From Charitable Network to Governing Power: The Legacy Infrastructure

Hamas did not appear in 1987 as a new organization improvising its way to relevance. It inherited a two-decade head start, and the officials responsible for building that head start are on the record about it. The Mujama al-Islamiya network that Israel’s military administration had licensed, financed, and shielded from PLO-style crackdowns since the late 1970s had already built the schools, clinics, mosques, and charitable committees that would become Hamas’s institutional skeleton. Yitzhak Segev, the Israeli Brigadier General who served as military governor of the Gaza Strip in the early 1980s, developed a personal friendship with Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, arranged Yassin’s medical treatment inside Israel, and later admitted to a reporter that he had helped finance Islamist movements specifically as a counterweight to the PLO and to communist factions active in Gaza at the time. Segev is the single most direct on-record source for Israeli financial facilitation of the network Hamas would later absorb.

The leniency extended beyond funding and into active operational cover: in 1986, IDF general Shalom Harari, who also served in Israeli military intelligence roles concerning the Palestinian territories, authorized Mujama-aligned students to engage Fatah-aligned students in a violent clash at Birzeit University, reportedly telling colleagues that if the two sides wanted to burn each other, they should be allowed to. When Yassin and his colleagues formalized Hamas at the outbreak of the first intifada the following year, they were not building a social base from nothing; they were relabeling and politicizing one that a serving Israeli military governor had helped finance and an Israeli general had helped protect from its rival. Israel’s strategic logic at the time was narrowly framed: a religious social movement focused on charity and education looked less dangerous than a nationalist movement organizing strikes and armed cells under PLO discipline. What that calculation failed to weight was the long-term time horizon. The PLO’s threat was immediate and visible. The Islamist network’s threat was structural and cumulative, and structural threats don’t register on a governor’s tour or an annual threat briefing the way a riot does — particularly when the governor himself was one of the people underwriting it.

Parallel Legitimacy Under Oslo

The 1993 Oslo Accords and the creation of the Palestinian Authority might have been expected to marginalize Hamas, which rejected the agreement outright and refused any role in the new PA structures. In practice, Hamas’s refusal to participate became an asset rather than a liability. The PA under Yasser Arafat, and later Mahmoud Abbas, absorbed the burden of governance, and with it the burden of governance’s failures: patronage networks that rewarded loyalty over competence, security services widely seen as serving factional and even Israeli-coordinated........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)