 Speaking in Jerusalem Dec. 20, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Daniel Kurtzer
made the connection between the growth of the Islamic fundamentalist
groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and Israel's promotion of the Islamic
movement as a counter to the Palestinian nationalist movement. Kurtzer's
comments come very close to EIR's own presentation of the evidence of
Israel's instrumental role in establishing Hamas, and its ongoing control
of that organization.
Kurtzer said that the growth of the Islamic movement in the Palestinian
territories in recent decades-"with the tacit support of Israel"-was "not
totally unrelated" to the emergence of Hamas and Islamic Jihad and their
terrorist attacks against Israel. Kurtzer explained that during the 1980s,
when the Islamic movement began to flourish in the West Bank and Gaza,
"Israel perceived it to be better to have people turning toward religion
rather than toward a nationalistic cause [the Palestinian Liberation
Organization-ed.]." It therefore did little to stop the flow of money to
mosques and other religious institutions, rather than to schools.
According to the Dec. 21 Israeli daily Ha'aretz, Kurtzer made these
extraordinary statements at a seminar on religion and politics sponsored
by Oz V'Shalom-Netivot Shalom, a largely Anglo-American organization that
promotes peace between Israelis and Palestinians. Rabbi Dr. Aharon
Lichtenstein, the head of Har Etzion Yeshiva in Alon Shvut, who is an
active advocate of a just regional peace, also spoke. Kurtzer said that as
a result of the growth of Islam at the expense of education, there are now
Palestinians who are "determined terrorists that use religious beliefs in
a perverted way to appeal to the masses."
Kurtzer said that cultural and religious interaction is potentially a way
to "build bridges." But instead, "the perverted use of religion in the
region is today becoming one of the great challenges for the years ahead."
He said that there is no "inherent component" in Islam that advocates
violence. But one of the five principles of Islam, jihad-resistance-"in
classic religious associations connotes religious belief and fervor, not
violence." But extremists have distorted the meaning of jihad, so it now
has a connotation of violence in the service of a religious purpose.
The Enemy of My Enemy Is My Friend
This statement is extraordinary given
the fact that Kurtzer is a very senior diplomat, having held the post of
Ambassador to Egypt just prior to going on to Tel Aviv. He is also an
Orthodox Jew who is not shy of criticizing the extreme anti-Israeli and
anti-Semitic views held by certain Arab circles. But Israeli Prime
Minister Ariel Sharon rarely grants the United States' highest
representative in Israel an official audience.
The ambassador's comments are an acknowledgment of what any serious Middle
East observers knows: Hamas has always been seen as a tool by which Israel
could undermine the nationalist movement led by Palestinian Authority
President and Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Chairman Yasser
Arafat. Similar statements by Arafat have been dismissed by Israel as
"cranky" propaganda. In an interview with the Dec. 11 Italian daily
Corriere della Sera, Arafat said,
 "We are doing everything to stop the violence. But Hamas is a creature of
Israel which at the time of Prime Minister [Yitzhak] Shamir [the late
1980s, when Hamas arose], gave them money and more than 700 institutions,
among them schools, universities and mosques. Even [former Israeli Prime
Minister Yitzhak] Rabin ended up admitting it, when I charged him with it,
in the presence of [Egpytian President Hosni] Mubarak."
To the Italian daily L'Espresso, Arafat laid out the reasons for this
support. "Hamas was constituted with the support of Israel. The aim was to
create an organization antagonistic to the PLO. They received financing
and training from Israel. They have continued to benefit from permits and
authorizations, while we have been limited, even to build a tomato
factory. Rabin himself defined it as a fatal error. Some collaborationists
of Israel are involved in these [terror] attacks," he said. "We have
proof, and we are placing it at the disposal of the Italian government."
On one level the support for Hamas is simply the application of the old
saying, "The enemy of my enemy is my friend." Indeed, in the minds of
crude Israeli ultra-nationalists and fascists
 such as Sharon and his
faction, this is indeed the case. Sharon is not interested in peace and
therefore is not concerned that the violence and needless deaths of
Israelis and Palestinians continue. In the Jan. 3 Ha'aretz, Yossi Sarid,
chairman of the Meretz party, wrote, "What does frighten Sharon ... is any
prospect or sign of calm or moderation. If the situation were to calm down
and stabilize, Sharon would have to return to the negotiating table and,
in the wake of pressure from within and without, he would have to raise
serious proposals for an agreement. This moment terrifies Sharon and he
wants to put it off for as long as he possibly can." In contrast, Sarid
said that Sharon understands "that the terrorists and those who give them
asylum are not the real enemies. Instead, the real enemies are the
moderates.... You fight terrorists-a pretty simple operation-but you must
talk with moderates, and this is a very tricky, if not dangerous,
business."
More important for the survival of not only the Palestinian people, but
especially Israel itself, is the dangerous role of the puppet masters
outside the region, who are manipulating both sides of this deadly game as
part of their own demonic plans to spread the policy of a "clash of
civilizations." In this regard, Sharon, and his "Greater Israel" policy,
is just as much a puppet as the Palestinian, strapped with explosives, who
blows himself up at an Israeli bus station.
