Israel, Hamas, Hizbollah, the Muslim Brotherhood and Iran

"If Islamist movements come to power all over the region, they should express their debt of gratitude to their bete noire, Israel. Without the active or passive help of successive Israeli governments, they may not have been able to realize their dreams. That is true in Gaza, in Beirut, in Cairo and even in Tehran."

That is the provocative view of Uri Avnery, in a piece entitled Shukran, Israel published by Gush Shalom. 

On Hamas he writes, "“Turning the Palestinians towards Islam, it was thought [by the Israeli secret police], would weaken the PLO and its main faction, Fatah. So everything was done to help the Islamic movement discreetly.”

On Hizbollah he concludes, “To outflank Amal [the main Shi’i political group in Lebanon in the early 1980s], Israel encouraged a small, more radical, rival: God’s Party, Hizbollah.”

On the Muslim Brotherhood, Avnery insists “Had Israel made peace with the Palestinian people somewhere along the line, the Brotherhood would have lost much of its lustre. As it is, they are emerging from the present democratic elections as the central force in Egyptian politics.”

On the Islamic Republic of Iran, Avnery observes, “Israelis made fortunes selling weapons to the Iranian army [under the Shah]. Israeli Shabak agents trained the Shah’s dreaded secret police, Savak. It was widely believed that they also taught them torture techniques.”

He concludes,

At present, all Israel is in turmoil because the powerful Orthodox community is compelling women in many parts of the country to sit separately in the back of buses, like blacks in the good old days in Alabama, and use separate pavements on one side of the streets. Male religious soldiers are forbidden by their rabbis to listen to women soldiers singing. In Orthodox districts, women are compelled to swathe their bodies in garments that reveal nothing but their faces and hands, even in temperatures of 30 degrees Celsius and above. An eight-year-old girl from a religious family was spat upon in the street because her clothes were not “modest” enough. In counter-demonstrations, secular women waved posters saying “Tehran is Here!” Perhaps some day a fundamentalist Israel will make peace with a fundamentalist Muslim world, under the auspices of a fundamentalist American president. Unless we do something to stop the process before it is too late."

Read Uri Avnery's full article here

Uri Avnery was a member of the Irgun as a teenager and sat in the Knesset from 1965–74 and 1979–81. He is the founder of the Gush Shalom peace movement