Inside Israel’s 83-Year History of Becoming the Enemy — and the Questions Nobody Is Asking
Say these two words out loud.
Hah-MAHS. Yah-MAHS.
One letter. One syllable. That’s the only difference between the name of Israel’s most hated enemy and the name of Israel’s most secret undercover unit — a unit that operated in the same territory, was created two years later, and was staffed by people trained to be indistinguishable from the enemy they were supposedly fighting.
Hamas — حماس — is the Arabic acronym for “Islamic Resistance Movement.” The word means “zeal” in Arabic. In Hebrew, it means “violence,” “cruelty,” and “injustice.” Why would a resistance movement name itself a word that hands its enemy a permanent propaganda gift — the ability to say, every time it’s mentioned, that its very name means brutality?
YAMAS — ימ”ס — is the Hebrew acronym for Yehidat HaMista’arvim: the Mista’arvim Unit. The Washington-based human rights organization DAWN translates it as the “Disguised as Arabs Unit.”
Hamas was founded in Gaza in 1987.
YAMAS was founded in Gaza in 1989.
This is not a coincidence. And the story behind these two names is one that Israel celebrates at home, America funds with your tax dollars, and almost nobody in this country has ever been told.
What Is a Mista’arvim?
The word comes from the Arabic musta’rib — “one who has become Arab.” It refers to elite Israeli units whose members are trained to be completely indistinguishable from the Arab populations they infiltrate. They speak the local dialect. They know Islamic prayers and customs. They dress, act, and live as Palestinians. They carry concealed weapons. They embed themselves in communities for days at a time.
The program is 83 years old. The first unit was created in 1942 — six years before Israel existed — as part of the Palmach, the pre-state Zionist paramilitary. Its members were Jews born in Arab countries who spoke Arabic as their first language.
Israel doesn’t hide this history. It celebrates it. The Netflix show Fauda dramatizes the mista’arvim. Eli Cohen — an Egyptian-born Jew who infiltrated the highest levels of the Syrian government in the 1960s under a fake identity — is a national hero with streets named after him across Israel.
But the history goes places Israel’s public relations would prefer you not look.
In the 1950s, Israeli intelligence recruited Iraqi-born Jews to infiltrate Palestinian villages. To maintain their cover, some married Palestinian women who had no idea who they really were and fathered children with them. When the operation ended, the women were told the truth and given a choice: stay Palestinian or convert to Judaism. The women and children were reportedly traumatized.
In 1954, Israeli military intelligence recruited Egyptian Jews to firebomb American and British targets in Cairo and Alexandria — libraries, cinemas, post offices — and blame the Muslim Brotherhood. The operation, known as the Lavon Affair, was exposed. Two operatives were hanged. Israel denied it for 51 years. In 2005, the Israeli government held a public ceremony honoring the surviving operatives.
This is what Israel does. It builds identities inside other populations. It has done it for 83 years, across multiple countries, using Jews from Arab and Muslim backgrounds as operatives. It is state doctrine, celebrated domestically, and documented in Israeli academic and military sources.
Israel Built Hamas
This is not an accusation. Israeli officials have said it themselves, by name, on the record.
Brigadier General Yitzhak Segev, Israel’s military governor of Gaza in the early 1980s: “The Israeli Government gave me a budget and the military government gives to the mosques.”
Professor Avner Cohen: “Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation.”
Jane’s Intelligence Review, one of the world’s top defense publications (1993): Hamas was “actively promoted by the Shamir government” to undermine the secular PLO.
Yasser Arafat, in Italy’s Corriere della Sera (2001): Hamas is “a creature of Israel.”
Israel recognized Hamas’s predecessor — the Mujama al-Islamiya charity founded by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin — in 1979. Israel allowed it to build mosques, schools, and clubs across Gaza while simultaneously hunting and killing members of the secular Palestinian resistance. The strategy was deliberate: a divided Palestinian population can’t form a state.
In 2019, Prime Minister Netanyahu admitted it openly, telling his Likud party that allowing Qatari money to reach Hamas served the goal of preventing Palestinian statehood.
The Timeline That Tells the Story
Read this straight through.
1979: Israel registers Yassin’s charity. Funds it. Protects it.
1984: Israel catches Yassin with a weapons cache. Sentences him to 13 years. Releases him after 11 months. Why?
1987: Hamas is founded. Its first leaflet accuses Israeli intelligence of recruiting Palestinian “collaborators.” Israel takes no action against Hamas while conducting mass arrests of the secular PLO.
1988: The New York Times reports Israel still hasn’t touched Hamas. A Western diplomat calls it “remarkable.”
