Читать книгу Blaming the Jews - Bernard Harrison - Страница 13
ОглавлениеHAMAS ADDRESSES THE JEWISH QUESTION
To take only the subject of the Jews: it would be difficult to find a form of bad reasoning about them which has not been heard in conversation or been admitted to the dignity of print.
—George Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such
NAZI ANTISEMITISM IN ARAB DRESS
The prewar German National Socialist Party made itself notorious, as we all know, for promoting the kind of antisemitism with which this book will be mainly concerned: the kind that sees a Jewish conspiracy at the root of every non-Jewish reverse and holds that the inimical influence of the Jews, or Zionism, can only be countered by getting rid of them, or it, altogether.
It is common to hear it said today that that kind of antisemitism died as a serious political force with the final defeat of Nazism in 1945 and nowadays survives in the Western world only among tiny neofascist groups with neither the numerical strength nor the political influence to revive it.
Despite the undeniable frequency and savagery of Islamist assaults on individual Jews and on Jewish institutions and property, one commonly also hears it said that there is in the Islamic world no equivalent to Western antisemitism, of this or any other kind. In the same vein, it is widely assumed in the more bien-pensant liberal and left-leaning sections of the media that Muslim opposition to Jews, far from being antisemitic, is wholly political in nature, stemming purely from resentment against the threat to Muslim interests posed by the establishment and continued existence of the State of Israel.
I shall be arguing at length in this book that both these claims are false. Argument starved of concrete instances, however, soon becomes vapid and overformal. It seems appropriate to begin, therefore, with two chapters offering instances of both the survival and the influence today of exactly the kind of antisemitism popularized by the Nazis. The present chapter will contrast the overt antisemitism of an Islamist organization with the covert but not dissimilar implications of a Eurobarometer poll. Chapter 2 will examine an American academic debate ostensibly concerned with the “scholarly” issue of the uniqueness of the Holocaust.
Hamas, the Islamist1 organization that at present controls Gaza, is a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood (the Society of Muslim Brothers, Jama’at al-ikhwan al-muslimin), an organization founded in 1928 in Egypt by the charismatic preacher Hassan al-Banna. A leading scholar of Islamic antisemitism has this to say of the latter: “The significance of this organization goes far beyond Egypt. For today’s global Islamist movement the Muslim Brothers are what the Bolsheviks were for the Communist movement of the 1920s: the ideological reference point and organizational core which decisively inspired all the subsequent tendencies and continues to do so to this day.”2
Hamas currently enjoys support in the West both among elements of the Muslim community and in those parts of the left whose dislike of the United States and Israel allows their sympathizers to overlook the utter moral and intellectual incompatibility of leading elements of Hamas’s outlook with values they themselves profess in other contexts. Those elements include religious fanaticism, support of suicide bombing (including the use of children as suicide bombers), rabid misogyny, hatred of gays, and in general, the contempt of Hamas and similar Islamist organizations for everything in which the Western left has traditionally believed, including human rights, democracy, and socialism. Blatant political opportunism of this kind is widely considered to extend at time of writing to the current leadership of the British Labour Party. “In 2009, when Jeremy Corbyn [recently the leader of the Labour Party in parliamentary opposition—BH] invited ‘friends’ from Hezbollah and Hamas to speak in Parliament, he said of Hamas: ‘The idea that an organization that is dedicated towards the good of the Palestinian people, and bringing about long-term peace and social justice and political justice in the whole region should be labelled as a terrorist organization by the British government is really a big, big historical mistake.’”3
In addition to its other unsavory characteristics, Hamas has traditionally advertised its commitment to a type of antisemitism differing in no significant respect from that espoused by the Nazis. Article 22 of the movement’s 1988 charter, or covenant, contains the following passage:
For a long time, the enemies [the Jews] have been planning, skilfully [sic] and with precision, for the achievement of what they have attained. They took into consideration the causes affecting the current of events. They strived to amass great and substantive material wealth which they devoted to the realisation of their dream. With their money, they took control of the world media, news agencies, the press, publishing houses, broadcasting stations, and others. With their money they stirred revolutions in various parts of the world with the purpose of achieving their interests and reaping the fruit therein. They were behind the French Revolution, the Communist revolution and most of the revolutions we heard and hear about, here and there. With their money they formed secret societies, such as Freemasons, Rotary Clubs, the Lions and others in different parts of the world for the purpose of sabotaging societies and achieving Zionist interests. With their money they were able to control imperialistic countries and instigate them to colonize many countries in order to enable them to exploit their resources and spread corruption there.
