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Debunking the lie that “Israel created Hamas”
(electronicintifada.net)
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this post was submitted on 16 Apr 2026
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I am not talking about this funding, I am speaking about their early funding, back before they were even called Hamas. Yitzek Segev, former Israeli general and military governor of Gaza in the early 1980s admitted as much in an interview with the New York Times.
You seem obsessed with defending Hamas's autonomy to the point where you are blinded to Israel's larger game plan. The fact that Israel provided funding to Hamas in its early days does not delegitimise Hamas as an organisation.
The fact is that certian cunning people want you to believe that Hamas is not a resistance group that retaliate for israel colonial policies and war crimes. They want you to believe it is a simple tool for Israel. You are falling into israel game. I want the plo to back to it's root as a real liberation . Israel has been breaching the oslo accords for decades. Doing slow genocide in the west bank
You don't seem to understand that Hamas can be both an indigenous resistance group retaliating against Israel and financed by Israel in its early years as a religious counterbalance to the secular PLO.
You also don't seem to understand how it is beneficial to Israel to be fighting a group like Hamas over the PLO in how Israel presents this conflict to the media and the world. Israel can point at Hamas and say "look at these Muslim extremists, you can't negotiate with them. Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East, looks what Hamas do to women and gays! This war is to do with religion, the Muslims always want to destroy the Jews." This narrative was not possible against the PLO, if you can't see how this situation favours Israel when selling the story to the Western audiences and how Israel much prefers it this way you are hopelessly myopic.
I understand that hamas is an islamist group that have an different ideology to plo. What you are ignoring is that despite that Hamas colaborate with non islamist groups. The problem is that your argument is used to deligetimize Hamas as a resistsnce group.
Yes, I don't understand. Before hamas. Israel was talking about how the plo is a terrrorist group blowing up israelis . Nothing changed. They will always find an excuse and someone to blame .
But most people are not dumb. They undwrstand settler colonialism is one of the worst thing ever , worse than religious extremists. They know that torturing people, raping people, stealing their homes is bad. Rhey understand that an occupied population can't be worse than an occupier
I do not dispute or ignore this
I don't agree with you here, you are viewing this issue as black and white, ignoring the shades of grey that most of the world actually lives in. In trying to undermine their opponent Israel helped create a new one that was more violent and aggressive. It initially looks as though this was a mistake by Israel but it was the subtext for the subsequent genocide in Gaza.
The point is not to delegitimise Hamas but to show how the Israeli propaganda and colonial expansion work hand in hand.
You give people too much credit, the evidence all around us including but not limited to what is happening in Gaza should be proof of this. Mass media indoctrination of islamophobia over the last 30 years has achieved its goal of manufacturing the consent required to dehumanise Muslim people in the Middle East. If people understood there would never have been a genocide in Gaza.
The vast majority of people don't understand that Israel is a settler colonial state in the first place and think the Jewish population has always been in "Israel".
The narrative that hamas was created simply to oppose the "secular" plo don't work because Hamas collaborate with non Islamists .
Israel can make mistakes. Israel did not expect Hamas to become as strong and didn't expect a revolution in Iran, making Iran the main backer of all major resistance groups toward Israel. As a settler-colonial power, the only choice is for resistance groups to be more violent and aggressive, but without retaliating on innocent civilians. The peaceful way was already tried. The situation in the West Bank is another failure of the peaceful method.
Without Hamas, Israel wouldn't have been forced to remove the settlers and rely on external occupation to avoid casualties.
Islamophobia is the hate of Islam, not only Islamists, so Islamophobic people would still not support Palestine when the PLO is also majoritarily Muslim. Having non-Muslim resistance groups as the most powerful groups will never happen.
Wrong. If no countries had recognized and built relations with Israel after the Nakba, the genocide would never have happened.
Before Hamas even existed, the Western countries' populations were more supportive of Israel than Palestine. Imagine saying "I support Israel" just after the Nakba, where 850,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed, including 50,000 Christians.
Again, I never said this, I don't know where you're getting this from. I said that Israel assisted many non-secular groups, what became Hamas was merely one of them. Israel created nothing, they certainly assisted them in their early days.
Your assertion that because Hamas works with non Islamists they couldn't have been created to oppose the secular PLO makes no logical sense. I don't even understand how this point makes sense in your head?
