will Hamas ever be our friends?

Hamas will need to make some step to formally change their goal from the destruction of Israel to coexistence. This is a a very credible precondition for talks, and I don't really see the Israelis negotiating with Hamas if Hamas doesn't transform itself at least a little bit. The Palestinians also have preconditions, a common one being that Israel stop targeting the heads of these militias for assassination.

In Hebrew when saying that the Palestinians or Arabs want to destroy the state of Israel, the standard phrase is that they want to drive them into the sea. A Google search for "Israel into the sea" gives 6300 results.

Here is a cartoon from the after the Six Day's War when Egypt, Syria and Jordan all attacked Israel in an attempt to drive the Israelis into the sea:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Al-Farida%2C_Lebanon_pre-1967_war.jpg

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/7f/Al-Farida%2C_Lebanon_pre-1967_war.jpg

this is debatable... any such rejection is tactical rather than fundamental.

It's worth remembering that Israel attacked Egypt, Syria, and Jordan in 1967, although Egypt was moving troops to the border and the Israeli government did fear a likely attack. Thanks for the image, though. One thing - is the whole "driving Israel into the sea" thing a Hebrew figure of speech for "destroying Israel", or when people say that Arab leader X said this do they mean that he actually said "I will drive Israelis into the sea"?

anyway, back to Hamas! I think having preconditions about intentions is pointless. Practical preconditions - like ceasefires - are far more sensible.

Do you have a direct source for this?

The saying comes from 1967, when the Egyptian President Nasser (he's doing the kicking in the above cartoon) said that the Egyptians would "drive Israel into the sea" and that "our basic objective will be the destruction of Israel."

Not only Egypt was mobilising troops near Israeli borders, but also Jordan and Syria (which share borders with Israel). They began this mobilisation on Israel's Independence Day, which gave it more meaning. Iraq, Sudan, Kuwait and Algeria also mobilised troops in this time period.

Before the start of the war, Egypt was blockading the Israeli town of Eilat and had closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping. It was considered an act of war, and Israel received permission from the United States to act against Egypt. The official start of the Six Days' War was when Israel attacked the Egyptian Air Force, but skirmishes were going on long before this.

I think that it is wrong to think of Israel as the aggressor in this case. The war was caused by a spiral of smaller incidents building up over years.

Actually, as far as I know, none of the parties in the whole of the Knesset have this as part of their platform. Though some are completely against an independent Palestinian state. By the same token, there are also anti-Zionist as well as Arab parties in the Knesset. Because Israel uses party-list proportional representation, it means that smaller fringe parties can often get into the Knesset and make some noise, but that normally they don't take part in the governing coalition.

Moledet (Hebrew מולדת, literally homeland) is a small right-wing political party in Israel. It advocates the notion of transfer of the Palestinian population of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

Moledet was founded in 1988 by Rehavam Zeevi, who headed it until his murder by members of the PFLP in 2001, after which Rabbi Benny Elon was elected as chairman. In 1999, Moledet united with Herut and Tkuma to form the National Union (איחוד לאומי, pronounce Ihud Leumi). Later Herut left the Union. In 2003, Yisrael Betenu (led by Avigdor Lieberman) joined the National Union, and became the largest party in it.

While other parties (Kach, National Union) have advocated transfer, Moledet is the party most associated with this notion in Israel, due to its almost lack of any other element in its platform, and due to Zeevi's success in bringing together opposing elements (in particular, both secular and religious) under the transfer flag. In general it advocates voluntary transfer (see the Elon Peace Plan for details), but Zeevi has been known to suggest forced transfer as well.

Throughout its existence, Moledet remained a small party and never exceeded 3 members of the Knesset (out of 120). As of 2004, it has two Knesset Members, Elon and Professor Arie Eldad. In its beginnings, it was excommunicated by the leading Israeli political parties, meaning it was considered unsuitable to participate in the coalition. As the political tensions in Israel exacerbated; and possibly owing to the fact that it was at that time part of the National Union which was not so clearly associated with the notion of transfer, it finally joined the coalition in 2001. Zeevi was made minister of tourism and served in this position until his assassination, after which Elon replaced him. He was dismissed in mid-2004 due to his opposition to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's Gaza withdrawal plan.

preamble:

Surat Al-Imran (III), verses 109-111 Israel will rise and will remain erect until Islam eliminates it as it had eliminated its predecessors. The Islamic World is burning. It is incumbent upon each one of us to pour some water, little as it may be, with a view of extinguishing as much of the fire as he can, without awaiting action by the others.

translation: we need to kill the Jews. Every Muslim has to do his part.

