Here is yet another reason I remain skeptical that things are not always as they are portrayed... ..........................snip................................
Netanyahu privately shared in 2019:
“Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas,” Netanyahu told Likud Party legislators, according to Haaretz, Israel's longest-running newspaper. Doing so would help prevent the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority (PA) from ruling Gaza and giving Palestinians a relatively moderate, unified voice at the negotiating table. “This is part of our strategy -- to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.”
Israel’s reckless exploitation of Hamas is as old as the group itself. Indeed, decades before Netanyahu’s closed-door candor, the Israeli government pushed Hamas into its initial prominence, with direct and indirect financial support.
Throughout the 1970s, Israel’s nemesis was the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). In stark contrast to Hamas -- which emerged from the Muslim Brotherhood -- the PLO was a secular, leftist organization, led by Yasser Arafat, who headed the PLO’s Fatah faction.
As a former senior CIA official told UPI’s Richard Sale in 2001, Israel’s initial boosting of Hamas “was a direct attempt to divide and dilute support for a strong, secular PLO by using a competing religious alternative."
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... sounds so similar to Obama creating Isis with the CIA...
I think you might be missing the context. Hamas was supported because they were the “official” government of Gaza; they tossed out Fatah. At the time Israel thought Hamas might be a better political player than Arafat and his ilk. The money paid to them was for the standard things in that area: Humanitarian aid, food, medical stuff, and the like. Israel really had no choice but to deal with them.
Hamas has a political side and a terrorist side. At the start, they allowed more aid through to the people. The people supported them. Of course, they were a rotten core with a nice tasty outer shell.
Of course Israel knew this, but the world would not listen to them.
The history of Hamas goes back decades. The liberals in DC are like goldfish, they have memories that only go back minutes.