Replies to post #488939 on Zeev's Turnips Talk Politics (ZTTP)

[Undercooked Falafel]

Ron Paul speaks the truth

[Undercooked Falafel]

It isn’t the kind of history Israelis like to talk about, or admit, but it’s also undeniable: Hamas is at least partly an intentional creation of Israel that dates back to the 1970s.
Back then the secular Palestine Liberation Organization was waging a terror campaign against Israel, which it vowed to destroy. There was no contact between Israel and the PLO, at least not officially. But Israel looked for Palestinians who didn’t align themselves with the PLO. It found them, in Gaza, in an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood—deeply pious Palestinians who were opposed to the PLO’s secular outlook, and who had adopted the Brotherhood’s motto: “Islam is the solution. The Koran is our constitution.”

The Wall Street Journal’s Andrew Higgins in January 2009 provided a concise history of the serrated Hamas-Israel relationship in the context of both sides’ mania for outsmarting and outlasting the other. “A look at Israel’s decades-long dealings with Palestinian radicals -- including some little-known attempts to cooperate with the Islamists,” Higgins wrote, “reveals a catalog of unintended and often perilous consequences."


Waltzing with Hamas
The Palestinian group that would begin calling itself Hamas in 1987 was founded by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, a half-blind cleric partially paralyzed by a childhood sports accident. In the 1970s, Yassin’s interest was to turn Palestinians toward the Koran and to find their way through it, rather than through the PLO. Israel saw an opportunity to battle the PLO from within its own Palestinian ranks by openly supporting Yassin and his followers.

Israel’s assumption that Yassin could be a viable alternative to Yasser Arafat was the same sort of miscalculation the United States committed in Iran in the 1970s, when the CIA cultivated radical Islamist groups there should the regime of the Shah of Iran falter or fall. In 1979, the regime did fall. The CIA had misread the forces of political Islam in Iran. It had also misread its reach: Political Islam wasn’t a fad. It was the future.

Lessons not learned, the United States, under the guidance of the Reagan administration, committed an equally catastrophic miscalculation in Afghanistan in the 1980s, when the CIA armed and supported Arab and Afghan mujahideen in their war against Soviet occupiers. Osama bin Laden was the Arab mujahideen’s leaders.


Political Islam
What did Afghan and Arab mujahideen, Iranian militants and Yassin’s rising pieties in Gaza have in common? Political Islam -- “which,” as the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk noted, “has much less to do with Islam than is commonly thought,” and much more to do with a conception of absolutist power in the name (rather than in the service of) Allah. Like the United States, Israel was blinded by expediency. It did not see political Islam’s long-term aims, only its short-term possibilities as pawn in Israel’s designs on the PLO.

Israel had a no-contact policy with the PLO. It had no such policy with other Palestinian groups. It embraced Yassin, who called his group Mujama Al-Islamiya (which loosely means Muslim brotherhood, or Muslim association) and registered it officially as an Islamic charity. It certainly was that. Yassin built schools, clinics, a library, ran social services that Yasser Arafat’s Fatah organization neglected, cleaned streets, provided religious education to children, and slowly, gradually carved its way into the appreciative hearts of Gazans. Meanwhile, Arafat and Fatah were floundering in the eyes of ordinary Palestinians. Arafat in 1993 renounced terrorism, Fatah and the PLO revoked their vow to destroy Israel, and the two sides began working toward a two-state solution. Their failures were Hamas’ gains.


Could Hamas Have Been Stopped?
“Arieh Spitzen, the former head of the Israeli military's Department of Palestinian Affairs, says that even if Israel had tried to stop the Islamists sooner,” Higgins wrote, “he doubts it could have done much to curb political Islam, a movement that was spreading across the Muslim world. He says attempts to stop it are akin to trying to change the internal rhythms of nature: ‘It is like saying: ‘I will kill all the mosquitoes.’ But then you get even worse insects that will kill you...You break the balance. You kill Hamas you might get al Qaeda.’”

But why one or the other? That question, Higgins leaves unasked because it implicates Israel’s uncompromising and, in the end, self-defeating attempts to shape its Palestinian neighbors in its own image of pliant, predictable subservience. As Roger Cohen wrote in The New York Review of Books, Israel “is ghettoizing itself, not least from the agonizing plight of the estimated 1.5 million Palestinians crammed into the narrow strip of land that is Gaza.”


When Hamas Turned Violent
Yassin’s group renamed itself Hamas at the beginning of the first Palestinian intifada, in 1987. A year later Hamas published its charter, which calls, in part, for wiping out Israel. Israel initially ignored the charter and continued to talk with Hamas militants—until 1989, when Hamas launched its first direct attack on Israeli soldiers.

By 2004, when Hamas had embraced suicide bombings as a tactic, Israel reverted to an old tactic of its own: assassinations. An Israeli helicopter killed Yassin as he was leaving a prayer service. His bodyguards and nine civilian bystanders were also killed. A few weeks later, an Israeli gunship fired a missile at the car that was carrying Yassin’s successor, Abdel Aziz Rantis, killing him, his bodyguards and his son.

It was then that Khaled Mashaal, whom Israel had tried to assassinate years earlier, took over Hamas, directing its political operations from Damascus.

Israel’s War on Hamas
Besides killing between 1,200 and 1,500 Palestinians, most of them civilians and 40 percent of them women and children (compared with 13 Israelis, most of them soldiers) Israel’s 22-day war against Hamas in December 2008 and January 2009 did not change the equation in Gaza. Hamas is still in control. Its military wing is largely unscathed. Admiration for Hamas has soared among Palestinians, while respect for Fatah and the Palestinian Authority continue to fall.

http://middleeast.about.com/od/israelandpalestine/a/me090126.htm