Debunking the lie that “Israel created Hamas”

by Mujamma Haraket, The Palestinian Islamic organization Hamas is both an armed group and a political movement. It is supported by a large proportion of the Palestinian population, primarily due to its leading role in resisting Israel. Despite its deep roots in Palestinian society, there is a pervasive, false narrative about the origins of Hamas that is widely promoted, particularly in the West – including among some sympathetic to the Palestinian national liberation cause. That narrative goes like this: Hamas was encouraged or even created by Israel to undermine the secular Palestine Liberation Organization of the late leader Yasser Arafat. But this narrative is a myth that emerged from both anti-Hamas elements within Palestinian society and by Israeli intelligence. Among the former is Muhammed Dahlan who – ironically – later worked closely with the Central Intelligence Agency and was instrumental in the failed, US- and Israel-backed coup against the Hamas government that was elected by the population in 2006. The main claims to this narrative – and a more recent iteration used as a cudgel by opponents of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – fall apart upon closer scrutiny. Historian Khaled Hroub, a prominent expert on Hamas, explained to The Electronic Intifada why the myth is baseless.

Long and layered history

The narrative that Israel created or supported, whether directly or indirectly, Hamas has a long and layered history. One of the earliest influential instances of this narrative in the English-language media is a March 1981 report by David K. Shipler for The New York Times. Shipler quotes Yitzhak Segev, then Israel’s military governor of Gaza, stating that “the Israeli government gave me a budget and the military government gives to the mosques.” Shipler adds, without explicitly attributing these claims to Segev, that these “funds are used for both mosques and religious schools, with the purpose of strengthening a force that runs counter to the pro-PLO leftists.” In a later edition of his 1986 book Arab and Jew, which won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction, Shipler synthesized Segev’s remarks by stating that Segev told him that Israel had “financed the Islamic Movement as a counterweight to the PLO and the communists.” Shipler parenthetically remarks that this funding “helped nourish the seeds of Hamas.” Since then, the “counterweight” line has been attributed not to Shipler but to Segev, whose position as military governor lent this putative narrative credibility. The misattribution has been made by numerous publications and commentators, including The Intercept and analyst Alon Ben-Meir. Another early article in the American press that popularized this narrative is a 1992 piece for the Los Angeles Times by Yossi Melman, a longstanding opponent of Netanyahu, titled “Hamas: When a Former Client Becomes an Implacable Enemy.” This was compounded by Andrew Higgins’ 2009 article for The Wall Street Journal titled “How Israel Helped to Spawn Hamas.” That piece quotes Avner Cohen, an Israeli official responsible for “religious affairs” in Gaza at the time of Hamas’ ascendance, who remarks that “Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation.” Paraphrasing Cohen, Higgins states that Israel “for years tolerated and, in some cases, encouraged” the Islamic Movement in Gaza as a supposed counterweight to the secular Palestine Liberation Organization. As this article will demonstrate, the actual history is much more complex and the facts do not support the “Israel created Hamas” myth. Yet the myth proliferated after Hamas’ surprise offensive on 7 October 2023, code-named Operation Al-Aqsa Flood. Mainstream and establishment media have also echoed these claims, including Mark Mazzetti and Ronen Bergman’s widely read December 2023 article for The New York Times titled “‘Buying Quiet’: Inside the Israeli Plan That Propped Up Hamas.” Around the same time, CNN also amplified the related narrative that a Qatari cash pipeline to Hamas-governed Gaza was not only approved but championed by Netanyahu, who, according to CNN, was criticized by some of his coalition partners “for being too soft on Hamas.” Zionist outlets have used this narrative as a cudgel against Netanyahu, who they claim was overly permissive in his handling of Hamas. Tal Schneider, a political correspondent for The Times of Israel, averred in an op-ed published on 8 October 2023 that Israel’s longstanding policy had “propped up” Hamas, thereby effectively paving the road for Hamas’ operation the previous day. Josep Borrell, the former European Union foreign policy chief, remarked in 2024: “Yes, Hamas was financed by the government of Israel in an attempt to weaken the Palestinian Authority led by Fatah.” Not only does Borrell claim that Israel allowed for Qatari funding to Gaza, but he also implies that this amounted to Israel financing Hamas. This misrepresentation of history is unsubstantiated and misleading.

