2023-10-16 00:12:06
In the last forty years, even before it made public its founding charter on August 18, 1988, important members of the Israeli Government have acknowledged on several occasions that, during the 1980s, they actively participated in the creation of Hamas. A support that shortly after turned against them, starting a conflict that this Saturday saw one of the bloodiest episodes in its history, with a death toll that already exceeds 1,300 in five days.
To give you an idea, the greatest wave of violence in the Gaza Strip in the last decade occurred in May 2019, in which half a thousand rockets were launched and several bombings occurred in which 23 Palestinians and four died. Israelis. This Saturday, therefore, was an unprecedented attack against Israel since it began its war against Hamas in the early 1990s. In fact, this fundamentalist movement had never been able to carry out an offensive of such magnitude.
In the early hours of Saturday to Sunday, some 3,000 young people were at the Nova Festival, in the middle of the Negev desert, near Kibbutz Reim, when Hamas militiamen burst in, armed to the teeth, and murdered 260 people. A massacre that coincided with the Jewish holiday of Sukkot and that also left more than a hundred people kidnapped. “Hamas has made a mistake of historic proportions,” declared the next day the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who in the years in which the fundamentalist movement was created, specifically between 1984 and 1988, was Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations. .
The first testimony of this collaboration of Israel with the fundamentalists occurred in March 1981. Israeli General Yitzhak Segev, governor of Gaza at that time, acknowledged in an interview with ‘The New York Times‘something that in the following years many other officials of the Jewish State admitted: that Israel actively participated in the creation and expansion of Hamas, above all, by supporting with funds the mosques in which its followers were indoctrinated. The objective of this economic aid was to create a force that would act as a retaining wall for what was its main enemy: Yasir Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).
“Without democracy”
Segev described the situation in those early 80s like this: «For a thousand years, life here existed without democracy. There are no elections. People are afraid of each other as if they were animals. There is a current that supports the PLO, since many of its leaders are from here. Another supports Jordan and a third, Egypt and the peace treaty. In the midst of these warring factions among Gaza’s 430,000 residents, the PLO had just assassinated Sheikh Hashim Huzandar, the “imam of Gaza,” for supporting the peace program and the deputy mayor of Jabaliya for “collaborating.” » with Israel. few moths
There was a progressive increase in violence within Gaza and the aforementioned Israeli governor of the Strip defended in ‘The New York Times’ that all these murders had been committed by religious extremist fanatics who were acting against the violation of Islamic law, for the alleged sale of alcohol and narcotics in the Strip that was taking place in the area, and against anyone who cooperated with Israeli security. Despite this, he had no qualms about acknowledging that the faction of the Muslim Brotherhood from which Hamas emerged also received help from the Jewish State: “The Israeli Government gave me a budget that the Army gives to the mosques,” said General Segev. .
All these funds, he added, were also used to maintain religious schools with the purpose of promoting a new generation of Palestinians opposed to the pro-PLO leftists who venerated Arafat as if he were a god. The one who would be the first president of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) in 1994 already represented the hope of his people in the mid-1980s. «He was better known than the Palestinian flag; “a martyr, a symbol even for those who were not with him,” said a Palestinian citizen on the day of his death in 2004.
Arafat, in one of his last public interventions
Borders of 1967
Their demands were well known: East Jerusalem, capital of the Palestinian State, the return of refugees and compensation for those who could not return, return to the 1967 borders, control of water and “the creation of a viable, free, independent and with territorial continuity. However, for some he was simply a terrorist who amassed fortunes safely stored in Swiss accounts and, for others, the liberator with an olive branch in one hand and a rifle in the other. There was no doubt that Arafat was the leader who had put Palestine on the map of international politics and Israel wanted to get out of the way.
The one who was Israeli responsible for religious affairs in Palestine until 1994, Avner Cohen, also admitted in another interview with ‘The Wall Street Journal’ that “Hamas, to my regret, is a creation of Israel.” It was “a huge, stupid mistake,” he added. And the principle applied by Israel with this fundamentalist faction was the same one that the United States applied in Afghanistan, during the 1980s, when it supported Osama Bin Laden and his guerrillas in their war against the Soviet Union. That is to say, the enemy of my enemy is my friend, but unfortunately the result was also the same.
For Israel, the sheikh Ahmed Yassin, a mythical figure in the history of Palestine who was very critical of the PLO’s process of opposition to Israel and who founded Hamas inspired by the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt, was something like a “guerrilla for freedom.” It was the same conception that Washington had in those 80s of Bin Laden before the founding of Al Qaeda. At that time, the Jewish State did not stop for a moment to think about the enormous risk involved in supporting militants inspired by radical ideology.
Sharia
Yassin considered it as important to fight against Israel as to preserve sharia or Islamic law as the backbone of a future Palestinian state. This was reflected in his founding letter, made public on August 18, 1988. In his preamble he announced: “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam destroys it, just as it has erased others before.” Article 7: «The Day of Judgment will not come until the Muslims fight the Jews. Until the Jews hide behind the mountains and trees and shout: ‘O Muslim! A Jew is hiding behind me, come and kill him!’ Article 13: «The so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences are nothing more than a means to appoint infidels as arbiters in the lands of Islam. “There is no solution to the Palestinian problem other than Jihad.”
Thus we could continue for 36 articles in which the identity was outlined and the objectives of this movement financed in its gestation by Israel and which called for the destruction of any Jewish vestige in the Middle East. The pretexts were pointed out in articles such as 28: «Jews seek to undermine societies, destroy values, corrupt consciences, deteriorate character and annihilate Islam. “They are behind the drug trade and alcoholism in all its forms to facilitate its control and expansion.” Or 32: «Zionist plans have no end. After Palestine, they will want expansion from the Nile to the Euphrates. Then they will think about continuing to expand and so on.
Since then, and thanks to the subsequent history of attacks against Israeli targets, the organization has been considered a “terrorist group” not only for Israel, but also for the United States, Canada, Japan, the European Union and even neighboring Egypt. While for its followers, as well as for some allied Arab countries, such as Russia and Turkey, it was nothing more than a legitimate resistance movement that had been born as an alternative to the PLO.
Ahmed Yassin, praying during the last stage of his life ABC
Mujama al-Islamiya
Hamas, therefore, was established with the express knowledge and tacit support of Tel Aviv, which granted official permission to Ahmed Yasin in 1979 to create what was initially called the Mujama al-Islamiya, a supposed charitable organization from which Hamas later emerged. In addition, Israel also allowed him to develop the Islamic University of Gaza, where many of the future leaders of the terrorist organization and even its best specialists in the manufacture of explosives and weapons were trained.
During those years, in fact, Segev himself regularly met with Yasin, for whom he provided medical treatment in a hospital in Israel. There were also friendly meetings between Mahmud Zahar, another of the group’s founders, with the Israeli Minister of Defense, Isaac Rabin, who would be the country’s prime minister twice. The Jews maintained contact with them, even after a cache of weapons was discovered in Gaza in 1984, which the religious leader justified because they were going to use them against the PLO.
Two years after its founding, Hamas and the Israeli state still maintained a relationship of convenience, until in 1989, the organization carried out the first murder of two Israeli soldiers. The action led to Yasin’s life sentence and the deportation of almost 400 leaders of the group to Lebanon.
#huge #stupid #mistake