Jeremy Powell on the creation of Hamas

Between Israel and the broader Arab world after more than seventy years, nobody stands right.  Politics in the Middle East is complicated, but one word summarizes the situation perfectly: sectarianism.  I can’t do much justice to Arab-Israeli history here, so I’ll advance to recent events.  When Hamas launched its blitzkrieg into southern Israel and committed atrocities there, people didn’t think much about the organization other than merely another terrorist group dedicated to wiping the Jewish state off the map.  By any decent person’s definition, Hamas is a terrorist organization. 

But there’s a plot twist not many are aware of: Hamas is a creation of Tel Aviv intended to further Israeli interest in annexing the Gaza Strip by dividing the Palestinians into factions.  It wasn’t a conspiracy theory but a full-fledged project in the 1980s by Tel Aviv to destabilize Palestine by dividing the more secularist Palestine Liberation Organization with what would become Hamas through funding radical mosques.  It was a classic divide-and-conquer move, with the end goal being annexing the remainder of Palestinian territory.  Even though Israeli funding for the group ended years ago, Tel Aviv still lobbied Arab states to fund it until 2020. 

The initial divide-and-conquer campaign partially did what it intended to do.  The move split Palestinian territory and helped Israel to an extent in annexing territory.  But the price was paid by thousands of Israeli and Palestinian lives through the years as Hamas’s grip on Gaza continues, at least for the time being.

~ Jeremy Powell, "Israel Isn’t the Brilliant Friend of Freedom the Beltway Claims It to Be," Mises Wire, November 7, 2023