You may speak as much as you want about regional and world wars. They were behind World War I, when they were able to destroy the Islamic Caliphate, making financial gains and controlling resources. They obtained the Balfour Declaration, formed the League of Nations through which they could rule the world. They were behind World War II, through which they made huge financial gains by trading in armaments, and paved the way for the establishment of their state. It was they who instigated the replacement of the League of Nations with the United Nations and the Security Council to enable them to rule the world through them. There is no war going on anywhere, without having their finger in it.4
The 1988 Hamas covenant makes a good starting point for our purposes, not least because of the refreshing openness with which it parades views that in the West tend, except in the relative anonymity of the street or social media, to be expressed only in ways designed to disguise their real nature. The above passage from Article 22 serves to illustrate, with bracing directness, the bulk of what we shall find in this book to be leading components of antisemitism considered not as a mere matter of personal contempt or dislike but as a body of pseudo-explanatory theory capable of directing the political outlook of believers.
First, it asserts the Jews to be the deliberate authors of evil on a world scale. In this case, it construes them as the unique and sole cause of every war and every revolution that has taken place since 1793. Second, it takes Jews to be conspiratorially organized in the pursuit of these appalling aims. It assumes there to exist, in other words, a coherent system of Jewish “control” extending across the whole world. Third, it asserts this system of control to be occult, wrapped in a degree of secrecy sufficient to render it in practice utterly inscrutable and hence inviolable, operating beneath or “behind” all the apparently (but only apparently) non-Jewish institutions, great and small, from the media to the United Nations to the Lions Club, that appear (but only appear) each to exercise an influence independent of the others over what happens in the world. This extraordinary web of Jewish influence is exercised through the mysterious power of money. This makes it terrifyingly opaque to any form of scrutiny available to non-Jews and thus to any form of control that might be exercised over Jewish power by non-Jewish political institutions. All of these (except, inexplicably, for those constituted by the antisemite and his friends) are anyway themselves totally under the control of the Jews. Fourth, the passage powerfully conveys the impression that the world would be to all intents and purposes perfect—no wars, no revolutions, the Islamic Caliphate that expired at the end of World War I still in existence—if only the Jews did not exist. That, together with the first three claims, strictly entails the remaining contention of this type of antisemitism: that the only viable way of restoring the world to that happy state is to remove, to eliminate, in the last analysis to exterminate the Jewish people in its entirety.
EUROPEAN ECHOES
The Hamas charter of 1988, echoing in detail as it does the main claims of prewar Nazi antisemitism, might seem so extreme in this respect as to justify the consoling belief that antisemitism—at least that kind of antisemitism—is essentially dead in Europe.
That would be a mistake. In 2003, the European Union (EU) commissioned Gallup to carry out a public opinion poll aimed at discovering what European citizens considered to be the main threat to world peace. The results were startling enough to cause concern around the world:
A Flash Eurobarometer survey carried out in October 2003 for the European Commission in the fifteen member states of the EU found that nearly 60 percent of European citizens believe Israel poses the biggest threat to world peace. Iran is considered the second biggest threat, North Korea the third and the United States the fourth. The survey was carried out by EOS Gallup Europe.
The European Commission survey asked the public in all 15 member states to look at a list of countries and say which they considered potential threats to peace. Israel was selected by a majority in almost all the EU member states, with 74% of Dutch citizens putting the country at the top of the list as a threat to peace and 69% of Austrian citizens. Italy is the only country where opinions are divided with 48% of respondents confirming that they perceive Israel as a threat to peace in the world and 46% of the opposite opinion.
