The Secret History of Hamas
by James Corbett
corbettreport.com
April 14, 2024
Isn't it funny how the establishment "news" makes its audience feel informed even when they're frighteningly ignorant? An event like the October 7th false flag takes place and suddenly the very same people who couldn't find Israel on a map are now self-proclaimed experts on the region, dutifully repeating all the talking points about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that they heard on the nightly news.
Of course, when you try to drill down on specifics with these people, you will quickly come to the limits of their knowledge.
Ask them about Hamas, for instance, and you're likely to hear that Hamas:
is a designated terror group;
is sworn to destroy Israel;
won an election at some point and now runs Gaza as a theocratic terror state; and
consists of cowards who lob rockets into Israel and use women and children as human shields.
As is often the case, there are elements of truth to these regurgitated media soundbites. But the errors and omissions in this pat, Zionist-friendly, mainstream narrative are enough to make those who mindlessly believe it and repeat it not just wrong, but dangerously wrong.
Yes, the unthinking masses who buy into this propaganda are wrong about Israel. It is not the poor, put-upon democratically elected underdog of the Middle East, but a rogue nuclear power and apartheid state that wields an outsized influence on the world through its use of espionage (both real and virtual), subterfuge, lobbying and blackmail. It has been formally rebuked for its ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and stands accused of massacres, atrocities, war crimes and genocide in the latest conflict.
But these propaganda parrots are not only wrong about Israel. They're wrong about Hamas, too.
Or, at the very least, they don't know the real history of Hamas.
So, what is Hamas? Where did it come from? What are its aims? And, most importantly, how did it rise to power in the Gaza Strip?
Today, let's answer those questions and dispel, once and for all, the cloud of ignorance hanging over this conflict.
The His/Story of Hamas
If you're curious about the history of Hamas and you're an average Joe (i.e., blissfully unaware of the Fifth-Generation Infowar that is raging all around you), you might begin your search for answers where the gatekeepers of information want you to start all your searches: Google.
And, if you do wander into that Library of Babel, you will doubtless wind up clicking on the first result: the Wikipedia entry on Hamas. From there, you'll learn some basic facts about the organization, such as:
Hamas is a "Palestinian Sunni Islamist political and military movement governing parts of the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip."
Its name derives from HMS, the acronym of the Arabic phrase Ḥarakah al-Muqāwamah al-ʾIslāmiyyah ("Islamic Resistance Movement"), which is glossed by the Arabic word ḥamās (meaning "zeal," "integrity" and/or "bravery").
It has engaged in combat operations against Israel since 1989 in pursuit of its goal of establishing an Islamic caliphate in Palestine; etc.
If you have patience and persistence, you might uncover other interesting tidbits about the history of Hamas by mining the Wiki article's notes and references. (Case in point: remember when the Irish government expelled an Israeli diplomat for forging Irish passports during a Mossad operation to assassinate Hamas' chief logistics officer?)
. . . But, no matter how patient you are, you will quickly discover that the answers to the most important questions about Hamas aren't on Wikipedia—a platform that is admittedly manipulated by Zionist agents to eliminate any and all information that is critical of Israel.
So, if you're looking for the unadulterated truth about Hamas, where do you turn?
<sarc>Why, to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), of course!</sarc>.
That's right, the IDF have a handy-dandy six-minute explainer video purporting to tell you "The Full History of Hamas," in which you'll learn (SPOILERS!) that Hamas:
is "a terrorist organization that rules Gaza";
employs "suicide bombings, car rammings, kidnappings and firing rockets into Israel" in its campaign to "kill the Jews"; and
gained power after the selfless Israeli government gallantly withdrew its illegal settlements from Gaza in 2006.
You will also learn that Hamas receives $100 million annually from Iran—funds that it uses to create "rockets, drones, and a 500-kilometre long web of underground tunnels."
Finally, you will learn that at long last somebody is stepping up to the plate to take care of the Hamas problem once and for all—and you will be shocked (SHOCKED! I tell you!) to learn that that "somebody" is the IDF!
