Mick Hartley

Jeffrey Herf on the extraordinary alliance between the western left and the extreme far right doctrines of Hamas – a toxic fusion of Nazism and Islamism – and the role played by the revised 2017 Hamas charter. 

The mass murders by Hamas on October 7 were the outcome of its core ideology, clearly expressed in its founding charter of 1988. That “ideology of mass murder” has its origins in the fusion of Nazism and Islamism that first took place in the 1930s and 40s, and then persisted in the Islamist politics of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, of which Hamas is an offshoot. Hamas’ ability to gain supporters, first in the universities, now in the streets, rests as well on its revised charter of 2017, which draws on the anti-Zionism of the secular Left. Hence a close reading of the revised charter, whose language and arguments now echo on campuses and in the streets, is in order.

The authors of the Hamas charter of 1988 were explicit about their ideological connections to the radical antisemitic conspiracy theories that had emerged in 20th-century Europe, and to the virulent hatred of Jews, Judaism, and therefore Israel that they derived from their anti-modernist Islamist interpretation of Islam. Yet the deadly implications of this document received far too little attention in the mainstream media of the West, despite being easily accessible online in English and German translations. Instead, an objectively pro-Hamas Left began developing among academics in Europe, Britain, and the United States, as became apparent in 2014 during one of Hamas’ attacks on Israel. They found themselves in the peculiar position as leftists of repeating Hamas’ arguments.

They did so because they had adopted the view of Israel that had become the common coin of the international Left since the 1960s. According to that view, the Jewish state is in reality a colonialist and racist endeavor built on the expulsion of the indigenous population in 1948. Relying on that profound misinterpretation of the events surrounding Israel’s founding, they were willing to make common cause with an organization that is profoundly hostile to the modernist values that had long been associated with at least some segments of leftist politics.

Seventy years of Soviet and Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) propaganda mischaracterizing Zionism and Israel, equally unbalanced UN resolutions, and New Left romance about third-world revolutions had placed Israel on the “wrong” side and the Palestinians on the “right” side of the global divide between oppressors and oppressed. In the course of doing so, a distinctive leftist form of antisemitism, expressed in the language of anti-Zionism and support for armed attacks on Israel, fostered an opening to support not only the secular PLO but also Hamas. In Britain, that support and leftist antisemitism gained political influence in 2015 when Jeremy Corbyn won election as the leader of the Labour Party. This bizarre fusion of the Islamist Right and the secular Left was the first time since the Hitler-Stalin pact that leftist organizations made common cause with a movement of the extreme right, and the only time I can recall when they supported a group rooted in religious fanaticism. Their shared antagonism to Israel surmounted the contrasting ideological starting points.

Read on. The revised 2017 charter allowed gullible western sympathisers, already primed to hate the Jewish state, to believe that Hamas was just anti-Zionist, and not at all antisemitic. It was, of course, nonsense.

For decades there has been far too little public discussion in the world’s democracies about the echoes of Nazism and persistence of Islamist-based religious hatred that are evident in Hamas’ key documents. The authors of its 2017 charter drew on the secular language of the global left to obscure its reactionary, antisemitic, and fundamentalist essence, but the reality of a religious war against the Jews remained central to what Hamas was and is. All three faces of antisemitism—right, left, and Islamist—are evident in the 2017 charter just as they were in the 1988 one. On October 7, 2023, those religious and secular hatreds exploded with a barbarity that surprised only those who had not looked directly at the truth about Hamas’ war against the Jews, which was sitting in plain sight in these two evil documents.