It’s Not Guilt That Causes Germany to Support Genocide But their Desire to Transfer Guilt for the Holocaust onto the Palestinians

When Germany Attacks Jewish anti-Zionists It is Following in the Footsteps of the Gestapo

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German Police Smash Up Palestine Congress

On the eve of the First World War Sir Edward Grey, British Foreign Secretary uttered the immortal phrase that summed up what was to come, when he said

‘The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.’

I think if Judge Silas Reid is going to start imprisoning jurors for coming up with verdicts for the wrong reasons, he should also deny them food & water whilst they’re in gaol, to really lean into that ‘17th century judicial tyrant’ energy https://t.co/tSZZDbSa4I pic.twitter.com/Y0mdBpPX1F

— Paul Powlesland (@paulpowlesland) March 1, 2024

We could well say the same today. Patrick Devlin, a former Law Lord, wrote in his book Trial by Jury (1956) that the jury system was ‘the lamp that shows that freedom lives”. That too is under threat from judges like Silas Reid who threatened a jury at the Old Bailey with prosecution if they allowed their consciences to interfere with the verdict. Reid’s action were an echo of the famous case of Bushell’s in 1670, when a jury was imprisoned for 2 days and nights without ‘meat, drink, fire or tobacco’, because they refused to return a guilty verdict.

But it is not only in Britain that the lamp of liberty is in danger of being extinguished. In Germany, a state which 80 years ago was exterminating millions of people it classed as subhuman, 2,500 Police forcibly closed a Palestine Congress in Berlin, banning from the country the former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis.

Yanis Varoufakis Describes How He Was Prevented from Speaking at a Palestine Congress in Berlin by Germany’s Police

Germany’s Support for Israel Mirrors Nazi Germany’s Support for Zionism

Today the German state purports to be pro-Jewish but when it comes to Jewish anti-Zionists, the German State is following exactly the same path as the Nazis took 89 years ago. The Nazis too distinguished between Zionists, (good Jews) and anti-Zionists (bad Jews).

On 28 January 1935 Reinhard Heydrich, whom Gerard Reitlinger described as the ‘real engineer of the final solution’ issued a directive:

The activity of the Zionist-oriented youth organisations that are engaged in the occupational restructuring of the Jews … lies in the interest of the National Socialist state’s leadership. (These organizations) are not to be treated with that strictness that it is necessary to apply to the members of the so-called German-Jewish organizations (assimilationists).

This can be found in Lucy Dawidowicz’s War Against the Jews (p.118).

The result was that the activities of Zionist groups were supervised with ‘more benevolence’ than comparable activities by non-Zionist Jewish groups. The Gestapo and the SD (SS Security Service) ‘place(d) no restrictions on Zionist organisations.’ [Herbert Strauss, pp. 352-3., Jewish Emigration from Germany: Nazi Policies and Jewish Responses]

In May 1935 Das Schwarze Korps, the paper of the SS, wrote that:

the Zionists adhere to a strict racial position and by emigrating to Palestine they are helping to build their own Jewish state.... The assimilation-minded Jews deny their race and insist on their loyalty to Germany or claim to be Christians because they have been baptized, in order to subvert National Socialist principles.

On 26 September 1935 in Das Schwarze Korps Heydrich wrote that the German government

Is in agreement with the great spiritual movement within Jewry itself, Zionism, whose position is based on the recognition of the unity of Jewry throughout the world, and the rejection of all ideas of mixing in. [Francis Nicosia’s Zionism and Anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany].

Heydrich was the Deputy to Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS and the second most powerful man in Germany to Hitler himself.

Ian Lustick, an Israeli political scientist, described in The Holocaust in Israeli Political Culture, (p.150) how, in the Eichmann Trial

Extraordinary precautions’ were taken to prevent the name of Hans Globke, the closest advisor to Konrad Adenaeur, the German Chancellor, from being made public.

In 1936 Globke, a senior official at the Interior Ministry, wrote a legal commentary on the Nuremberg Laws which became standard in Nazi Germany’s courts. It stipulated that sexual relations between Aryans and non-Aryans was a crime even if they took place outside Germany. In 1938 he introduced a regulation requiring Jews to take the first names, Israel and Sarah.

In 1941 Globke took part in drawing up an ordinance that stripped Jews in the conquered nations of their citizenship and allowed their possessions to be confiscated. A legal precondition for the Holocaust. ‘Hitler’s former henchman, was true architect of modern Germany’, The Times, 4.3.21.

