Days after Hamas agreed to a ceasefire with Israel, thousands of its goons reemerged from their tunnels or were called up to assault Palestinians who they view as opponents and to reimpose the group’s despotic rule.
Hamas reactivated its internal security and police units and armed hundreds of combatants. It unleashed its thugs to engage in clashes with rival forces and to carry out public executions that it ensured were seen around the world. The goal was to put down all resistance to its rule and any development of the class struggle.
Hamas’ actions are further proof the group is a deadly threat to Palestinians, Jews and working people of all nationalities. Its origins lie among Arab forces who collaborated with Adolf Hitler’s Nazis in the second imperialist world war and shared their aims of annihilating the Jewish people.
Understanding Hamas’ roots is important in light of the efforts by Stalinists and other middle-class radicals to paint the Nazi-like group as a national liberation movement.
Hamas “has its roots both in the landed classes and monarchies in the Arab world of the 1920s and 1930s, and in anti-working-class bourgeois nationalist currents and parties across the region ever since,” writes Dave Prince in the introduction to The Fight Against Jew-Hatred and Pogroms in the Imperialist Epoch: Stakes for the International Working Class.
“These ruling classes stood in opposition to revolutionary developments among working people in Palestine and elsewhere in the Middle East, developments that were inspired by the example of the Russian Revolution and were welcomed by its Bolshevik leadership,” he says.
Foremost among these reactionary forces was Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem. He led bloody pogroms against Jews in 1920, 1929 and 1936, before Israel came into existence. He was aided by the fact that setting Arabs against Jews was a cornerstone of the British imperialists’ divide-and-rule policy in Palestine.
During World War II, al-Husseini met with Hitler and concluded an alliance with the Nazis with the aim of extending the Holocaust from Europe to the Middle East. The Nazis broadcasted al-Husseini’s Jew-hating rants by radio across the region. While in Bosnia he helped them establish a Muslim unit of the Waffen SS, the Nazi party’s paramilitary outfit.
Following the war, al-Husseini returned to the Middle East and assumed leadership of the Arab Higher Executive Committee. It helped lead the rulers of Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria to try to crush the newly independent state of Israel in 1948. Their assault was defeated, but al-Husseini and his allies, including the Muslim Brotherhood, which also collaborated with Hitler, never gave up their goals.
Nazis massacre Jews, all opponents
Years later, Hamas was founded as the armed wing of the Muslim Brotherhood to pursue the destruction of Israel. Killing Jews is written into its founding charter. In the wake of the recent “ceasefire,” Hamas leaders announced their loyalty to that goal.
Hamas makes clear it has no intention of surrendering, giving up arms or changing its murderous course. The Nazi-like group is terrorizing the Palestinian people in order to continue using them as human shields against Israeli retaliation and to be able to exploit them for profit, as they have for years. Only decisive action to defeat and dismantle Hamas by Israel Defense Forces can prevent it from carrying out another Holocaust.