How the Zionists Use Hamas As A Tool of Provocation
From its beginnings over a century ago, the object of the Zionist
movement has been to create an ethnically and religiously exclusive "Jewish
state" through conquering the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the
Jordan River. "A land without people for a people without land," was the
slogan. But since Palestine was actually populated by Arabs, they had to
be made to disappear, through selective or wholesale expulsion and massacres,
such as is taking place now on the West Bank. To realize their program,
the Zionists have often resorted to provocation, even against "their own
people" - for example, the Mossad's 1951 bombing of the Baghdad synagogue,
in order to provoke the flight of the Iraqi Jews (see "Zionist Terror and
the In Gathering' of Iraqi Jews," The Internationalist No. 9, January-February
2001). And from Theodor Herzl, Ze'ev Jabotinsky and David Ben Gurion to
Yitzhak Rabin and Ariel Sharon, the Zionists have always been prepared to
"do business with" the worst anti-Semites, including Hitler's Nazis (see
"Zionism, Imperialism and Anti-Semitism" in the same issue).
Following this logic, the state of Israel helped create and foster the growth
the Islamic fundamentalists. It is by now well-known how U.S. intelligence
agencies created Osama Bin Laden, using the Saudi-born Yemeni millionaire
to recruit "holy warriors" (mujahedin) to fight against the Soviet army
in Afghanistan, and how the CIA's dogs of war later slipped the leash, turning
their religious frenzy against the "infidels" of the West. Similarly, and
in close connection with U.S. operations in Afghanistan, Israeli leaders
nurtured the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) as a counter to the secular
nationalist Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), then allied with the
Soviet Union. Even after Hamas turned to suicide bombing against Israelis,
the Zionist authorities favored it over the PLO. Today, as the Israeli army
is supposedly engaged in a war to root out the "terrorist infrastructure,"
it has not touched Gaza, the bastion of Hamas and origin of most of the
suicide bombers. Moreover, Israel's military machine has deliberately provoked
terrorist attacks by the Islamic fundamentalists which then become the excuses
for its war on the Palestinians.
The Zionist leaders want anti-Semitic terror. They need attacks on Jews in
order to tighten their hold on the Hebrew people in the Israeli garrison
state and to solidify their support from the imperialists, without which
Israel could not survive.
The 1967 war - in which the Israeli army seized East Jerusalem and the West
Bank from Jordan, the Gaza Strip and Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, and the
Golan Heights from Syria - gave rise to a nationalist Palestinian opposition
grouped together in the PLO. The largest single component was Fatah, headed
by Yasir Arafat, a former member of the Muslim Brotherhood who became a
protégé of Egyptian nationalist leader Gamal Abdel Nasser.
The PLO also included smaller nationalist groups allied with Syria, as well
as the Palestine Communist Party (PCP) and two groups that cloaked their
nationalism in Stalinist rhetoric, the Popular Front for the Liberation
of Palestine (PFLP) of George Habash and the Democratic Front for the Liberation
of Palestine (DFLP) of Nayef Hawatmeh. At the time of their founding, the
PFLP and DFLP modeled themselves on the Vietnamese National Liberation Front
and saw themselves as fedayin (guerrilla fighters) in a national liberation
struggle.
In the Palestinian lands which the Zionists occupied in 1967, the fedayin
completely dominated the resistance and remade the PLO, which had been founded
by Nasser in 1964 as the Palestinian nationalist umbrella organization.
Nevertheless, the nationalist guerrillas were vulnerable in tiny Gaza, where
nearly a million people are crammed into 140 square miles, most of it desert,
most of it desert. For several years, the fedayin/PLO attacked Zionist military
targets, achieving modest successes until the Israeli army laid siege to
Gaza in 1971. Israel bulldozed hundreds of homes in the refugee camps and
deported tens of thousands, including 15,000 suspected PLO fighters who
were packed off to camps in the Sinai desert. As the Zionists brutally repressed
the PLO, they sought to bolster the then-unimportant Islamic fundamentalist
organizations centered around the Gaza-based Muslim Brotherhood.
