Well, there isn't much to acknowledge, for all Tel Aviv did was to free Ahmed Yassin (ca. 1937 -- 22 March 2004) in 1967 and license the Muslim Brotherhood's charity work, thinking that the group will depoliticize the Palestinians. If Tel Aviv did more than that for the Muslim Brotherhood or Hamas itself, we have no evidence that documents it.
Besides, first-generation Hamas leaders such as Yassin and Abdel Aziz al-Rantissi (23 October 1947 -- 17 April 2004) have already been assassinated by Tel Aviv. The current leaders are younger men who were too young to lead any major organization back in the days when Tel Aviv was kinder to the Brotherhood than to the PLO. Khaled Meshal, who resides in Damascus, was born in 1956; Ismail Hanya was born in 1963, so he is in his early forties, among the youngest leaders of states and social movements today, a lot younger than many LBO-talk subscribers. Below the leadership, most activists are a generation or two younger than Meshal and Hanya and probably don't give a damn about the history of Hamas's precursor organization or even its early days. Neither do the Palestinians, a very young population, in the OPTs: "The average age of the Palestinian inhabitants of the Gaza Strip is 15.5 yrs, with 49% of the population between the ages of 0-14, and 48.3% aged 15-64" (Physicians for Human Rights, "The Disengagement Plan and Its Repercussions on the Right to Health in the Gaza Strip," January 2005, <http://www.phr.org.il/phr/files/articlefile_1123056289960.pdf>).
When it really comes down to it, Hamas has grown because the PLO couldn't deliver, and the way Fatah is acting today, in concert with Tel Aviv and Washington, the final nail into the coffin of secular Palestinian nationalism may be being driven in the OPTs. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>