Introduction:

For our struggle against the Jews is extremely wide-ranging and grave, so much so that it will need all the loyal efforts we can wield, to be followed by further steps and reinforced by successive battalions from the multifarious Arab and Islamic world, until the enemies are defeated and Allah’s victory prevails.

translation: see above

Article Six:

The Islamic Resistance Movement is a distinct Palestinian Movement which owes its loyalty to Allah, derives from Islam its way of life and strives to raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine.

translation: No room for non-Muslims in our world, I guess we'll have to kill them too.

Article Seven:

The prophet, prayer and peace be upon him, said: The time will not come until Muslims will fight the Jews (and kill them); until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees, which will cry: O Muslim! there is a Jew hiding behind me, come on and kill him! This will not apply to the Gharqad, which is a Jewish tree (cited by Bukhari and Muslim)

translation: we hate Jews. We plan on killing all the Jews. Get it?

Article Nine:

Hamas finds itself at a period of time when Islam has waned away from the reality of life ... As to the objectives: discarding the evil, crushing it and defeating it, so that truth may prevail, homelands revert [to their owners], calls for prayer be heard from their mosques, announcing the reinstitution of the Muslim state. Thus, people and things will revert to their true place.

translation: religious fundamentalism is our game (see article six)

Article Twelve

Hamas regards Nationalism (Wataniyya) as part and parcel of the religious faith. Nothing is loftier or deeper in Nationalism than waging Jihad against the enemy and confronting him when he sets foot on the land of the Muslims. And this becomes an individual duty binding on every Muslim man and woman; a woman must go out and fight the enemy even without her husband’s authorization, and a slave without his masters’ permission.

translation: Islam, yay! Everything else, boo! This is so important, that we'll even let our women make their own decisions for once. And our slaves too (slaves!).

Article Thirteen

[Peace] initiatives, the so-called peaceful solutions, and the international conferences to resolve the Palestinian problem, are all contrary to the beliefs of the Islamic Resistance Movement.

translation: Violence is the only recourse.

Article Seventeen

The Muslim women have a no lesser role than that of men in the war of liberation; they manufacture men and play a great role in guiding and educating the [new] generation.

translation: note to women: birth our babies, okthxbye. This article goes on to spur on the fight against various community groups and labour organizations. Seemingly any woman who was in a labour union would start to get wacky ideas in her pretty little head and start to think that she should be viewed on an equal plane as men, and if that happened, she might not want to be subservient and spend her life at the mercy of her husband, birthing his babies whenever he felt like it.

Article Twenty

A society which confronts a vicious, Nazi-like enemy, who does not differentiate between man and woman, elder and young ought to be the first to adorn itself with this Islamic spirit.

translation: BWHEHWBWHWBAHHEHABEH????!?!?!?!?!

Article Twenty Two

They also used the money to establish clandestine organizations which are spreading around the world, in order to destroy societies and carry out Zionist interests. Such organizations are: the Freemasons, Rotary Clubs, Lions Clubs, B’nai B’rith and the like. All of them are destructive spying organizations. They also used the money to take over control of the Imperialist states and made them colonize many countries in order to exploit the wealth of those countries and spread their corruption therein.

translation: worldwide Jewish conspiracies ... they're everywhere ... look out!!

Article Twenty Seven

Therefore, in spite of our appreciation for the PLO and its possible transformation in the future, and despite the fact that we do not denigrate its role in the Arab-Israeli conflict, we cannot substitute it for the Islamic nature of Palestine by adopting secular thought. For the Islamic nature of Palestine is part of our religion, and anyone who neglects his religion is bound to lose.

translation: NO TO SECULARISM (again)

Article Thirty Two

For Zionist scheming has no end, and after Palestine they will covet expansion from the Nile to the Euphrates. Only when they have completed digesting the area on which they will have laid their hand, they will look forward to more expansion, etc. Their scheme has been laid out in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and their present [conduct] is the best proof of what is said there.

translation: worldwide Jewish conspiracy, yep. Told ya so.

So, the policies of Hamas, presently, are very clear. Now, as I have advocated on other threads, if Hamas wants to renounce all this stuff and join Fatah or some other kind of legitimate Palestinian political movement, then that would be a reasonable step forward.

None of this has any equivalent in Israeli politics. Sure, there will always be wacko parties, and some of them will even grab Knesset seats from time to time, since Israel uses a proportional voting system in elections. Obviously such views are marginalized, the same way that white power organizations are vocal but marginalized in European and North American politics.

