Or, How States Create Their Own Enemies

You may or may not be familiar with the concept of “blowback.” Basically, it’s the idea that most foreign policy threats faced by nation-states are the unintended consequences of their own past foreign interventions and exercises of power. The October 7 Hamas terrorist attack on Israel is a textbook illustration of the concept.

Few people are aware that Hamas exists, as a significant political force, largely because of past Israeli policy. Mehdi Hassan and Dina Sayedahmed at The Intercept report that Brigadier General Yitzhak Segev — the Israeli military governor in Gaza in the early 1980s — later told New York Times reporter David Shipler “that he had helped finance the Palestinian Islamist movement as a ‘counterweight’ to the secularists and leftists of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Fatah party, led by Yasser Arafat.” “The Israeli government gave me a budget,” Negev said, “and the military government gives to the mosques.”

Avner Cohen, an Israeli official in Gaza during the 1970s and 1980s, lamented that “Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation.” He observed the Islamist movement take shape, muscle aside secular Palestinian rivals and then evolved into what is today Hamas — a militant group that now calls for Israel’s destruction. Cohen argued that

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