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

Yoshie Furuhashi critical.montages at gmail.com
Sun Oct 15 10:47:22 PDT 2006


On 10/15/06, Michael Hoover <mhhoover at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 10/15/06, Colin Brace <cb at lim.nl> wrote:
> > On 10/14/06, Seth Kulick <skulick at seas.upenn.edu> wrote:
> > > "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.
> > > many Israeli staff officers believed that the rise of
> > > fundamentalism in Gaza could be exploited to weaken the
> > > power of the PLO.
> >
> > 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:
> > "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
> <<<<<>>>>>
>
> i have pointed above out a number of times over the years on several
> e-lists, have asked without answer whether hama leadership
> acknowledges israel's role in organization's early years, asking
> again... mh

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/>



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