Jeffrey Herf
October 7: The Problem of Underestimation Yet Again
The mass murders, rapes, and kidnapping of Israeli men, women, and children by Hamas on October 7, 2023 were a logical outcome of ideas clearly expressed in the Hamas Charter of 1988 and in its programmatic statement in 2017, in which Hamas reiterated its determination to attempt to destroy the state of Israel by force of arms. Just as Hitler’s contemporaries underestimated the seriousness and centrality of his Jew-hatred, so much of the world, and even the government of Israel, underestimated Hamas’s determination to unite an evil ideology with murderous practice. Just as Hitler, in his infamous 1939 “prophecy,” stated his intentions to exterminate the Jewish race in Europe, Hamas stated in 1988 that its interpretation of the religion of Islam justified its effort to destroy the state of Israel by force of arms. The blunder of underestimation was bad enough in the 1930s. Almost a century later, it is apparent that many have learned too little from that bitter experience.
On January 5, 1993, The Washington Post published five paragraphs from the 36 articles (9,000 words) of the Hamas Charter (“For the Record: From the Hamas Charter”). The first mention of the Charter in The New York Times appeared on April 16, 2009 in a very good 220 word letter to the editor by the late Israel political theorist, Shlomo Avineri (“What the Hamas Charter Says About Jews”). In the years since, The Times has not published extensive sections of the Charter, nor has it offered its readers an article that fully presented its core arguments and language.
In 2003, in the aftermath of the 9/11 Al Qaeda attacks, ca ira, a small, left-leaning press in Germany published Matthias Küntzel’s Jihad und Judenhass: Über den neuen jüdischen. As far as I know, Küntzel’s book was the first extended description of the Charter and its significance by any scholar in Israel, Europe, or the United States. He described the Charter as “probably the most important programmatic document of contemporary Islamism” (109). In 2008, the “Avalon Project: Documents in Law, History and Diplomacy” at the Yale law library posted the English translation of the Charter’s full text on its website. In 2010, Meir Litvak, a historian at Tel Aviv University, published a valuable exposition, “‘Martyrdom is Life’: Jihad and Martyrdom in the Ideology of Hamas” in the specialist journal, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism. Judging from published articles, this “most important document of contemporary Islamism” aroused little interest among journalists, human rights organizations, or most scholars focused on the Middle East, Israel, and Jewish Studies. In the vast effort of the “war on terror,” officials in the Bush and Obama administrations did not draw public attention to the Hamas Charter and its renewal of a war against the Jews.
The lack of attention in the Academy to the Charter’s Islamic dimension of Jew-hatred and hatred of Israel found a counterpart in the paucity of attention in public discussion. Indeed, with the coining of the term “Islamophobia,” those who dared to examine the topic risked being accused of racism. Nevertheless, the presence of the full text on the prominent Avalon Project website meant that this crucial document was readily available to English readers across the world.
The 1988 Hamas Charter interpreted the destruction of the state of Israel as an Islamic religious obligation. It favorably quoted the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al-Banna, that “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it." The convergence of Jew-hatred and the goal of annihilating Israel was complete. “Our struggle against the Jews is very great and very serious.” Hamas “is but one squadron that should be supported by more and more squadrons from this vast Arab and Islamic world, until the enemy is vanquished, and Allah's victory is realized.” The Charter celebrated the Islam of the seventh century. “By adopting Islam as its way of life, the Movement goes back to the time of the birth of the Islamic message, of the righteous ancestor, for Allah is its target, the Prophet is its example and the Koran is its constitution.” Article Six stated that it strove “to raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine.” Article Seven described Hamas as “one of the links in the chain of the struggle against the Zionist invaders” of 1939, the war of 1948, and “the Jihad operations of the Moslem Brotherhood in 1968 and after”—that is, acts of terrorism. It celebrated the destruction of Israel as an apocalyptic, murderous theology. "The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.” In Article Eleven, the Charter asserted that “the land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf consecrated for future Moslem generations until Judgement Day. It, or any part of it, should not be squandered: it, or any part of it, should not be given up.” Its goal was to replace all of Israel with an Islamic state governed by Sharia law. Article Thirteen insisted that there was “no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals, and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors.” Jihad was a call for war and a justification of terrorism for which Hamas became famous in the 1990s.
