Israel Backs Palestinian Militias in Gaza to Create Divide

“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 Street Journal, “is Israel’s creation.” Sustenance and encouragement from the Jewish state had effectively emboldened a mortal enemy.

Such a record should chasten wise legislators and leaders. But the only lesson history teaches is that its grave lessons are left unlearned, with disastrous, inimical mistakes made anew. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is proof of that contention. His various governments proudly backed the policy of division between the Gaza Strip and West Bank, defanging Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in the latter while propping up Hamas in the former. Every now and then, the Israeli Defense Forces would keep Hamas in bloody check, a strategy that came to be called “mowing the grass.”

Israel’s support for Hamas has come in the form of work permits (up to 3,000 granted to Gazans in 2021, rising to 10,000 during the Bennett-Lapid government), and suitcases, heavy with Qatari cash, entering the Strip through crossings since 2018. In 2019, Netanyahu was quoted as telling a Likud faction meeting that opponents of a Palestinian state should support the transfer of funds to Hamas. Five years prior, Bezalel Smotrich, the current firebrand, pro-ethnic cleansing Finance Minister, declared with candour that “The Palestinian Authority is a burden, and Hamas is an asset.”

With Hamas now the target and sworn enemy, the PM feels that the same, failed experiment adopted at stages since the 1970s can be replicated: backing and encouraging yet another group of Palestinians to undermine any sovereign cause.

The central figure and beneficiary of this latest folly is the shady Yasser Abu Shabab, a Rafah resident from a Bedouin family known for a spotty criminal record. Calling itself the “Anti-Terror Service” or the Popular Forces, and possessing assault rifles and equipment seized from Hamas, his “clan”, as reports have described it, has a committed record of looting humanitarian aid in Gaza. In Netanyahu’s eyes, these rapacious poachers have turned into opportunistic game keepers, partially guarding the paltry aid that is currently being sent into Gaza under the supervision of the Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation….”

Excerpted from Binoy Kampark’s article ‘Bad Old Habits’ published in Savage Minds. He is contributing editor at CounterPunch and columnist at The Mandarin, and Former Commonwealth Scholar, Selwyn College, Cambridge.

 The full article can be read here.