Globke also played a key role in the development of Israel’s nuclear weapons. Protecting Israeli-German military and financial relations was paramount.[Lustick, fn. 27 p.150] Israel was determined to avoid a little matter like the role of ex-Nazi officials in the new German state coming between Israel and Germany. [ Lars Petersson, Hitler’s Deserters, pp. 123-9]

Berlin police just canceled the entire Palestine Congress. I was the only speaker that successfully finished a speech.

Salman Abu Sitta was cut off after 1 minute. Our livestream ended and electricity cut off.

This is Germany. pic.twitter.com/07NUCpownv

— Hebh Jamal (@hebh_jamal) April 12, 2024

It is this that explains the strategic and military alliance between Germany and Israel and why Germany is prepared to openly support Israel’s genocide in Gaza, to the extent of joining it at the International Court of Justice. ‘Anti-Semitism’ is merely the pretext for attacking democratic rights in Germany itself.

After all Germany took part in 2 genocides in the last century, so what is a third genocide between friends? Indeed there was a direct link between the first genocide, the extermination of the Herero and Nama people in South-West Africa (Namibia) and the Holocaust.

It is no surprise that Namibia’s anger boiled over when Germany offered to join Israel’s case at the ICJ. It was in Namibia, then a German colony, that Germany’s extermination program became the template for the Holocaust.

Eugen Fischer was the Nazi doctor who helped pioneer eugenics in the Third Reich. As director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology (1927-42) Fischer provided the ‘scientific’ rationale for the Nazi’s war of extermination.

On Shark Island in SW Africa Fischer ran medical breeding experiments on the camp’s inmates. Racist ideas developed in the colony were brought back to German institutions along with the Africans’ skulls.

Fischer conducted medical experiments on children born from the rape of African women. His research inspired Adolf Hitler and in the 1930s, Fischer taught his racist theories to Nazi doctors. One of his students, Joseph Mengele, was responsible for the medical experiments in the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp.

In 1939, Fischer declared

When a people wants … to preserve its own nature, it must reject alien racial elements,… The Jew is such an alien and, therefore, when he wants to insinuate himself, he must be warded off.

An organisation named “Commission Number 3” was created by the Nazis to deal with the so-called problem of the “Rhineland Bastards”. This was organised under Eugen Fischer. It was decided that the African-German children would be sterilised under the 1933 Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring.

The programme began in 1937, when local officials were asked to report on all “Rhineland Bastards” under their jurisdiction.

All together, some 400 children of mixed parentage were arrested and sterilised. The Nazis went to great lengths to conceal their sterilisation and abortion programme. See The Holocaust’s forgotten black victims – the‘Rhineland Bastards’

Liberal Jews in Germany referred to the Zionists as ‘volkish’ or racial Jews. In Romania the Zionists were referred to by other Jews as ‘Hitler Juden (Jews)’. So when the modern day German State favours Zionist Jews they understand their ideological affinity

Why Does the German State Favour the Zionists?

The German State never deNazified after the war. In many cases the same civil servants, the same judges and police chiefs continued to play the same role that they had played in Nazi Germany.

Hostility after the war to Germany was very great, given the millions who had died at its hand. With the division of Europe into East and West, it was crucial to NATO and the Western Alliance that West Germany be integrated into the West’s military alliances. At the time there was a vigorous campaign against German  re-armament.

It was through Israel that Germany was rehabilitated and the price it paid was billions in reparations, which were meant for the holocaust survivors but were paid to the Israeli state. Israel stole the reparations together with the Jewish Claims Conference. To this day Israel keeps over a third living in poverty, choosing between heating and eating.

Reparations and Restitution

Yad Vashem, the Israeli state Holocaust museum boasted that West Germany’s government ‘realized that paying reparations would help accelerate West Germany's acceptance by the Western powers.’

Through reparations and direct transfers of weapons Israel paved the way for the integration of West Germany into NATO. But there was a political price. Israel was not to make an issue of the presence of Nazis in Konrad Adenaeur’s government.

Germany and Britain’s Attack on Democratic Rights

On December 20^th I was arrested under s.12 Terrorism Act 2000 for having posted, a month before, a tweet supporting Hamas, a proscribed organisation. Although Hamas’s military wing, the Al Quassem Brigades had been proscribed in 2001 its political wing had not been proscribed until 2021.

No justification has ever been given for why this further step had been taken although the Zionist organisations had long been lobbying for it. The government’s explanation was that:

Hamas IDQ was proscribed by the UK in March 2001. At the time it was HM government’s assessment that there was a sufficient distinction between the so called political and military wings of Hamas, such that they should be treated as different organisations, and that only the military wing was concerned in terrorism. The government now assess that the approach of distinguishing between the various parts of Hamas is artificial. Hamas is a complex but single terrorist organisation.