In all member states, with the exception of Italy, the majority of citizens believe Israel presents a threat to peace in the world with “yes” results in the EU as a whole as 59%. Iran, North Korea and America were all selected by 53% as a threat. The survey also listed Iraq, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Pakistan, China and Russia as potential threats.5
What makes these results startling is the extent to which they reveal European opinion to be in accord, in certain important respects, with the outlook so ingenuously presented in Article 22 of the 1988 Hamas covenant. It is not clear from the terms of the Eurobarometer poll whether what was “deemed … a threat to world peace” was, in the minds of the assenting 59 percent, the policies of the government of Israel or the very existence of the State of Israel itself. Given the democratic cast of Israeli politics, however, that is perhaps a distinction without a difference.
Either way, to consider “Israel” the single most important threat to world peace is, necessarily, to consider it a very considerable force for evil in the world. While some Jews on the left share this view, a large number of Jews do not. It is in any case a commonly held view that most, if not all, Jews support Israel. It follows that it is a very short step from considering Israel to be the main threat to world peace to regarding Jews in general as supporters of evil—or at the very least, as people who place Jewish interests above the interests of humankind at large.
It follows that for those Europeans who view Israel as the chief threat to world peace, the general support for Israel manifested by a number of Western nations, with the United States at their head, cannot but seem intrinsically puzzling. The puzzle would be easily solved if one could regard the United States as acting in this respect not in the interests of its non-Jewish citizens but at the behest of an absurdly minuscule but nevertheless wealthy and entrenched Jewish lobby, conspiratorially active behind the scenes of conventional politics. And, indeed, suggestions of this kind have been, and still are, widely promoted by at least notionally respectable voices in the West.6 For those with any clear sense of the evils of war, and the importance of avoiding it, the conclusion to be drawn from these considerations can only be the one drawn by the authors of the Hamas covenant—and for that matter, as we noted in the introduction by a senior French diplomat—that the world would be a much better, because a much safer, place if only the Jews and their wretched national state did not exist. The eliminationist consequences of this conclusion are too volcanic in their implications to be explicitly stated or examined in the West—at present. Nevertheless, they hang in the air.
Setting the 2003 Eurobarometer poll and Article 22 of the 1988 Hamas charter alongside each other reveals a further characteristic of antisemitism, shared by all versions of it in all ages. The beliefs on which it rests and in which it trades are one and all delusive. Not only that, they are delusive in the more radical of two senses attaching to that term. Someone may be deluded in the sense that he or she believes something that might have been true but happens not to be true. Thus, I may deludedly believe that my glasses are at my bedside. And indeed they might well have been, although in fact they are on the kitchen table, where I have quite forgotten having left them earlier in the day. More seriously, someone may be deluded in the second of my two senses, in that he or she believes something that could not possibly be the case. This is the condition of those who believe the world to be flat or hollow, either possibility being inconsistent with elementary and exhaustively confirmed laws of physics. The philosopher J. L. Austin caught the distinction between the two types of delusion in a happy phrase when he spoke of its being “plain boring” to hear, from certain philosophers, “the constant repetition of things that are not true, and sometimes not even faintly sensible.”7 The beliefs cherished by antisemites, like those cherished by flat-earthers and hollow-earthers, fall characteristically into the second category—that of the not only false but also “not even faintly sensible.”
A case in point is that of the celebrated blood libel, the medieval belief that Jews, as a matter of religious duty, are constrained to abduct and kill gentile children in order to add their blood to the dough of the Passover matzo (accusations of this kind were brought in law as late as 1911).8 While an individual Jewish lunatic, or for that matter a gentile one, might do such a thing, it is not something that Jews might do as a matter of religious duty, for the simple reason that the consumption of blood, from any source and in any form, is expressly forbidden to observant Jews by the laws of kashruth (the dietary laws). Explaining the disappearance of a gentile child by suggesting that Jews might have killed the child in order to mix its blood with the Passover matzo is thus on a par with explaining the disappearance of a cow by suggesting that Hindus might have slaughtered it in order to make a religious offering of roast beef in the temple. These are not things that “might have happened, though thank goodness they have not.” The belief that either even might have occurred is a delusion in the second of the above two senses: a mere confusion of thought, a maggot of the mind.
