How Israel went from helping to create Hamas to bombing it!

 

Hamas

I recently watched an appalling BBC interview with the Israeli journalist and author, Ronen Bergman, of the New York Times. He called the Hamas attack on Israel an "intelligence failure" and claimed that Israel was caught by surprise.

Yet, we've heard reports that Egypt told the Israeli's of an imminent attack on Israel days before it happened. I first heard of this on BBC 2 Newsnight. The Israeli government spokesman being interviewed denied this.

The Texas Republican Congressman and former attorney, Michael McCaul, who heads the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee, told the press that he'd been told at a "closed door" intelligence briefing, that Israel had been forewarned of an attack. Yet none of this was put to Bergman.

Israel initially supported Hamas because they saw the Islamic fundamentalist as a useful tool against the more secular Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). This isn’t some ridiculous conspiracy theory but perfectly true.

Brig. Gen, Yitzhak Segev, who was the Israeli military governor in Gaza in the early 1980s, told a New York Times reporter that he’d helped to finance the Palestinian Islamist movement as a ‘counterweight’ to the secularists and leftist Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and Fatah party, led by Yasser Arafat. The PLO leader had referred to Hamas as “a creature of Israel.” The retired brigadier general confessed: “The Israeli government gave me a budget”, and the “military government gives to the mosques.”

In 2009, Avnar Cohen, a former religious affairs official who worked in Gaza for for twenty years, told the Wall Street journal: “Hamas, to my regret, is Israel’s creation.”

If what Congressman Michael McCaul says is true, why didn't the Israeli government act to thwart the attack by Hamas?