Cognipresent
“Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation.”
Those words do not come from a conspiracy website or a Palestinian propagandist. They come from Avner Cohen, the Israeli government official who was responsible for religious affairs in Gaza for more than twenty years. He said them to the Wall Street Journal in 2009, for an article the paper itself titled “How Israel Helped to Spawn Hamas.” Cohen had watched the whole thing happen from the inside, and back in the mid-1980s he had even written an official warning to his superiors, urging them to “break up this monster before this reality jumps in our face.”
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The Setup: Two Kinds of Palestinian Resistance
Start with a simple fact: after Israel’s founding in 1948, the Palestinians who lost their homes and land did not agree among themselves about how to respond. Over time, two rival movements emerged, and the rivalry between them is the key that unlocks everything that follows.
The first movement was secular nationalism. These were Palestinians—Muslims and Christians alike, since a significant share of Palestinians were Christian—who wanted one thing: a Palestinian state. Their politics were worldly, not religious. In 1957, a young activist named Khalil al-Wazir proposed creating an organization with “no visible Islamic coloration or agenda but which has the stated goal of liberating Palestine.” Out of that idea came Fatah, founded in 1958–59 by Yasser Arafat and his circle, which soon became the dominant faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization, or PLO—the umbrella group that the world came to know as the face of the Palestinian cause. From 1965 onward, Fatah waged guerrilla war against Israel. For the next several decades, when Israel spoke of its enemy, it meant the PLO.
The second movement was religious fundamentalism, and its vehicle was the Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood was founded in Egypt in 1928 with a very different goal: not national liberation, but the Islamization of society and, eventually, an Islamic state governed by religious law. It spread into Palestine early—by 1947 it had twenty-five branches there with as many as 25,000 members.
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1967: New Rulers, New Rules
In June 1967, Israel defeated Egypt, Jordan, and Syria in six days and seized the Gaza Strip and the West Bank—placing roughly a million Palestinians under Israeli military occupation.
For the secular nationalists, the occupation meant what you would expect: surveillance, arrests, deportations, and war. But for the Islamists, something strange happened. Things got better.
Ahmed Yassin walked free from Nasser’s jail—liberated, in effect, by the Israeli conquest. And the new Israeli military administration took a notably relaxed attitude toward religious activism.
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The numbers tell the story of what this permissiveness produced. Between 1967 and 1987, the number of mosques in Gaza tripled, from 200 to 600. In the West Bank, they grew from 400 to 750. The Islamic religious endowments came to control ten percent of all the real estate in Gaza, plus hundreds of businesses and thousands of acres of farmland. Every one of those new mosques and properties grew under an occupation authority that demolished Palestinian homes for far smaller offenses. None of it could have happened without Israeli approval.
The 1970s: From Tolerance to Partnership
In 1970 came a demonstration of whose side the Brotherhood was really on. That September, the PLO—then headquartered in Jordan—fought a civil war against King Hussein and lost, in the bloody episode known as Black September. The Muslim Brotherhood sided with the king against the Palestinians. Israel, for its part, helped the king too, threatening to intervene if Syria came to the PLO’s rescue. Israel, Jordan, and the Brotherhood had just fought, in effect, on the same side of a war against the PLO. It would not be the last time.
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1978: Begin Makes It Official
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Begin’s government acted on that logic almost immediately. In 1978, it formally licensed Ahmed Yassin’s Islamic Association—granting legal recognition to the Islamist movement at a time when the PLO remained an outlawed terrorist organization whose sympathizers filled Israeli prisons. Dreyfuss describes the move as part of a “full-court press against the PLO” fought on two fronts: fostering the Islamists, and creating so-called Village Leagues—puppet local councils run by anti-PLO Palestinians vetted by the Israeli military. Yassin’s Brotherhood won heavy influence inside the Leagues; up to 200 League members received paramilitary training from Israel, and the Shin Bet used the network to recruit paid informers. (The Leagues themselves flopped—ordinary Palestinians scorned them as collaborators—but the Islamists kept gaining.)
And the support wasn’t just legal recognition. It was money, and we know this because the man who wrote the checks bragged about it to a reporter. David Shipler of the New York Times recorded the Israeli military governor of Gaza, Brigadier General Yitzhak Segev, explaining how he had financed the Islamic movement as a counterweight to the PLO and the communists.
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A Detour Through Syria: Proof This Was a Strategy
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During these same years—the late 1970s and early 1980s—Israel and Jordan were jointly supporting a Muslim Brotherhood terrorist insurgency against a different secular Arab enemy: the government of Hafez Assad in Syria. The Brotherhood’s campaign there was savage: assassinations of officials, car bombs in Damascus, and in 1979 a massacre at a military school in Aleppo where eighty-three cadets were locked in a building and killed with automatic weapons and firebombs. A 1981 car bomb in Damascus killed two hundred people.
The Brotherhood fighters trained in camps in northern Jordan and in Israeli-controlled parts of Lebanon. Israel’s proxy militia commander in south Lebanon, Major Saad Haddad, didn’t even hide it—he issued public communiqués announcing the opening of Brotherhood training camps, boasting at the seventh one that his 200 mostly Syrian trainees would receive commando training “not available anywhere else in the region” to “liberate Syria from the factional Alawi regime.”
