[Leondros]

Originally Posted by blankall

The idea that Israel intervened to help Hamas win the election is complete BS. Hamas was elected in 2006. Hamas was founded in 1983. In 1984 Israel arrested their leader. Prior to 1983, Hamas was simply the Muslim Brotherhood, which was a well established organization that had been in existence since 1928.

No where did I mention they intervened to get Hamas elected. You will see I said "intervene again like they did to help create another player like they did Hamas." It has been documented that without the help of Israel, Hamas would not have been able to survive. It was the lesser of two evils with the PLO. I do not blame them.

“Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation,” retired Israeli official Avner Cohen, who worked in Gaza for more than two decades, told journalist Andrew Higgins in a 2009 Wall Street Journal article, describing it as an “enormous, stupid mistake.”

In the same piece, headlined “How Israel Helped To Spawn Hamas,” David Hacham, who also worked in Gaza in the late 1980s and early 1990s as an Arab affairs expert in the Israeli military, said: “When I look back at the chain of events, I think we made a mistake. But at the time, nobody thought about the possible results.”

But it’s also true that the Israeli government originally viewed Hamas primarily as a religious and charitable organization.

It believed that by supporting Hamas, it could use it as a counterweight to undermine a secular terrorist organization which it considered a greater threat — the Palestine Liberation Organization, founded in 1964 and headed by Yasser Arafat, leader of the Fatah movement.

Israeli governments formed an unofficial alliance with Hamas’ spiritual leader, Sheikh Ahmed Ismail Hassan Yassin, a wheel-chair bound, nearly blind paraplegic who founded Hamas’ forerunner in Gaza, an Islamist group called Mujama al-Islamiya.

With the quiet approval of Israeli authorities, Yassin built up a network of schools, clinics, blood banks, daycare centres, youth groups and even a university, as well as recognizing Mujama al-Islamiya as a charity, permitting it to raise funds through donations.