. . . But, being the skeptical sort, you might question whether it's a good idea to take the Israeli military's propaganda about its own enemies at face value. And so, in an effort to balance the IDF's obviously biased perspective with an equally biased perspective on the other side of the conflict, you might turn to Son of Hamas, which purports to be a from-the-horse's-mouth account of Hamas' formation and its subsequent activities.
This autobiography is penned by Mosab Hassan Yousef, the son of Hamas co-founder Hassan Yousef. It contains first-hand information that challenges the official history of Hamas. Yousef contends, for example, that Hamas was not founded in 1987, as Wikipedia asserts, but in a secret meeting of Palestinian spiritual authorities and resistance leaders that took place in Hebron in 1986.
The book also contains interesting tidbits about Yousef's life growing up in Ramallah in the shadow of Israeli military occupation, and it recounts how Palestinian rage about Israeli mistreatment spilled over into the First Intifada and the creation of Hamas.
. . . But as you continue reading, you'll discover that Yousef was recruited by the Shin Bet—Israel's security agency—while serving time in an Israeli jail in the 1990s. Then you'll learn that he actively collaborated with the Israelis to hunt down, arrest and thwart his fellow Palestinians (including his own father, Sheikh Hassan Yousef). Eventually, you'll realize that you're not reading Hamas' side of the story at all. You're simply reading a different flavour of Israeli propaganda.
So, starting over, you might decide to turn to primary sources. You'll dig up Hamas' original 1988 charter and read that the "Islamic Resistance Movement" (i.e., Hamas):
is "one of the wings of Moslem Brotherhood in Palestine";
is striving to "raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine":
holds that Palestine is "an Islamic Waqf consecrated for future Moslem generations until Judgement Day" and thus "the law governing the land of Palestine [is] the Islamic Sharia (law)";
defines nationalism as "part of the religious creed," meaning that "[r]esisting and quelling the enemy become the individual duty of every Moslem, male or female";
rejects "so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences" as contradictions of its principles; and
believes that "[i]n face of the Jews' usurpation of Palestine, it is compulsory that the banner of Jihad be raised."
. . . But, being a diligent researcher who always seeks to corroborate information (even "primary sources" like the Hamas charter), you might do some further digging and run across Hamas: A Beginner's Guide by Khaled al-Hroub, professor of Middle Eastern Studies at Northwestern University in Qatar, who claims that the Hamas charter is not an official Hamas document at all.
The Charter was written in early 1988 by one individual and was made public without appropriate general Hamas consultation, revision or consensus, to the regret of Hamas’s leaders in later years. The author of the Charter was one of the ‘old guard’ of the Muslim Brotherhood in the Gaza Strip, completely cut off from the outside world. [. . .] Hamas leaders and spokespeople have rarely referred to the Charter or quoted from it, evidence that it has come to be seen as a burden rather than an intellectual platform that embraces the movement’s principles.
You may even dive further down the academic rabbit hole to uncover more about this Muslim Brotherhood/Hamas connection. And, while you're down there, you might come across "Hamas: A Historical and Political Background," a scholarly article published in the Summer 1993 edition of Journal of Palestine Studies. This version of the Hamas story—penned by Ziad Abu-Amr, former associate professor of political science at Birzeit University and current Deputy Prime Minister of the State of Palestine—places Hamas in its historical context by identifying it as a Palestinian offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Up until the 1980s, when the radical Islamic Jihad broke away from the Muslim Brotherhood Society, the history of the Islamic movements in Palestine can be reduced to the history of the Brotherhood. The Brotherhood had been founded in Egypt in 1928 by Hasan al-Banna, and soon spread to other parts of the Arab world. In his attempt to revitalize the Islamic call, al-Banna stressed three elements: revival, organization, and upbringing. Basically, the goal of al-Banna's movement, like other Islamic revival groups, was to transform society to approximate as closely as possible that established by the Prophet Muhammad and his Companions. This would entail the establishment of an Islamic state, with no distinction being made between religion and government, and with the Quran and the sunna serving as the basis for all aspects of life.