Having said all this:

First of all, if anyone (such as DV) advocates "being friends" with Hamas, then, if a party like Moledet somehow came to power in Israel, I hope you would extend to them the same courtesies and naively suggest that the Palestinians should make all efforts to have normal relations with them.

But mainly, this "aw shucks, why won't Israel play nice for a change" attitude and cretinous statements such as "There is also the problem that Hamas is officially dedicated to the abolition of the state of Israel, while some parties in the Israeli governing coalition are officially dedicated to ethnic cleansing all Palestinians and non-Jews from Israel and Palestine" which are fishing for parallels between Hamas and Israel are complete fucking bullshit. DV, you know nothing about the Middle East, you should refrain from starting threads on it. Unless you enjoy me showing up on all of your Middle East threads to show everyone how much of an ass you are.

The Allied powers didn't have a policy of killing hundreds of thousands of German civilians in WWII, but it didn't stop them from doing it. I guess that means that Churchill and Roosevelt were as bad as Hitler. That seems to be the logical equivalent to your statement (my apologies for invoking Godwin's law on this thread).

Furthermore, US/Iraq vs Israel/Palestine are not comparable in any conceivable way (unless, possibly, one believes that the US is fighting this war on Israel's behalf, in which case there's no hope for you).

I always feel more conservative them I really am whenever these Israel threads pop up. Inevitably (as this one will) they devolve into ad hominem anti-Israel attacks: "blah blah genocide blah blah ethnic cleaning blah blah racist zionists blah blah blah." Whereas all one has to do is look at Hamas' own words for irrefutable proof that they are NOT NICE. They do not want peace with Israel or Israelis. They are not just upset at the Israeli political system or the West Bank. They do not want a two state solution or peaceful coexistence. They want all the Jews in Israel dead, and well-meaning, reasonable people should not contort themselves into believing otherwise.

I refuse to equate "pro-Israel" with "conservative". The Israel-Palestine issue has drifted all over the political spectrum during the past few decades (to name but two examples: the Canadian labour movement was strongly pro-Israel in the 1960's; Reagan and Begin hardly agreed on anything -- for instance, Reagan was in favour of the Palestinian Right of Return).

The pro-Israel = neocon attitude was constructed by the anti-Israel movement (again, I won't call them as "liberals" -- surely, anyone who believes that Arafat was anything other than scum cannot be liberal), who, reminiscent of George Bush's infamous "if you're not with us, you're with the terrorists" statement, have declared that anyone who is pro-Israel is clearly a Bush-loving neocon. I've encountered this rather prevalent attitude on ILX and IRL. This attitude is harmful and has done a lot to alienate Jews (who have always one of the most liberal ethnic groups in NA) from being more active in the actual political left (although their voting habits haven't changed for the most part). I agree with many of Bush's policies re:Israel (note that I said "Israel" and not "Middle East") -- so what?

There are some pretty racist extremists on the Israeli side, but they tend to be more marginalized.

Abbas wants to incorporating terror groups into his govt or recruit them for his security forces. That won't happen right now, but it's a great long-term goal and I hope he sticks with it. It's a workable plan, not least because that's exactly what the Israeli govt did in 1948 to curb the activities of guys like Shamir and Begin. Say what you want about those guys (call them "extremists", "racists", whatever) but they were still marginalized in Israeli politics for 30 years before anyone would take them seriously. This includes Sharon, who was a pariah for *another* 20 years before regaining credibility, and even then he hasn't even come close to shaking his more extremist past, and probably never will.

However, every time we go six weeks without a suicide bombing, anti-Israel types are like "it looks like Hamas has altered their strategy -- maybe Sharon or Abbas should reconsider some things".

Do you have a direct source for this?

not as such, but I recall reading it in Ha'aretz when some of the religious nutter parties joined Sharon's coaltion.

(???????????????????????)

This, MindinRewind, is called intellectual honesty: I am trying to frame what I think your argument is in its strongest terms, a privilege you rather rudely did not extend to me.

I recognize that Dresden and Tokyo and Hiroshima weren't part of an expansionist agenda on the part of the Allies. But I believe the Iraqi invasion IS an expansionist adventure for the US. And I believe the Israeli settlements are an incredibly misguided expansionist adventure for Israel, one it believes to be absolutely necessary to secure it future, unfortunately. In this context it's hard to imagine Hamas being very friendly.

