Hamas: The Indispensable Threat

Hamas: The Indispensable Threat

There are several testimonies and apparent anomalies which indicate that Israel nay have had fore-knowledge of the 7th October attack on the Israeli music festival by Hamas, and may have specifically allowed it to happen in order to allow them to fulfil this genocide agenda. An Israeli soldier Shalom Sheetrit, a member of the Golani Brigade based at the Pega outpost five miles north of the festival site, during a meeting in the Israeli Knesset involving reserve personnel testified: “We received orders on October 7th to cancel all patrols along the Gaza border from 5:20am to 9:00am.”

In testimonies given to Israeli media, several IDF Female Field Observers, soldiers stationed along the Gaza border stated they observed Hamas militants training for months to breach the border wall, storm kibbutzim, and take hostages. They testified that their repeated reports up the chain of command were dismissed as insignificant, with officers telling them Hamas lacked the capability to carry out such plans. 

Proponents of the theory that Hamas has been deeply penetrated by Israel and is used to carry out provocations which allows Israel to respond with disproportionate military might to suit its end goal of eradicating the Arabs from Palestine, point to Israel’s advanced signals intelligence like Unit 8200 and human intelligence networks such as Shin Bet, asserting that an organisation as geographically confined as Hamas could not operate at scale without significant intelligence penetration by the Israelis, if not top-level operational direction. Indeed, as revealed by The New York Times, Israeli military intelligence had obtained Hamas’s battle blueprint (codenamed "Jericho Wall") more than a year before the October 7th attack:

Israeli officials obtained Hamas’s battle plan for the Oct. 7 terrorist attack more than a year before it happened... The approximately 40-page document, which the Israeli authorities code-named 'Jericho Wall,' outlined, point by point, exactly the kind of devastating invasion that led to the deaths of about 1,200 people... The document did not set a date for the attack, but described a methodical assault designed to overwhelm the fortifications around the Gaza Strip, take over cities and storm key military bases, including a division headquarters. 

Furthermore, hours before the attack, senior intelligence and military officials held late-night consultations regarding unusual activity (including the activation of Israeli SIM cards inside Gaza), but concluded it was merely a routine training exercise and deferred action until morning. 

During Israel’s occupation of the Gaza Strip, Israeli authorities faced a dominant and internationally popular, secular Palestinian nationalist movement led by Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which was viewed as the primary security threat. For four decades, Arafat was an instantly recognisable household name around the world and seen as an important figure and charismatic leader on the world-stage. To fracture and weaken the secular nationalist movement, Israeli officials adopted a "divide and rule" approach. They tolerated and, in some cases, facilitated and cultivated the rise of Islamist networks and charities.

Sheikh Ahmed Yassin was a crippled, blind cleric who established the Islamist charity Mujama al-Islamiya in Gaza in the late 1970s which was officially recognized by Israel and Israeli authorities granted licenses and allowed the group to build and expand its network of mosques, clubs, schools, a library, and the Islamic University of Gaza. Mujama al-Islamiya eventually laid the organizational foundations for Hamas, which was officially formed in late 1987 at the onset of the First Intifada. Hamas evolved into a militant group committed to armed struggle and the destruction of Israel. Israel strategically exploited the political division between the West Bank Palestinian Authority and Hamas based in Gaza, to prevent a unified two-state negotiation.

Avner Cohen, a former Israeli religious affairs official in Gaza, told The Wall Street Journal in 2009: "Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation." There are several other documented quotes from Israeli military, intelligence, and political figures reflecting on the unusual relationship between Israel and Hamas across different eras. Military Governor of Gaza, in the early 1980s, Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Segev, speaking to The New York Times reporter David K. Shipler in 1981, Segev confirmed that the Israeli military administration funded Islamic institutions as a counterweight to the secular PLO: “The Israeli Government gave me a budget and the military government gives to the mosques… The main enemy was the PLO.” 