This telling of Hamas' foundation leads us from 1973—when the dynamic, wheelchair-bound Palestinian Sheikh Ahmed Yassin established the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza—to the events of 1987. That December, an escalating series of incidents led to a protest at the Jabalia refugee camp, where one of the protesters—17-year-old Hatem al-Sisi—was shot dead by an Israeli soldier. News of al-Sisi's murder quickly spread, igniting a number of protests, demonstrations, strikes and riots across Israeli-occupied Palestine. This was the beginning of what would come to be known as the First Intifada.
By Abu-Amr's account, it was this mass uprising of Palestinians in December 1987 that prompted Sheikh Ahmed Yassin to convene a series of strategy meetings that brought together some of the most prominent Palestinian Brotherhood members in Gaza. After several days of meetings, this group issued a statement calling on Palestinians to stand up to Israeli occupation. And, according to Abu-Amr, Hamas now considers this to be its first serialized leaflet.
. . . But then we're back to Mosab "Son of Hamas" Yousef's assertion that the group had actually been founded in 1986—i.e., before the intifada—not in 1987 as has been previously reported. This is important because, Yousef insists, Hamas already existed in 1986 and Sheikh Yassin and his fellow Hamas conspirators—including Mosab Yousef's own father—had spent a year waiting for an incident "that could serve as a justification for the uprising." The al-Sisi killing was, Yousef asserts, just that: a convenient excuse for a revolt.
So, after all that digging, are we really any closer to answering our questions about Hamas? Perhaps not.
. . . But at this point, we'll remember that history is usually no more than his/story. Our understanding of history will depend entirely on what sources we listen to and which ones we tune out. And, as Corbetteers already know, the history we're taught is usually the history that is written by the winners.
With that in mind, there are still objective facts about history that everyone can agree on, and the his/story of Hamas is no different. When it comes to Hamas, most people concede that:
Hamas is a Palestinian Islamic movement.
It recognizes the need for armed, violent resistance to Zionist occupation as part of the struggle to free Palestine from Israeli occupation.
It garnered support from Palestinians who had grown frustrated with political leaders engaging in fruitless peace talks.
It possesses both a military wing and a political wing.
It won the 2006 Palestinian legislative election, and, after winning a battle against Fatah in 2007, has governed the Gaza Strip ever since.
. . . But from there, we start to get the fractioning of narratives along ideological lines. What does it mean that Hamas governs Gaza? Is Hamas a government? Was it legitimately elected? Does it continue to have a mandate for governing? Is it a political organization? An armed liberation movement? A radical terrorist organization? Or all three?
All of these are valid questions—ones that I could no doubt explore in a treatise many times the length of this one.
. . . But there is one question that stands out as a matter of prime importance. The answer to this question acts a Rosetta Stone for decoding the real history of Hamas. That answer is as widely-admitted as it is studiously ignored. But, if it were to come to light, it could drastically alter the average, uninformed, MSM-consuming masses' understanding of the entire Israel-Palestine conflict.
That question is: If Hamas really is such a monstrous terror organization (as the Israeli propaganda would have us believe), then how did it flourish in Gaza, an open-air prison that is carefully controlled, surveilled and blockaded by the Israeli military?
In other words: How did Hamas grow into such a fearsome enemy of the Israeli government right under that government's nose?
ISRAEL AND HAMAS
If you have followed events in the region for some time, you will be completely unsurprised to learn that Hamas has been encouraged and supported by elements within Israel's political, military and intelligence establishment since its inception.
The fact that Israel has actively supported Hamas is not a "far-out conspiracy theory." It's a well-documented fact that has been attested to time and time again by Israeli insiders and reported over and over in mainstream media.
Take the 2009 Wall Street Journal article, "How Israel Helped to Spawn Hamas." In it, reporter Moshav Tekuma quotes Avner Cohen—a Tunisia-born Jew who worked as an Israeli official in Gaza during the 1970s and 1980s—lamenting that "Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel's creation." According to Cohen, it was Israel's strategy from the very beginning to foster Islamic radicals in Palestine to thwart Israel's true enemy: the secular Palestinian leadership that was seeking to win Palestinian statehood through peaceful, diplomatic means.