The same is true of the central contention of Article 22 of the Hamas charter, that the Jews control every apparently non-Jewish institution in the world, from the United Nations to the Rotary Club, and do so in the service of an organized pursuit of world domination. One might argue against these concerns that the Jews, of all people, given their general character, hardly seem best placed to conduct a world conspiracy of the kind envisaged. For one thing, such a project would require, on the part of those conducting it, an unusual degree of willingness to subordinate rationally grounded dissent to the demands of political unity, and such willingness is not something that, with the best will in the world, one readily associates with Jews. “Argument is the life of Judaism,” say the rabbis, to which the Jewish man in the street notoriously responds, spreading his hands, “Two Jews, three opinions.” But to argue in that way would be tacitly to grant to the authors of Article 22 that if they are deluded, it is only in the first sense: to grant, in other words that it remains a real possibility, though one happily unrealized on grounds of incapacity, that the Jews might be in secret control of the world. But why should anyone grant the reality of such a possibility when plainly it savors of lunacy! The Jews are, indeed, not in control of the world but that they are not is not a mere consequence of their not being up to the job. Rather, it is a consequence of the evident fact that nobody, no nation, no state, no movement—not the United States, not international socialism, nor anybody else—could conceivably be up to such a job. Humanity is manifestly too diverse, economically, politically, socially, and ideologically, for any unified control of it to be feasible. In even envisaging such a possibility, we, like the authors of Article 22, have strayed into cloud cuckoo land.
What about the famous Eurobarometer poll that created such a stir in the world press in 2003? Might the majorities that fingered Israel as the greatest threat to peace in the world have been, and be, then and now, right about that?
One needs for a start to ask what the vague phrase “threat to peace in the world” is supposed to mean. Are we talking about peace in the Middle East, or are we speculating about World War III?
Let us begin with peace in the region. In fact, the Middle East has been convulsed by an endless series of wars since 1948. Some of these have involved Israel, but these, as I will argue in chapters 7 and 8, have been brief, minor, and from Israel’s standpoint, overwhelmingly defensive in character. The others, all very much more enduring and far more serious both in terms of loss of life and destruction of property and infrastructure—from the Iran-Iraq War of 1980, which lasted eight years and devastated both countries, to the more recent but equally enduring and even more destructive wars in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen—have arisen entirely out of conflict between the major Muslim regional powers, motivated in part by rival territorial claims and in part by the religious conflict between Sunni and Shi‘a Islam, and having in either case virtually nothing to do with Israel.
Israel, in short, has hardly shown itself in practice to constitute even a major, let alone the major, threat to peace in the region. And this is hardly to be wondered at, given that the main object of the State of Israel since its foundation has been to provide a safe space within stable frontiers for Jews (not to mention several other groups recently subject to abuse of quasi-genocidal proportions under neighboring regimes) to inhabit in freedom from persecution. This has been manifest in the readiness of Israel to exchange land for peace—by the withdrawal from the Sinai Peninsula after the 1967 war, in the unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip under Ariel Sharon, and in the readiness of Israeli politicians to engage in repeated negotiations aiming at the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank. A state with as its main aim security within any borders capable of securing an agreed and enforceable peace can hardly be said intelligibly to “threaten peace” with its neighbors—unless of course its neighbors would wish, if they could, to destroy it. The latter condition certainly holds true in Israel’s case; however, that can scarcely justify blaming Israel for any resulting breaches of the peace.
Leaving aside war and peace in the region, then, are there any grounds for crediting the existence of a Jewish state in Israel with the potential to set off World War III?