The only really strategic settling that Israel has done has been on its own land, out of security concerns, in the Negev desert and the in the corridor between J'lem and Tel-Aviv. The Negev because it is so sparsely populated. And the corridor because it was the scene of heavy fighting during many Arab-Israeli wars, and is basically the heart of Israel.

translation: we need to kill the Jews. Every Muslim has to do his part.

come on, barry. that's not really an intellectually honest translation, is it?

in the hamas charter it also says: "Dost thou not see how Allah putteth forth a parable; representing a good word, as a good tree, whose root is firmly fixed in the earth, and whose branches reach unto heaven; which bringeth forth its fruit in all seasons, by the will of its Lord? Allah propoundeth parables unto men, that they may be instructed." (Abraham - verses 24-25)

if you want to be REALLY CLEAR about the aims and intentions of hamas, you could sum up the hamas charter in a sentence: we seek to escalate the intensity of the armed struggle against israel by insisting on an islamist justification for violence and/or the struggle itself.

so you are looking at an organization whose intention is to intensify the militancy of the armed palestinian struggle against the state of israel, and you are clipping out the religious language and you are saying "oh wow, look at this, it's so INTENSE, isn't it?"

but you aren't looking at why the people who founded hamas and the people who supported hamas and the people who make up the ranks of hamas would choose religious militancy over a secular, nonviolent struggle against israel.

what you are doing is confusing the hamas charter - which is essentially internal propaganda pro: high-intensity guerrila warfare - with a political statement of intent.

you may as well attempt to divine american geopolitical strategy by analyzing "semper fi" or something...

the question in the thread title is sort of akin to asking in WWII: "will america ever be at peace with the kamikaze bombers of japan??"

and the answer is "no, of course not, in that the preconditions for a workable peace are conditions in which kamikaze bombing is no longer necessary or relevant"

or to put it another way: for there to be a workable peace, israel will have to do SOMETHING to convince potential hamas supporters that the palestinian people are no longer with their backs to the wall and no longer need in extremis violent struggle.

Again, Hamas is not friendly in ANY context. They would have the same attitude toward Israel and toward Jews no matter what the Israeli govt's policies were.

come on, barry. that's not really an intellectually honest translation, is it?

Their violent anti-Semitism is more than obvious in many sections of their Charter. That's not debatable. As it pertains to the section you cited (from the introduction), I suppose one can interpret in more than one way *if and only if* it is considered in isolation from the rest of the document. That is, the line "Israel will rise and will remain erect until Islam eliminates it as it had eliminated its predecessors" could be interpreted as "we will destroy the state of Israel" or "we will destroy the Jews". However, Article 13 (violence is necessary), and Article 7 (kill the Jews) provide the proper context to support my interpretation. (also, how can Israel the country be eliminated without killing people, including Jews?)

i suppose you could rightly ask why i think it's mainly the responsibility of israel and not that of hamas to provide those conditions.

It's mainly the responsibility of the PA to lead their own people. They've received billions in international aid that has gone unnaccounted for. That money was supposed to be used for stimulating the Palestinian economy -- for housing, health care, and so on. How many fewer potential Hamas supporters would we have today if the PA had built permanent houses for refugees (they have yet to build a single one) instead of quintupling the size of their army and padding their bank accounts?

Arafat's plan never changed: to do nothing. If he felt like being peaceful, he gained Israeli concessions and international funding. If he felt like giving money to militants and going on TV to talk about shahada to children, then people were killed (on both sides) while he played the victim and complained about occupation. Either way, Israel was responsible for everything, and he was responsible for nothing. That's why I don't subscribe to the "responsibilities of those in power to excercise it correctly" argument. By that measure, those with all the responsibility should get to make all the decisions, which is why we have a unilateral disengagement plan in Gaza and not a negotiated settlement.

"Those in power" in the area right now are Mahmoud Abbas + his govt, and Ariel Sharon + his govt. If they're "partners in peace" then they're partners in responsibility. The PA funded Hamas and other terror groups, and they have heavily supported incitement against Jews. Granted, a lot of that didn't happen on Abbas' watch, but it's his govt now, so the onus is on him to clean up his predecessors' mess. The same would be (and frequently is) expected of any elected leader (Canadian sponsorship scandal, anyone?).

