Whose interest is Hamas serving?
For Israel's ultra-nationalist Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Hamas is an asset, and Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority's (PA) president, is a burden. During his 14-year rule over the past 15 years, Netanyahu did everything possible to keep Hamas in power in Gaza and make the moderate PA increasingly irrelevant and weakened, wrote Israeli historian Adam Raz on October 20 last year.
Through actions like allowing cash transfers to Gaza, Netanyahu indirectly funded Hamas, despite its anti-Israel activities. Most notably, Netanyahu opposed military actions that could threaten Hamas's control, preferring to keep Gaza separate from the West Bank politically. The "surprise" attack of October 7, 2023, was only a consequence of this unholy alliance, underscoring Netanyahu's prioritisation of sustaining Hamas over Israeli security interests. This is a classic tactic that the Israeli state machinery has been deploying ever since Hamas was born.
For all latest news, follow The Daily Star's Google News channel. Although active since the 1950s as a part of the Muslim Brotherhood movement, Hamas was formally founded in 1987, gaining influence through a network of mosques and charitable organisations. Muslim Brotherhood was already a dominant political factor similar to the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), a secular platform committed to a separate Palestinian state.
Egypt was in control of Gaza until 1967, when it lost the war with Israel. Reversing Cairo's policies, Tel Aviv immediately started hunting down PLO members but eased restrictions on Hamas, allowing it to operate almost at will, using it as a counterweight to the PLO.
Muslim Brotherhood's leader in Gaza was Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, who founded the Islamist charity Mujama al-Islamiya that Israel recognised in 1979 and allowed it to build mosques, clubs, schools, and a library. Gaza's governor at the time, Yitzhak Segev, formerly Israel's military attaché in Tehran, who saw Iran's Islamic revolution that toppled the Shah, was aware of Hamas's rising influence. Yet he repeatedly met with Yassin, once arranging his hospital treatment in Israel.
In 1984, acting on a tip-off, Israeli troops raided several Hamas-controlled mosques and found a cache of weapons. Yassin was arrested but released within a year because he could "convince" his captors that the weapons were meant to be used against secular Palestinians, not Israel. An Israeli official, Avner Cohen, warned his seniors of the dangers of an Islamic movement. There was still no action.
In 1993, the PLO abandoned militancy and took to political and diplomatic means to achieve its objectives by signing the Oslo Accords. Hamas, aware of its progress, adopted suicide bombing five months before the accord, when it launched the first such attack. It rejected the accords and the PLO's and Israel's recognition of each other.
Nor did the Israeli hardliners intend to allow a separate Palestinian state, as Osamah Khalil, professor of US and Middle East history at Syracuse University, said. The agreement was incomplete from the start: it didn't address critical issues such as illegal Jewish settlements, the status of Jerusalem, Palestinian refugees, and the right of return. But it served Tel Aviv's interests rather well; it gave the legitimacy to sustain its occupation of Palestine and the Palestinian people, according to Dr Alaa Tartir, director of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute's (SIPRI) Middle East and North Africa Programme. Palestinians had high expectations of an independent state with Jerusalem as its capital. For Israelis, that was never on the agenda. The deal was doomed to fail because the occupier and those occupied weren't equals in negotiations.
Israel needed to disarm the PLO and got that right away. The PLO realised it would remain the weaker party regardless of its minor attacks on Israeli interests or random kidnapping and killing of its citizens, and the deal could be the way out. But in a perverse dance between two unequal parties, terrorism by Hamas and settlement by Israel continued, eroding all chances of peace.
Israel's prime minister of the time, Yitzhak Rabin, was sincere when he signed the deal, though he was not a peacemaker to start with. As defence minister during the First Intifada, he realised the conflict had no military solution. But despite his sincerity, Rabin could not push it through the Israeli bureaucracy and security establishment that held the real power.
In November 1995, Rabin was attending a peace rally where 100,000 pro-peace citizens turned up. Veteran folk singer Miri Aloni performed her signature anthem, "Shir LaShalom" (A Song for Peace), to the ecstatic crowd. Rabin's parting message to them was: "Let's not just sing about peace—let's make peace." All that was gone when Yigal Amir, a 25-year-old Israeli Jew, emerged from the shadows and calmly shot Rabin twice. An hour and a half later, Rabin was pronounced dead.
Netanyahu was then the leader of the opposition and incited violence among the crowd, who shouted, "Death to Rabin." In July 1995, he went so far as to lead a mock funeral procession for Rabin featuring a fake black coffin. To justify their action in opposing the deal, Israeli ultra-nationalists needed a similar reaction from the other side, and Hamas neatly fit the bill. The Islamist group played the intended role in this game as it continued its opposition to the deal and kept launching missiles into Israeli territory. The PLO grew weaker and lost Gaza to Hamas, and it became clear that a separate Palestinian state may never materialise.
The entire population of Gaza that now faces extermination is only collateral damage in this brutal power game in which Hamas is playing along with Israeli ultra-nationalists, as it always has.
Dr Sayeed Ahmed is a consulting engineer and the CEO of Bayside Analytix, a technology-focused strategy and management consulting organisation.
Views expressed in this article are the author's own.
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