mycorrhiza they/them

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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • The absurd thing is that Israel helped create and fund Hamas initially as a counterweight to the largely secular leftist Palestine Liberation Organization under Yasser Arafat. This whole situation is partially blowback from an Israeli effort to divide-and-conquer Palestine.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/17/opinion/letters/israel-gaza-palestinians.html

    In 1981, Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Segev, Israel’s military governor of Gaza, told me that he was giving money to the Muslim Brotherhood, the precursor of Hamas, on the instruction of the Israeli authorities. The funding was intended to tilt power away from both Communist and Palestinian nationalist movements in Gaza, which Israel considered more threatening than the fundamentalists.

    https://web.archive.org/web/20090926212507/http:/online.wsj.com/article/SB123275572295011847.html

    “Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation,” says [retired Israeli official Avner Cohen], a Tunisian-born Jew who worked in Gaza for more than two decades. Responsible for religious affairs in the region until 1994, Mr. Cohen watched the Islamist movement take shape, muscle aside secular Palestinian rivals and then morph into what is today Hamas, a militant group that is sworn to Israel’s destruction.

    Instead of trying to curb Gaza’s Islamists from the outset, says Mr. Cohen, Israel for years tolerated and, in some cases, encouraged them as a counterweight to the secular nationalists of the Palestine Liberation Organization and its dominant faction, Yasser Arafat’s Fatah. Israel cooperated with a crippled, half-blind cleric named Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, even as he was laying the foundations for what would become Hamas.

    The secular PLO has now largely been supplanted by Hamas in Gaza.