This is the opening to my essay how Israel helped nurture Hamas for its own ends, published in the Observer on 25 May 2025. You can read the full version in the Observer.
“They want Hamas to remain in power”, claimed the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, after European and Canadian government criticisms of Israel’s actions in Gaza. Many British commentators agree, denouncing the UK government for standing with Hamas. The horror killings of two Jewish Israeli embassy staff in Washington DC added weight to such condemnation, Israeli foreign minister Gideon Saar insisting on a “direct line” from criticism of Israel to antisemitic murders.
The irony, though, is that until 7 October 2023, when Hamas launched its murderous assault on the Nova music festival and nearby kibbutzim, the jibe might have with greater accuracy been aimed at Israel itself. For 50 years, it tolerated, even supported, the organisation and its precursors, regarding Hamas as a useful weapon with which to enfeeble the secular Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and sow discord within Palestinian ranks. “Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas,” Netanyahu told a meeting of Likud’s Knesset members in 2019. On 7 October, the Times of Israel noted the day after the slaughter, the strategy “of indirectly strengthening Hamas… went up in smoke”.
Israel captured Gaza from Egypt in 1967, during the Six Day War. The Egyptian president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, had suppressed the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood and ordered the execution of its leader, Sayyid Qutb. Israel dramatically changed approach, first tolerating the Brotherhood, then providing it with a legal framework and funding to operate in Gaza. Its leader, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, was encouraged to set up the Mujamma al-Islami (“Islamic collective”) as a charity to run social, religious, welfare and educational programmes.
General Yitzhak Sager, Gaza’s military governor, told the International Herald Tribune in 1981 that the Israeli authorities provided funding “with the purpose of strengthening a force that runs counter to the pro-PLO leftists”. The Mujamma did not remain the pliant creature Israel hoped it would be, moving from welfare to political opposition and eventually terror.
Read the full version of the essay in the Observer.
Pandaemonium 