Two Decades of Undermining Arafat
Given the level of control that the
Israeli intelligence services such as the Shin Bet and Mossad have been
able to exert over the Palestinian territories during the last 35 years of
Israeli occupation, the capability to manipulate militant and violent
organizations, such as those associated with Hamas, should not surprise
anyone familiar with intelligence and even routine police operations. This
should be obvious, considering that Israel has routinely recruited
thousands of collaborators and provocateurs among the tens of thousands of
Palestinians who have passed through Israeli prisons in over 35 years of
its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Most convincing is a comparison of the development of Hamas, Islamic Jihad
and their antecedents, and the growing national and international
legitimacy of the PLO and its undisputed leader, Arafat.
 Hamas is an acronym for Harafat al-Muqawama Al-Islamiyya, or Islamic
Resistance Movement. Its spiritual leader is Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, who,
despite his fiery anti-Israeli sermons, has had an unusual relationship
with the Israeli authorities. In 1973, Yassin established the Islamic
Association-at a time when it was Israeli policy to promote what
Ambassador Kurtzer refers to as the "Islamic movement."
One might ask: Why should Israel promote an Islamic movement which later
turns around and attacks it? How could the Israeli secret services be
taken in by a Yassin? They weren't. The simple fact is, that the stated
policy of Hamas is simply the flip side of Sharon's "Greater Israel"
policy that refuses to seek a territorial compromise. The Hamas charter in
1988 stated, "The land of Palestine has been an Islamic Waqf throughout
the generations, and until the Day of Resurrection, no one can renounce it
or part of it, or abandon it or part of it.... Peace initiatives, the
so-called peace initiatives, are all contraray to the beliefs of Hamas,
for renouncing any part of Palestine means renouncing part of the
religion." In this rhetoric there is no room for a state of Israel-as
there is none for a state of Palestine in Sharon's "Greater Israel."
Israel's Hamas relations intensified after the Arab League, in 1974,
decided to recognize Arafat and the PLO as the representatives of the
Palestinian people-in effect, a government in exile. By 1979, top Yassin
acquired an official permit from the Israeli government of Prime Minister
Menachem Begin. This coincided with the signing of the Camp David peace
treaty between Israel and Egypt. That treaty embodied detailed clauses
calling for the establishment of a Palestinian Authority in the Occupied
Territories, which would be the precursor for the Israeli withdrawal and
the establishment of a Palestinian state. Gen. Ariel Sharon has been the
chief proponent since this treaty was signed, of the policy of ensuring
that these clauses would never be implemented. His chosen alternatives
were war in Lebanon and the expansion of the Jewish settlements in the
Occupied Territories. Sharon was helped by the assassination of Egyptian
President Anwar Sadat by Anglo-American-controlled, Egypt-based Islamic
terrorists.
`Policy of Strengthening Islamic Bodies' Israeli toleration, if not
initial sponsorship of the Islamic movement, has been acknowledged and
well documented in Israeli sources. In 1997, the Jaffee Center for
Strategic Studies, at Tel Aviv University, published a study, "Hamas:
Radical Islam In A National Struggle," authored by Anat Kurz and Nahman
Tal. It stated that the Islamic Association, "the platform of which
contained no nationalist clauses, obtained a permit from the Israeli Civil
Administration in 1979 to conduct its activities. The permit was
apparently consistent with the Israeli policy of strengthening Islamic
bodies as a counterweight to Palestinian nationalist groups."
The rapid expansion of the Islamic Association led to clashes on the
Palestinian University campuses in the Occupied Territories in the 1980s,
between PLO-affiliated students and those associated with the Islamists.
This expansion was aided by the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, where
Sharon hoped to solve the "Palestinian problem" by militarily crushing the
PLO-which was then based in Lebanon-and by carrying out genocide against
the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians living in impoverished refugee
camps in Lebanon. Despite his orchestration of the massacre of thousands
of Palestinians, including women and children, at the Sabra and Shatila
refugee camps, Sharon failed to eliminate Arafat. Nonetheless, Arafat and
the PLO were exiled to Tunisia, their influence severely weakened.
Sheikh Yassin, along with other Hamas leaders, was arrested in 1984, after
it was discovered that the Islamic Association had maintained arms caches.
But the organization was not banned. In fact, Yassin was soon released as
part of an unprecedented prisoner exchange between Israel and Ahmed
Jabril's PFLP-General Command. This deal, made with one of the most
violent of all anti-PLO Palestinian groups at the time, was made in a
period when the Mossad was busy assassinating the most moderate of PLO
leaders.
Then, in 1988, the Islamic Association created Hamas as a direct
alternative to the PLO, which had launched the first Intifada the year
before. 1988 was also important because the PLO, at the 19th Conference of
the Palestinian National Council in Algeria in 1988, accepted the United
Nations Security Council resolution of 1947 calling for two states in
Palestine. They also called for convening an international peace
conference based on UN Resolutions 242 and 338, which established the
land-for-peace concept. This was a de facto recognition of Israel by the
PLO and Arafat. By the end of 1988, the Reagan Administration extended
official recognition to the PLO as the official representative of the
Palestinian people.