Just as the CIA sought since the 1940s to foster Islamic-led counterrevolution
in Soviet Central Asia (considered by the Cold Warriors to be the "soft
underbelly" of the USSR), the Zionists believe that their aims can be served
by manipulating Islamic fundamentalist groups. One of the most important
leaders of Hamas was a top operative in U.S. imperialism's anti-Soviet operation
in Afghanistan. ABC News correspondent John Cooley, writing in the International
Herald Tribune (13 March 1996), noted: "A key Hamas organizer was Abdallah
Azzam. He was a tough, brilliant and charismatic Palestinian from Jordan.
He supervised training for the CIA's Afghan guerrillas in Peshawar, Pakistan,
where a car bomb killed him in 1989. In the earlier 1980s he toured the
United States, recruiting Arab-Americans for the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan."
The Israelis sought to use the Islamists in order to wield the club of religion
against the alleged "godless Communists" in the PLO. In the CIA-funded "holy
war" against modernizing nationalists and Soviet troops in Afghanistan,
revolutionaries stood four-square with the Red Army, while pro-imperialist
"leftists" cheered Washington's mujahedin. Today, the American
ISO criticizes the U.S. government for "hailing Islamists in Afghanistan
as 'freedom fighters' against the old USSR" (Socialist Worker, 12 April).
In an act of historical falsification worthy of Stalin's own photo editors,
it seeks to airbrush out the fact that the anti-Soviet ISO also hailed the
Islamists at that time. In 1978 the Zionist government sought out Sheikh
Ahmed Yassin, the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, and helped him found
an Islamic social works organization, Mujama. According to a study by Beverley
Milton-Edwards, Islamic Politics in Palestine (Tauris, 1996):
"In 1978 Israel's civil administration in Gaza encouraged Sheikh Yassin and
his colleagues to submit an application to register the Mujama as a charitable
society. Permission was granted; as such official [recognition] was frequently
denied to other Gazans during this period, the decision was viewed with
suspicion by the local political community. Although the Mujama described
itself as a charity, the Israelis were well aware of its political aspirations....
When the Mujama started to exert its influence over already existing institutions
as a means to undermine the nationalists, the Israelis stood by."
With Israeli collusion, Mujama set up the Islamic University of Gaza, to
inculcate students with anti-PLO propaganda. The Mujamists chanted, "How
can uncovered women and men with Beatle haircuts liberate our holy places?"
Students who were insufficiently convinced of the anti-PLO line were brutally
attacked, and sometimes acid was thrown in their faces. Mujama professed
to be an education and charitable organization, but its real purpose was
to attack PLO-allied institutions such as the Palestinian Red Crescent Society
(PRC), a welfare and health care organization. In 1979, Mujama lost a municipal
election in Gaza to the PRC, and appealed to the Israeli government to overturn
the results! When the Israelis balked, knowing that overt Zionist support
would have exposed Mujama as their tool, the Islamists took action.
"A demonstration then started out from the grounds of the [Islamic] university.
Most of the people involved in the march and subsequent attacks were Mujama
supporters. The demonstrators, ignoring the Israeli army soldiers stationed
along their way, set off in the direction of the PRC building. According
to Shalom Cohen, 'Thousands of demonstrators took to the streets shouting
Allahu Akbar (God is great), down with Communism, long live Islam.'
"During the demonstration the Mujama militants attacked cafes, video shops
and liquor stores. When they arrived at the offices of the PRC they set
the building on fire. The offices were destroyed, including approximately
80 per cent of the books in the library... Throughout the attack the Israeli
authorities failed to intervene."
The PRC issued a statement denouncing the complicity of the Israeli forces:
"The tacit approval of the authorities, if not their actual connivance in
what happened, was displayed by their attitude of non-interference. While
they usually display great alertness to combating even peaceful demonstrations
of young students within schools, here they stood indifferently watching
a violently destructive demonstration marching to its objective."
At the time of the intifada of 1988, the second main Muslim fundamentalist
organization in Palestine, Islamic Jihad, had been weakened by Zionist repression.
