Die Hamas - Terror- und Wohlfahrtsorganisation
Sie steht für Terroranschläge gegen Israel und die Ablehnung eines Judenstaates. In ihrer Anfangszeit jedoch wurde die Hamas gezielt von Israel gefördert - um ein Gegengewicht zu Arafat und der PLO zu schaffen.
"Hamas" ist die Abkürzung für "Harakat Al-Muqawama Al-Islamia": "Islamische Widerstrandsbewegung". Die Hamas wurde erst 1987 bekannt, als die konservativ-islamisch orientierte Gruppe plötzlich im Gazastreifen und in der Westbank öffentlich auftrat und der weltlich orientierten PLO das Terrain streitig machte.
Genau deswegen hatte die israelische Besatzungsmacht die Hamas anfangs unterstützt: Man wollte den Alleinvertretungsanspruch der PLO entkräften und zeigen, dass es in den besetzten Gebieten selbst Kräfte gibt, die die Palästinenser besser vertreten als die - damals noch in Tunis residierende - PLO Yasser Arafats. In Jerusalem hoffte die israelische Regierung, dass eine religiös gefärbte Bewegung, die bisher vor allem karitativ und humanitär tätig gewesen war, ein geeignetes Gegengewicht gegen den damals noch als Erzterroristen verschrienen Yasser Arafat sein würde.
Kompromisslos antiisraelisch
Bildunterschrift: Selbst Kinder sympatisieren offen mit der Hamas. Aus Überzeugung?Israel hatte bereits Jahre zuvor einen ähnlichen Versuch unternommen, indem es in der Westbank die Gründung so genannter "Dorf-Ligen" unterstützte. Dies auch um zu zeigen, dass die PLO nicht alleiniger Vertreter der Palästinenser ist. Der erste Versuch scheiterte, der zweite ebenso: Nachdem im Herbst 1987 die erste Intifada ausbrach, ergriff Hamas die Initiative und rief ihren eigenen Aufstand aus: Mit eigenen Streiktagen, vor allem aber mit eigenen Anschlägen, versuchte Hamas, die "nationale Führung" der PLO auszustechen und die Führungsrolle zu übernehmen.
http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,1872618,00.html
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Amid all the howls of pain and gnashing of teeth over the triumph of Hamas in the Palestinian elections, one fact remains relatively obscure, albeit highly relevant: Israel did much to launch Hamas as an effective force in the occupied territories. If ever there was a clear case of "blowback," then this is it. As Richard Sale pointed out in a piece for UPI:
"Israel and Hamas may currently be locked in deadly combat, but, according to several current and former U.S. intelligence officials, beginning in the late 1970s, Tel Aviv gave direct and indirect financial aid to Hamas over a period of years. Israel 'aided Hamas directly - the Israelis wanted to use it as a counterbalance to the PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organization),' said Tony Cordesman, Middle East analyst for the Center for Strategic [and International] Studies. Israel's support for Hamas 'was a direct attempt to divide and dilute support for a strong, secular PLO by using a competing religious alternative,' said a former senior CIA official."
Middle East analyst Ray Hanania concurs:
"In addition to hoping to turn the Palestinian masses away from Arafat and the PLO, the Likud leadership believed they could achieve a workable alliance with Islamic, anti-Arafat forces that would also extend Israel's control over the occupied territories."
In a conscious effort to undermine the Palestine Liberation Organization and the leadership of Yasser Arafat, in 1978 the government of then-Prime Minister Menachem Begin approved the application of Sheik Ahmad Yassin to start a "humanitarian" organization known as the Islamic Association, or Mujama. The roots of this Islamist group were in the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood, and this was the seed that eventually grew into Hamas - but not before it was amply fertilized and nurtured with Israeli funding and political support.
Begin and his successor, Yitzhak Shamir, launched an effort to undercut the PLO, creating the so-called Village Leagues, composed of local councils of handpicked Palestinians who were willing to collaborate with Israel - and, in return, were put on the Israeli payroll. Sheik Yassin and his followers soon became a force within the Village Leagues. This tactical alliance between Yassin and the Israelis was based on a shared antipathy to the militantly secular and leftist PLO: the Israelis allowed Yassin's group to publish a newspaper and set up an extensive network of charitable organizations, which collected funds not only from the Israelis but also from Arab states opposed to Arafat.
Ami Isseroff, writing on MideastWeb, shows how the Israelis deliberately promoted the Islamists of the future Hamas by helping them turn the Islamic University of Gaza into a base from which the group recruited activists - and the suicide bombers of tomorrow. As the only higher-education facility in the Gaza strip, and the only such institution open to Palestinians since Anwar Sadat closed Egyptian colleges to them, IUG contained within its grounds the seeds of the future Palestinian state. When a conflict arose over religious issues, however, the Israeli authorities sided with the Islamists against the secularists of the Fatah-PLO mainstream. As Isseroff relates, the Islamists
"Encouraged Israeli authorities to dismiss their opponents in the committee in February of 1981, resulting in subsequent Islamisation of IUG policy and staff (including the obligation on women to wear the hijab and thobe and separate entrances for men and women), and enforced by violence and ostracization of dissenters. Tacit complicity from both university and Israeli authorities allowed Mujama to keep a weapons cache to use against secularists. By the mid 1980s, it was the largest university in occupied territories with 4,500 students, and student elections were won handily by Mujama."
Again, the motive was to offset Arafat's influence and divide the Palestinians. In the short term, this may have worked to some extent; in the longer term, however, it backfired badly - as demonstrated by the results of the recent Palestinian election.
The Hamas infrastructure of mosques, clinics, kindergartens, and other educational institutions flourished not only because they were lavishly funded, but also due to being efficiently run. Sheik Yassin and the future leaders of Hamas acquired a reputation for "clean" governance and good administrative practices, which would greatly aid them - especially in comparison to the PLO, which was widely perceived as corrupt. Indeed, "clean government" - and not the necessity of armed struggle - was the main theme of their successful election campaign.
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=8449