Political rivalry catalyzed myth

The earliest insinuations of the “Israel created Hamas” myth come from figures close to Israel’s intelligence and military establishment, including Segev and his aforementioned remarks about the Israeli government allocating funds to the mosques during the nascent Islamic Movement’s mosque-building phase. In his book Hamas: Political Thought and Practice, historian Khaled Hroub notes that Israeli assessments and interpretations concerning the ascendance of Palestinian Islamism were varied and sometimes contradictory. Some viewed the rise of Islamists as an Israeli “plot,” while “others posited that Israeli policy merely ignored the phenomenon; still others asserted that the Israeli stance was absolutely and implacably hostile and aimed to repress the phenomenon.” But the myth was cemented by Hamas’ rivals in the Palestinian political arena – chiefly Yasser Arafat, the head of the Palestine Liberation Organization, whose ideological opposition to Hamas is rooted in the founders of the secular Fatah party’s splitting from the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood (whose existence predates that of the state of Israel) in the 1950s. In his book, Hroub observes that “the PLO information apparatus wholeheartedly adopted [the Israeli] interpretations and worked to propagate them,” favoring the interpretation declaring “Hamas to be merely a creation of Israel to weaken the PLO.”

Tensions between the PLO, the vanguard of the Palestinian national liberation struggle since the 1960s, and Hamas, which emerged in the late 1980s, rose shortly before the 1991 Madrid Conference that prefigured the Oslo accords signed by Israel and the PLO. The PLO extended an invitation to Hamas to participate in a preparatory committee aimed at reconstructing the Palestinian National Council, a body representing Palestinians in their homeland and in the diaspora. After Hamas demurred, the PLO’s official organ Filastin al-Thawra instigated “a vituperous campaign … that accused Hamas of deserting the unity of nationalist ranks,” as Hroub describes in his book. “The PLO’s statements focused on the idea that Hamas had been established to satisfy an Israeli aim, or at least that it had been established with the consent of Israel in order to weaken the PLO,” Hroub states. During the Madrid Conference, Hamas published a communiqué discrediting the PLO due to what the former characterized as the latter’s capitulation to the occupation. Tensions increased further after several Palestinian factions – including Islamic, nationalist and left-wing/Marxist organizations – coalesced into a united front opposed to the so-called peace process. These factions called for a general strike while the Madrid Conference was convened between 28 and 30 October 1991. As Hroub notes in his book, “the success of the strike was remarkable and worrying to the PLO leadership.” The leadership of Hamas and 10 other factions meanwhile convened at a conference held in Tehran from 22 to 24 October 1991. After Hamas opened an office in the Iranian capital in early 1992, PLO leaders “constantly” accused Hamas of “owing allegiance to a foreign power,” according to Hroub. In late 1992, Arafat claimed that Hamas received $30 million annually in support from Iran – “an allegation that Hamas denied categorically as being both alarmist and exaggerated,” Hroub observes. The Arab and Western press soon echoed these claims. Arafat sought to cast aspersions on Hamas, which vehemently opposed negotiations with Israel and Fatah’s abandonment of the Palestinian refugees’ right of return. Given that Hamas also began coordinating with leftist and nationalist factions, Arafat and the Fatah leadership feared that, with Hamas at the helm, the coalitions of factions opposed to the peace negotiations track might become a viable alternative to the PLO. Over the next several years, Arafat and other Fatah leaders tried to mollify this worry by attempting to cajole Hamas into joining the PLO. When Hamas, which insisted on the PLO implementing significant reforms, rebuffed these efforts, Arafat launched a campaign to delegitimize Hamas. Arafat claimed in an interview with Dina Nascetti published in the 13 December 2001 edition of the Italian weekly magazine L’Espresso that then Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, “with his intransigence,” had “favored the Islamic extremists, whose attacks have given him an excuse to invoke self-defense.” Incidentally, the author states in the same article that Mossad “takes care of” Arafat’s security when he travels outside the Palestinian territories, with the implication being that Israel would prefer Arafat over more “extreme” Palestinian elements – contradicting Arafat’s claim that Hamas enjoyed preferential treatment. In the subsequent issue of L’Espresso, Nascetti published a second interview with Arafat in which the Palestinian leader’s remarks were even more pointed. When questioned about Hamas’ “terrorism,” Arafat responded by saying: “Hamas was formed with Israel’s support. The aim was to create an organization that would antagonize the PLO. It received funding and training from Israel. They continued to benefit from permits and authorizations, while we were denied even the permission to build a tomato factory. [Yitzhak] Rabin himself called it a fatal mistake.” Although this quotation, or selective portions of it, has since been reproduced far and wide, Arafat’s claim about Hamas having received training from Israel was both unprecedented and wholly unsubstantiated. It is possible that Arafat had in mind an unsourced claim produced in 1989 by Michal Sela of The Jerusalem Post, which stated that Israel’s “military government believed that their [the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood’s] activity would undermine the power of the PLO and of leftist organizations in Gaza. They even supplied some of their activists with weapons, for their protection.” However, the actual origins of Hamas bear little resemblance to what was alleged by Arafat.