Article Twenty-Two incorporated the secular antisemitic conspiracy theories of twentieth century Europe into a primarily Islamist text. The Jews:
"with their money took control of the world media, news agencies, the press, publishing houses, broadcasting stations, and others . . . stirred revolutions in various parts of the world with the purpose of achieving their interests and reaping the fruit therein . . . were behind the French Revolution, the Communist revolution and most of the revolutions we heard and hear about, here and there . . . formed secret societies, such as Freemasons, Rotary Clubs, the Lions and others in different parts of the world for the purpose of sabotaging societies and achieving Zionist interests . . . were able to control imperialistic countries and instigate them to colonize many countries in order to enable them to exploit their resources and spread corruption there . . . They were behind World War I, when they were able to destroy the Islamic Caliphate, making financial gains and controlling resources. They obtained the Balfour Declaration, formed the League of Nations through which they could rule the world. They were behind World War II, through which they made huge financial gains by trading in armaments and paved the way for the establishment of their state. It was they who instigated the replacement of the League of Nations with the United Nations and the Security Council to enable them to rule the world through them. There is no war going on anywhere, without having their finger in it."
In attributing sinister and vast powers to the Jews, Article Twenty-Two echoed the antisemitic conspiracy theories of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the propaganda of the Nazi regime. The idea that the Jews were the cause of World War II, which then “paved the way” to the establishment of Israel recalled Nazi Germany’s Arabic language radio broadcasts that asserted, for example, that “the Jews kindled this war [World War II] in the interest of Zionism” (Herf, Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009], 184). In 2009, I published Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World, a work that offered an unprecedented amount of evidence of the cultural fusion of Nazi and Islamist ideology during World War II and the Holocaust. The Nazi influences in the Hamas Charter of 1988 were now also visible to a scholarly and policy-making readership. Nevertheless, during the Hamas war of 2014 against Israel, judged by statements signed by left-leaning historians, an objectively pro-Hamas Left that echoed Hamas propaganda emerged in American academia (Herf, “A Pro-Hamas Left Emerges,” American Interest [August 26, 2014]).
In 2017, Hamas issued a statement that adopted more of the secular language of anti-Zionism made famous by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Yet this text remained true to the spirit of the founding Charter. It rejected “any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea.” In the same paragraph that included what became a famous chant, the authors inserted a phrase that convinced some journalists that Hamas had moderated its stance. It read, “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. If the “Zionist entity” is rejected and “Palestinian rights” as Hamas defined them could not be “relinquished,” and the refugees had to be returned to “their homes from which they were expelled,” the state of Israel would have to be destroyed. “Resisting the occupation with all means and methods” was not a reference to Israeli occupation of the West Bank but to the existence of Israel itself. Nevertheless, the statement of 2017 performed the magic trick of presenting this profoundly reactionary organization as the primary representative of the Palestinian people, serving as a cause celebre of the global Left.
Following its violent seizure of power in 2007, Hamas unified ideology and policy. Now it was not only a terrorist organization, but also a small dictatorship whose core purpose was to wage war against Israel. It killed or jailed Gazans, famously throwing some off the roofs of buildings, intimidated the press, controlled education, and imposed Sharia law. Rather than spending millions on improving the lives of Gaza’s civilians, it lavished huge sums on a stupendous construction project that built over 400 miles of tunnels designed to wage wars against Israel.
Although the key texts were available, and Hamas had become infamous for numerous acts of terror before October 7, the efforts of historians to make the ideology and policy of Hamas a center of discussion were unsuccessful. Instead, in the decades before October 7, the Academy was preoccupied with debates about Israel as a “settler-colonialist” or even “apartheid” regime. Antisemites have often asserted that persecution of Jews is a justified response to what they claim are the Jews’ own misdeeds. The reversal of perpetrator and victim has been a constant dynamic in the history of the longest hatred. This old habit of antisemitic thinking was at work in the lack of attention given to the connection between ideology and the actions of Hamas. In this sense, antisemitic ways of thinking played a major role in allowing Hamas to engage in the interrupted genocide of October 7. Having been silent about the threat, it was no surprise that, yet again, there were many who either celebrated or pointed to a “context” of Israeli sins that justified the aggression of that day. The years before, and the months since October 7, suggest that much of the Academy has learned little or learned the wrong lessons about antisemitism in Nazi Germany, World War II and the Holocaust, and their Islamist aftermath. For decades, historians of the Nazi era documented the disastrous underestimation of Nazi ideology and its radical Jew-hatred. Since the 1930s, and again since 1988, remnants of Nazism have been combined with Islamist hatred of Judaism, the Jews, and the state of Israel to produce a toxic form of radical Jew-hatred. October 7 has demonstrated that we are now living in the second era of underestimation of the longest hatred.