No indication was given as to what this assessment was or what had changed since 2021. In fact there is no evidence whatsoever that Hamas is a single organisation any more than the IRA was a single organisation between 1969 and its ceasefire.

A Palestine solidarity demonstration in the Potsdamer Platz area, Berlin, October 15, 2023. The police suppressed the demonstration shortly after authorizing it.

See Germany cancels pro-Palestine event, bars entry to Gaza war witness

If Sinn Fein, the IRA’s political wing had been proscribed along with the IRA then there would have been no Good Friday peace agreement. The ban on Hamas makes it clear that the British government, despite pretending to oppose Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory, in practice does the precise opposite.  As the current genocide demonstrates, the real terrorists have always been the Israeli army and government.

Hilary Clinton Admits to Creating Al Qaeda

Hamas has never operated outside Palestine. It was elected, in free and fair elections, by the Palestinian people in 2006. Comparisons with ISIS are nonsense and merely police state rhetoric. If anyone is responsible for ISIS and Al Qaeda it is the United States. There was no ISIS before the invasion of Iraq and there was no Al Qaeda before the West began funding Islamic fundamentalist groups in Afghanistan in order to overthrow the secular pro-Soviet government there.

During the 1980s the Israeli government was instrumental in creating Hamas, for similar reasons. It wanted a Palestinian counterweight to secular Palestinian nationalism.

Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Segev, who was the Israeli military governor in Gaza in the early 1980s, 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 referred to Hamas as “a creature of Israel.”)

“The Israeli government gave me a budget,” the retired brigadier general confessed, “and the military government gives to the mosques.”

“Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation,” Avner Cohen, a former Israeli religious affairs official who worked in Gaza for more than two decades, told the Wall Street Journal in 2009. In the mid-80s, Cohen wrote an official report to his superiors warning them not to play divide-and-rule in the Occupied Territories, by backing Palestinian Islamists against Palestinian secularists. See Blowback: How Israel Went From Helping Create Hamas to Bombing It

Today Hamas is enemy no. 1. ‘Terrorism’ is a term of abuse that one hurls at one’s opponents. It has no intrinsic meaning. As Lord Carrington, Margaret Thatcher’s Foreign Secretary admitted ‘one man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist.’ In other words ‘terrorist’ is a label to stick on your opponents.

The Nazis too labelled their opponents ‘terrorists’ or ‘bandits’. To them the Maquis, the French Resistance, was a terrorist group as were the Partisans and all those who fought against them but the British had no problem at the time allying with them.

That is why Britain’s anti-terrorist legislation is based on a lie. Hamas is no more of a terrorist than any number of groups that the US and Britain has funded when it founded convenient.

Hamas has never operated outside Palestine. Unlike ISIS it did not send operatives to blow people up in Europe such as at the Bataclan massacre in Paris in 2015 which both it and Islamic Jihad condemned.

Prevent & The Use of Anti-Terrorism To Silence Dissent – The Thinking of the Thought Police

The British state has been very adept at exploiting terrorism in order to politically attack their opponents and in particular Muslims. It has laid the basis of Islamaphobia. Prevent was first introduced by the Blair government in 2006 to counter terrorism.

Since the passage of the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act July 2015 there has been what is known as the Prevent Duty. Schools, Universities and a wide range of public sector bodies have a legal responsibility to “have due regard to the need to prevent people from being drawn into terrorism”.

It is based on the bonkers idea, which the Police have adopted wholesale, that non-violent ‘extremism’ is the conveyor belt to terrorism. It is bonkers because there is no proof of this theory and because the causes of terrorism are self evident. Little things like America and Britain’s illegal invasion of Iraq that MPs voted for and Blair lied for with the story of Weapons of Mass Destruction.

Terrorism has causes and they are down to the fact that Western imperialism insists on invading, bombing and destabilising countries in the Global South in order that they can extract their wealth.

In Libya a country under the unified government of Muammar Ghadaffi was bombed by NATO countries and the result was a failed state which included ISIS and a refugee crisis.

The same happened in Syria where the CIA, Saudi Arabia and Qatar funded and supplied weapons to a host of Jihadi groups in their efforts to overthrow the Assad regime. Not surprisingly this gave ISIS a headstart and as in Afghanistan, the West’s Frankenstein turned against them. This is what creates terrorism not radicalisation.

Prevent operates on the basis that people are ‘radicalised’ by ‘extreme’ views and then are susceptible to recruitment by terrorists. No proof has ever been found to back up this nonsense. If anything Prevent is likely to create the very problem it’s designed to overcome.

It is no accident that the vast majority of people targeted by Prevent are Muslims and that support for Palestine is one of the indicators that someone is susceptible to being drawn to terrorism.