 When Palestinian leader Abu Jihad began negotiating with Hamas, in an
attempt to win its mass base over to the new policy, he was promptly
assassinated by the Mossad.
Yassin, as all senior leaders of Hamas, is a member of the Muslim
Brotherhood, the far-flung international Islamic organization with
operations throughout the Islamic world. In the past, Anglo-American
factions have not hesitated to manipulate the Brotherhood's various
factions to destabilize secular Arab regimes. When Zbigniew Brzezinski
launched the Afghan war against Russia in the 1980s, many of the Arab
mujahideen fighters were recruited through Muslim Brotherhood-linked
networks. The Muslim Brotherhood story fills volumes; the crucial point
here is that Hamas, one of its branches, has traditionally stood in
opposition to the secular nationalism of Arafat, the PLO, and its
supporting governments.
Hamas has a peculiar organizational structure which contrasts sharply with
that of the PLO. While within the West Bank and Gaza, Hamas exists as a
broad political movement, its militant wings, the Izza-Din Al Qassam and
Islamic Jihad, split-offs from the organization, are administered totally
separately. These latter organizations, which are responsible for the
attacks, are under the control of leaders who operate from abroad. Their
offices are in London, where the group's magazine, Falatin Al Muslimah, is
based; Jordan; Syria; and the United States, particularly in Virginia and
Texas. Although Arafat has periodically tried to bring the popular base of
Hamas into the Palestinian fold, the foreign-based military leadership has
always opposed him.
This bifurcation dovetails with Sharon's strategy of launching brutal
attacks against Hamas targets, in order to elicit the equally brutal
response from Islamic Jihad and the Izza-Din Al Qassam. Thus Arafat, and
diplomatic goals, are undermined, and the fires of civil war within the
Occupied Territories are stoked.
The Anti-Oslo Terror Campaign Begins The Oslo Accords marked the first
glimmer of hope for a resolution of the Middle East conflict. And, the
first suicide terrorist attack aimed at destroying it was not launched by
Hamas or Islamic Jihad or another Palestinian faction. The first suicide
attack was launched on Feb. 25, 1994, by Israeli terrorist Baruch
Goldstein, when he entered the Mosque of Hebron and killed 50 Muslim
worshippers as well as himself. Goldstein was a member of Kach, the
terrorist organization founded by the late Meir Kahane, who also founded
the Jewish Defense League in the 1960s in the United States. Kach, which
is well connected to Sharon, is on the official U.S. State Department list
of terrorist organizations.
The unprecedented massacre was calculated to set the stage for a suicide
bombing campaign by Hamas and its split-off, Islamic Jihad, over the next
year. In fact, it set into motion the "cycle of violence" that has yet to
end. The Goldstein attack came at precisely the point when Israeli Prime
Minister Rabin and Arafat began the formal implementation of the Oslo
agreement which envisioned the establishment of a Palestinian state by
1998. The first Hamas-linked suicide attacks did not start until two
months later, in April 1994, when Rabin and Arafat signed the agreement
for the establishment of the Palestinian National Authority. The agreement
called for the conduct of free elections throughout the territories-which
would eventually establish the international legitimacy of the Arafat-led
government.
But despite this terror campaign, which lasted for months under a massive
crackdown by Arafat's security forces, the Rabin-Arafat alliance, although
seriously weakened, was not broken. This alliance was finally broken with
Rabin's assassination by an Israeli, on Nov. 5, 1995.
The next phase of attacks followed the "targeted assassination" of Hamas
bomb-maker Yahya Ayyash on Jan. 5, 1996. Although said to be "revenge
attacks," they were in fact part of Hamas' campaign to get Benjamin
Netanyahu elected Israeli prime minister. This was admitted by Ibraham
Ghawshah, Hamas' official spokesman resident in Amman, Jordan. He said
that it was part of their strategy to influence Israeli public opinion to
bring down the entire Oslo process. The election of Netanyahu indeed
fulfilled all their hopes, especially after he launched his own
provocations, which not only brought about the pre-calculated Hamas
response, but also brought the region several times to the brink of war.
This tit-for-tat campaign reached the height of insanity when Netanyahu,
under the direction of Sharon, who was a member of his government at the
time, launched a Mossad assassination attempt in 1997 against the
Jordan-based Hamas official Khalid Mishaal. Not only did the attempt fail,
but it led to Israel agreeing to release Hamas spiritual leader Sheikh
Yassin from an Israeli jail, where he had been under arrest since 1989.
Yassin was allowed to return to Gaza to rally Hamas against the Oslo
process in general, and Arafat in particular.
 This pattern has continued to this very day. Netanyahu's downfall in 1999
led to the short-lived government of Ehud Barak, who despite much talking
and negotiating, furthered the Oslo process not one iota. By the end of
the Summer of 2000, the stage was set for Sharon's ultimate provocation,
his Sept. 28 march on to the Islamic holy site Al-Haram Al-Sharif/Temple
Mount.
Since coming to power, Sharon has done everything to ensure the collapse
of Arafat and the Palestinian Authority. If successful, it would either
bring Hamas to power or lead to political chaos within the territories.
Original Link:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/AND204A.html
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