Jeffrey Herf is Distinguished University Professor of History, Emeritus, University of Maryland, College Park. His most recent publication is Three Faces of Antisemitism: Right, Left, and Islamist (New York: Routledge, 2024).
On January 5, 1993, The Washington Post published five paragraphs from the 36 articles (9,000 words) of the Hamas Charter (“For the Record: From the Hamas Charter”). The first mention of the Charter in The New York Times appeared on April 16, 2009 in a very good 220 word letter to the editor by the late Israel political theorist, Shlomo Avineri (“What the Hamas Charter Says About Jews”). In the years since, The Times has not published extensive sections of the Charter, nor has it offered its readers an article that fully presented its core arguments and language.
In 2003, in the aftermath of the 9/11 Al Qaeda attacks, ca ira, a small, left-leaning press in Germany published Matthias Küntzel’s Jihad und Judenhass: Über den neuen jüdischen. As far as I know, Küntzel’s book was the first extended description of the Charter and its significance by any scholar in Israel, Europe, or the United States. He described the Charter as “probably the most important programmatic document of contemporary Islamism” (109). In 2008, the “Avalon Project: Documents in Law, History and Diplomacy” at the Yale law library posted the English translation of the Charter’s full text on its website. In 2010, Meir Litvak, a historian at Tel Aviv University, published a valuable exposition, “‘Martyrdom is Life’: Jihad and Martyrdom in the Ideology of Hamas” in the specialist journal, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism. Judging from published articles, this “most important document of contemporary Islamism” aroused little interest among journalists, human rights organizations, or most scholars focused on the Middle East, Israel, and Jewish Studies. In the vast effort of the “war on terror,” officials in the Bush and Obama administrations did not draw public attention to the Hamas Charter and its renewal of a war against the Jews.
The lack of attention in the Academy to the Charter’s Islamic dimension of Jew-hatred and hatred of Israel found a counterpart in the paucity of attention in public discussion. Indeed, with the coining of the term “Islamophobia,” those who dared to examine the topic risked being accused of racism. Nevertheless, the presence of the full text on the prominent Avalon Project website meant that this crucial document was readily available to English readers across the world.
The 1988 Hamas Charter interpreted the destruction of the state of Israel as an Islamic religious obligation. It favorably quoted the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al-Banna, that “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it." The convergence of Jew-hatred and the goal of annihilating Israel was complete. “Our struggle against the Jews is very great and very serious.” Hamas “is but one squadron that should be supported by more and more squadrons from this vast Arab and Islamic world, until the enemy is vanquished, and Allah's victory is realized.” The Charter celebrated the Islam of the seventh century. “By adopting Islam as its way of life, the Movement goes back to the time of the birth of the Islamic message, of the righteous ancestor, for Allah is its target, the Prophet is its example and the Koran is its constitution.” Article Six stated that it strove “to raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine.” Article Seven described Hamas as “one of the links in the chain of the struggle against the Zionist invaders” of 1939, the war of 1948, and “the Jihad operations of the Moslem Brotherhood in 1968 and after”—that is, acts of terrorism. It celebrated the destruction of Israel as an apocalyptic, murderous theology. "The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.” In Article Eleven, the Charter asserted that “the land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf consecrated for future Moslem generations until Judgement Day. It, or any part of it, should not be squandered: it, or any part of it, should not be given up.” Its goal was to replace all of Israel with an Islamic state governed by Sharia law. Article Thirteen insisted that there was “no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals, and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors.” Jihad was a call for war and a justification of terrorism for which Hamas became famous in the 1990s.
Article Twenty-Two incorporated the secular antisemitic conspiracy theories of twentieth century Europe into a primarily Islamist text. The Jews:
"with their money took control of the world media, news agencies, the press, publishing houses, broadcasting stations, and others . . . stirred revolutions in various parts of the world with the purpose of achieving their interests and reaping the fruit therein . . . were behind the French Revolution, the Communist revolution and most of the revolutions we heard and hear about, here and there . . . formed secret societies, such as Freemasons, Rotary Clubs, the Lions and others in different parts of the world for the purpose of sabotaging societies and achieving Zionist interests . . . were able to control imperialistic countries and instigate them to colonize many countries in order to enable them to exploit their resources and spread corruption there . . . They were behind World War I, when they were able to destroy the Islamic Caliphate, making financial gains and controlling resources. They obtained the Balfour Declaration, formed the League of Nations through which they could rule the world. They were behind World War II, through which they made huge financial gains by trading in armaments and paved the way for the establishment of their state. It was they who instigated the replacement of the League of Nations with the United Nations and the Security Council to enable them to rule the world through them. There is no war going on anywhere, without having their finger in it."
