Workers looking to understand why Hamas thugs and their backers in Tehran organized the systematic slaughter of over 1,200 Jews, as well as a few dozen Bedouin Arabs and immigrants, Oct. 7 will greatly benefit from a look at the group’s origins and history. It revolves around their determination to solve the “Jewish Question” by exterminating the Jews.
Their origins lie in ultra-reactionary Arab forces that formed a yearslong alliance with Hitler’s Nazi Party in the 1930s based on a common desire to carry out the “final solution” — the slaughter of Jews worldwide. These forces include Amin al-Husseini, who became the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem in 1921, and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the forerunner of Hamas. They emerged out of the deepening worldwide capitalist crisis and the revolutions and counterrevolutions that would lead to World War II.
Massacres of Jews in the Middle East by Islamist forces began decades before Israel came into existence. The record of these atrocities by Hamas’ forerunners are hidden today by the Stalinists and middle-class leftists who present Hamas as a national resistance movement.
Beginning in the early 1920s, al-Husseini — from a wealthy landowning family — orchestrated a series of massacres of Jews in Palestine. The capitalist rulers in the U.K. had taken control over Palestine as part of the notorious Sykes-Picot backroom deal that redrew the borders of countries in the region and divided the riches of the Middle East between London and Paris.
Al-Husseini’s assaults on Jews living in Palestine took place as revolutionary struggles against colonial oppression and capitalist exploitation spread worldwide in the decades following the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia.
In Egypt a rebellion for independence and a general strike paralyzed British colonial rule in 1919, before London brutally suppressed it.
The same year the Bolsheviks led the formation of the Communist International. Communist parties were formed in Egypt in 1922 and Palestine in 1923. In Palestine the party was initially composed largely of Jewish revolutionaries. They strove to emulate the example of the Bolshevik Revolution led by V.I. Lenin, unify the toilers of all nationalities and religions to take power and carry out a socialist revolution.
But that promising beginning was destroyed when a counterrevolution in the Soviet Union led by Joseph Stalin overturned Lenin’s course in the late 1920s. It led to the destruction of the Communist International as a revolutionary instrument for the working class.
Al-Husseini forges ties to Nazi regime
Al-Husseini first led a pogrom in Jerusalem in 1920 during a Muslim religious procession, inciting attacks on the Jewish quarter. The British withdrew their troops from Jerusalem, giving their blessing to the pogrom. Six Jews were murdered and two women raped. The British authorities then pardoned al-Husseini, and appointed him the city’s Grand Mufti.
In 1929 he urged his followers to attack Jews in Jerusalem, killing 130. Sixty-seven more Jews were massacred in Hebron a few days later. Women were raped and men castrated. British authorities responded not by fighting the reactionary pogroms, but by placing limits on Jewish immigration to Palestine.
Al-Husseini urged the same during bloody riots against Jewish settlements in 1936.
Britain’s rapacious imperialist exploitation in the region was based on playing the Arabs against the Jews in order to control both.
By 1937 al-Husseini no longer limited his horizon to attacks on Jews in Palestine. “Whoever believes that, if the Palestine problem is solved or if the Jews are defeated in this conflict everything will be fine, are wrong,” he wrote in Islam and Judaism. He set out to forge close ties to Hitler and his Nazi regime, to extend the Holocaust to the Middle East.
He said Arabs were “the natural friends of Germany because both are engaged in the struggle against three common enemies: the English, the Jews and Bolshevism.”
The Nazis took on distributing al-Husseini’s writings. Up to 1939, the German Embassy in Cairo produced Muslim Brotherhood propaganda. By the start of World War II the Nazis established radio broadcasts in Arabic, Farsi and Turkish, helping spread al-Husseini’s Jew-hating tirades to a much wider audience. None of the anti-Hitler Arabic language broadcasts by British and other Allied powers made any effort to politically answer the Nazis’ “kill the Jews” vitriol.
Al-Husseini met with Hitler in Berlin in 1941, concretizing plans for collaboration against Jews in the Middle East.
A pro-Nazi regime was established in Baghdad, Iraq. Al-Husseini was based there. When that regime was brought down in 1941, he accused the city’s Jews of being responsible. Days later, a series of deadly pogroms led to the murder of 180 Jews. Later, mass graves of 600 more victims were found. The British army had troops based just 8 miles away, but chose to do nothing to stop the slaughter.
These assaults were the beginning of the end for Baghdad’s Jews, who had made up around a third of its population and lived there for centuries.
In cooperation with the Nazis, al-Husseini launched a Muslim division of Hitler’s hated paramilitary SS in Yugoslavia, recruiting Muslims from Bosnia.
From 1941-43, German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel led German and Italian forces in an effort to drive British forces out of Egypt, take control of the Suez Canal and open the door to seizing the region’s oil supplies. Al-Husseini’s SS was to follow, tasked with eliminating all Jews there.
Rommel’s forces made significant gains. When it looked like he was on the verge of a decisive breakthrough, al-Husseini put out a call to his followers. “Everywhere people are asking what part they can play in wiping out the British and the Jews,” The Voice of the Free Arabs radio station said. “Every Jew’s name must be written down, together with his address and his business.”
“Arabs of Syria, Iraq and Palestine, what are you waiting for?” the station said 12 days later. “Kill the Jews, burn their property, destroy their stores.”
But Rommel was defeated at al-Alamein, Egypt, and Hitler never threatened the Middle East again.
Joins with Muslim Brotherhood
In 1945, Allied forces captured al-Husseini and held him under house arrest in France. He escaped the next year and went to Egypt where he was feted by the Muslim Brotherhood leadership.
Hassan al-Banna, a Muslim Brotherhood central leader, welcomed him. It had just instigated a pogrom that left six Jews dead in Cairo. “Germany and Hitler are gone, but al-Husseini will continue the struggle,” al-Banna said.
That’s what he did. He assumed the leadership of the Arab Higher Executive Committee of Palestine, dedicated to the fight to prevent the establishment of the state of Israel. He led the fight to get the reactionary Arab rulers in Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria to wage war against Israel in 1948.
Hamas was founded in 1987 as the armed wing of the Brotherhood in Palestine with a political lineage going back to al-Husseini and his collaboration with the Muslim Brotherhood and with the Nazi regime.
Hamas shares the same hatred for the Jews as a people and the same desire to see them driven off the face of the earth.
This picture of the historical roots of Hamas shatters any idea that this bloodthirsty group has any claim to be an anti-imperialist or progressive leadership of Palestinian workers and peasants. They are the opposite, a reactionary threat to the Jews and the entire working class that must be fought and defeated.