Israel's responsibilities right now (among other things) is to work with a viable Palestinian leadership, halt settlement activity, and stick to the concessions that they've agreed to.

http://www.cucinaconme.it/images/hummus.jpg

well, i think you're being sort of reductive here about what the hamas covenant is and what it does.

this is what this language: the Islamic Resistance Movement is one of the links in the chain of the struggle against the Zionist invaders. It goes back to 1939 ... the 1948 war ... the Jihad operations of the Moslem Brotherhood in 1968 ... Moreover, if the links have been distant from each other ... the Islamic Resistance Movement aspires to the realisation of Allah's promise ... "the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him!" (from article seven)

says to me: this land, which the world has been convinced by zionists is israeli land, is actually palestinian land. the struggle to reclaim this land, which is rightfully palestinian land, is an ongoing struggle, and is contiguous with the struggle of islamism to establish the middle east as one pan-islamic state. although zionists would like to tell you that israel is a jewish land, the very land itself, the very rocks and trees themselves, repudiate the zionists. though the israelis are in strategic control of your homeland and are using this control to consolidate their position, it is promised in the koran that by virtue of your cultural connection to palestine this will prove to be of no great advantage to the israelis.

though i think you're painting the hamas covenant with an overly broad brush, i agree with you in principle. the aims of the hamas covenant are entirly objectionable.

hamas is a paramilitary (terrorist, if you prefer) organization, but more importantly, it is the most visible outgrowth of a political philosophy that uses religion as a means of legitimizing the use of extreme violence.

in this aspect, the hamas covenant is the flipside of the bureacratic language of the israeli army, and, to be fair, all "legitimate" military organizations around the world. militaries use uniforms, ranks, protocols, code-words, etc to legitimize what they do. hamas uses powerful rhetoric borrowed from the qu'ran. hamas is hardly alone in yoking religion to violence: chief sitting bull is the first prominent "sympathetic" example that comes to my mind.

this is what paramilitaries and militaries need to do, so that they can do what they do, which is bomb buildings and buses, shoot civilians and children, look at people like pieces of meat, help your comrades do the same.

i'm not sure how much i agree with this, only because i'm not sure to what extent this thread is about hamas vis-a-vis the intifada and its aftermath in general.

one group "in power" i would hold culpable for the actions of hamas: radical sunni clergy in cairo and damascus. it would be nice to see mainstream clerics put more serious pressure on these guys to tone it down, though i can't propose how or why it would be in their interest to do that.

again, this line of reasoning seems to me to be conflating hamas with the intifada.

also quintupling the size of their army is an important step: expanding the military infrastructure gives the PA a semblance of control over some of the various secular paramilitaries by allowing them to recruit those paramilitaries.

the same thing happens after most guerrila conflicts: the size of the "legitimate" military suddenly swells as it absorbs still-armed paramilitary units. if you are dealing with a bunch of guys who have spent their formative years running around town toting guns, you might as well have them in uniform and answering to rank, right?

xpost: the very existence of hamas harms the interests of the entire first world!

comparisons between hamas and the IRA / sinn fein are totally off-base. hamas is what happens when people decide to turn their losing battle around by 1) escalating the violence and 2) tying the violence into an existing current of religious fanaticism.

the idea of making peace with hamas is totally antithetical to a peaceful future middle east: it would be like macarthur making peace with hirohito's cult of imperial divinity.

In the Oslo accords, it was agreed that the PA could assemble a 30K person army, which is not a small number by any means. In comparison to the number of Palestinians, this is comparable to the size of the army in most other Middle Eastern countries. By 2000, Arafat's army numbered around 50K, not including terror groups. Anyhow, the workings of Arafat's mid-90's war machine is off-topic, but my point was that channelling massive amounts of money into the military while ignoring almost all of the basic needs of his people is very likely the biggest reason why things are the way they are right now for the Palestinians. The PA had enough money to pay for everything if the money had been spent as it was meant to be spent.

again, this line of reasoning seems to me to be conflating hamas with the intifada

Similarly, if the PA had done something to improve the lives of Palestinians, then they would have made it more difficult for Hamas and other terror groups to recruit. Not to mention how the PA contributed to the growth of terror groups either through direct funding or by turning the other cheek. For these types of reasons, it is mainly the PA's responsibility, not Israel's, to convince potential Hamas supporters to renounce extremism (as was discussed several posts upthread). But this process will take years, not weeks or months.

Unfortunately, I think that Abbas significantly weakened his position by postponing the elections (Friday) on the heels of Hamas' rejection of his Hamas-Fatah merger plan. The timing is particularly bad considering he just came back from a series of international trips which seemingly increased his visibility and credibility. Hamas will have a field day with this.