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. Sheikh Yassin continues to inspire militants today; during the recent war in Gaza, Hamas fighters confronted Israeli troops with "Yassins," primitive rocket-propelled grenades named in honor of the cleric.
The Journal article then goes on to further corroborate this claim, citing retired IDF Brigadier General Yitzshak Segev, who even admitted to arranging a trip to Israel for Sheikh Yassin so he could receive hospital treatment. As Segev later confessed to another reporter: “The Israeli Government gave me a budget and the military government gives to the mosques.”
There are plenty of other examples of Israeli complicity in the build-up of Hamas.
In 2013, Yuval Diskin, head of the Israeli Shin Bet security service from 2005 to 2011, told Yedioth Ahronoth: “If we look at it over the years, one of the main people contributing to Hamas’s strengthening has been [Israeli Prime Minster] Bibi [Benjamin] Netanyahu, since his first term as prime minister.”
In 2019, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak appeared on Israeli Army Radio, where he opined that Netanyahu's "strategy is to keep Hamas alive and kicking . . . even at the price of abandoning the citizens [of the south] . . . in order to weaken the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah."
Yasser Arafat told an Italian newspaper that "Hamas is a creature of Israel" and claimed that former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin had admitted as much to him.
The sadly misinformed, MSM-imbibing masses we identified at the beginning of this exploration—the ones who believe themselves informed on the Israel/Hamas conflict even though they are just repeating the talking heads' talking points—might be confused by all these frank admissions. "But why would Israel support their enemies?" they might ask in bewilderment.
Luckily, this isn't a difficult question to answer. According to Ehud Barak, the logic holds that "it's easier with Hamas to explain to Israelis that there is no one to sit with and no one to talk to." In other words, a radical, violent Palestinians enemy gives the radical, violent Likudniks an excuse to avoid ever having to seriously engage in peace talks with the Palestinian people.
Once again, it is important to stress that this is not some wild conspiracy theory. It's publicly acknowledged Israeli policy. As Haaretz openly admitted in the wake of October 7, Netanyahu has even confessed to using this strategy in cabinet meetings:
“Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas,” he told a meeting of his Likud party’s Knesset members in March 2019. “This is part of our strategy—to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.”
So how does that strategy actually play out in reality?
Let's look at the al-Shifa Hospital incident. Remember when Netanyahu won the Fake News Award earlier this year for touting the ridiculous IDF animation showing how "Hamas-ISIS" (whatever that is) "turn hospitals into headquarters for their terror"?
And remember how the IDF then released a (debunked) video revealing that this terror headquarters actually consisted of two guns and a (GASP!) MRI machine?
Well, regardless of the discrepancy between the scary IDF cartoon of the Hamas bunker layer and the completely banal reality, it does raise some interesting questions, such as:
Other than Hamas, who could have possibly built such a bunker, anyway?
And what possible reason would they have for building a bunker under a hospital except to use that hospital as a shield for their terrorist activities?
Oh, that's right. Hamas didn't build the bunker. Israel did, back when Israeli troops were occupying Gaza. And why did Israel build the bunker? According to Ehud Barak, it was "in order to enable more space for the operation of the hospital within the very limited size of these compounds."
So now you see how this game works: The Israeli government does something, then it waits until everyone forgets about what they did, at which point it pretends Hamas did that thing—and that it was done for terrorist purposes. The Israelis then use that pretext as a justification for the military invasion of Gaza they were already planning.
The same argument can be made for the rocket attacks against Israel that—prior to the October 7th false flag—constituted Israel's primary case against Hamas. These rockets are constructed from transfers of funds and materials—transfers that the Israeli government has explicitly facilitated and that Netanyahu has defended time and time again. As Netanyahu himself reportedly told a meeting of Likudniks back in 2019:
"Whoever opposes a Palestinian state must support delivery of funds to Gaza because maintaining separation between the PA [Palestinian Authority] in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza will prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state."
