What is the history here? Did Israel encourage a group to oppose Arafat? Did that group later become Hamas? I do not know. Do you?
Hamas developed from a network of Muslim Brotherhood charities in Gaza in the mid-1980s. The Muslim Brotherhood was one of the most notorious of anti-Israeli organizations in the region, formed in the 1920s in opposition to the collapse of the Caliphate and the British Mandate that followed. At the founding of Hamas, it called for “jihad” to seize Israel and create an Islamist state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. They formed in direct opposition to the PLO (now called Fatah in the Palestinian Authority government), to some extent because Yasser Arafat was negotiating with Israel, albeit in bad faith while trying to drum up financial and political support in the West. Hamas gets its funding from Iran, hardly a disinterested third party in this conflict — and the main engine of radicalizing Muslims, eclipsing the Muslim Brotherhood ever since the Iranian revolution of 1979.
Hamas was co-founded by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin as an offshoot of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. When Israel imprisoned Yassin, the fringe group almost disappeared until Bibi Netanyahu released Yassin as a ‘goodwill’ gesture. Yassin was then a hero and Hamas revived to take control of Gaza.
Netanyahu, while adored on FR, has actually spent his career as an appeaser.