Serious debate on that question has mainly concerned Israel’s nuclear options. Israel is widely believed to have possessed an effective nuclear deterrent since just before the 1967 war. Israeli government policy, however, has always been to neither confirm nor deny that it possesses nuclear weapons, although it does affirm that it will never be the first to use them. The most serious and widely believed book on the issue is Avner Cohen’s 1998 Israel and the Bomb.9 Cohen, who has written widely on a range of moral and political issues concerning nuclear deterrence and proliferation, argues against Israel’s policy of secrecy concerning its nuclear abilities, on the grounds that it is undemocratic, violates the public’s right to know, undermines the principle of public accountability, and hinders the effort to achieve internationally recognized and accepted norms for the control of nuclear weapons. However, even were one to admit the force of these charges, they by no means suffice to identify Israel’s possession of nuclear weapons as any more likely to lead to World War III than the possession of nuclear weapons by other countries, such as Russia, the United States, Britain, France, China, India, Pakistan, and North Korea—the last three of which are not even signatories to the Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1968–70.
That is not, perhaps, the end of the matter. In 1991, the celebrated Washington-based investigative journalist Seymour M. Hersh published a book called The Samson Option, largely based on information supplied by Ari Ben-Menashe, a former Israeli government employee who claimed to have worked for Israeli intelligence.10 It explores the idea that Israel might be ready and willing to launch a devastating nuclear strike on an enemy state, possibly Iran, in the event of its suffering an attack so great as to threaten its survival as a Jewish state. The thought expressed in the book’s title is that Israel would in this respect be harking back to the celebration, in the Book of Judges, of Samson’s final act of pulling down the pillars of the temple of Dagon, crushing both himself and all the Philistines.
In 2011, the same idea was explored again by the American journalist Ron Rosenbaum in a book titled How the End Begins: The Road to a Nuclear World War III.11 The tone and the quality of Rosenbaum’s reasoning can be gauged by the following extract: “A Samson option is made possible by the fact that even if Israel has been obliterated, it can be sure that its dolphin-class nuclear submarines cruising the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean, and the Persian Gulf, at depths impervious to detection, can carry out a genocidal-scale retaliation virtually anywhere in the world. … [The policy] presupposes a rage on the part of post-second Holocaust survivors in possession of nuclear weapons determined to reduce the entire temple of civilisation to ashes for having complacently allowed two Holocausts to be inflicted on our people.”12
The second half of this passage argues that the policy outlined in the first “presupposes” a willingness to “reduce the entire temple of civilization to ashes,” that in turn can only issue from a rage so great as to be peculiar to those who have survived a Holocaust and hence to be something that only a Jew could possibly feel. This, of course, echoes several themes of antisemitism as a pseudo-explanatory theory: that the Jews are a uniquely vengeful people, that Jews care nothing for the sufferings of non-Jews, and so on.
But this is absurd, because the policy complained of has nothing to do with rage of any kind, let alone the rage, if such there be, peculiar to Holocaust survivors. The possession of some means of ensuring the possibility of delivering a devastating blow to a nuclear aggressor even after a first strike by that aggressor is essential to the policy of mutual assured deterrence, which is why nuclear powers, such as the United States, Britain, France, and Russia, take steps, including the deployment of nuclear-armed submarines, to secure the possibility of such a blow independently of the continued territorial integrity of the nation wielding it. That is just a feature of where we sit in the modern world. If nuclear deterrence is to work, that is how it must be organized. To give a spuriously Jewish tinge to the policy by labeling it a “Samson option” is to employ the most debased kind of political rhetoric to mislead those whose critical powers lag behind their credulity.