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Robert Baer, the veteran CIA field officer, confirmed to Dreyfuss that the CIA had standing instructions not to even treat the Muslim Brotherhood as an intelligence target. “Our approach to the Middle East was defined by the Cold War, and if these guys were going after Assad, well, so what?”
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1983: The Weapons That Weren’t for Israel
Back to Gaza, and to the first of two episodes in Yassin’s life that have fed decades of suspicion—voiced most loudly by his Palestinian rivals—that his relationship with the Shin Bet went beyond mere tolerance.
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And here is the detail that made even his enemies’ jaws drop: Yassin’s own explanation was that the weapons were gathered not to attack Israeli forces at all, but to fight other Palestinian factions. Dreyfuss calls the incident “curious and still unexplained” and notes that it led Yassin’s critics to suspect “secret ties to the Shin Bet.” At minimum, it tells you exactly what everyone—including the Israelis who released him—understood his organization’s guns to be for. They were pointed at the PLO.
1987: The Creature Gets a Name
In December 1987, the occupied territories exploded. The first intifada—the word means “shaking off”—was a mass Palestinian uprising against twenty years of occupation: general strikes, boycotts, stone-throwing youths against soldiers. It caught everyone by surprise, including the PLO leadership in exile.
It was in this moment, in 1986–87, that Yassin founded Hamas—an Arabic acronym for “Islamic Resistance Movement.”
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Did Israel’s support simply stop at that point? The record says no.
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The tolerance ended only in 1989, when Hamas began attacking Israelis rather than Palestinians. Israel then cracked down hard, arresting Yassin and many of the leadership. The pet project had begun to bite.
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The 1990s: Peace Almost Breaks Out, and Two Sets of Extremists Kill It
The intifada had one great political effect: it convinced Israel’s Labor Party that the occupation was unsustainable and pushed it toward negotiating with the PLO. The result was the Oslo peace process, launched in 1993 with the famous Rabin-Arafat handshake: the PLO recognized Israel, Israel recognized the PLO as the representative of the Palestinians, and a step-by-step path was laid out that was widely expected to end in a Palestinian state.
For Hamas, Oslo was an existential threat. Its entire reason for being was that the secular nationalists were frauds and only Islam could deliver.
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Step back and look at Yassin’s whole career: freed from Nasser’s jail by Israel’s conquest in 1967; freed by Israel after serving one year of a thirteen-year weapons sentence in 1984; freed by Israel again in 1997. Three times the man who built Hamas walked out of prison, and all three doors were opened by Israel. Israel finally killed him—by helicopter gunship, in 2004—only long after the asset had definitively become a liability.
2000–2005: Sharon Finishes the Job
In 1999 Netanyahu fell and Labor’s Ehud Barak revived negotiations, coming close to a comprehensive deal with President Clinton’s help. Once again the right supplied the spark. In September 2000, Likud’s Ariel Sharon—a man Palestinians knew as the officer responsible for cross-border massacres in the 1950s and for the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre in Beirut—staged a heavily guarded, deliberately provocative visit to the Haram al-Sharif, the Jerusalem holy site Jews call the Temple Mount. Dreyfuss calls it “an action calculated to provoke the Muslim Brotherhood fundamentalists, and it did.” The second intifada erupted—this one dominated by suicide bombings—and the terrified Israeli electorate swept Sharon into the prime minister’s office, killing any chance of a deal.
What followed reads less like counterterrorism than like the careful curation of an enemy. In 2001, when the PLO actually secured a pledge from Hamas to halt attacks, Sharon ordered the assassination of a senior Hamas official—an act that, as the Israeli journalist Alex Fishman wrote in the newspaper Yediot Ahronot, deliberately shattered “the gentlemen’s agreement between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority.” In 2002, ninety minutes before Yassin was scheduled to announce a ceasefire, Israel bombed a Hamas building in Gaza, killing seventeen people, including eleven children. The Harvard scholar Sara Roy, quoted by Dreyfuss, summarized what analysts were concluding: even while assassinating Hamas leaders, 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.”
The strategy worked—on the Palestinians. In 1996, polls showed only fifteen percent of Palestinians backing the Islamists. By 2002, after the crushing of the secular alternative, a Birzeit University poll found forty-two percent supporting Hamas’s vision of an Islamic state—a shift Roy called “totally unprecedented.”
Even Israel’s 2005 unilateral withdrawal from Gaza—the move that handed the territory to Hamas, which seized full control in 2007—was explained by its own architects in these terms. Dov Weissglas, Sharon’s closest adviser, described the withdrawal’s purpose with a metaphor that deserves to be remembered forever: “The plan provides the amount of formaldehyde required so that there will be no political process with the Palestinians.” Formaldehyde: the chemical that preserves a corpse. The corpse being preserved was the peace process, and Hamas’s rule in Gaza was the preservative.
2009–2023: The Suitcases of Cash
Dreyfuss published his book in 2005, but the story did not end there. It simply changed instruments—and this final chapter comes to us almost entirely from the mouths of senior Israeli officials.
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Which meant Hamas had to be kept alive. And it was—with cash. Beginning in 2018, with the explicit approval of Netanyahu’s security cabinet, the Gulf state of Qatar began delivering roughly fifteen million dollars a month into Gaza to sustain the Hamas government—famously, in literal suitcases full of cash, driven into Gaza through Israeli territory with Israeli permission. Israel’s own Mossad helped arrange and defend the pipeline.
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The Most Revolutionary Act 