In 1973, the Islamic Center, known in Arabic as al-Mujamma al-Islami, was founded by the teacher and charismatic religious leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and other figures from the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood who would later become closely associated with Hamas, including Mahmoud al-Zahar, Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, Ibrahim Fares al-Yazouri, Abdul Fatah Dukhan, Issa al-Najjar and Salah Shehadeh. The Islamic Center’s focus was providing charity and welfare to refugee camps and poor urban areas neglected by other political parties. As Shaul Mishal and Avraham Sela recount in their 2000 book The Palestinian Hamas, the number of mosques in Gaza doubled from 77 in 1967 to 150 by 1986 – the period leading up to Hamas’ formation. There were 200 mosques by 1989. The mosques served as clandestine political sanctuaries safe from Israeli surveillance and as venues where the Islamic Movement could spread its message, build support and gain influence. This phase occurred in a wider context in which “Islamist parties rose speedily in the political scene,” not only in the Levant but also in the Gulf region and North Africa, Hroub told The Electronic Intifada. In neighboring Jordan, where political and social dynamics mirror those in Palestine, Hroub added, “Islamists won almost one-third of the seats in the 1989 parliamentarian elections.” Within this regional change, according to Hroub, Palestinian Islamists shifted their strategy “from re-Islamization of society and focusing on charity and social work to resistance and confrontation against Israel.” Hroub added that “along with this change of strategy, [the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood] changed their name to Hamas,” emerging as such towards the end of the period during which the Brotherhood was focused on building social institutions; the eruption of the first intifada in Gaza in early December 1987 coincided with Hamas’ formation.

Israeli permits

A key facet of the “Israel created Hamas” myth is rooted in this phase of institution building from which Hamas emerged. “Two main Islamist hubs are usually mentioned in this context,” according to Hroub: the Islamic Center and the Islamic University of Gaza, founded in 1973 and 1978, respectively. The fact that Israel issued a permit to the Islamic Center six years after its founding, allowing it to operate above board, seeded the myth that Israel not only consented to the formation of Hamas but encouraged it. In reality, the Islamic Center’s permit was temporarily rescinded soon after its issuance and only reissued after a lengthy arbitration process. Additionally, as Mishal and Sela acknowledge, Yassin and his Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood colleagues submitted “repeated requests” for licensing to the Israeli military administration beginning in 1970, but were rejected. Indeed, as the authors write, these rejections were “not least because of [Israel’s] opposition to traditional Islamic elements.” Meanwhile, the Islamists’ secular rivals and their associations were beholden to the same Israeli colonial authorities, from which they also received permits to operate legally during this period – as was Birzeit University near the West Bank city of Ramallah in 1978.

