[lbo-talk] Hamas "a project of Shin Bet" (was: Hezbollah vs IDF)

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

On 10/15/06, Colin Brace <cb at lim.nl> wrote:
> On 10/14/06, Seth Kulick <skulick at seas.upenn.edu> wrote:
>
> > 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)

That is all true, but origin doesn't explain development.  Hamas could
grow only because the PLO made a lot of concessions without being able
to deliver Tel Aviv's concessions to the Palestinians; an increasing
number of Palestinians have grown tired of the PLO's corruption,
nepotism, etc.; and Palestinians refugees have begun to believe that
Hamas would keep them in mind while the PLO would rather forget about
them altogether.
-- 
Yoshie
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