Did you know that Israel is basically responsible for the creation of Hamas? The Hamas they used as an excuse to destroy Gaza and commit genocide? Or that they’ve set their sights on their new enemy and the next Gaza?
No? Let me catch you up…
Israel funded Hamas. Hamas tried to destroy Israel. Israel spent decades bombing Gaza over it. Gaza is now rubble.
And right now, Israel has moved on to Lebanon, ground troops pushing south of the Litani River, over a million people displaced, 912 dead in two and a half weeks, all while the United States and Israel are simultaneously at war with Iran.
It is now Day 19 of that war. The region is on fire. And the kindling was laid in the 1970s by the people now holding the matches.
In the 1970s and 80s, Israel had a problem. The Palestine Liberation Organization, led by Yasser Arafat, was gaining serious international legitimacy. The PLO was secular, organized, politically savvy, and increasingly hard to dismiss on the world stage. So Israeli officials did what governments do when they’re scared of an organized opposition: they funded a competitor to split the vote.
That competitor was a Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood preacher named Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. He ran a Gaza-based charity called Mujama al-Islamiya, which set up mosques, schools, and social services. Israel registered it, licensed it, looked the other way when it got into fights with other Palestinian factions, and, according to Israeli Brigadier General Yitzhak Segev who was actually the military governor of Gaza at the time, handed it money directly. Segev told the New York Times in 1981 that the Israeli government gave him a budget and the military government paid the mosques.
The logic was clean: a religious Islamic movement would be too busy fighting the secular PLO to fight Israel. Divide the Palestinians and you weaken both sides.
Avner Cohen, an Israeli religious affairs official who spent over twenty years working in Gaza, later told the Wall Street Journal that Hamas, to his “great regret,” was Israel’s creation. He actually wrote a memo to his superiors in the 1980s warning them to stop backing Yassin’s network before it became a monster. They ignored him.
In December 1987, the First Intifada broke out. Yassin’s organization rebranded as Hamas, declared they were done being a charity, and within a few years had a military wing and a charter calling for the destruction of Israel, built on the social infrastructure that Israeli money and tolerance had spent a decade developing.
Ron Paul said all of this on the House floor in 2009. That Hamas was “encouraged and really started by Israel to counteract Yasser Arafat.” He was slightly imprecise, because Israel didn’t build Hamas from scratch, they built Hamas’s predecessor. But the substance was right, and he got almost no credit for it at the time.
Once Hamas became a serious military threat, the answer was to bomb Gaza. Repeatedly. 2009, 2012, 2014, then the full destruction that followed October 7, 2023, which has now killed over 72,000 Palestinians. The whole time, Netanyahu was also quietly approving Qatari cash transfers into Gaza, knowing full well the money was flowing to Hamas leadership.
His own intelligence officials later pointed to that Qatari funding as a factor in the success of October 7. An Israeli major general named Gershon Hacohen, one of Netanyahu’s own associates, said in a 2019 interview that Netanyahu’s strategy was to keep Hamas alive to prevent a two-state solution. You can’t negotiate a Palestinian state with a terrorist organization, so why bother with a peace process.
Gaza served its purpose. Now Israel has a new one.
Hezbollah, Iran’s most powerful proxy, is the next project.
On February 28, the U.S. and Israel launched a joint strike campaign against Iran. Two days later, Hezbollah fired rockets into northern Israel for the first time since the 2024 ceasefire, in retaliation for the assassination of Supreme Leader Khamenei. Israel responded by bombing Beirut and issuing evacuation orders across southern Lebanon. As of this week, Israel has begun a ground invasion south of the Litani River. A senior Israeli official told Axios they intend to do “what we did in Gaza.” Over a million Lebanese have been displaced. The UN is calling the strikes potential war crimes.
Hezbollah, like Hamas before it, was also funded for decades by Iran, about a billion dollars a year. It was also tolerated and at times tactically useful to Israel as a counterweight to PLO influence in Lebanon. It was also allowed to build civilian infrastructure, schools, hospitals, social services, a political base, right up until it wasn’t.
The fertilizer that grew Hamas came from Israel. The fertilizer that grew Hezbollah came from Iran, with Israeli tolerance along the way. The bombs now falling on Lebanon come from Israel. The permission structure for all of it comes from Washington.
David Hacham, an Israeli military officer stationed in Gaza in the 1980s, said it plainly years later: “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.”
Nobody thought about the possible results.
Day 19.
Sources:
- Israeli support for Hamas
- Blowback: How Israel Went From Helping Create Hamas to Bombing It
- History of Hamas
- Flashback: Ron Paul – Hamas “Encouraged and Really Started by Israel”arch – Centre for Research on Globalization
- Mapping Israeli attacks and the displacement of one million in Lebanonel war on Iran News
- Israel begins ground invasion south of Litani River (Axios)
- Israel steps up bombing in Lebanon as Iran keeps stranglehold on shippingNews
- Israeli attacks on Lebanon may amount to war crimes, UN rights office saysael attacks Lebanon News