When I was remanded in Birmingham prison for a week in 2021, after having been arrested going on a Palestine Action outing, I was asked at the prison reception whether I was an ‘extremist’.  I asked her if she knew what an ‘extremist’ was and she confessed she didn’t.

I then explained that all those who fight for their freedom and democratic rights are called extremists and I gave as an example the Suffragettes who were called ‘extremists’ and ‘terrorists’. Today they have plaques in the House of Commons and statues commemorating them but in their time they were vilified by people like Churchill.

Next thing I know, the Jewish Chronicle said I was comparing myself to the Suffragettes.  Some people just don’t get it.

Last Thursday I went to court challenging the Police seizure of my computer and electronic equipment. Although most of it has no value to the Police they insist on hanging on to it.

I brought an action under s.1 of the Police Property Act 1897. The matter was adjourned to a later date. For the hearing the Police officer in charge of my case, Chris Beckford from the Anti-Terrorist Police prepared a witness statement. It was very interesting and gives a good insight into the mentality of Britain’s Thought Police.

In his statement Beckford stated on page 2, paragraph 7 that:

It is important to the investigation that we fully understand Mr Greenstein’s mind set and ideology. This not only comes from public sources, ie his blog and social media, but from his internet search history and communication with others. How, and indeed if, he talks about Hamas with others away from the public domain provides highly relevant insight into Mr Greenstein. (my emphasis)

This isn’t ‘anti-terrorism’ it is the thought police. An insight into someone’s mindset and how they think. Not once in the course of two interviews lasting about 2.5 hours was I asked about any bombs I had made or planted.

The only questions related to articles on my blog or a speech I made at Holocaust Memorial Day on January 27. Counter-terrorism has become the policing of peoples’ minds and what they can say. And there are still fools, knaves and liars like Starmer and Sunak who pretend that this has something to do with peoples’ safety when it is about restricting what we are and are not allowed to say.

In the final paragraph of his witness statement Beckford wrote that:

The return of the property to Mr Greenstein at this stage would be prejudicial and compromising to the investigation as to whether he supports a proscribed terrorist organisation, and whether there is a wider risk to the public that they will be subjected to this support.

So what is this risk to the public? That they will be blown up by my words and thoughts? Chris Beckford is anxious to ensure that no one will be subjected’ to my views on Hamas and the Palestinians. Some might call this censorship but I would be loathe to do so.

This is not just a paper exercise. I was reported to the Police by Zionists and one racist in particular by the name of Heidi Bachram. The Zionist movement in this country is busy trying to extinguish our freedom of speech having done much the same in Israel.

The corrupt rogues and thieves who govern us go scot free. Billions of pounds went to the crooked cronies of the Tories via a VIP channel for procurement. Yet the Police are not interested in investigating corruption, perjury or miscarriages of justice. To date just 2 people have been investigated over the Post Office conspiracy to jail and convict nearly a thousand innocent sub-postmasters. The Met Police are not interested in crimes by the rich and powerful.

Clamping down on free speech in this country or playing the part of the Gestapo by Germany’s police is what freedom under capitalism means in the 21^st century as world war comes ever closer and climate catastrophe signals the end of the human race.

So I guess I am an ‘extremist’ because i want to abolish capitalism before it abolishes us.

Tony Greenstein

HAMAS - When Israel & Netanyahu Sang from a Different Songsheet

Why Israel Virtually Created Hamas

Hamas, despite its reactionary politics (for example a Charter that noone reads which is anti-Semitic) has played the role of an effective resistance in Gaza.  In particular it has acquitted itself   well, unlike last time, and killed over 50 Israeli soldiers.

However it should not be forgotten that Hamas is the Palestinian offshoot of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, a sectarian and conservative organisation which was originally created nearly a 100 years ago by the British.

This article is by way of an answer to the hypocrisy of Israel and its supporters, who pretend that Hamas is the Palestinian equivalent of the Nazi Party.  It shows how it was Israel that was responsible for creating Hamas as a counterweight to secular Palestinian nationalism, which has always been the main enemy of Zionism.

Tony Greenstein

How Israel Helped to Spawn Hamas

ANDREW HIGGINS

Updated Jan. 24, 2009 12:01 a.m. ET

Moshav Tekuma, Israel

Surveying the wreckage of a neighbor's bungalow hit by a Palestinian rocket, retired Israeli official Avner Cohen traces the missile's trajectory back to an "enormous, stupid mistake" made 30 years ago.

"Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel's creation," says Mr. Cohen, a Tunisian-born Jew who worked in Gaza for more than two decades. Responsible for religious affairs in the region until 1994, Mr. Cohen watched the Islamist movement take shape, muscle aside secular Palestinian rivals and then morph into what is today Hamas, a militant group that is sworn to Israel's destruction.

Instead of trying to curb Gaza's Islamists from the outset, says Mr. Cohen, 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. Israel cooperated with a crippled, half-blind cleric named Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, …

"When I look back at the chain of events I think we made a mistake," says David Hacham, who worked in Gaza in the late 1980s and early '90s as an Arab-affairs expert in the Israeli military. "But at the time nobody thought about the possible results."

Israeli officials who served in Gaza disagree on how much their own actions may have contributed to the rise of Hamas. They blame the group's recent ascent on outsiders, primarily Iran. This view is shared by the Israeli government. "Hamas in Gaza was built by Iran as a foundation for power, and is backed through funding, through training and through the provision of advanced weapons," Mr. Olmert said last Saturday. Hamas has denied receiving military assistance from Iran.

Arieh Spitzen, the former head of the Israeli military's Department of Palestinian Affairs, says that even if Israel had tried to stop the Islamists sooner, he doubts it could have done much to curb political Islam, a movement that was spreading across the Muslim world. He says attempts to stop it are akin to trying to change the internal rhythms of nature: "It is like saying: 'I will kill all the mosquitoes.' But then you get even worse insects that will kill you...You break the balance. You kill Hamas you might get al Qaeda."…

Hamas is a Creation of Mossad

by Hassane Zerouky

Global Outlook, No 2, Summer 2002

www.globalresearch.ca   23 March 2004

Thanks to the Mossad, Israel's "Institute for Intelligence and Special Tasks", the Hamas was allowed to reinforce its presence in the occupied territories. Meanwhile, Arafat's Fatah Movement for National Liberation as well as the Palestinian Left were subjected to the most brutal form of repression and intimidation…

it was Israel, which in fact created Hamas. According to Zeev Sternell, historian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, "Israel thought that it was a smart ploy to push the Islamists against the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO)".

Ahmed Yassin, the spiritual leader of the Islamist movement in Palestine, returning from Cairo in the seventies, established an Islamic charity association. Prime Minister Golda Meir, saw this as an opportunity to counterbalance the rise of Arafat’s Fatah movement. .According to the Israeli weekly Koteret Rashit (October 1987), "The Islamic associations as well as the university had been supported and encouraged by the Israeli military authority" in charge of the (civilian) administration of the West Bank and Gaza. "They [the Islamic associations and the university] were authorized to receive money payments from abroad."

The Islamists set up orphanages and health clinics, as well as a network of schools, workshops which created employment for women as well as system of financial aid to the poor. And in 1978, they created an "Islamic University" in Gaza. "The military authority was convinced that these activities would weaken both the PLO and the leftist organizations in Gaza." At the end of 1992, there were six hundred mosques in Gaza. Thanks to Israel’s intelligence agency Mossad (Israel’s Institute for Intelligence and Special Tasks) , the Islamists were allowed to reinforce their presence in the occupied territories. Meanwhile, the members of Fatah (Movement for the National Liberation of Palestine) and the Palestinian Left were subjected to the most brutal form of repression.

In 1984, Ahmed Yassin was arrested and condemned to twelve years in prison, after the discovery of a hidden arms cache. But one year later, he was set free and resumed his activities. And when the Intifada (‘uprising’) began, in October 1987, which took the Islamists by surprise, Sheik Yassin responded by creating the Hamas (The Islamic Resistance Movement): …

Ahmed Yassin was in prison when, the Oslo accords (Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government) were signed in September 1993. Hamas had rejected Oslo outright. But at that time, 70% of Palestinians had condemned the attacks on Israeli civilians. Yassin did everything in his power to undermine the Oslo accords. Even prior to Prime Minister Rabin’s death, he had the support of the Israeli government. The latter was very reluctant to implement the peace agreement.

Hamas then launched a carefully timed campaign of attacks against civilians, one day before the meeting between Palestinian and Israeli negotiators, regarding the formal recognition of Israel by the National Palestinian Council. These events were largely instrumental in the formation of a Right wing Israeli government following the May 1996 elections.

Quite unexpectedly, Prime Minister Netanyahu ordered Sheik Ahmed Yassin to be released from prison ("on humanitarian grounds") where he was serving a life sentence. Meanwhile, Netanyahu, together with President Bill Clinton, was putting pressure on Arafat to control Hamas. In fact, Netanyahu knew that he could rely, once more, on the Islamists to sabotage the Oslo accords. Worse still: after having expelled Yassin to Jordan, Prime Minister Netanyahu allowed him to return to Gaza, where he was welcomed triumphantly as a hero in October 1997.