In attributing sinister and vast powers to the Jews, Article Twenty-Two echoed the antisemitic conspiracy theories of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the propaganda of the Nazi regime. The idea that the Jews were the cause of World War II, which then “paved the way” to the establishment of Israel recalled Nazi Germany’s Arabic language radio broadcasts that asserted, for example, that “the Jews kindled this war [World War II] in the interest of Zionism” (Herf, Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009], 184). In 2009, I published Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World, a work that offered an unprecedented amount of evidence of the cultural fusion of Nazi and Islamist ideology during World War II and the Holocaust. The Nazi influences in the Hamas Charter of 1988 were now also visible to a scholarly and policy-making readership. Nevertheless, during the Hamas war of 2014 against Israel, judged by statements signed by left-leaning historians, an objectively pro-Hamas Left that echoed Hamas propaganda emerged in American academia (Herf, “A Pro-Hamas Left Emerges,” American Interest [August 26, 2014]).
In 2017, Hamas issued a statement that adopted more of the secular language of anti-Zionism made famous by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Yet this text remained true to the spirit of the founding Charter. It rejected “any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea.” In the same paragraph that included what became a famous chant, the authors inserted a phrase that convinced some journalists that Hamas had moderated its stance. It read, “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. If the “Zionist entity” is rejected and “Palestinian rights” as Hamas defined them could not be “relinquished,” and the refugees had to be returned to “their homes from which they were expelled,” the state of Israel would have to be destroyed. “Resisting the occupation with all means and methods” was not a reference to Israeli occupation of the West Bank but to the existence of Israel itself. Nevertheless, the statement of 2017 performed the magic trick of presenting this profoundly reactionary organization as the primary representative of the Palestinian people, serving as a cause celebre of the global Left.
Following its violent seizure of power in 2007, Hamas unified ideology and policy. Now it was not only a terrorist organization, but also a small dictatorship whose core purpose was to wage war against Israel. It killed or jailed Gazans, famously throwing some off the roofs of buildings, intimidated the press, controlled education, and imposed Sharia law. Rather than spending millions on improving the lives of Gaza’s civilians, it lavished huge sums on a stupendous construction project that built over 400 miles of tunnels designed to wage wars against Israel.
Although the key texts were available, and Hamas had become infamous for numerous acts of terror before October 7, the efforts of historians to make the ideology and policy of Hamas a center of discussion were unsuccessful. Instead, in the decades before October 7, the Academy was preoccupied with debates about Israel as a “settler-colonialist” or even “apartheid” regime. Antisemites have often asserted that persecution of Jews is a justified response to what they claim are the Jews’ own misdeeds. The reversal of perpetrator and victim has been a constant dynamic in the history of the longest hatred. This old habit of antisemitic thinking was at work in the lack of attention given to the connection between ideology and the actions of Hamas. In this sense, antisemitic ways of thinking played a major role in allowing Hamas to engage in the interrupted genocide of October 7. Having been silent about the threat, it was no surprise that, yet again, there were many who either celebrated or pointed to a “context” of Israeli sins that justified the aggression of that day. The years before, and the months since October 7, suggest that much of the Academy has learned little or learned the wrong lessons about antisemitism in Nazi Germany, World War II and the Holocaust, and their Islamist aftermath. For decades, historians of the Nazi era documented the disastrous underestimation of Nazi ideology and its radical Jew-hatred. Since the 1930s, and again since 1988, remnants of Nazism have been combined with Islamist hatred of Judaism, the Jews, and the state of Israel to produce a toxic form of radical Jew-hatred. October 7 has demonstrated that we are now living in the second era of underestimation of the longest hatred.
Jeffrey Herf is Distinguished University Professor of History, Emeritus, University of Maryland, College Park. His most recent publication is Three Faces of Antisemitism: Right, Left, and Islamist (New York: Routledge, 2024).