Before the mysterious death in 2004 of PLO chairman Yassser Arafat, which many claim has the hallmarks of assassination by Israel since inexplicably large readings of radioactive polonium 210 were found in his personal effects which prompted an exhumation in 2012 in which similarly high levels of this radioactive element were found, he accused Israel of cultivating Hamas to sabotage secular Palestinian statehood. In an interview with the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera in late 2001 he said:

Hamas is a creation of Israel which at the time of Prime Minister Shamir gave them money and more than 700 institutions, among them schools and universities. Even Yitzhak Rabin ended up admitting it, when I accused him of it, in the presence of Mubarak. 

Instead of trying to curb Gaza’s Islamists from the outset, Israel for years tolerated and, in some cases, encouraged them as a counterweight to the secular nationalists of the Palestine Liberation Organization and its dominant faction, Yasser Arafat’s Fatah. Reporting in Haaretz and The Jerusalem Post cited Netanyahu explaining his policy of permitting Qatari funds to enter the Gaza Strip during a March 2019 Likud party faction meeting:

Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas. This is part of our strategy — to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank. 

Speaking on Israel’s Knesset Channel in 2015 about why the Palestinian Authority’s diplomatic efforts were viewed by the Israeli right as a greater danger than Hamas, far-right politician and later Minister of Finance, Bezalel Smotrich commented:

The Palestinian Authority is a burden, and Hamas is an asset. On the international playing field, in this game of delegitimization… the PA is a burden and Hamas is an asset. It’s a terrorist organization, nobody will recognize it, nobody will give it status at the [International Criminal Court].

Yuval Diskin, director of Israel’s Security Agency - Shin Bet 2005–2011, reflecting in a 2013 interview on the political management of the conflict: “If we look at it over the years, one of the main people who contributed to Hamas’s strengthening was Bibi Netanyahu, since his first term as prime minister.”

Cohen was describing the policy of the 1970s and early 1980s in which Israeli authorities tolerated, and in some cases actively facilitated, Islamist social and charitable networks in Gaza (particularly Sheikh Ahmed Yassin’s Mujama al-Islamiya, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood). The explicit goal at the time was to create a religious counterweight to the secular, nationalist PLO/Fatah under Yasser Arafat. Other Israeli officials from that period (including former Gaza military governor Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Segev) have made similar admissions about funding or preferential treatment for mosques and Islamist charities.

It ought to be clear then that Hamas has served a very useful purpose of the State of Israel and has the people of Gaza have been made unwitting dupes in furthering Israel’s goals. By Israel covertly encouraging, and actually helping create an Islamist militant group in Gaza committed to Israel's destruction, Israel could argue internationally that there was no unified or viable partner for peace. In modern history, Israeli governments permitted Qatar to funnel hundreds of millions of dollars in cash into the Gaza Strip. The argument frames this policy not as humanitarian mitigation, but as deliberate state sustenance to keep Hamas armed, entrenched, and functioning as a permanent counterweight to the Palestinian Authority. In summary then, it ought to be fully evident that Hamas operates within the context of ‘controlled opposition’ and possibly even under covert Israeli control and spectacular, though ultimately futile attacks by Hamas serve a strategic function by providing political and diplomatic justification for military campaigns, territorial control, and security crackdowns.

Perhaps Gazans are under the delusion that a ragtag gang of Arabs have the capacity to be a mighty military force, but the days of the Umayyad and Abbasid armies are a 1000 years past. Perhaps also their blind obedience to the Quran has been translated into blind obedience to whatever leader will tell them what they want to hear who couches their rhetoric in Quran idioms and metaphors and evokes their God and prophet in furtherance to violent idealistic daydreams and it is perhaps apt that Hamas was founded by a blind Islamic cleric. Whether the leadership of Hamas realise that they have been played, or whether they are actually willingly complicit in the deception we can only guess, and perhaps information will come to light clarifying their role at some point in the future.