Bill Berkowitz and Robin Heid, M.A.
Blowback is a bitch.
The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language defines blowback as “negative repercussions affecting a country whose government has undertaken a usually clandestine intelligence operation in another country.”
While there has been much discussion since the October 7 attack on Israel by Hamas about its attack funding sources, little has been written about its genesis and where it got its start-up money.
To better understand the current tragedy that began October 7, and continues today with no end in sight, we can start with a 2018 story in The Intercept called “Blowback: How Israel Went From Helping Create Hamas To Bombing It,”by Mehdi Hassan and Dina Sayedahmed. https://theintercept.com/2018/02/19/hamas-israel-palestine-conflict/?fbclid=IwAR0s9A8w-JHOAcNQVATdmXN5CzitHVqroiUS1ocgWRrEhxjKCnwrhWB3ncoThis report details the role Israel played in creating Hamas.
That's right: Israel helped create Hamas for political reasons, just as Gamel Abdel Nasser and Anwar Sadat colluded with the Muslim Brotherhood for political reasons, and the CIA created Al Qaeda and ISIS for political reasons. In 1953, the CIA overthrew the Iranian president Mohammad Mossadegh, which planted the seeds that grew into the 1979 Iranian Revolution that underlies much of what’s going on today in the Middle East. For now, we focus on Hamas, both present and past.
The present. Hamas is the de factogovernment of Gaza after it won legislative power in the 2006 Palestinian parliamentary elections; then seized total power in Gaza in a 2007 civil war (there have been no elections since).According to NBC News(https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna121099), Hamas has an investment portfolio of real estate assets worth $500 million and an annual military budget of $350 million. Much of the money received by Hamas “is public and legal, including large sums of financial aid from Qatar via the United Nations,” NBC’s Dan De Luce and Lisa Cavazuti reported, “an arrangement encouraged and approved by Israel. The Qatari aid covers the salaries of civil servants, buys fuel for the power grid and provides cash to needy families.”
The past. Hassan and Sayedahmed asked in their 2018 report: “…did you know that Hamas — which is an Arabic acronym for ‘Islamic Resistance Movement’ — would probably not exist today were it not for the Jewish state? That the Israelis helped turn a bunch of fringe Palestinian Islamists in the late 1970s into one of the world’s most notorious militant groups? That Hamas is blowback?”
They went on:
This isn’t a conspiracy theory. Listen to former Israeli officials such as Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Segev, who was the Israeli military governor in Gaza in the early 1980s. Segev later told a New York Times reporter that he had helped finance the Palestinian Islamist movement as a ‘counterweight’ to the secularists and leftists of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Fatah party, led by Yasser Arafat (who himself referred to Hamas as ‘a creature of Israel.’”)
The Intercept story pointed out that Avner Cohen, a former Israeli religious affairs official who worked in Gaza for more than two decades, told the Wall Street Journal in 2009, that “Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation.” Hassan and Sayedahmed noted that in a mid-1980s, Cohen-authored official report to his superiors he “warned them not to play divide-and-rule in the Occupied Territories, by backing Palestinian Islamists against Palestinian secularists. ‘I… suggest focusing our efforts on finding ways to break up this monster before this reality jumps in our face,’ he wrote.”
“When I look back at the chain of events, I think we made a mistake,” David Hacham, a former Arab affairs expert in the Israeli military who was based in Gaza in the 1980s, later remarked. “But at the time, nobody thought about the possible results.”
According to a 2009 report in Forbes, (https://www.forbes.com/2009/01/16/gaza-hamas-funding-oped-cx_re_0116ehrenfeld.html?sh=673430a17afb) in addition to funding from the European Union, Iran and Saudi Arabia,“Incredibly, Israel also supplies Hamas with cash. It began transferring truckloads of cash to Gaza after Hamas’ violent takeover of the territory in June 2007. The first transfer of more than $51 million (delivered in Israeli shekels) was purportedly to strengthen the influence of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in the Gaza Strip and pay the salaries of 35,000 Palestinian Authority employees then allegedly loyal to him. Among those employees, however, were Ismail Haniya, the Hamas-appointed prime minister in Gaza, and Mahmoud Zahar, Hamas’ foreign minister.”
In 2019, The Jerusalem Post reported (https://m.jpost.com/arab-israeli-conflict/netanyahu-money-to-hamas-part-of-strategy-to-keep-palestinians-divided-583082) that Netanyahu said “‘whoever is against a Palestinian state should be for’ transferring the funds to Gaza, because maintaining a separation between the PA in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza helps prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.”
On October 23, writing for The Jerusalem Post, Elie Podeh and Yitzhak Gal noted that “Since taking power in 2007, (Hamas) has developed five funding channels: four of them operate under arrangements to which Israel is a party or are subject to its supervision” (https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-769721).
Prof. Podeh, a Mitvim Institute board member and teacher at the Department of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at Hebrew University, and Gal, an expert on the Middle East and Palestinian economies and a Mitvim Policy fellow, pointed out that “Combined, these channels generate $2 billion to $2.5 billion a year for Hamas. This is a huge sum compared to the size of Gaza’s economy. By comparison, the Palestinian Authority (PA) budget, net of the sums transferred to the Gaza Strip, is slightly more than $3 billion a year. Some of the funds from these five channels are used to finance civilian public services, and the rest to fill the Hamas arsenals.”
Israel’s early support for strengthening Hamas set the stage for Hamas to seize total control of Gaza in 2007, and for its October 7 massacre of 1,400 civilians and Israeli soldiers. As of this writing, Israel has unleashed a bombing campaign that has killed more than 8,000 Gazans, according to The Gaza Health Ministry. Israel has now started a ground invasion that will yield even more casualties.
Israel’s support of Hamas for reasons of political expediency has resulted in decades of tragedy for Palestinians and Israelis alike. Now, that support has unleashed a new wave of death and destruction that threatens not only to surpass all previous carnage, it threatens to destabilize the entire region, and perhaps even lead us into the darkness of World War III.