Mick Hartley

Jeffrey Herf at Quillette on The Ideology of Mass Murder:

The terrorist invasion of Israel by Hamas on October 7th, 2023, is the worst instance of mass murder of Jewish civilians since the Holocaust. Its barbarity may be shocking to many observers, but it will not have surprised those familiar with the ideology of the perpetrators. This latest outburst of violence is the logical outcome of the Jew-hatred that Hamas has openly expressed since 1988, and it rests on a strand of Islamic antisemitism that emerged in the early 20th century and fueled the Arab war of rejection in 1948. The ideology that inflames the Hamas leadership was the product of the fateful fusion of Nazism and Islamism in the 1930s and 1940s, and it has always rejected the legitimacy of a Jewish state (or indeed any polity that isn’t explicitly Islamist) anywhere in what, before 1948, had been British Mandate Palestine.

Hamas’s decision to launch this extensive attack calls to mind the efforts of previous terrorist actors who sought, sometimes with success, to sabotage diplomatic efforts that could lead to negotiated settlements of longstanding conflict. Yet the cruelty of this latest operation—murdering young people at a music event, executing whole families in their homes, seizing hostages—demonstrates that Jew-hatred has deranged the minds of the killers. Short-term political calculations may be helpful in explaining the timing of individual attacks, but the history of Islamist antisemitism is critical to understanding the genocidal racism that supports Hamas’s longterm eliminationist goals.

It is the intellectual and cultural historian’s task to recall the ideological passions driving Islamist behavior. Recollection is not difficult. Hamas considers its Jew-hatred to be a virtue and has repeatedly unified ideology and policy in the wars it has launched against Israel. Over several decades, the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) has collected a vast archive of texts, television programs, radio broadcasts, and social-media content that provides copious evidence of Hamas’s Jew-hatred. Likewise, the Middle East Forum run by Daniel Pipes has examined Hamas over many years. Though these resources are readily available to anyone with an internet connection, there has been widespread reluctance, particularly in liberal and progressive media circles, to pay attention to what Hamas officials actually say.

Well indeed. It's all there in plain sight, but in liberal and progressive circles the stirring talk of anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism, and the righteous fixation on "Palestinian rights", has drowned out any concerns about Islamic antisemitism. Hint: this isn't being done in the name of Palestinian political liberation; it's being done in the name of Islam.

Meir Litvak, chair of the Department of Middle Eastern and African Studies at Tel Aviv University, has published extensively in scholarly journals on the Islamization of the Arab-Israeli conflict, with careful attention to the Arabic and Farsi language sources. In his recent article on “The Antisemitism of Hamas” in the Palestine-Israel Journal, Litvak writes:

Hamas emphasizes the “Islamic essence” of the Palestinian cause. As such, the struggle is portrayed as an unbridgeable dichotomy between two absolutes: a “war of religion and faith,” between Islam and Judaism and between Muslims and Jews, rather than one between Palestinians and Israelis or Zionists. It is a historical, religious, cultural, and existential conflict between the true religion, which supersedes all previous religions, i.e., Islam, and the abrogated superseded religion, Judaism.

Litvak, like [Matthias] Küntzel, interprets the ideology and actions of Hamas as a war of religion, and therefore an absolutist remnant of pre-modern politics fully at odds with the compromises of political and cultural modernity. In a similar vein, Paul Berman’s important books Terror and Liberalism (2003) and Flight of the Intellectuals (2010) drew attention to the totalitarian ideology that fueled the attacks of 9/11 and the Second Intifada. Much of this body of scholarship and intellectual commentary lies firmly in the liberal tradition, but it has often been ignored by those reluctant to probe too closely into the nature of Islamist doctrines and politics. Instead, liberal and progressive outlets have attempted to explain Palestinian terror as an instrument of postcolonial thought and anti-imperialist resistance, thereby transforming an ideology of the reactionary far-Right into an ideology of the revolutionary Left.

Worth reading in full.