I agree with many of Bush's policies re:Israel

which just makes me ask...what policies? I mean, apart from sort of letting Sharon do whatever he wants. Bush came into office very pointedly saying that he didn't want to get involved over there (partly because he didn't want any part of anything Clinton had been involved in, yes we are governed by grade-schoolers), and while Sept. 11 made it impossible to maintain that stance as an official policy and we supposedly have the "road map" and whatever, the administration has still been pretty hands off in practice.

Which somewhat gets at the Hamas issue. I don't think befriending Hamas per se is the real challenge. The challenge (as with Bin Ladenism and other forms of extremism) is to make something else seem more appealing to the people whose lives are most directly affected by it. That's what the West as a whole has failed to do. We can go around spouting democracy all we want, but just getting appalled when people vote for Hamas or Hezbollah (or Hugo Chavez) isn't gonna do the trick. To the extent that there's any analogy with Ireland, a lot of what has marginalized the IRA and protestant paramilitaries is just plain old economic growth. Make it easier for people to have jobs and decent schools and some sense of self-respect, and the political appeal of violent resistance starts to ebb fast. It's what's so cockeyed and crippling about our whole War on Terror, the idea that any of this stuff is best fought with guns and saber-rattling.

"If Hamas comes into power, it would be in their interest to disarm. I don't mean that they destroy their guns, but that they co-opt their militia into the Palestinian police (or something similar, which gives them a legitimate role)."

i think this is idealistic, if not moonshine.

My view is that it would be better to try and draw Hamas into politics and away from violence, and uncompromising war against them is not the way to do this. I also think that if Hamas does succeed in becoming the dominant Palestinian political party then it is pretty much inevitable that people will start to talk to them more and more, as otherwise there is no one to make friends with.

I hear this a lot: poverty causes a violent ideology like Hamas to flourish. But if poverty were the primary issue, you'd see more Hamas-like attacks in starving African nations (well, you do in the Sudan). Many if not most Palestinian suicide bombers are university-educated and from relatively well-to-do families. The problem is not economic but ideological. If you're conditioned from birth to see being a shahid as a high ambition, if your school textbooks show *all of Israel* as "Palestine," if there are summer camps and soccer teams named after suicide bombers, then there's a bigger problem that leaving Gaza or offering more US aid won't solve.

Yes, but Hamas' policies are minimally affected by anything Israel does or doesn't do. Many suicide attacks have happened at times when the peace process was moving forward. A Palestinian state could be born tomorrow and Hamas' attitude toward Israel would remain unchanged.

Stence, I haven't heard that rumour, but is sounds completely false to me. Hamas was founded in the late 70's but its military arm was founded in the early 80's. Throughout the 80's, Israel uncovered various weapons stashes and consequently inprisoned Hamas leaders. But while all this was going on, the PLO was at its absolute weakest point, "exiled" so-to-speak, in Tunisia. So it doesn't make any sense that Israel would have needed to take those sorts of unorthodox measures to destabilize the PLO at that time.

I read that they boosted Islamic organisations at some point to destabilise the secular Fatah, not suspecting that said organisations would involve into paramilitary groups with no qualms about blowing up civilians.

I will check for a source for this in a book.

it suggests that the US & British governments, together with the EU and the Israeli military are moving towards pragmatic dialogue with Hamas or its representatives.

nice use of inverted commas... I didn't realise the Palestinians were from Tunisia.

I don't know anything about this UPI lot, but they assert that the Israeli state gave actual money aid to Hamas.

I didn't realize they were from Lebanon, either!

Anyhow, I did a brief search and couldn't find a corroborating primary source for that article, which says something about its credibility.

Also, it still doesn't make sense that Israel would want to "destabilize" the PLO or Fatah after 1982.

But principally, the things alluded to in that article sound a lot like "spying", not "funding". It's fairly well-known that Israel had high-level spies working in Egypt and Syria during the 60's who were putting money into their economies and working with high-ranking officials. I certainly wouldn't call that "support" for, or "funding" of the Syrian and Egyptian regimes.

Also, every country spying on every other country SHOCKAH.

Talk is cheap, of course. This is still somewhat interesting. Islamic Jihad have little electoral support, and so were seen as having little to gain from moving into politics from violence (bar Israel not exterminating them).

On the other hand, Islamic Jihad sources have denied reports that they will observe a truce during the Gaza pull-out: http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/607892.html

Wow, Hamas Israel truce.

don't jinx it!

manishevitz all over monitor

Wow, Hamas Israel truce.