scourge was self-inflicted, for the Civil Administration
> had contributed considerably to the development of the Muslim groups that came
> to the fore soon after the start of the intifada. Just as President Sadat had
> encouraged the growth of the Islamic Associations to offset the leftist
> elements in Egypt, many Israeli staff officers believed that the rise of
> fundamentalism in Gaza could be exploited to weaken the power of the PLO.
In a similar vein, Robert Dreyfuss, in his book "Devil's Game", published earlier this year, devotes a chapter to Hamas, and he argues that Hamas originated in Israeli-Jordanian efforts in the late 1970s to foster Muslim Brotherhood-allied groups in in Syria and Palestine with the aim of undermining the Assad government and the PLO.
Quote:
...beginning in 1967 through the late 1980s, Israel helped the Muslim Brotherhood establish itself in the occupied territories. It assisted Ahmed Yassin, the leader of the Brotherhood, in creating Hamas, betting that its Islamist character would weaken the PLO. It did, though it backfired in a way that the Israeli supporters of Hamas didn't count on, evolving into a terrorist group that in the 1990s carried out suicide bombings that killed hundreds of Israeli Jews. Together, Israel and Jordan unleashed a monster.
"Israel started Hamas," says Charles Freeman, the veteran US diplomat and former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia. "It was a project of Shin Bet [the Israeli domestic intelligence agency], which had a feeling that they could use them to hem in the PLO". (p. 191)
--
Colin Brace
Amsterdam