Avner Cohen, a former Israeli religious affairs official with more than two decades of experience in Gaza, lamented in 2009 to The Wall Street Journal that “Hamas, to my great regret, is a product of Israel”. In an official report, he cautioned his higher-ups in the early ‘80s against employing a strategy of division and manipulation in the Occupied Territories by setting Palestinian Islamists against Palestinian secularists, urging them to “break up this monster before this reality jumps in our face”. Israeli officials, of course, failed to heed such warnings.
And today? China understandably jumps at the chance to demonstrate the hypocrisy of the USA and her fledgling enfant terrible
