Bad Old Habits: Israel Backs Palestinian Militias in Gaza

Photograph Source: Hussein Jaber – CC BY-SA 4.0

It is one of those things that should be recorded and replayed for eternity: Israel, in order to guard some misplaced sense of security, happily backs Palestinian groups in order to divide themselves. Hamas, seen now as an existential monster, was tolerated and even supported for lengthy stints in efforts to undermine the various factions in the Palestinian Liberation Organisation represented by Fatah.

In his 2008 work, Hamas vs. Fatah, Jonathan Schanzer, writes how the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, the inspirational font for Hamas, was seen as an opportunity by the Israelis when taking root in Gaza. “By the late 1970s, the Israelis believed that they had found Fatah’s Achilles’ heel.” Israeli strategy permitted the Brotherhood to thrive, going so far as to allow the cleric Sheikh Ahmed Yassin to operate a network of welfare, medical and education services. These had been sorely neglected by Fatah in the Gaza Strip. This approach effectively licensed the emergence of fundamentalism, seen, curiously enough, as more manageable than the military adventurism of the PLO.

The First Intifada in 1987 spurred on the creation by Yassin and his followers of Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiya (“Islamic Resistance Movement”). The 1988 charter of the organisation we know as Hamas, more youthful, and leaner, and hungrier than their Fatah rivals, made its purpose clear: “There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through jihad”.

In 2009, while surveying the ruins of a neighbour’s bungalow in Moshav Tekuma, the retired Israeli officer Avner Cohen, who had served in Gaza for over two decades, was rueful. “Hamas, to my regret,” he told the Wall........

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