Useful cudgel

Yet the misleading claim that Hamas readily received permits from a forthcoming Israel has proven enduring and continues to be a useful cudgel wielded by the resistance movement’s opposition. It has its roots in a 1985 courtyard debate at the Islamic University of Gaza (IUG) between a young Yahya Sinwar, belonging to the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood’s student activist circle, the Islamic Bloc, and Fatah’s Muhammad Dahlan. As Nihad al-Sheikh Khalil recounts in his 2011 book The Muslim Brothers Movement in the Gaza Strip (1967–1987), during the years 1984-1986, the student activists of the Islamic Bloc at IUG participated in a number of “discussions and debates” with Fatah students, which “took place spontaneously within the university courtyards.” Citing an interview with Subhi al-Yazji, currently a professor at IUG, al-Sheikh Khalil conveys that these discussions revolved around the Palestinian cause and armed struggle. “The most notable” such debate, al-Sheikh Khalil writes, was conducted “between Yahya Sinwar and Muhammad Dahlan in 1985,” with the conversation focusing “on the exchange of accusations between the two sides [i.e., Fatah and the Islamic Movement].” During their discussion, Sinwar condemned the Fatah leadership’s “peace overtures” while Dahlan “reproached the Muslim Brothers for not carrying out armed struggle against Israel and for operating the Islamic Association with a permit from the occupation.” Over the subsequent decades, Dahlan would continue articulating different versions of this claim, including in a November 2015 interview with Al Jazeera in which he said that Hamas “cooperates with Israel” indirectly by securing Gaza’s boundary with Israel. Ironically, Muhammed Dahlan later began to work directly with the CIA. He collaborated with the US and Israel in an effort to reverse the results of the Palestinian Legislative Council elections in 2006, in which Hamas won a majority of seats, contrary to the expectations of the Palestinian Authority’s Western patrons. These efforts resulted in a short-lived civil war between Fatah and Hamas in Gaza and the West Bank in 2007. Coup efforts by Fatah were decisively crushed in Gaza with Dahlan forced to flee, but were successful in the West Bank where Mahmoud Abbas’ Palestinian Authority continues to play a subcontractor role to Israel and prevents new elections from taking place. False claims about cooperation with Israel quickly snowballed, gaining traction amongst the detractors of the Islamic Movement, and, after it came into being, Hamas. Following Arafat’s excoriating aforementioned public remarks, the “permits narrative” was strategically instrumentalized by both the Hebrew press and the Shin Bet. As Hroub observes, this served “Israel’s strategy of firmly establishing that its Arab and Palestinian foes are not capable of carrying out any undertaking that may influence events outside Israel’s masterful control.” Over the following decades, this narrative developed into the received view within much of Western academia, bolstered by political scientist Beverley Milton-Edwards’ influential 1996 book Islamic Politics in Palestine. Linguist and political commentator Noam Chomsky also repeated the claim in 2010, saying that “in its early days, Israel supported Hamas as a weapon against the secular PLO.” This narrative allowed for leaders in Fatah to besmirch Hamas while the former backtracked on the tenets of the 1968 Palestine National Covenant by rescinding armed struggle.

Benign Hamas

A claim related to the “Israel created Hamas” myth argues that, before the first intifada, Yassin and his group were viewed as non-threatening to the occupation and treated as such. This claim stems from Israel’s arrest of Yassin in 1984 following the discovery of a weapons cache in Gaza. It rests on the perception that the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood, which fought against Zionist forces before the conquest of Palestine in 1948, had abandoned armed resistance after the group launched a series of guerrilla raids against Israel from Jordan between 1968-1970 in the wake of the 1967 War and subsequent occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Hroub writes in his history of Hamas that the raids were initiated by the broader Arab leadership and opposed by the Gaza branch, which viewed the idea as “futile.” In the decade following the raids, the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood focused on recruitment and deferred confrontation with Israel “under the conviction that they were preparing a new generation,” according to Hroub. Given this retreat from armed resistance during the 1970s, conventional wisdom held that any weapons possessed by Yassin could not have been intended for armed resistance against Israel and were likely intended to be used against Palestinian rivals. This is, however, at odds with the actual history.

