The mounting pressure by the Joseph Biden administration and other imperialist powers to impose a long-term cease-fire on Israel, putting on ice its battle to destroy the military capacity of Hamas, ignores the avowed intentions of this reactionary group — to continue to kill Jews and destroy the state of Israel.
“Longing for Auschwitz” was the headline of an article in the March 3 Tablet online Jewish magazine. It points to the unwavering line of march of the proxy forces of the reactionary regime in Tehran — Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Houthis in Yemen.
On Oct. 7 Hamas unleashed its thugs to carry out a murderous attack on a dance party and farm communities in Israel, a pogrom that killed 1,200 people, wounded more than 5,000 and kidnapped over 250 hostages who were taken to Gaza and tortured, killed or offered for ransom. It was the worst massacre of Jews since the Nazis’ Holocaust.
Hamas’ assault on Israel was not, as its boosters worldwide claim, some national liberation protest or an excusable act of rebellion, “but something far worse,” says the Tablet. Those attacked, the vast majority of them Jews, “were not only to die, but to die in torment.” This included torture, burnings, beheadings, gang rapes and other forms of sexual assault.
Hamas’ actions involved “the purposeful humiliation of Jews by people who detest them and were sworn to degrade and dehumanize them before murdering them,” wrote author Alvin Rosenfeld. He is the director of the Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and chair in Jewish Studies at Indiana University at Bloomington. Contrary to the claims of President Biden and capitalist rulers in the Middle East, Hamas and its allies are not looking for a “two-state solution.” They’re working for a repeat of Adolf Hitler’s Final Solution, one that this time is 100% successful. Understanding and acting on this undeniable fact is a key political question facing working people today.
Hamas’ 1988 founding covenant explicitly spells out its goal —“killing the Jews.” It declared, “Israel exists and will continue to exist until Islam obliterates it, just as it obliterated others before it.” The “Palestinian problem,” it says, is not amenable to a negotiated political settlement.
Leaders of Hamas have made clear they intend to expand attacks like the Oct. 7 pogrom. Hamas leader Ghazi Hamad, speaking on Lebanese TV Oct. 24, stated that this attack “is just the first time and there will be a second, a third, a fourth … until Israel is annihilated.”
The stakes involved are high. Some 46% of world Jewry lives in Israel today. That’s almost one out of every two Jews alive. “Were Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, and their allies ever to succeed in liquidating Israel, the loss would be immeasurable,” Rosenfeld explains.
The state of Israel came into existence 75 years ago as a result of three historical developments: A series of betrayals by counterrevolutionary Stalinist parties that prevented powerful workers movements from taking political power in Germany, Italy, Spain, Greece and elsewhere in Europe before and after World War II; the refusal of the imperialist rulers in Washington, London, Ottawa and more to open their borders to Jews seeking to flee Nazi persecution; and the resulting slaughter of 6 million Jews in the Holocaust — 40% of Jews alive worldwide.
In the U.S., the Democratic Party administration of Franklin Roosevelt granted an average of just 17,000 visas per year to Jews from 1933 to 1945.
After the imperialist allies and Moscow defeated Germany, ending the war, a quarter million Jews were held in “displaced persons camps” set up in Germany, Austria and Italy. Barred from the U.S. and elsewhere, many Jews overcame obstacles put in place by the British, then the colonial power in Palestine, and made it there and joined the fight to find a refuge free from Jew-hatred.
This history explains the founding of the state of Israel, and the importance of recognizing Israel’s right to exist as a refuge for Jews.
Rosenfeld quotes Hungarian Jewish writer and Holocaust survivor Imre Kertesz, who wrote in 1998, “The antisemite of our age no longer loathes Jews: He wants Auschwitz.”