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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region Forums"How Israel Helped to Spawn Hamas"
This is from just after the end of the last Gaza War.
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB123275572295011847
How Israel Helped to Spawn Hamas
By ANDREW HIGGINS
Updated Jan. 24, 2009 12:01 a.m. ET
Moshav Tekuma, Israel
Surveying the wreckage of a neighbor's bungalow hit by a Palestinian rocket, retired Israeli official Avner Cohen traces the missile's trajectory back to an "enormous, stupid mistake" made 30 years ago.
"Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel's creation," says Mr. Cohen, a Tunisian-born Jew who worked in Gaza for more than two decades. Responsible for religious affairs in the region until 1994, Mr. Cohen watched the Islamist movement take shape, muscle aside secular Palestinian rivals and then morph into what is today Hamas, a militant group that is sworn to Israel's destruction.
Instead of trying to curb Gaza's Islamists from the outset, says Mr. Cohen, Israel for years tolerated and, in some cases, encouraged them as a counterweight to the secular nationalists of the Palestine Liberation Organization and its dominant faction, Yasser Arafat's Fatah. Israel cooperated with a crippled, half-blind cleric named Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, even as he was laying the foundations for what would become Hamas. Sheikh Yassin continues to inspire militants today; during the recent war in Gaza, Hamas fighters confronted Israeli troops with "Yassins," primitive rocket-propelled grenades named in honor of the cleric.
Last Saturday, after 22 days of war, Israel announced a halt to the offensive. The assault was aimed at stopping Hamas rockets from falling on Israel. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert hailed a "determined and successful military operation." More than 1,200 Palestinians had died. Thirteen Israelis were also killed.
<snip>
Much more at the link. It's worth reading the whole thing.
Uncle Joe
(58,372 posts)Thanks for the thread, Comrade Grumpy.
Loudly
(2,436 posts)Seems pretty perverted to blame Hamas on the Jews.
I trace it, instead, to the ancient rivalry between the biblical STORIES of Isaac and Ishmael.
Bill Maher is my theologian in this regard.
Scootaloo
(25,699 posts)Ken Burch
(50,254 posts)nice big of demagogic deflection there.
Loudly
(2,436 posts)I can't imagine Israel flailing about looking for a Jewish advantage NOT making errors of this kind.
Homeland of the Jewish People is the singular theme of all the noise.
Ken Burch
(50,254 posts)if the Israeli government(again, not "the Jews" hadn't put sidelining the PLO above any and all other priorities.
You'd have to agree that the Likudnik obsession with delegitimizing Yassir Arafat was a tragic and inexcusably stupid policy, I think...and that there's nothing the PLO could have done that could ever have been worse than what's happening now.
BlindTiresias
(1,563 posts)stranger81
(2,345 posts)for the deaths of their own children.
And I see that all day long on this board.
countryjake
(8,554 posts)easychoice
(1,043 posts)and netinyahu is a moderate? Geez.
Comrade Grumpy
(13,184 posts)elias7
(4,012 posts)PLO, Al Aqsa martyrs brigade, Palestine Islamic jihad, Popular resistance committee, the DFLP, the PFLP, fatah, etc... Not to mention dozens from surrounding countries ....Hezbollah, etc...
Perhaps there is a historically accurate point being made, but the basic idea is not that Israel helped spawn Hamas because of their own activity, but rather to help develop infighting amongst the groups that were already bent in the destruction of Israel.
bemildred
(90,061 posts)Viva_Daddy
(785 posts)Woops. We created a monster (think Frankenstein) and it is now running amok. It's not like it hasn't happened before.
eridani
(51,907 posts)--than secular nationalists. See also US establishment of the Taliban.
malaise
(269,087 posts)Rec