As Palestinians Confront a Second Nakba, the Relationship Between Israel and Hamas is 'Complicated'

Chandigarh: First coined by the Central Intelligence Agency in the early 1950s to signify the unintended consequences of covert operations, the term ‘blowback’ perhaps best describes the events in Israel and Palestine following Hamas’s October 7 terrorist strike.

For, largely unspoken, and articulated sotto voce, if at all, in the enduring fog of the Gaza war, is the indisputable reality that Israel had previously helped nurture and cosset Hamas through the ’70s and ’80s and later. According to a cross-section of analysts and overseas media reports, Israeli leaders – especially Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – had continued to intermittently back the Islamist terror group to cynically further their selfish political ends to retain power.

Several media outlets, including the Washington Post, have convincingly argued in recent years that Hamas was in reality Israel’s Taliban, patronised by Tel Aviv in the age-old colonial strategy of divide-and-rule for its own complex and twisted cynical ends. But in classic blowback follow-through, Hamas, under Tel Aviv’s patronage, mutated into a deadly, cunning and implacable foe for its sponsor, its ferocity culminating in last month’s well-planned hit in which it killed around 1,400 Israelis and took 240 others hostage.

Analysts said Israel’s prior backing of Hamas was prompted by its attempt to ‘manage’ Tel Aviv’s immediate point of Palestinian pain, which for the newly founded Jewish nation, was personified in its early years of existence by Yasser Arafat’s secular and left-leaning Fatah party. Fatah – meaning victory – comprised the core of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) founded in 1964 to fight for a homeland, 16 years after its people were arbitrarily rendered homeless.

And though a terrorist organisation for Israel, the PLO was recognised by neighbouring Arab states as well as India – the first non-Arab country to acknowledge it as the sole and legitimate representative of dispossessed Palestinians. Arafat, with his distinctive black and white chequered keffiyeh headdress and holstered pistol at his hip, visited India periodically.

Consequently, Israel’s military and security establishment, facing an existential crisis, needed to offset the PLO with one of its own kind and Hamas – an acronym for Harakat al-Muqawamah al-Isamiyya or Islamic Resistance Movement – ideally fitted the bill.

Affiliated with Egypt’s proscribed Muslim Brotherhood, the Sunni-Palestinian Hamas group was founded in Gaza in 1973 as an Islamist charity organisation called Mujama-al-Islamiya, by Ahmed Yassin, a near-blind and quadriplegic Imam and activist. In his proselytising endeavours, Yassin soon found an unexpected ally in Israel, which at the time controlled Gaza, having captured it from Egypt after the six-day war in 1967, and under Tel Aviv’s patronage, he set about establishing a network of kindergartens, schools, clinics, blood banks, daycare centres, youth groups and even an Islamic University.

The Palestinian imam was further emboldened by Israel loosening previous restrictions on activists promoting political Islam in Gaza, and thus proceeded to officially register his Mujama al-Isamiya first as a charity and later, once again with Tel Aviv’s backing, elevated its status to that of an association. Mujama members were also permitted by Israel to disseminate their message in occupied Gaza to build ‘goodwill’ amongst local Palestinians. Subsequently, this eventually assisted Hamas in acquiring political legitimacy, by securing control of the Gaza Strip in 2007, following elections that took place after the 2005 Israeli pull-out from the area.

Israel, for its part, then fully engaged in battling the PLO, stood back when its ‘collaborator’ Islamist group inevitably clashed with and combated its rival Fatah Palestinian secularists. In this region, a ‘collaborator’ from either the Jewish or Muslim communities co-operating with the other side, is regarded as the ultimate traitor. Even mere suspicion, in many cases, of collaborating with ‘the other’, was enough to hopelessly damn the concerned person.

Steady Israeli funding to Mujama, meanwhile, augmented its influence and reach and having attained financial solvency alongside military organisation, it ended up morphing into Hamas in 1987-88, following the outbreak of the First of three Intifadas or rebellions by Palestinians against their Israeli occupiers. However, soon after, the fledgling Hamas’s ‘sponsorship’ ties with Israel broke down as its founding Charter or Covenant refused to accept the latter’s existence and vowed to work towards its total elimination. Hamas also categorically rejected the two-state solution to the long-running conflict, committing itself to seeking an Islamic Palestinian entity over the combined territories of Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip through a concerted campaign of terrorism.

In short, the opening moves of what was steadily building up to the blowback were in place. But events would unravel gradually and bloodily, as they normally do in such instances, over the next three decades, in which Israel fought three wars with Hamas – in 2009, 2012 and 2014 – and enforced a 17-year-long blockade of the Gaza Strip in addition to frequent air strikes and targeted assassinations.

But the UK-based AnalystNews online news service last month stated that ‘even more ‘sinister’ was the way the Israeli authorities continued to deliberately enable Hamas. Netanyahu’s political strategy, it declared had, since 2009 revolved around keeping Hamas alive and kicking, even if it hurts Israelis. “While Israel and Netanyahu give lip service to seeking a two-state solution, Hamas provides (it) a convenient excuse to avoid pursuing one,” the news portal added.

A day after the October 7 attack, the conservative Jerusalem-based Times of Israel online newspaper went even further via an op-ed piece entitled: ‘For years, Netanyahu propped up Hamas. Now it’s blown up in our faces.‘

Authored by the newspaper’s political correspondent Tal Schneider, the commentary stated that for years, various governments led by Netanyahu had pursued an approach that divided power between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank – bringing Palestinian Authority (PA) president Mahmoud Abbas to his knees – while initiating moves that propped up Hamas.

The idea, Schneider stated, was to prevent Abbas – or anyone else in the PA’s (feeble) West Bank government – from advancing toward the establishment of a Palestinian state. Amid this bid to impair Abbas, Hamas had been upgraded from a mere terror group to an organisation with which Israel held indirect negotiations via Egypt, and one that was allowed to receive infusions of cash from abroad, Schneider wrote. Most of the time, she added, Israel’s policy was to treat the PA as a burden and Hamas as an asset.

Earlier, in 2021, Brigadier General Yitzhak Segev, Gaza governor in the early 1980s, had told the New York Times that he had helped finance Hamas as a counterweight to the secularists and Leftists of the PLO and the Fatah Party led by Arafat. He admitted to funding Hamas himself with Israeli taxpayer money that was later used to kill the same people who were funding them, revealing thereby the copybook rollout of the classic blowback syndrome.

This was corroborated further by David Remick in the New Yorker in late October, when he quoted Netanyahu telling his Likud Party supporters at a closed-door meeting in 2019 that anyone who wanted to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state must support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas. “This is part of our strategy – to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank,” the Israeli PM had added, according to Remick.

And yet again, to further drive home the same point, Israeli general-turned-academic-researcher Gershon Hacohen said that in order to prevent the two-state option, Netanyahu was ‘turning Hamas into his closest partner’. The former two-star Israeli Defence Forces officer said Hamas was an enemy, but covertly it was a (Netanyahu) ally. He further added that Israel was wreaking devastation in Gaza in pursuit of a monster it helped spawn.

In short, the blowback in Gaza and Israel has just begun unravelling and its consequences – inadvertent or intended – augur another Nakba or catastrophe for the Palestinians.