Arafat was helpless in the face of these events. … the Gulf states decided to cut off their financing of the Palestinian Authority. …  between February and April 1998, Sheik Ahmad Yassin was able to raise several hundred million dollars, from those same countries. The the budget of Hamas was said to be greater than that of the Palestinian Authority. These new sources of funding enabled the Islamists to effectively pursue their various charitable activities. It is estimated that one Palestinian out of three is the recipient of financial aid from the Hamas. And in this regard, Israel has done nothing to curb the inflow of money into the occupied territories.

The Hamas had built its strength through its various acts of sabotage of the peace process, in a way which was compatible with the interests of the Israeli government. In turn, the latter sought in a number of ways, to prevent the application of the Oslo accords. In other words, Hamas was fulfilling the functions for which it was originally created: to prevent the creation of a Palestinian State. And in this regard, Hamas and Ariel Sharon, see eye to eye; they are exactly on the same wave length.

The Muslim Brotherhood, led in Gaza by Sheikh Yassin, was free to spread its message openly. In addition to launching various charity projects, Sheikh Yassin collected money to reprint the writings of Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian member of the Brotherhood who, before his execution by President Nasser, advocated global jihad. He is now seen as one of the founding ideologues of militant political Islam.

Mr. Cohen, who worked at the time for the Israeli government's religious affairs department in Gaza, says he began to hear disturbing reports in the mid-1970s about Sheikh Yassin from traditional Islamic clerics. He says they warned that the sheikh had no formal Islamic training and was ultimately more interested in politics than faith. "They said, 'Keep away from Yassin. He is a big danger,'" recalls Mr. Cohen.

Instead, Israel's military-led administration in Gaza looked favorably on the paraplegic cleric, who set up a wide network of schools, clinics, a library and kindergartens. Sheikh Yassin formed the Islamist group Mujama al-Islamiya, which was officially recognized by Israel as a charity and then, in 1979, as an association. Israel also endorsed the establishment of the Islamic University of Gaza, which it now regards as a hotbed of militancy. The university was one of the first targets hit by Israeli warplanes in the recent war.

Brig. General Yosef Kastel, Gaza's Israeli governor at the time, is too ill to comment, says his wife. But Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Segev, who took over as governor in Gaza in late 1979, says he had no illusions about Sheikh Yassin's long-term intentions or the perils of political Islam. As Israel's former military attache in Iran, he'd watched Islamic fervor topple the Shah. However, in Gaza, says Mr. Segev, "our main enemy was Fatah," and the cleric "was still 100% peaceful" towards Israel. Former officials say Israel was also at the time wary of being viewed as an enemy of Islam.

Mr. Segev says he had regular contact with Sheikh Yassin, in part to keep an eye on him. He visited his mosque and met the cleric around a dozen times. It was illegal at the time for Israelis to meet anyone from the PLO. Mr. Segev later arranged for the cleric to be taken to Israel for hospital treatment. "We had no problems with him," he says.

In fact, the cleric and Israel had a shared enemy: secular Palestinian activists. After a failed attempt in Gaza to oust secularists from leadership of the Palestinian Red Crescent, the Muslim version of the Red Cross, Mujama staged a violent demonstration, storming the Red Crescent building. Islamists also attacked shops selling liquor and cinemas. The Israeli military mostly stood on the sidelines.

Mr. Segev says the army didn't want to get involved in Palestinian quarrels but did send soldiers to prevent Islamists from burning down the house of the Red Crescent's secular chief, a socialist who supported the PLO.

'An Alternative to the PLO'

Clashes between Islamists and secular nationalists spread to the West Bank and escalated during the early 1980s, convulsing college campuses, particularly Birzeit University, a center of political activism.

As the fighting between rival student factions at Birzeit grew more violent, Brig. Gen. Shalom Harari, then a military intelligence officer in Gaza, says he received a call from Israeli soldiers manning a checkpoint on the road out of Gaza. They had stopped a bus carrying Islamic activists who wanted to join the battle against Fatah at Birzeit. "I said: 'If they want to burn each other let them go,'" recalls Mr. Harari.

A leader of Birzeit's Islamist faction at the time was Mahmoud Musleh, now a pro-Hamas member of a Palestinian legislature elected in 2006. He recalls how usually aggressive Israeli security forces stood back and let conflagration develop. He denies any collusion between his own camp and the Israelis, but says "they hoped we would become an alternative to the PLO."

