Thread by @HammadSGill

Today, Israel blames Hamas for terrorism. But it is a lesser known fact that Israel helped Hamas to grow into one of the world's biggest militant organizations.

For Israel Hamas is a blowback. But how ?

Thread :

#AlAqsaUnderAtrack
#PalestineLivesMatters
#GazaUnderAttak

In 1980's, Israel was in conflict with a secular nationalist Palestinian resistance organization called Palestinian Liberation Organization(PLO) led by Yasser Arafat. In 1964, PLO had founded a militant wing called the Fatah. Gradually, this Fatah emerged as one of the most ....

... powerful anti-Zionist militant group. If there were any terrorist attack on Israel, hijacking, or assassination of a Israeli officials, Fatah would to be blamed. Arab states in 1974 declared the PLO the "sole legitimate representative" of the Palestinian ppl world-wide.

PLO and Fatah had become a constant headache for the policy makers in Tel Aviv. At the same time the US was in bed with the Islamists in Afghanistan. Israel also considered the Islamists its allies against the secular PLO. It decided to 'divide and rule' Palestine.

Israel's military-led administration in Gaza looked favorably on the paraplegic cleric, who set up a wide network of schools, clinics, a library and kindergartens. Sheikh Yassin formed the Islamist group Mujama al-Islamiya, which was officially recognized by Israel as a .....

.... a charity and then, in 1979, as an association. Israel also endorsed the establishment of the Islamic University of Gaza, which it now regards as a hotbed of militancy. Later this Mujama al- Islamiya became Hamas and Sheikh Yassin its first leader.

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Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Segev, who was the Israeli military governor in Gaza in the early 1980s, told a NYT reporter that he had helped finance the Palestinian Islamist movement as a “counterweight” to the secularists & leftists of the PLO & the Fatah party.

“The Israeli government gave me a budget,” the retired Brig. General confessed, “and the military government gives to the mosques. Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation”

Sheikh Yassin used the money provide by the Israel & the Muslim Brotherhood to reprint the writings

of Sayyid Qutb, the ideological father of Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas.

Mr. Cohen, who worked at the time for the Israeli govt's religious affairs department in Gaza, says he began to hear disturbing reports in the mid-1970s about Sheikh Yassin from traditional Islamic clerics.

They warned Cohen, "Keep away from Yassin. He is a big danger."

But Israeli military kept supporting Yassin saying, "Our main enemy is Fatah".

Mr. Segev accepted he had regular contact with Sheikh Yassin. It was illegal at the time for Israelis to meet anyone from the PLO.

Mr. Segev later arranged for the cleric to be taken to Israel for hospital treatment. "We had no problems with him", he said.

In fact, the cleric & Israel had a shared enemy:secular Palestinian activists.

Clashes between Islamists & secular nationalists spread to the West Bank

and escalated during the early 1980s, convulsing college campuses, particularly Birzeit University, a center of political activism.

As the fighting between rival student factions at Birzeit grew more violent, Brig. Gen. Shalom Harari, then a military intelligence officer in Gaza

says he received a call from Israeli soldiers manning a checkpoint on the road out of Gaza. They had stopped a bus carrying Islamic activists who wanted to join the battle against Fatah at Birzeit.

"I said: 'If they want to burn each other let them go,'" recalls Mr. Harari.

A leader of Birzeit's Islamist faction at the time was Mahmoud Musleh, now a pro-Hamas member of a Palestinian legislature recalls how usually aggressive Israeli security forces stood back and let conflagration develop, "they hoped we would become an alternative to the PLO."

In 1987, several Palestinians were killed in a traffic accident involving an Israeli driver, triggering a wave of protests that became known as the first Intifada, Mr. Yassin and six other Mujama Islamists launched Hamas, or the Islamic Resistance Movement.

Israeli officials, still focused on Fatah & initially unaware of the Hamas, continued to maintain contacts with the Gaza Islamists. Mr. Hacham, the military Arab affairs expert, remembers taking one of Hamas's founders, Mahmoud Zahar, to meet Israel's

then defense minister, Yitzhak Rabin, as part of regular consultations between Israeli officials & Palestinians not linked to the PLO.

In 1989, Hamas carried out its first attack on Israel, abducting & killing two soldiers. Israel arrested Sheikh Yassin & sentenced him to life.

It later rounded up more than 400 suspected Hamas activists, including Mr. Zahar, and deported them to southern Lebanon. There, they hooked up with Hezbollah, the Iran-backed A-Team of anti-Israeli militancy.

Meanwhile, the PLO dropped its commitment to Israel's destruction

and started negotiating a two-state settlement.

Unable to uproot a now entrenched Islamist network that had suddenly replaced the PLO as its main foe, Israel tried to decapitate it. It started targeting Hamas leaders. This, too, made no dent in Hamas's support, and sometimes

even helped the group. In 1997, for example, Israel's Mossad spy agency tried to poison Hamas's exiled political leader Mr. Mashaal, who was then living in Jordan.

The agents got caught and, to get them out of a Jordanian jail, Israel agreed to release Sheikh Yassin.

The cleric set off on a tour of the Islamic world to raise support and money. He returned to Gaza to a hero's welcome. On the March 24, 2004, Sheikh Yassin was killed by an Israeli air strike.

Mr. Cohen recalls a 1970s meeting with a traditional Islamic cleric who wanted Israel

to stop cooperating with the Muslim Brotherhood followers of Sheikh Yassin:

"He told me: 'You are going to have big regrets in 20 or 30 years.' He was right."

References :

1) BLOWBACK: HOW ISRAEL WENT FROM HELPING CREATE HAMAS TO BOMBING IT — @theintercept

2) How Israel Helped to Spawn Hamas — @WSJ

3) What is Hamas, how it rose to power & its role in Israel-Palestine conflict — @ThePrintIndia