Seeking to capitalize on the upsurge of militant protests by Palestinian
youth, Hamas emerged from Mujama's ranks as its fighting organization. While
PLO supporters preferred mass action, Hamas specialized in shootings, often
of Israeli army personnel. Yet at the height of the intifada. Sheikh Yassin
and Dr. Mahmoud Zahar of Hamas would meet with the likes of then-defense
minister Yitzhak Rabin, while meetings with the PLO were prohibited by law.
As Milton-Edwards notes:
"The relationship between Hamas and the Israeli authorities was, however,
at its strongest during the second year of the Intifada. The Israelis had
been quick to extend legitimacy and status to Hamas in an attempt to marginalise
the PLO. Leaders of Hamas were regularly filmed at meetings with top-level
Israeli officials and the message the Israelis were sending out was that
they regarded Hamas as the type of people with whom they could work....
In addition the Israelis continued turning a blind eye to the large amounts
of money coming into the country destined for Hamas coffers, while at the
same time actively stopping the flow of PLO funds in support of the Intifada."
In May 1991, following George Bush l's murderous war against Iraq, U.S. ally
Saudi Arabia diverted all monies -reportedly $28 million per month - from
the PLO to Hamas. This was punishment for Arafat's support for Saddam Hussein
and a reward for Hamas' condemnation of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait (which
Hussein had informed the U.S. ambassador about beforehand), the pretext
for "Operation Desert Slaughter." Hamas, as far as the Zionists and the
U.S. imperialists were concerned, was an asset.
But it was the Oslo "peace process" that gave Hamas its chance to win support
in the Palestinian population: while the PLO was clamping down on any opposition
to the accords with its myriad police forces, organized in cooperation with
the CIA and Israel's Shin Beth, Hamas began carrying out indiscriminate
bombings of civilian targets. Some of these actions were suicide bombings,
in which a mujahid (holy warrior) would blow himself up in a crowded Israeli
bus or market place. Between 1994 and 1998, Hamas killed around 150 Israeli
civilians in this way. With Arafat closely tied to the Zionists and their
U.S. backers, Hamas made temporary alliances with dissident factions within
the PLO, and gained a reputation as "militants." Many of its new supporters
did not agree strongly or at all with the Islamic goals of Hamas, but they
were revolted by the apparent collaboration with the Zionists by leaders
of Fatah, Arafat above all. By its double strategy of "negotiating" with
the PLO and building up Islamic fundamentalism, Israeli rulers succeeded
in fostering sometimes deadly rivalries among the Palestinian political
leaders.
The Zionists also periodically provoked Hamas into carrying out a terrorist
action against Israeli civilians whenever they were trying to derail peace
talks with the PLO or to launch a broad attack on the Palestinians. A favorite
tactic is to launch an attack on a prominent religious shrine. In September
1990, Zionist fundamentalists held a provocative march on the A I Aqsa mosque
in Jerusalem, predictably leading to an outburst of protest which was then
bloodily suppressed by the Israeli police and army, leaving at least 21
dead. Israeli leaders were chomping at the bit to use the impending U.S.
war on Iraq as a pretext to drown the first intifada in blood. At the time,
George Bush I told Likud prime minister Shamir to cool it because he needed
Arab support for his war. At the end of September 1996, the government of
Likud prime minister Netanyahu provoked a slaughter of Palestinians by opening
a tunnel under Al Aqsa, in order to undercut U.S. president Clinton's plans
for negotiations with Arafat. And then, once again in September 2000, there
was Sharon's provocative promenade in front of Al Aqsa, accompanied by 1,000
top Likudniks and 3,000 police and troops. This set off the second Palestinian
intifada and with it a new wave of Hamas bombings, the latest being the
Passover massacre at Netanya which provided the trigger needed to launch
Israel's "Operation Defensive Shield."
Liberal commentators who admit that Israel created Hamas sometimes maintain
that it is Israel's "Frankenstein monster," which got out of control
and now has supposedly become Zionism's fiercest opponent. On the contrary,
Israel's rulers continue to cynically provoke Hamas terror as a way of pushing
their "final solution" against the PLO and all Palestinians. The Zionists
have engineered the Palestinian "opposition" they want.