Hamas was founded in 1987 as the Palestinian wing of the Muslim Brotherhood. The terrorist group has ruled in Gaza since 2007. Central to its outlook is an all-consuming hatred of Jews, something it shares with its chief sponsor and arms supplier, the reactionary bourgeois-clerical regime in Iran.
Hamas’ 1988 founding charter is riddled with poisonous conspiracy theories, designed to scapegoat Jews as responsible for the crisis of capitalism that comes down on working people. Article 22 of the charter claims that “with their money” Jews “were behind the French Revolution, the Communist revolution” in Russia and both World Wars of the last century.
Without any mention of the Holocaust, Hamas’ version of Jewish history includes the claim that Jews “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.”
Hamas’ Oct. 7 pogrom is the most far-reaching assault carried out by any Tehran-backed terror outfit along the road to a “final solution.” These antisemitic forces falsely claim to speak for Palestinian national rights.
Before and during World War II, Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem, was the self-proclaimed leader of Muslims in what was then British-controlled Palestine. He formed a strong alliance with the Nazis, claiming Arabs were “the natural friends of Germany because both are engaged in the struggle against three common enemies: the English, the Jews and Bolshevism.” His comments underline the fact that the Jew-hatred espoused by reactionary forces is deeply connected to their drive to destroy the revolutionary leadership of the workers movement.
In 1943 al-Husseini fought to scuttle scheduled talks between Hitler’s allies and the British rulers over the evacuation of thousands of Jewish children from Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania to safety in Palestine. Instead, he demanded they be sent to Hitler’s death camps in occupied Poland.
Al-Husseini collaborated with Nazi spy agencies. He helped launch a Muslim division of the SS — Hitler’s notorious paramilitary unit — in Yugoslavia. After the war al-Husseini was welcomed in Egypt by Muslim Brotherhood founder Hasan al-Banna. He described al-Husseini as a “hero who challenged an empire and fought Zionism, with the help of Hitler and Germany.”
“Germany and Hitler are gone, but Amin al-Husseini will continue the struggle,” al-Banna said.
Hamas is al-Husseini’s political heir.
Tehran: Destroy Israel
The capitalist rulers in Tehran are the main counterrevolutionary force among rival capitalist powers across the Middle East today. They aid and arm proxy forces and allied capitalist regimes like that of Bashar al-Assad in Syria to advance their own deadly expansionist foreign policy, a policy that has met rising condemnation from working people across Iran since 2017.
Tehran provided decisive military force to prop up Assad’s hated regime after a popular uprising against his tyrannical rule exploded in 2011. Tehran-backed thugs joined Iraqi state forces killing hundreds and suppressing protests for political rights in 2019. “Iran out, out!” was the chant at protests in Baghdad.
Tehran ensures Hezbollah has a well-stocked supply of rockets to launch at Israel from Lebanon. Tehran, Hezbollah and Hamas openly state their common aim is to destroy Israel. Hezbollah celebrated Hamas’ pogrom.
In one of the most deadly assaults on Jews since World War II, Hezbollah in 1994 slaughtered 86 people at a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, Argentina. This followed on their killing of 29 others there in a bomb attack on the Israeli Embassy two years earlier.
Hezbollah thugs were at the forefront of the Lebanese government’s brutal repression of protests demanding political rights and an end to government corruption in 2019.
The Iranian regime’s “axis of resistance” includes the Houthi rebels in Yemen and Islamist militia forces in Iraq, as well as Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas.
These Jew-hating forces will inevitably carry out further atrocities like the Oct. 7 pogrom until a revolutionary working-class leadership and parties can be built in the Middle East capable of taking political power.