The earliest signs of an Islamic armed resistance branch emerged in 1980, when the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood’s leadership dispatched some of its members abroad to receive military instruction. Beginning in the early 1980s, in the wake of the Islamic revolution in Iran and the ascendance of political Islam in the wider region, the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood created several organizations explicitly for the sake of armed resistance. These included a military apparatus named the Islamic Resistance Movement – anticipating the formal name of Hamas – and a subsequent security apparatus, Munathameh al-Jihad wa al-Dawa, abbreviated “Majd,” as well as a secret military committee established in late 1982 and early 1983. Ahmed Yassin created the aforementioned military branch in the Gaza Strip, initially commanded by Abdulrahman Tamraz and later by Salah Shehadeh, who would eventually become one of the leaders of Hamas’ armed wing. This nascent military wing formed by Yassin was exposed, leading to a crackdown by the Israeli authorities, who arrested Yassin in early 1984. According to a contemporaneous article in The Jerusalem Post, an English-language Israeli publication, an Israeli military court in Gaza imprisoned a man from Nuseirat refugee camp “for selling weapons to an Islamic underground [sic] charged with plotting to wage ‘a holy war’ on Israel.” The paper added that five other Gazans, including Yassin, “pleaded guilty to illegal possession of submachine guns, grenades, rifles and pistols” and paraphrased an Israeli military spokesperson asserting that the men “are believed to be the nucleus of religious anti-Israel activity in Gaza.” This is not the first instance of the occupation persecuting the Islamic Movement prior to Hamas’ formation. In 1972, the Islamic Movement tried to establish a library in Gaza City’s Al-Abbas Mosque in coordination with the Islamic religious endowments authority, but was rebuffed, as al-Sheikh Khalil details in his 2011 study of the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza. In response, according to al-Sheikh Khalil, Yassin “took it upon himself to build the library.” But during the beginning of its construction, Israeli police destroyed the foundation “so that the building could not be completed.” Mosque-building turned out to be a slow and iterative process, for “when construction work began, the Israeli police or the occupation army would come and demolish the building, especially if it was in its early stages.” Israel held a contradictory position toward the Islamic Movement’s mosque-building, sometimes sanctioning construction – such as with Jawrat al-Shams Mosque, the inauguration of which Israel’s military governor attended in September 1973 – and in other cases, impeding it. The approach appeared to waver based on the individual Israeli colonial official involved, indicating the absence of a coherent government policy regarding the mosques. Avner Cohen, the aforementioned religious affairs official, “became increasingly suspicious” that the Islamic Movement was using mosques to organize armed resistance against Israel, as Beverley Milton-Edwards and Stephen Ferrel recount in their 2010 book Hamas. Avner appealed to the Israeli military to outlaw the Islamic Center but was told that banning houses of worship would violate international law, according to journalist Charles Enderlin in his 2009 book Le Grand aveuglement. Cohen’s efforts were not entirely wasted, however, as only three days after he published his 1984 internal report on Gaza’s mosques, the Israeli authorities arrested Yassin. As Azzam Tamimi recounts in his 2009 book Hamas: The Unwritten Chapters, an Israeli military court declared Yassin “guilty of plotting to destroy the State of Israel and sentenced him to 13 years imprisonment.” Yassin was released a year later as part of a prisoner exchange in which three Israeli soldiers captured during the 1982 Lebanon War were exchanged for various prisoners held by Israel. Once free, Yassin was barred from engaging with the Islamic Center, but clandestinely, with Saleh Shehadeh, reconstituted the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood’s covert military formation, this time under the banner of the Palestinian Mujahideen, with the purpose of waging armed resistance against Israel in Gaza. Shehadeh organized armed resistance against the Israeli military between 1985 and 1987. So where did the idea that Yassin and company’s weapons were to be used against fellow Palestinians emerge from? As Tamimi summarizes in his book, “rumors were circulating in Gaza to the effect that the [Muslim Brotherhood] had been buying weapons in order to use them against their opponents in the other Palestinian factions.” Having made powerful enemies in rival factions, the rumors regarding the Muslim Brotherhood “found ready credence, owing to the tension that gripped Gaza at the time,” with competition between Fatah and the Muslim Brotherhood playing out in battles over the administration of the Islamic University of Gaza.

