The Battle Cry of Terror

Like most Jews, I did not expect the worldwide explosion of support for Hamas after it carried out the Oct. 7 slaughter of Israelis. Nor did I anticipate demonstrators chanting, “from the [Jordan] river to the [Mediterranean] sea, Palestine will be free,” knowing that slogan means eliminating the Jewish state to make room for the Palestinian. If Hamas ever won a war with Israel, the Jews would be mass murdered to the last one. 

Like most Jews, I was shocked and depressed, not quite sure what can be done. But the more I reflect on it, the more I feel we should take it to them. You celebrate Hamas? Then you own the intentional killing of civilians, brutalizing women, planned genocide. You chant, “By any means necessary”? That means you support beheading children and raping women while killing them. 

Israel has responded to the atrocities of Oct. 7 by shifting from treating Hamas as a necessary evil to be contained to dealing with it as an unvarnished evil force to be removed from governance and influence. By upholding and confirming Hamas’ terror tactics, the terrorists’ fellow travelers have forfeited the right to be treated with respect as a legitimate partner in the public debate. It is time to put all the facts out there and let us see if humanity or its leadership will support — or repudiate — the glorification of death in the name of religion. 

The Hamas policy is very clear. The foundational charter of Hamas — the Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement issued in 1988 — states that its goal is the realization of the dream in the hadith (Prophet Mohammed’s teachings recorded after the Quran) of the final battle in which the Muslims will kill the last Jews. “The Day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews… when the Jews will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say, ‘O Muslim, O servants of God, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.’’’

The charter states that “our struggle against the Jews is very great and very serious” and gives its reasons and sources. The Jews are planning to take over the world (“The Zionist plan is limitless”) as proven in “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” — the tsarist forgery the charter takes to be true and authoritative. Jews “were behind the French Revolution, the Communist Revolution and most of the revolutions” as well as World War I and World War II. Jews set up the United Nations to rule the world through it. Jews control the banks and the world communication media. 

The charter states clearly that the land of Palestine is Islamic Waqf land and not an inch may be conceded to any non-Muslims. It quotes Hassan al Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, as saying, “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it,” and states, “Jihad is the path” of Hamas. It denounces “so called peace initiatives and international conferences” as futile and undermining Palestinian efforts. 

In 2017, apparently in response to public relations advice, Hamas rewrote its charter to say that not the Jews but the Zionists must be destroyed. But everybody knows that this is a euphemism because anti-Zionism is respectable but antisemitism is not. Besides, almost all Jews are Zionists. 

Hamas has been in power in Gaza since 2007. In this period, it practiced the fundamentalism which it preaches by requiring all women to wear the hijab, restricting women from socializing (including public appearances and education) as well as fostering “honor killings” of women who deviate. Homosexuality remains a gravely prohibited sin, punished by throwing suspected offenders off rooftops. Media are tightly controlled; dissidents are silenced and foreign journalists have been coopted or expelled.

Hamas allows no alternative political parties. In 2007, some Fatah political opponents in Gaza were killed; others were sent home. No free elections are permitted. Hamas has taken billions of dollars annually in foreign aid and Islamic charities and spent them on paying its fighters and creating military infrastructure and armaments, as well as a network of military tunnels extending over hundreds of kilometers. Meanwhile Hamas has left over half the people of Gaza living in poverty and without air-raid shelters or safe rooms in homes. By placing military equipment and control centers in hospitals, schools, mosques and private homes, Hamas set up all the citizens of Gaza to be human shields, fully exposed to any Israeli military response. 

By what twisted logic can the so-called progressive left justify supporting such a reactionary and inhumane movement, which violates so many norms and values of the left?

Not only were more than 1,200 killed (including 300 soldiers) and 240 kidnapped: Children were killed in front of parents and parents in front of children. Babies were machine gunned and beheaded. Pregnant women were eviscerated. Women were sexually abused, gang raped and slaughtered. Bodies were mutilated— some while still living.  Whole families were burned alive.

Those demonstrating for Hamas are celebrating the record and behaviors of Hamas. To this day, no Arab government, except Bahrain, has publicly condemned Hamas’ behavior on Oct. 7.

Those demonstrating for Hamas are celebrating the record and behaviors of Hamas. To this day, no Arab government, except Bahrain, has publicly condemned Hamas’ behavior on Oct. 7. The calls for immediate ceasefire are officially presented to save Palestinian lives. Coming as they do, without condemning Hamas or asking it to lay down its arms, they constitute a call to save Hamas before it is destroyed so it can survive and try to attack again and again.

We have to demand accountability from the world leaders of Islam — for Hamas is the fruit of radicalized Islam. The grand imam of al Azhar University, the leading religious institution of Egypt, endorsed Hamas’ actions on Oct. 7. Out of a failed modernization process and political/economic frustration, Islam has been channeled into an extremist, jihadist world view which justifies violence and destruction of opponents or dissidents. Islam’s mainstream must disown this twisted version of Islam and reeducate the communities. Otherwise this great world religion will be permanently stained with violence, hatred and collaboration with barbarism.

