It might be more accurate to say Israel propped up Hamas through various channels (including Qatar) as a general strategy of undermining the Palestinian Authority and split Gaza from the West Bank. “Supported” can have many different meanings that don’t require direct Israeli government funds. To me, this sounds like classic blowback to Western meddling, and whether Israel directly funded Hamas is a red herring.

It’s like the phrase “The CIA used drug money to do XYZ” is less of a mouthful than “The CIA manipulated ABC regional politics and XYZ violence such that the drug trade benefited allies and harmed opponents of the CIA.”

At the very least, they crushed any secular nonviolent movements that weren’t Hamas.

Palestinian resistance to the Zionist entity is only natural as long as there are Palestinians and Israel maintains its presence as a colonialist ethnostate. The Mossad, Israeli intelligence apparatus or even the American intelligence apparatus is aware of this contradiction. When presented with organized, secular Marxist groups like the PFLP intelligence agencies do what they always do; they infiltrate, split the org, sow dissent and make terrorist groups go after the threatening groups. An interesting detail to note is that the new group is not necessarily fruitless, it’ll just be less threatening to the state than the organized Marxist group that they were targeting. This is not very different to the NOI replacing the Black Panthers.

I have nothing to say about whether Israel funded Hamas directly or indirectly, haven’t looked into that issue.

My understanding is that the more clerical Muslim Brotherhood were funded as a less political alternative to Islamic Jihad and the PLO (which was at this time pretty radical, leftist, and committed to the destruction of Israel), and Hamas began as a branch of the Muslim brotherhood.

Probably true to an extent (not that they created it - the origins of Hamas are documented well enough - but that they put their fingers on the scale at various times), but it is the easiest fucking cop-out for smug liberals to pretend they’re being objective and critical of Israel, while endorsing the core “objective” of Israel’s campaign of extermination. Israel is only bad insofar as Netanyahu is bad, and Netanyahu is only bad insofar as Hamas is bad, and the root of the problem remains that Hamas is bad, and not that Israel is a genocidal apartheid state. This is the fundamental logic underlying this rhetoric. It leads you to the exact same fucking place as the Hasbara reply guys on Twitter who will respond to the gruesome assassination of surgeons and aid workers by ‘lamenting’ about what Hamas has made this necessary.

Israeli intelligence obviously preferred to have an opponent they could portray as fanatics (pot, meet kettle) over secular liberals or a workers party. Their goal is not a compromise, but Libensraum. You say something like Palestinian Islamic Jihad and all the fucking wine mom/ipa dad liberals will shit their pants and withhold support because the victims of oppression are not resisting their oppression correctly. It is good for Hasbara purposes, and funds like this buy influence and blackmail capabilities. It is standard operating procedure for intelligence agencies like this.