Blaming the Jews. Bernard Harrison
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