Where does that leave Israel’s putative ability to start a World War III, assuming that to be the issue on which the 2003 Eurobarometer poll was endeavoring to test opinion? It leaves it nowhere for a very simple reason. A World War is by definition a war between major powers. Israel, like all the other actors in the continuing drama of Middle Eastern politics, is a very minor power indeed. How, after all, could a nation of seven million, occupying a tiny scrap of land at the far end of the Mediterranean, pose at any time even a threat, let alone the main threat to world peace, if by that phrase one means to invoke the possibility of a World War III? Posing such threats is the privilege of major players in the game of world politics. One needs to be Russia, or China, or the United States to pose in those terms a “threat to world peace.” The minnows of the world order—Denmark, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Israel—while they may be in a position to defend themselves against aggression (as Switzerland and Israel, for example, certainly are) are not in any kind of position to pose a threat to anyone: they simply lack the firepower (and if it comes to that, the resources of cannon fodder) available to more populous nations. The nations of the Middle East have in any case been for two centuries, and are at present, subject to extensive interference by major powers in their tormented affairs. That interference has caused untold suffering to the inhabitants of the region. But it has not led to any major conflict between the major powers concerned—at present the United States and Russia—and shows no sign of doing so.
Once again, in short, we are dealing with a set of implicitly antisemitic claims based, as such claims always appear to be, not merely on factual error but on a rooted inability to distinguish between what is factually possible and what Austin called “not even faintly sensible.” Such claims deal in dreamwork: more specifically, in the dream that the wounds of an imperfect world might suddenly and magically be comprehensively healed, if only the Jews could somehow be got rid of.
A QUALIFIED RECANTATION
In 2017, Hamas issued a new charter13 that contains nothing—or almost nothing—corresponding to Article 22 of the 1988 charter. This matters little for the concerns of the present chapter, since antisemitic theorizing along much the same lines, as we know from the work of Matthias Küntzel and others able to read Arabic- and Farsi-language sources, is nowadays entirely commonplace throughout the Middle East. I chose Article 28 of the 1988 Charter for discussion merely because it offers a convenient English-language source for such thinking. It is interesting, however, that what has replaced it in the 2017 charter corresponds closely to the current discourse of Western “anti-Zionism.” Central to that discourse, as we saw in the introduction, is the idea that hatred of Zionism and Zionists can be sharply distinguished from hatred of Jews and that only the latter constitutes “antisemitism.” Article 16 of the new charter reads: “Hamas affirms that its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion. Hamas does not wage a struggle against the Jews because they are Jewish but wages a struggle against the Zionists who occupy Palestine. Yet, it is the Zionists who constantly identify Judaism and the Jews with their own colonial project and illegal entity.”
The last sentence attempts to shift the blame for any idea that the Jews are responsible for the existence of Israel to the Zionists themselves. The suggestion here is that if there are Jews who accept in its entirety Hamas’s analysis of the origins and nature of Israel and are prepared to agree inter alia that “the Zionist project is a racist, aggressive, colonial and expansionist project based in seizing the properties of others” (Article 14), then Hamas has no quarrel with those Jews. This stance, as we shall see later, has been characteristic of Western antisemitism since at least the French Revolution and remains popular on the left today. However, it is clearly an assertion of Jew hatred, not a renunciation of it.
It is not the case, anyway, that the vision of the Jews as secretly in charge of the world, and as capable of employing vast hidden powers to subvert non-Jewish interests, so clearly set out in the 1988 charter, has been entirely expunged from the 2017 version. In Article 15, we learn that “the Zionist project” is not confined to the setting-up of a Jewish state in Palestine but threatens the peace and security, not only of the entire Muslim world but also that of humanity in general. The article reads: “The Zionist project does not target the Palestinian people alone; it is the enemy of the Arab and Islamic Ummah posing a grave threat to its security and interests. It is also hostile to the Ummah’s aspirations for unity, renaissance and liberation and has been the major source of its troubles. The Zionist project also poses a danger to international security and peace and to mankind and its interests and stability.”
The parallels between this and Article 28 of the 1988 version make it tempting to suggest that “the Zionist project” is here merely functioning as politically correct code for “the Jews.” That impression is confirmed when one learns from Article 17 of the 2017 version, ostensibly containing a further attempt to distance Hamas from the antisemitism so roundly embraced in the 1988 charter, that the Zionist project is able to summon the Western powers to its assistance. “Hamas is of the view that the Jewish problem, anti-Semitism and the persecution of the Jews are phenomena fundamentally linked to European history and not to the history of the Arabs and the Muslims or to their heritage. The Zionist movement, which was able with the help of Western powers to occupy Palestine, is the most dangerous form of settlement occupation, which has already disappeared from much of the world and must disappear from Palestine.”