1989: Hamas carries out its first attacks. Israel arrests Yassin. And in the same year — the exact same year — Israel creates YAMAS in Gaza. A secret unit of non-Jewish Arabs, primarily Druze, trained to pass as Palestinian, answering directly to Shin Bet. The military denies it exists. Its members can never reveal who they are. The United States does nothing. Hamas operates without any US designation for eight more years.
1997: Israel has Yassin serving life in prison. Netanyahu releases him as part of a diplomatic deal. Yassin returns to Gaza as a hero. The US finally designates Hamas a terrorist organization — a full decade after its founding.
2005: Israel withdraws from Gaza. Every mista’arvim unit that operated there for 35 years is formally disbanded. Israel retains control of all borders, airspace, and coastline.
2006: Hamas wins elections. Eighty-four percent of Palestinians credit armed resistance for Israel’s withdrawal.
2019: Netanyahu admits Hamas in power serves Israeli strategic interests.
A mistake is something you do once. A pattern across 37 years, involving multiple prime ministers and intelligence directors — funding, protecting, arresting, releasing, re-funding — is a policy.
What YAMAS Actually Is
Most YAMAS members are not Jewish. They are Druze, Bedouins, and Arab Christians — Israeli citizens from minority communities who can pass as Palestinian. They speak the dialect. They know the culture and religion. They carry concealed weapons under civilian clothes.
YAMAS does not follow normal military chain of command. It answers directly to Shin Bet — the same agency that runs Israel’s vast network of Palestinian informants and collaborators.
The unit has been described as having the most advanced urban warfare capabilities in the world. It has conducted more combat missions than any other unit in Israel’s security apparatus. It operates in groups of five to ten, infiltrating protests, throwing stones alongside real demonstrators, then suddenly turning on the crowd — pulling weapons and making arrests as uniformed soldiers close in from behind.
In November 2025, YAMAS operatives executed two unarmed Palestinian men on camera — Yousef Asasa and Al-Muntasir Billah Abdullah — after both had surrendered with their hands up and lifted their shirts to prove they carried no weapons. Israel’s National Security Minister visited the YAMAS base afterward, promoted the commander, and said: “Terrorists must die.”
The Persian Playbook Proves the Capability
If the YAMAS-Hamas connection seems like a stretch, consider what Israel has proven it can do elsewhere.
Former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad revealed in 2024 that Iran created a special unit to hunt Mossad agents — and the head of that unit was himself a Mossad agent. Twenty of his colleagues were too.
Former Iranian intelligence minister Ali Younesi: “The Mossad has infiltrated many government departments in the last 10 years to such a degree that all the country’s top officials should fear for their lives.”
Israel built a secret drone base inside Iran. Smuggled weapons through front companies. Assassinated 11 nuclear scientists in their bedrooms in a single morning. Ran agents at the highest levels of the Iranian government for years.
To supply this pipeline, Israel runs a high school program in Petah Tikva — “Iran, Security and Intelligence” — where Persian-Jewish teenagers learn Farsi, Islamic customs, and intelligence methodology, taught by a retired Shin Bet brigadier general. About 50% of graduates go into military intelligence.
If Israel can run the head of Iran’s counter-intelligence as its own agent for years, the question of what it has done inside Hamas — an organization it admitted to creating, in a territory it occupied for 38 years, using a unit with almost the same name — is not paranoia. It is the obvious question.
October 7: Failure or Something Else?
Israel had Hamas’s battle plan — codenamed “Jericho Wall” — since 2018. Five years before the attack.
A female Unit 8200 soldier warned repeatedly that Hamas was building the capacity to execute the plan. Her superiors dismissed her analysis as “imaginary.”
Egypt’s intelligence minister personally warned Netanyahu.
At 3:03 AM on October 7, Shin Bet detected Hamas brigades activating their phone networks and alerted the National Security Council. Hours later, 6,000 attackers breached the border at 119 locations. The IDF took hours to respond. Some communities waited more than five hours for help.
The Shin Bet’s own investigation, published in March 2025, found that Israel had maintained a “policy of calm with Hamas” that allowed its “massive buildup,” had allowed Qatar to transfer millions to Hamas that was diverted to military capabilities, and had operated on “false assessments” about Hamas for years.
Netanyahu refuses to allow a state commission of inquiry.
Hamas claims it turned captured Israeli agents into double agents who fed false information to Shin Bet before October 7 — creating a “false impression of security routine.” Senior Hamas officials say these agents were part of the attack plan.
Now consider: YAMAS is specifically designed to be invisible inside Palestinian society. Its members can never be identified. If YAMAS operatives were among the people involved in October 7 — in any capacity, on any side — no one would know. That is the unit’s entire purpose.