Many of the earlier Arab nationalists were secularists, influenced by Western culture. Modernity challenged but inspired the Muslim Brotherhood and stimulated its attraction to Nazism. The vacuum left by the failures of the secular nationalists has been filled by jihadi fundamentalists. This religious current has generated such movements as Taliban, ISIS, Al Qaeda and Hezbollah as well as Hamas. This heritage accounts for the Arab nations’ attempt to destroy Israel from before its birth. Moreover, for 75 years, antisemitism (intermingled with anti-Zionism and demonization of Israel) has circulated widely in the Arab world. “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” has been a best-seller for decades.

In recent decades, millions of Muslim refugees have moved to Europe. For the most part, they have not been integrated into the host countries. They suffer from poverty, crime, police abuse and outsider status so they have not been assimilated (in the good sense of the word) into European society and its democratic values, moderation in politics, its pluralism and tolerance of religion. These Muslim immigrants made up a large share of the pro-Hamas demonstrations which often spill over into anti-Israel and antisemitic language and behavior. 

The mainstream European political parties have not been able to solve the problem of positive integration and are often in denial of the problems generated. One result is that extremist parties, typically on the right, have made great electoral inroads because they acknowledge and purport to deal with the problem of refugees. Notably, some extremist right parties are exploring moving away from their antisemitic heritage toward sympathy for Israel, out of resentment and rejection of Muslim immigrants. 

Besides Muslim immigrants, the second channel mainstreaming Hamas has been the press and media. They have treated Hamas as a reputable player in Middle Eastern politics — presenting them as merely fighting against the occupation and for a Palestinian state. The media have steadfastly covered up or misrepresented that Hamas (and many Palestinians) are determined to wipe out Israel within its pre-1967 borders. Thereby they have put journalism at the service of attempted genocide. 

The most devastating falsification in the name of journalistic “neutrality” has been the moral equivalence by which Israel and Hamas are presented as equally extremist in their behaviors. A movement primarily targeting civilians and dedicated to terror and genocide is morally equated to a country trying to defend its citizens which makes extraordinary efforts to avoid inflicting civilian casualties. Israel inescapably kills some civilians because Hamas has deliberately intertwined its military within civilian homes and institutions and Hamas uses its population as human shields. The media’s false equivalence narrative gives the impression that Israel is the greater violator of warfare norms because Palestinian losses are greater. 

The third source of moral distortion is the growth of ”postcolonial, “postmodern” ideologies on the radical left, especially in academia. It is sad to see that what started as a desire to overcome inherited inequality by making special efforts to overthrow racism has morphed into justifying crimes against humanity. In this false moral theory, there are only two classes: oppressors and oppressed. Whites — all whites, even those committed to social justice — are automatically in the class of oppressor. They can do no right. People of color are automatically oppressed. They (or anything done in their name) can do no wrong. In the case of Israel, the demographic categories themselves are false, as more than 50% of Israelis are Mizrachim, descendants of Arab Jews, and as much “people of color” as are Palestinians. 

The labeling of Israeli Jews as colonials doubles the falsehood. Jews have been indigenous to the land of Israel for more than three millennia and those Jews who immigrated to Israel have come home. Moreover, the Zionist pioneers came not to exploit the land and its inhabitants but to restore and enrich them. They mostly fled persecution and have no land to which to return. The chilling conclusion is that by labeling the Israelis colonial settlers, they are being tagged as unworthy of existence and consigned to be murdered. These ideologies mislead people into approving genocide. They also corrupt the oppressed by celebrating (instead of condemning) barbaric behaviors in the name of liberation. 

The irony is that Israel (and India) led the anti-imperialist revolt that overthrew Western imperialism. Where the anticolonial revolutionaries were not held to a moral standard — as they were in Israel and India — the new nations turned into exploitative dictatorships which continued (or, in some cases, expanded) the abuses of the colonial rulers. The false ideology that revolutionaries could do no wrong was the fatal twist which led Communism, Stalinism, Maoism, Khmer Rouge — and the Marxist revolutionaries in Africa, Asia and South America — to become oppressive and murderous movements in the name of nationalism and human equality. Failure to uphold right and wrong led to the depravity of the leaders and the infliction of murder and abuse on millions. This same distortion enables Hamas, a jihadist death cult, to be hailed as the upholder of Palestinian liberation. 

Finally, we must challenge the international aid and human rights groups which lend themselves to this distortion by one-sidedly criticizing Israel and labeling it an “apartheid state.” By giving a free pass to Hamas’ and other Palestinian excesses, they have perverted the Palestinian cause. They have encouraged Palestinians to go on the road of victimhood instead of self-determination. They have led the Palestinians to predicate their own national cause on the destruction of another people. It is heartbreaking that the language and cause of human dignity, equality and security has been hijacked and betrayed into supporting those who commit atrocities and savage women. Amnesty International to this day has not condemned Hamas’ behavior on Oct. 7. Apparently, they believe that amnesty should be granted to those who slice off the breasts of women they are raping or fire bullets into their vaginas. 

It is time for all who support Israel and all who seek a world order in which human rights are incorporated into just societies to push back. The so-called progressives should be challenged for their support of terror and genocide in the name of human liberation. Their enabling of Palestinians seeking destruction of Israel (rather than focusing on building a life-affirming society ready to live in peace with its neighbors) has derailed the Palestinian national cause and set it back decades, if not permanently.

Rabbi Yitz Greenberg serves as the President of the J.J. Greenberg Institute for the Advancement of Jewish Life (JJGI) and as Senior Scholar in Residence at Hadar.