Day: October 10, 2023

Have you ever read the Hamas charter?

It’s worth taking a break from the unrelenting, tragic news to better understand the founding document of the group whose attack plunged Israelis and Palestinians into their current hell. 

Founding documents are aspirational. It took well over 100 years for the United States to begin to live up to “All men are created equal.” And Israel, even within its pre-1967 borders, is still lurching toward upholding “the full social and political equality of all its citizens without distinction of race, creed or sex” promised in its Declaration of Independence. 

Similarly, a close reading of Hamas’s charter, which was created in 1987 and revised in 2017, explains a lot about its decision to slaughter innocent Jewish civilians, and unleash a reaction that has inevitably claimed innocent Palestinian lives as well.

Hamas was founded in 1987 as an Islamic fundamentalist party — an offshoot, really, of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood. In 2006, a year after Israel withdrew its armed forces and settlers from the Gaza Strip in what is widely known as the disengagement, Hamas won legislative elections, beating the rival Fatah party of Mahmoud Abbas, 74 seats to 45. A year later, it launched a bloody military campaign against Fatah, and took complete control of Gaza. 

After Hamas’s takeover, Israel imposed a blockade on Gaza, controlling travel and trade in and out of the coastal enclave. Hamas, which the United States, Israel, the European Union, Canada, Egypt, and Japan designate as a terrorist organization, had by 2006 conducted terror attacks in Israel that killed 506 and wounded thousands. After the blockade, the number of attacks plummeted. 

But Hamas has never changed its aspirations to wrest control of all of Israel by killing its Jews— a goal you will see clearly when you read the Hamas charter, as I did on Tuesday. 

The first version of the charter, adopted in 1988, begins with a preamble. Only instead of “We-the-People,” it reads: “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.”

The 36 articles that follow are buttressed by quotes from the Quran and lessons of the Prophet Muhammed … as interpreted by the militant Islamists of Hamas. 

After establishing the primacy of Islam, the charter pivots to removing Jews from historic Palestine. “Nothing in nationalism is more significant or deeper than in the case when an enemy should tread Moslem land,” states Article 12. 

The charter’s description of Jews echoes millennia of antisemitic tropes.

“With their money, they took control of the world media,” reads Article 22, “news agencies, the press, publishing houses, broadcasting stations, and others.”

The 9000-word document blames Jews for the French and Communist revolutions, World War I and II, the Rotary Club and the United Nations, “ to enable them to rule the world through them.”

“There is no war going on anywhere,” it reads, “without having their finger in it.”

The charter directs the killing of Jews, drawing on a hadith, or prophetic saying: “The Day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight Jews and kill them. Then, the Jews will hide behind rocks and trees, and the rocks and trees will cry out: ‘O Moslem, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him.’”

In 2017, Hamas issued a revised charter, which softens its Islamist rhetoric somewhat. While maintaining the right to Palestine “from the river to the sea,” this new version accepts the idea of a Palestinian state in territories occupied by Israel since the 1967 War — the so-called two state solution. 

Analysts say the group’s continued loss of popularity among Gazans — even in 2006 it won only a plurality of the total votes cast, 44% — forced the changes.

The new charter states that Hamas’s conflict is with Zionism, not Jews.

The post The truth of Hamas is in its charter appeared first on The Forward.