A year later, in 1984, the Israeli military received a tip-off from Fatah supporters that Sheikh Yassin's Gaza Islamists were collecting arms, according to Israeli officials in Gaza at the time. Israeli troops raided a mosque and found a cache of weapons. Sheikh Yassin was jailed. He told Israeli interrogators the weapons were for use against rival Palestinians, not Israel, according to Mr. Hacham, the military affairs expert who says he spoke frequently with jailed Islamists. The cleric was released after a year and continued to expand Mujama's reach across Gaza.

Around the time of Sheikh Yassin's arrest, Mr. Cohen, the religious affairs official, sent a report to senior Israeli military and civilian officials in Gaza. Describing the cleric as a "diabolical" figure, he warned that Israel's policy towards the Islamists was allowing Mujama to develop into a dangerous force.

"I believe that by continuing to turn away our eyes, our lenient approach to Mujama will in the future harm us. I therefore suggest focusing our efforts on finding ways to break up this monster before this reality jumps in our face," Mr. Cohen wrote.

Mr. Harari, the military intelligence officer, says this and other warnings were ignored. But, he says, the reason for this was neglect, not a desire to fortify the Islamists: "Israel never financed Hamas. Israel never armed Hamas."

Roni Shaked, a former officer of Shin Bet, Israel's internal security service, and author of a book on Hamas, says Sheikh Yassin and his followers had a long-term perspective whose dangers were not understood at the time. "They worked slowly, slowly, step by step according to the Muslim Brotherhood plan."…

Israeli officials, still focused on Fatah and initially unaware of the Hamas charter, continued to maintain contacts with the Gaza Islamists. Mr. Hacham, the military Arab affairs expert, remembers taking one of Hamas's founders, Mahmoud Zahar, to meet Israel's then defense minister, Yitzhak Rabin, as part of regular consultations between Israeli officials and Palestinians not linked to the PLO. Mr. Zahar, the only Hamas founder known to be alive today, is now the group's senior political leader in Gaza.

According to Robert Dreyfuss, author of "Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam":

"And beginning in 1967 through the late 1980s, Israel helped the Muslim Brotherhood establish itself in the occupied territories.  It assisted Ahmed Yassin, the leader of the Brotherhood, in creating Hamas, betting that its Islamist character would weaken the PLO."

According to Charles Freeman, former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia, "Israel started Hamas. It was a project of Shin Bet [Israeli domestic intelligence agency], which had a feeling that they could use it to hem in the PLO."

One aspect of that strategy was the creation of the Village Leagues, over which Yassin and the Brotherhood exercised much influence.  Israel trained about 200 members of the Leagues and recruited many paid informers.

New York Times Reporter David Shipler cites the Israeli military governor of Gaza as boasting that Israel expressly financed the fundamentalists against the PLO:

"Politically speaking, Islamic fundamentalists were sometimes regarded as useful to Israel, because they had conflicts with the secular supporters of the PLO.  Violence between the two groups erupted occasionally on West Bank university campuses. Israeli military governor of the Gaza Strip, Brigadier General Yitzhak Segev, once told me how he had financed the Islamic movement as a counterweight to the PLO and the Communists.  'The Israeli Government gave me a budget and the military government gives to the mosques,' he said."

As Dreyfuss notes, "during the 1980s, the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza and the West Bank did not support resistance to the Israeli occupation.  Most of its energy went to fighting the PLO, especially its more left-wing factions, on university campuses."

After the Palestinian uprising of 1987, the PLO accused Hamas and Yassin of acting "with the direct support of reactionary Arab regimes... in collusion with the Israeli occupation."  

Yasser Arafat complained to an Italian newspaper: "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, universities and mosques."  

Arafat also maintained that Israeli prime minister Rabin admitted to him in the presence of Hosni Mubarak that Israel had supported Hamas.

In "Hamas and the Transformation of Political Islam in Palestine", for Current History, Sara Roy wrote:

"Some analysts maintain that while Hamas leaders are being targeted, Israel is simultaneously pursuing its old strategy of promoting Hamas over the secular nationalist factions as a way of ensuring the ultimate demise of the [Palestinian Authority], and as an effort to extinguish Palestinian nationalism once and for all."

Making Enemies - How Israel helped to create Hamas

February 12, 2007 Issue The American Conservative

by Brendan O’Neill

Hamas first emerged in 1987. It was formed from various charities based in the Palestinian territories with links to the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist movement born in Egypt in the 1920s from which many of today’s radical Islamic sects, including al-Qaeda, have sprung. Israel allowed these Islamic charities to gain strength and influence in Palestinian areas, hoping that they would counter the influence of secular Palestinian resistance movements. Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the spiritual leader of Hamas until his death by Israeli air strike in 2004, formed Hamas as the military wing of his group the Islamic Association, which was licensed by Israel 10 years earlier. During that period, when there was open conflict between Israeli forces and Palestinian nationalists, Israeli officials gave the nod to and even indirectly funded the establishment of Islamic societies in the West Bank and Gaza that might weaken the Palestine Liberation Organization. Martha Kessler, a senior analyst for the CIA, has said, “[W]e saw Israel cultivate Islam as a counterweight to Palestinian nationalism.” The very Islamic groups “cultivated” by Israel in the 1970s became Hamas in the 1980s, which went on to become Israel’s biggest nightmare in the 1990s. It remains so today.