“Israel funded Hamas”

The “Israeli created Hamas” myth became more prevalent following 7 October 2023, appended by the novel claim that Netanyahu enabled the Hamas offensive by allowing Qatar to transfer funds to Gaza. This telling rests on a misrepresentation of the protracted 2018-2019 Great March of Return negotiations between Hamas and Israel, which yielded an Israeli concession to allow Qatar to pay the salaries of civil servants in Gaza, among other measures to ease economic stagnation, to provide humanitarian aid and to repair war-damaged infrastructure, in exchange for Hamas tamping down the intensity of the protests along the Israel-Gaza boundary. Avigdor Liberman, then Israel’s defense minister, resigned in protest from Netanyahu’s government in November 2018, in part due to his opposition to the Qatari funding. Naftali Bennett, Israel’s education minister at the time, charged that Netanyahu was effectively paying Hamas “protection money” in order to purchase calm.

Netanyahu’s political opponents continue to claim that the infusions of funding from Qatar to Gaza enabled the Qassam Brigades to prepare for its 7 October 2023 operation, despite the safeguards in place to ensure that payments were made directly to civil servants and families with eventual Israeli oversight and pledges by Hamas not to touch donor funds. While Western media reports point to the Qatari infusion of funding into Gaza as an example of funding for Hamas, that money paid for the operation of critical civilian infrastructure and the alleviation of the economic hardship borne by years of Israeli and Western sanctions on the territory. Funding to relieve the humanitarian situation in Gaza is not the same as funding Hamas, even if it is widely misrepresented as such. “Qatari aid to the Gaza Strip is fully coordinated with Israel, the UN and the US,” an official from the Gulf state told Reuters in October 2023. There is no proof to support the claims that the Qatari funds flowed to Hamas – which has other means of financing its military activities – but plenty of contemporaneous documentation of the intended beneficiaries receiving the funding.

Busted myth

It is a fallacy to state that Hamas is a creation of Israel or that Israel encouraged the formation of the group. “Hamas is the outcome of a deeply rooted organization within the national Palestinian context, whose process of formation evolved over more than half a century,” Khaled Hroub told The Electronic Intifada. It emerged “within a broader regional ideological transformation (the rise of Islamism).” “To reduce this historical movement and emergence to a reductionist claim that it was created by Israel, is simply nonsense,” Hroub added. To acknowledge that Israel exploited “the existence of Hamas to further divide the Palestinians and facilitated control over them, is one thing.” “To claim that Israel invented or created Hamas is totally another, if absurd, thing,” Hroub said. Israel and its security apparatus may have at times been happy for the myth to persist, viewing it as preferable to accepting “the fact that this organization emerged and became strong against Israel’s will and its omnipresent intelligence.” By perpetuating the myth, Israel preserves its image of omnipotent superiority and reinforces “the belief, and fear, that everything that happens in Palestine, and perhaps in the region, is foreknown by them,” according to Hroub. Indeed, the persistence of the myth has facilitated myriad media commentators to readily claim that Operation Al-Aqsa Flood was both known in advance to the Shin Bet and permitted to transpire such that Israel could exploit it as an opportunity to resolve the so-called “Gaza question” and its concomitant demographics problem. Such claims are the logical endpoint of the “Israel created Hamas” narrative. Unfortunately, otherwise discerning minds have repeated these myths, with the adage that “Israel funded Hamas” becoming a consensus view, foreclosing the conceptual possibility of the Palestinian resistance’s functioning as an independent political actor with self-sufficiency and agency. Dispossessing Palestinians of their agency is a major plank in Israel’s psychological warfare campaign. But the military offensive led by Hamas on 7 October 2023 forever destroyed the myths of Israeli invincibility and omniscience – a reality underscored by Iran’s devastating retaliation against US and Israeli attacks. Mujamma Haraket is a translator and academic researcher in political philosophy with a specialization in non-state actors, political Islam and the history of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) in particular. The author’s scholarly writing has been published in academic forums and in forums like Orinoco Tribune and Liberated Texts.