The Jew-hatred at the heart of Hamas’ drive to destroy Israel is no secret. Its 1988 founding covenant says, “Our struggle against the Jews is very great and very serious.”
Hamas, which operates primarily in Gaza and the West Bank, comes out of the Egypt-based Muslim Brotherhood, which together with Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, collaborated with the Nazis during World War II. Their common goal failed, an attempt to extend the Nazi Holocaust in Europe to North Africa and the Middle East. In the 1920s and ‘30s Husseini led pogroms against Jews in then-British-ruled Palestine. In 1941 he met with Adolf Hitler in Berlin, collaborating to recruit Muslim troops to the Nazi SS storm troopers in Yugoslavia.
The Nazis tasked Field Marshal Erwin Rommel to sweep through Egypt to impose Nazi rule and the slaughter of Jews across the Middle East.
Speaking for the Mufti-led Arab Higher Committee for Palestine, his cousin, Jamal al-Husseini, testified before the United Nations Sept. 29, 1947, opposing the U.N. plan to partition Palestine into two states — one Jewish, the other Palestinian. “The Arab world is a racial homogeneity,” he said, echoing Nazi racial purity rhetoric. “The people of that vast territory speak one language and have the same history, traditions, and aspirations.”
The U.N. should not break up the “existing natural old homogeneity as that of the Arab world by the introduction in its midst of an alien body as is now being contemplated by the sponsors of the Jewish state in Palestine,” he said, calling the proposal a “monstrosity.”
His alternative to partition was to create “an Arab state in the whole of Palestine,” which he claimed would protect the “legitimate rights and interests of all minorities” — a fraudulent promise belied by his own record and that of the Grand Mufti in leading pogroms against Jews.
While apologists for Hamas chant in English “From the river to the sea, Palestine must be free,” they often use a variant common in the Arab east, “Palestine must be Arab.” What about the Palestinians of African descent? Circassians? Immigrants?
In 2021 after Hamas had unleashed a barrage of missiles at civilian areas in Israel, Ismail Haniyeh, then-head of the Hamas Political Bureau, boasted that “the theory of coexistence between the two peoples [Jews and Arabs] within the 1948 borders — a theory they have been cultivating for 70 years — is being trampled underfoot.”