The 2017 charter does not, as the 1988 version did, call for the slaughter of Jews wherever they live in the world. However, the difficulty of establishing who is a Zionist (Any Jew who supports Israel? Any non-Jew who supports Israel?) makes it difficult to establish precisely who remains outside the range of the license to kill claimed in Article 25 of the 2017 charter: “Resisting the occupation with all means and methods is a legitimate right guaranteed by divine laws and by international norms and laws. At the heart of these lies armed resistance, which is regarded as the strategic choice for protecting the principles and the rights of the Palestinian people.”
“All means and methods” have, as actually implemented, included successful attempts on civilian lives by means ranging from rocket attacks from the Gaza zone, suicide bombings, the use of cars and lorries to run down pedestrians in the street, casual stabbings, and more. All of these, according to “international laws and norms,” constitute war crimes. However, the 2017 charter offers no prospect of these ending at any point short of the complete destruction of Israel “from the river to the sea.” International attempts to resolve the crisis have of course since 1948 involved the creation of a Palestinian state coexisting with Israel. Hamas, though in the 2017 charter it professes itself prepared to accept such a state—described in Article 20 in terms that could hardly survive any actual negotiation—makes it clear that it would regard such a development not as a solution but at most as a halfway house to the total destruction of Israel.
Hamas believes that no part of the land of Palestine shall be compromised or conceded, irrespective of the causes, the circumstances and the pressures and no matter how long the occupation lasts. Hamas rejects any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea. However, without compromising its rejection of the Zionist entity and without relinquishing any Palestinian rights, Hamas considers the establishment of a fully sovereign and independent Palestinian state, with Jerusalem as its capital along the lines of the 4th of June 1967, with the return of the refugees and the displaced to their homes from which they were expelled, to be a formula of national consensus.
Reading through this new charter, it is difficult not to agree with “Robert F.,” who posted the following comment on the Middleeasteye.net website:
I suppose the major difference between this Hamas Charter and the previous one is that the previous one called for the slaughter of the Jews no matter where they live, whether in Israel or anywhere else in the world. It was profoundly anti-Semitic. It was profoundly Nazi.
The present new Hamas Charter does not contain this language. But the omission is in the interest of legitimating themselves in the world of diplomacy. Nothing has changed. They still educate their children to hate and murder Jews. However, Hamas has learned a valuable lesson from the Europeans. If you want to hate Jews, call them “Zionists” rather than Jews and it becomes politically correct in some circles.
We shall have occasion in later chapters to reflect at length on the pros and cons of his concluding remarks.
NOTES
1. I really do mean “Islamist” and not “Islamic.” Those who think that to be a Muslim is necessarily to be infected with Jew hatred would do well to spend a little time in the company of websites such as http://arabsforisrael.blogspot.co.uk. A Google search for “Muslim/Arab friends of Israel” will turn up many more such sites representing both groups and individuals.
2. Küntzel 2007, 7–8.
3. Rich 2016, 174–75.
4. Transcribed from the library of documents in law, history, and diplomacy maintained by Avalon Project of the Yale Law School and available at their website: http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/hamas.asp.
5. Arjan El Fassed, “EU Poll: ‘Israel Poses Biggest Threat to World Peace,’” Electronic Intifada, November 3, 2003, https://electronicintifada.net/content/eu-poll-israel-poses-biggest-threat-world-peace/4860.
6. See, for instance, John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008).
7. Austin 1962, 5.
8. For an excellent recent study of the long history of the blood libel, see Rose 2015.
9. Cohen 1998.
10. Hersh 1991.
11. Rosenbaum 2011.
12. Rosenbaum 2011, 141–42.
13. The 2017 version of the charter is available in full at the website of Middle East Eye: http://www.middleeasteye.net/news/hamas-charter-1637794876.