The documented record cannot prove that happened. But the documented record establishes that the capability existed, the infrastructure was in place, the motive was stated, and the warnings were ignored. Either the most sophisticated intelligence service in the Middle East experienced the most catastrophic failure in its history — on the one target it had monitored most closely for 35 years — or the “failure” was something other than a failure.
Why This Matters in the Poconos
Since October 7, 2023, the United States has spent $21.7 billion in military aid to Israel. Tobyhanna Army Depot in Monroe County — the largest employer in the region — builds equipment for foreign allies. The Scranton Army Ammunition Plant makes artillery shells. Defense contracts flow through every county in northeastern Pennsylvania — Monroe, Wayne, Pike, Lackawanna, Carbon, Luzerne.
Your tax dollars funded the weapons. A UN Commission of Inquiry has found that Israel committed genocide with those weapons. The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for Israel’s Prime Minister. A UN Special Rapporteur has cited estimates that 680,000 Palestinians may be dead. Israeli soldiers have filmed themselves blowing up homes, schools, and mosques and posted it on TikTok.
You are paying for this. You have a right to know whether the enemy your money is supposedly fighting is what you’ve been told it is.
The Question
Two organizations. Born in the same place, two years apart. Names one letter different — and pronounced almost identically. One Israel built, funded, and protected. The other Israel staffed with Arab operatives who answer to Shin Bet and can never reveal their identities. Both operating in the same territory, among the same population, under the same intelligence agency’s shadow.
The standard explanation is that Israel made a strategic miscalculation. It supported Islamists to weaken the PLO, and the monster it created turned on it.
But that explanation requires you to believe that the intelligence service that penetrated the highest levels of the Iranian government — that ran the head of Iran’s counter-Mossad unit as its own agent — that built drone bases inside enemy territory — that assassinated scientists in their bedrooms — that trained teenagers in Persian and Islamic customs specifically to infiltrate foreign governments — accidentally created its own worst enemy in its own backyard.
And then accidentally named its undercover unit one letter off from that enemy.
And then accidentally kept funding that enemy for decades.
And then accidentally ignored five years of warnings about that enemy’s battle plan.
And then accidentally failed to respond for hours while 6,000 attackers breached the border.
That’s a lot of accidents for one intelligence service.
Every fact in this article is sourced to named Israeli officials, Western media outlets, UN reports, or academic research. The question is not whether these things happened. They did.
The question is what they mean.
Sources
Israeli Officials on Creating Hamas: Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Segev (David K. Shipler, Arab and Jew, 1986); Prof. Avner Cohen; David Hacham; Yitzhak Mordechai (Uri Milstein, 2018); Jane’s Intelligence Review (July 1993); Netanyahu 2019 Likud faction meeting (Times of Israel, Haaretz, Jerusalem Post). Arafat quote: Corriere della Sera (December 2001).
YAMAS: DAWN: “Leahy Law: Prohibit Security Assistance to Israeli Border Police Unit” (December 2025); The New Arab (April 2022); Al Jazeera (April 2018); Grey Dynamics (November 2025); Israel Democracy Institute; Combat Operators.
Mista’arvim History: The Jerusalem Fund (2019); Al-Zaytouna Centre academic paper (January 2026); Matti Friedman, Spies of No Country (2019).
Lavon Affair: Leonard Weiss, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists / Stanford Freeman Spogli Institute (2013); Haaretz (June 2016, May 2015); Israel Ministry of Defense Archives.
Iran Operations: ProPublica (August 2025); Times of Israel (October 2024); CNN (June 2025); VOA (November 2018); Haaretz (June 2018).
Farsi Training Program: VOA: “Israel’s Only High School Teaching Farsi” (2018); Haaretz: “One Step Ahead of Iran” (2018); +972 Magazine (July 2022); Ynet (July 2025).
October 7 Intelligence: NPR (March 2025) — Shin Bet investigation; West Point Combating Terrorism Center (June 2025); Commentary Magazine (May 2025) — Ronen Bergman/Jericho Wall details; Israel Hayom (May 2025) — Hamas double agent claims.
US Military Aid: Brown University Costs of War Project; Council on Foreign Relations; Congressional Research Service (RL33222); Responsible Statecraft.
NEPA Defense Economy: NPR (September 2024); Washington Post (September 2024); NEPA Alliance/APEX Accelerator; Tobyhanna Army Depot Economic Impact.
UN Genocide Finding: OHCHR, Report A/HRC/60/CRP.3 (September 2025).
680,000 Estimate: UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, Geneva briefing September 15, 2025; Arena: Hil and Polya, “Skewering History” (July 2025).
Soldier Documentation: Al Jazeera Investigative Unit (April 2025); Washington Post (December 2024).
Hamas Name Etymology: Collins English Dictionary; Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle; PBS Global Connections.