After the Six Day War of 1967, Israel was much more lenient, even permissive in its attitude towards the Islamists. One of the first actions taken by Israel after its victory in the 1967 war was to release from prison various Muslim Brotherhood activists, including Ahmed Yassin, future founder of Hamas. Yassin and others had been jailed by the Egyptian authorities after the Muslim Brotherhood tried to assassinate Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, the anti-colonialist and pan-Arabist who considered political Islam a threat and an anachronism and was fairly unforgiving in his treatment of its practitioners. Israel, by contrast, sensing that such radical Islamists might be helpful in undermining Arab nationalists like the Nasser-influenced Fatah in the Palestinian territories released the Islamists from their cells and encouraged them to take root in Palestinian society.

According to Robert Dreyfuss, author of the enlightening and exhaustive book Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam, political Islamism grew exponentially as Israel took control of the Palestinian territories:

In Gaza, for instance, between 1967 and 1987, when Hamas was founded, the number of mosques tripled from 200 to 600. And a lot of that come with money flowing from outside Gaza, from wealthy conservative Islamists in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere. But, of course, none of this could have happened without the Israelis casting an approving eye upon it.

It is from these Islamist roots that Hamas emerged in 1987. Dreyfuss continues

There’s plenty of evidence that the Israeli intelligence services, especially Shin Bet and the military occupation authorities, encouraged the growth of the Muslim Brotherhood and the founding of Hamas [in Palestinian territories].

Indeed, according to former U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia Charles Freeman, Shin Bet—the Israeli counter-intelligence and internal security service—knowingly created Hamas: “Israel started Hamas. It was a project of Shin Bet, which had a feeling that they could use it to hem in the PLO.”

A former senior CIA official recently told UPI that Israel’s duplicitous support for the Islamist groups that subsequently became Hamas was “a direct attempt to divide and dilute support for a strong, secular PLO by using a competing religious alternative.” Dreyfuss agrees, pointing out how useful it was for Israel that an Islamist movement in the Palestinian territories antagonized, in some cases violently, the mass Fatah outfit:

The Hamas organization was a bitter opponent of Palestinian nationalism and clashed repeatedly with the PLO and with Fatah, of course. And there were armed clashes on university campuses in the 1970s and 1980s, where Hamas would attack the PLO, the PFLP [Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine], the PDFLP [Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine], and other groups, with clubs and chains. This was before guns became prominent in the Occupied Territories.

In allowing the emergence of radical Islamism, Israel was following in the footsteps of successive British and American governments and their policy of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Indeed, the Muslim Brotherhood itself, midwife to Hamas, is a creation of British colonialism. In the 1920s, the British, then the colonial rulers of Egypt, helped set up the Muslim Brotherhood as a means of keeping Egyptian nationalism and anti-colonialism in check. Dreyfuss describes the original Muslim Brotherhood as an “unabashed British intelligence front.” The mosque that served as the first headquarters of the Brotherhood, in Ismailia, Egypt, was built by the (British) Suez Canal Company. In the 1930s and 1950s, with Britain’s knowledge and tacit approval, the Brotherhood both challenged anti-colonial parties within Egypt and spread to other parts of the Near and Middle East, setting up branches in Transjordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine, where under the “approving eye” of Israel from the late 1960s to the 1980s, it eventually mutated into Hamas. Following Gamal Abdel Nasser’s rise to power in 1954, both the British and Americans viewed the Brotherhood as a useful weapon against secular nationalism and communism. In his book Sleeping With the Devil, former CIA officer Robert Baer describes the “dirty little secret” in Washington in the early 1950s, namely that “the White House looked on the Brothers as a silent ally, a secret weapon against—what else?—communism.”

Israel created its own gravediggers. Israel’s encouragement of Hamas’s emergence to counter secular nationalism represented an attack on the idea of popular and secular democracy, so it is not surprising that Hamas retains its somewhat extreme religious leanings and suspicion of traditional politics.

Brendan O’Neill is deputy editor of spiked in London. (spiked-online.com) 

February 12, 2007 Issue

See also How Israel Helped Create Hamas