There is more that could be said about Israel's role in propping up Hamas, but perhaps it is time to tackle the biggest question of all, namely . . .
WHAT DOES IT MEAN?
That a government would covertly arm, fund, train and otherwise support its supposed enemies is perfectly understandable to those who have studied the history of false flag terror.
Indeed, students of my five-hour documentary on The Secret History of Al Qaeda will already recognize the numerous parallels between that story and the Secret History of Hamas. For instance, the Muslim Brotherhood origins of Hamas might remind us that, despite being supposed enemies, the British collaborated with the Brotherhood at various times—even covertly financing the group in 1942. We might also be reminded that the Israeli military intelligence had attempted to blame its own false flag terror operation in Egypt in 1954 (Operation Susannah) on the Brotherhood.
But one does not need to be a student of conspiratorial history to understand what is going on here. Heck, even New York Times hack Thomas Friedman proved that broken clocks are right twice a day by effectively articulating the basic concept in his 2021 article, "For Trump, Hamas and Bibi, It Is Always Jan. 6":
Like Trump, both Bibi and Hamas have kept power by inspiring and riding waves of hostility to “the other.” They turn to this tactic anytime they are in political trouble. Indeed, they each have been the other’s most valuable partner in that tactic ever since Netanyahu was first elected prime minister in 1996—on the back of a wave of Hamas suicide bombings.
Yes, just like Bush and the neocons who puppeteered him were energized by the events of 9/11 and just like Putin was energized by the Russian apartment bombings of 1999, Netanyahu has been energized by the attacks of Hamas.
That this years-long cultivation of a bogeyman resulted in the events of October 7th is hardly surprising; in fact, perhaps it was inevitable. The only thing that has foiled Netanyahu and his Likudnik conspirators' carefully crafted plan to rally Israelis around the flag and to whip up global support for another round of ethnic cleansing is that people worldwide are seeing through this obvious inside job in greater numbers and at greater speed than they saw through 9/11 or similar false flag incidents in the past.
Granted, there are some disclaimers that need to be made here. The first is that none of this is to say that Hamas—or, more specifically, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades that form the military wing of Hamas—are entirely fictional. It's not as if these Hamas fighters are all Israelis in disguise or that their weapons are fake. Nor does it mean that the Hamas fighters are innocent, misunderstood peace-lovers who wouldn't want to hurt a fly and who are the poor, put-upon victims of Israeli slander.
Rather, in the same way that "Al Qaeda" consists mainly of real Islamic fundamentalists—useful idiots who don't realize their attacks are only successful insofar as they serve the false flag terror purposes of their enemies—so, too, do the ranks of the Qassam fighters doubtless contain mostly true believers in the radical Islamic cause.
Once again, it is important to understand the dynamic: the Likudnik crazies need the most extreme elements of Hamas to keep the Israeli public terrified and clamoring for security. Likewise, the Hamas hardliners need the radical Zionists in the Israeli government, military, political and religious institutions to continue their campaign against the Palestinians in order to justify their no-compromise, fight-to-the-death ideology.
Also, please keep something else in mind. The article that you are reading at this very moment is not history. It's his/story. In this case, my story. There are many, many other ways to put the pieces of this puzzle together to form a different image. A full explanation of Hamas should include a much closer examination of the difference between its political and military elements than I have had time to present here, for example.
If you want to read a well-researched his/story that makes a very different argument from mine, I suggest you read Robert Inlakesh's insightful article for The Last American Vagabond on "Did Israel Really Create Hamas?"
With all that in mind, it is important to remember two final things.
Firstly, we must always bear in mind that the would-be rulers of populations—whether that be Netanyahu and the Likudniks in Israel or Hamas and its leaders in Gaza—are playing high-level geopolitical games in order to secure the greatest advantage for themselves.
Secondly, we must remember that it is the innocent people caught in this conflict through no fault of their own—obviously the Palestinians who are currently being genocided, but Israelis, too—who pay for these games with their lives.
Until we acknowledge those ugly truths, we will never be able to write a happy ending to this brutal his/story.
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