Who "helped" Hamas? Israeli rivals trade blame
By Dan Williams JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his rival Benjamin Netanyahu traded blame on Monday about the rise of Hamas, exposing Israel's deepening political rifts about dealing with the governing Palestinian faction. Islamist Hamas swept Palestinian elections last year and has defied Western pressure to end its hostility to Israel. Having signed an alliance with the more moderate Fatah faction last week, Hamas now hopes for acceptance in the West.
That would hurt Olmert, who has seen the rightist opposition led by former prime minister Netanyahu boosted amid Israeli anger over failure to crush Hamas militarily during more than six years of fighting. 
Olmert accused Netanyahu in parliament of unwittingly helping Hamas transform itself from a grassroots Gazan charity-cum-militia into a major Middle East player with sponsors like Iran.
"This is the man who propped up Hamas and revived it. He is the one who freed Sheikh Yassin and gave Hamas the option to thrive thanks to the silly business that happened when he was prime minister," an Israeli official quoted Olmert as saying.
He was referring to Netanyahu's release of jailed Hamas founder and mentor Ahmed Yassin in 1997 -- a move to mollify Jordan after Israeli agents mounted, and botched, an attempt on the life of Hamas politburo chief Khaled Meshaal in Amman.
Netanyahu, who has made no secret of wanting to retake top office, sidestepped the charge and assailed Olmert for not rejecting outright the Hamas-Fatah unity deal as too hazy on core issues of whether Palestinians recognise the Jewish state.
"In his stammering weakness and confusion, the prime minister is undermining the State of Israel and, worst of all, he is undermining the walls of isolation that were so diligently built around Hamas," Netanyahu told reporters.
Netanyahu bolted the government of Olmert's predecessor, Ariel Sharon, in 2005, shortly before Israel withdrew settlers and troops from Gaza.
Netanyahu said such unilateralism would buoy Hamas, a prediction seemingly borne out by the group's election victory.
Olmert, bruised by last year's inconclusive Lebanon war, has since shelved a plan for redeploying in the occupied West Bank, where, like Gaza, Palestinians seek a state.
Parliamentary elections are not due for another two years but a poll by Haaretz newspaper last month found that if new elections were held, Olmert's Kadima party would win just 12 seats against 29 for Netanyahu's Likud in the 120-seat Knesset.
Hamas emerged in the first Palestinian revolt of 1987-1993, and later made international headlines with a wave of suicide bombings aimed at scuppering interim peace deals between Israel and the more secular Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO).
Prior to that rapprochement, Israel saw Hamas as a useful rival to the PLO. Historians say Israeli officials often turned a blind eye to Gazan Islamists -- the forbears of Hamas -- in the early 1980s in order to foster tensions between factions.
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