Mick Hartley

Alaa al-Ameri (the pen name of a British-Libyan writer) at Spiked:

Hamas’s strategy is underpinned by a key assumption – namely, that ‘the Palestinian cause’ is far more important than Palestinian people themselves. Islamists murder Israeli civilians in order to generate an Israeli backlash that leads to Palestinian casualties. This, in turn, will generate widespread condemnation of Israel. This is the behaviour of a sacrificial cult, and members of the Western media are fuelling it.

Indeed, the Western media are already peddling one of Hamas’s standard lines – namely, that its actions are born out of desperation. But that is misleading. Hamas’s total rejection of Israel’s existence is not a recent stance adopted in the face of Israel’s brutal treatment of Gaza. On the contrary, Islamist hostility towards Jews in the Middle East predates the founding of the Jewish state in 1948, let alone the occupation of Gaza in 1967.

Some Arab leaders in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were willing to compromise and work with the early Zionist movement. But some of the founders of the modern Palestinian-nationalist movement were different. Inspired by virulent anti-Semitism, they were intent on preventing and reversing all Jewish migration to the region.

Take Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem during the 1920s and 1930s. With the rise of Nazi Germany, al-Husseini became a devoted supporter and ally of Adolf Hitler. His aim was not simply to send Jews back to Europe, but to bring the Nazi Holocaust to the Middle East….

While al-Husseini is only a marginal figure in the history of the Nazi Holocaust, he was among the most important Nazi propagandists in the Arab world. During the 1930s and 1940s, he played a major role in developing the modern Islamist movement, and in embedding anti-Semitism as a cornerstone of postcolonial Arab identity.

After the defeat of the Axis powers in 1945, al-Husseini was detained in France before escaping to Egypt in 1946. Well after the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps had been publicly exposed, and while the Nuremberg war-crimes trials (which al-Husseini was arguably trying to evade) were still ongoing, Hassan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, welcomed al-Husseini to Egypt. Al-Banna described al-Husseini as a ‘hero who challenged an empire and fought Zionism’. ‘Germany and Hitler are gone, but Amin al-Husseini will continue the struggle’, he added.

Islamism and anti-Israeli rejectionism are therefore inseparably linked. Hamas is effectively enacting the central aims of an anti-Jewish agenda that predates the establishment of Israel by decades. And incredibly, it is this agenda that self-styled ‘anti-imperialists’ in the West have attached themselves to….

Hamas plays on the Western media’s obsession with Israel. It instigated its latest attacks in the knowledge that the resulting narrative war would be fought by others on its behalf. It is well past time that the true nature of Hamas’s ideology was properly understood and rejected in the West and the Arab world alike. Not only for the sake of Israeli civilians, but also for the sake of the Palestinians, who continue to be sacrificed to Hamas’s brutal and barbarous aims.

German historian Matthias Küntzel's recent book Nazis, Islamic Antisemitism and the Middle East covers some of this territory. See here.