As Condoleezza Rice prepares for her long-awaited testimony before the commission investigating al-Qaeda and the Sept. 11th attacks, a look at Israel's experience with terrorism is instructive. It may shock Americans to learn that Israeli leaders freely admit that the growth of Hamas was partly a tragedy of their own making. Israel made a conscious decision to allow the Islamist movement to grow in the West Bank and Gaza in the early 1980s, hoping that this would undermine support for Yasser Arafat's PLO. "In retrospect we made a mistake," former Defense Minister Benjamin Ben Eliezer told the daily Maariv last week.
The Israeli military administration in the territories had prohibited the PLO from operating openly, but it was instructed to allow the Islamists the freedom to establish a large-scale religious-welfare-political infrastructure. The Islamist welfare effort, which gave Hamas a claim on the hearts and minds of Palestinians living under occupation, was, of course, driven by an agenda even more poisonous than the PLO's to Israel's interest. But, says Ben Eliezer, "by the time we realized what was happening, it was too late."