You really just don't understand what I am saying do you? You also clearly don't understand the game Israel is playing here. You do not understand the multifaceted plan that the Israeli leadership is currently playing out to steal the entirely of Palestine. You are focusing on one small issue but completely missing the bigger picture. I have tried but I don't think I can help you understand.
Again missing the point completely.
It's like you don't even understand the difference between the media landscapes then and now or how now that people can actually see what is going on their opinions are shifting. This is an important moment in Palestine's future and you are choosing to fight a pointless fight on the early days of Hamas because in your mind Hamas mush be pure, any Israeli contamination, even funding in their early days somehow delegitimises Hamas. It does not delegitimise Hamas one bit, purity tests like this only harm revolution. Sometimes it takes a bad thing to kill an even worse thing.
It make perfect sense. Hamas is a resistance group which main goal is ending of the occupation. If Hamas agreed with PLO view of palestinian liberation they would definitely collaborate with them against Israel. I don’t even understand how this point do not makes sense in your head?
I perfectly understand what you are saying. You think Israel is such a very smart country that they can't make mistakes and just created hamas to counter the PLO to gives them an perfect excuse to continue genocide and occupation . You know my arguments are strong that's why you avoid them. That's why you ignored that I said Israel was vilifying the plo and said the same exact think about them as they say against Hamas
This is an important moment for Palestine but you decided to repeat the bs about Hamas the biggest resistance group is simply a tool of Israel so people demand Hamas to be dissolved before Palestine get free. The usa can stop support for Israel today, Palestinians would still need armed resistance to end the occupation .
It does delegitimize Hamas because it make them look like simply a tool for israel and if it get dissolved Israel could no longer make excuses to continue genocide
Hamas is not pure in my mind . Just because they are a resistance group they can't get away with war criminals. In a process of Truth and Reconciliation Hamas members involved in war crimes should be held accountable just like the israeli war criminals . I don't support it's political ideology
It does not magically invalidate the possibility Israel financed Hamas in their early days, if anything it makes it even more suspicious.
I don't think Israel is a smart country at all, quite the opposite actually. I think they are blood thirsty idiots. You clearly have a chip on your shoulder regarding this issue. What can't be denied is the fact that Israel has billions of times the resources available to Palestine and an international network of wealthy Zionists working to undermine Palestine. This mismatch in resources is why Israel has out planned and outmanoeuvred Palestine so far. Palestine and Hamas have been fighting the wrong fight for 30 years now. The evidence for this is Israel's continued encroachment on Palestinian territory at an increasing pace and today's occupation of Gaza.
I have not been avoiding anything dude. You are clearly not a native English speaker and I am having trouble understanding whether some of your points are bad English or bad logic.
The very next sentence you wrote is a perfect example of you not getting a coherent, comprehensible point across. The statement you made just doesn't make any sense buddy, I'm not dodging anything, I was being polite by not saying anything until you decided to call me out.
I never said this and don't believe that because Israel was involved in financing the precursor to Hamas 30 odd years ago that it makes them a tool of Israel today. The only way you seem to be able to argue against me is by putting words in my mouth and making things up.
By "pure" I was not referring to their war crimes I was referring to the purity of their origin. You believe that Israel's financing back then somehow contaminates the modern Hamas. This is where we disagree, I believe Israel's early financing has no bearing on the group today, 30-40 years later.
Armed resistance was always a fundamental part of fighting occupations. Fact is that most colonized countries has very low concrete support by populations of the world . Palestine tried to purely peaceful method , it didn't prevent Israel from murdering Palestinians. People under oppression can't simply do nothing and accept slow genocide and violent retaliation is inevitable . Because the situation is even worse now it doesn't it , it was the wrong decision
You don't seem to make a distinction between occupation and colonization too . Gaza never stopped being occupied since 67. It is because of hamas and other factions collaborating with them that Gaza moved from colonization with 8000 settlers to an occupation
Stop claiming that I talk specifically about you and that your intention is to delegitimate Hamas. I am talking about the impact behind the argument , not the intention begin mentioning the argument
You have yet tell me how it is pertinent to say Israel financed Hamas (which is inaccurate it they financed Mujama al-Islamiya and allowed Qatar fund to go to the Hamas government like they allow fund to go to the Palestinian authority ) when it was a charity organization considering that Hamas is the current strongest group fighting the genocidal army and that Israel had no problem to convince Palestinian are blood thirsty of geocoding all jews before Hamas existed