Likud & Hamas - an illict relationship

The Palestinians are about to have a monumental split, just what the Israeli doctor has ordered for the health of the Jewish nation.

While the legally elected government of Hamas has refused to recognise Israel, which I have gathered from several news sources, as a tactic to get the Israelis to move back to the 1967 borders, President Mahmoud Abbas (belonging to the rival opposition party Fatah) has ignored the constitutionally elected government by calling for a referendum on July 26. He wants the Palestinian people to vote on the question of recognition of Israel.

Hamas Prime Minister Ismael Haniyeh has warned the President that the referendum would cause a deep division among the Palestinian people that will take decades to overcome. Hamas MP Mushir Masri has dismissed the move as a sour grape coup attempt by Abbas and his Fatah faction.

"It is an attempt to create an uprising in the Palestinian lands and to move against what's legal. Moreover it's the announcement of a historic division and break amongst the Palestinian people and an escape from the reality of dialogue.”

"We are astonished at the attempt to recognise Israel and push people towards giving up their principles and rights."

But Abbas has been under enormous pressure from the Bush Administration to comply, that is, to force a de jure recognition of Israel over Hamas objection. Hamas is concerned that recognition of Israel at this stage will see the aggressive Israeli government refusing to move back to the 1967 borders as it had already indicated through its avowal to retain large Israeli settlements on Palestinian land in the West Bank, which unfortunately though not surprisingly has been approved by a biased President Bush.

The Israelis and their American sponsor, supporter and servant (all rolled into one) assessed that with a financially deprived Palestinian Authority, they would now find it easy to twist Abbas’ elbow into acceding to their bully boy tactics.

To be fair, Abbas is reasonably level headed and practical, but unfortunately he is not completely devoid of a conflict of interest because he is head of the Fatah party which lost the last election to Hamas. Obviously Abbas also wants to revive his party’s fortune, which had been viewed by Palestinians as corrupt and ineffective when compared to the clean and more caring Hamas.

And Americans and Israelis, particularly the former, just love to deal with corrupt Arab authorities. Money speaks, and the USA has money to shell out to brutal dictators like Saddam Hussein and a host of others stretching from South America across to Eastren Europe and the Middle East and right through to Asia.

When the US and Israelis intermittently released Palestinian tax revenue (collected by Israel at border points) and international funds to the Palestinian Authority they made much ado about such releases being made personally to President Abbas, to raise his stock among the Palestinian people.

Israel has also arranged for the supply of light weapons and ammunition to Abbas in order for him to cope with Hamas. It is only one of several surprise moves by both Israel and Abbas to isolate the ruling Hamas party. Amos Gilad, a senior Israeli defense official told Israel Radio:

"The arms supply will bolster Abbas in carrying out his brave decision to confront Hamas"

Not many people realise this, that it was Israel itself (or to be more precise, the Likud Party) which funded Hamas directly and indirectly over a period of years since the late 1970s. Several current and former US intelligence officials have confirmed this.

Tony Cordesman, one of the most experienced and reputable Middle East analysts for the Center for Strategic Studies said the Israelis had intended to use Hamas as a counterbalance to the PLO, Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Liberation Organization.

A former senior CIA official said that Israel's support for Hamas was a direct attempt to divide and dilute support for a strong, secular PLO by using a competing religious alternative, just as Israel is doing the exact opposite today.

The Israel-based Institute for Counter Terrorism showed that Hamas was legally registered in Israel in 1978 by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the movement's spiritual leader, as an Islamic Association by the name Al-Mujamma al Islami.

Paul Joseph Watson of Prisonplanet.com said the “objectives of Hamas dovetail with those of the Likud, no settlement at all costs. Whenever the prospect of a workable peace settlement between the Israelis and Palestinians arises, Hamas or one of their offshoots blows a bus, restaurant or a hotel to pieces. This gives Israel the justification needed to scupper any agreement and further entrench their occupation of disputed lands."

"All the outsider sees is carnage, death and a mainstream media that spins the issue so that these atrocities somehow represent the wishes of the Palestinian people.”

Read Watson’s article here about the link between Likud Party and Hamas, and the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, the man who would have brought peace to the Israeli-Palestine conflict, and who could have been responsible for his murder.

Years later, after the Iranian revolution when Islamic movements drew strength from the example of their Iranian (albeit Shiite) brethren, and when the Shiite Hezbollah demonstrated that they were able to resist effectively against Israel, the Israeli saw their sponsored and supported creation, Hamas, growing into a more frightening opposition than Fatah. Last year Israel murdered Hamas spiritual leader, the quadriplegic Sheik by missile attacks.

If now, more Israelis suffer because of Hamas abandoning the ceasefire that it had voluntarily observed for a year, because of the unmitigated slaughter of innocent Paletsinians by Israeli artillery, they would only be reaping the evil of the satanic seed sown by their Likud Party.

Likud of course still hasn’t learnt because it has now switched its support to Fatah. But the Palestinians are equally stupid to allow themselves to be manipulated by the Israelis, though can you blame them when even the most powerful nation in the world obeys a tiny little country like Israel.