The one-year anniversary of Hamas’ Oct. 7 pogrom in Israel — the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust — is less than a month away. It’s a stark reminder of the deadly character of Nazi-like Jew-hatred in the imperialist epoch and the central importance for workers and our unions of combating it.
Tehran-backed Hamas thugs slaughtered 1,200 people, two-thirds of them civilians, wounded thousands and took 251 hostages. Dozens of women were raped, often their bodies mutilated. Of the 101 hostages still held captive in Gaza, Israeli officials believe at least 33 are dead.
As part of its systematic goal of degrading and dehumanizing Jews, Hamas thugs filmed their atrocities and posted the recordings. They also hijacked victims’ social media accounts to livestream parts of the pogrom, horrifying victims’ friends, relatives and others.
Hamas also killed two dozen Arab citizens of Israel and almost 70 immigrant workers from Thailand, Nepal, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Africa, China and Cambodia. In the eyes of Hamas, anyone who works with Jews or believes that Jews and Arabs can get along together in the same land is an enemy who must be annihilated.
Farhan al-Qadi, a Bedouin-Arab citizen of Israel, spent 326 days as a Hamas hostage until Israeli troops rescued him. Hamas thugs shot him in the leg when he refused to take them to Jews he knew. Why did he refuse? Because Jews and Arabs in Israel “are one family, one people,” he said. “No one can take this from us.”
Unable to walk, he was forced to go up the stairs in the hospital in Khan Younis on all fours. “Look, here’s our dog walking,” the thugs said. The doctors operated on him without anesthesia. He spent eight months in a tunnel.
“I thought to myself that if this was how I was being treated as a Muslim, how were the Jews being treated?” he told Israel’s Channel 12.
Eden Yerushalmi, one of the six Jewish hostages Hamas murdered last week, weighed only 79 pounds at the time of her death, 22 pounds less than when she was kidnapped.
Hamas’ Nazi legacy
Hamas has nothing to do with fighting against the oppression of the Palestinian people.
Its origins are in the Egypt-based Muslim Brotherhood and the pogromist Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem. They allied with the Nazis in Germany during World War II with the aim of extending the Nazis’ “Final Solution” — the elimination of all Jews — across the Middle East.
By scapegoating the Jews for the problems facing the toilers, these forces prevented a working-class movement from developing that could take power out of the hands of the capitalists and semi-feudal landowners.
Consistent with this, Hamas’ 1988 founding covenant calls for killing the Jews and the destruction of Israel, the one country that provides Jews with a refuge. That remains the goal of Hamas and its enablers and financiers in Tehran.
Since 2007, when Hamas won a bloody war against its main rival, Fatah, the group has broken strikes by teachers and arrested, tortured and killed its political opponents.
Gazan: ‘Save us from Hamas’
One of Hamas’ latest victims was Ziad Abu Haya, who was shown by the Saudi-based Al-Arabiya news network in August asking the world to “save us from Hamas.” Gunmen dragged him naked out of his tent in Khan Younis Sept. 6 and beat and tortured him.
But as Israeli forces continue to make progress in dismantling Hamas command structures in Gaza and the West Bank, more Palestinians are standing up to the reactionary bourgeois group.
Israeli forces have been targeting Hamas command posts placed in schools, mosques and residential buildings. A central part of Hamas’ strategy is to maximize the deaths of Palestinian civilians, then claim them as “martyrs.”
The New York Times reported Sept. 10 that at the Abdul Kareem al-Aklouk school in Deir al Balah, leaders of families taking refugee there have been standing up to Hamas and its allied groups, telling them they are not allowed inside if they are armed.
“All the families agreed,” Nasser al-Zaanin told the Times. They want to lessen “any potential threat against us because of the existence of police and members of the Hamas government.”
Defeating Hamas is a necessary step to create openings for Jewish, Arab and other working people to come together to defend their class interests against the capitalist rulers in Israel, Gaza and across the region. Only through such action can a road be charted to replace capitalist rule with workers power and end Jew-hatred for all time.
Anti-Zionism today is antisemitism
Hamas, together with various Stalinist, Maoist and anarchist currents, has put together a well-oiled international propaganda machine that demonizes Israel. They claim they’re “anti-Zionist,” not antisemitic.
But a report issued Aug. 30 by an administration-appointed task force at Columbia University documents egregious cases of Jew-hatred at the campus, a center of anti-Israel actions.
A Jewish student, who had put up a mezuzah — a traditional Jewish symbol — on her doorway in an on-campus dormitory, was harassed at all hours of the day and night after Oct. 7 by Hamas apologists who banged on her door demanding she explain Israel’s actions.
“Students have reported having necklaces ripped off their necks and being pinned against walls, while walking back to their dorm” or “on their way to synagogue,” the report noted. Others were shouted at to “go back to Poland.” Many Jewish students have stopped walking alone on campus.