![Poster on Hamas internet site promotes suicide bombings to kill civilians in Israel, reflecting its scorn for working people, Jewish and Arab. It also shows how Israeli blows degraded Hamas’ ability to mount missile attacks.](https://themilitant.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Hamas-poster-8833.jpg)
The Israeli government’s decision to continue its attack on Hamas in Gaza — despite constant pressure from the U.S. government to end the war — has been decisive in dealing big blows to the Jew-hating thug outfit.
Israel’s goal is to destroy the ability of Hamas, backed and funded by Tehran, to launch yet another anti-Jewish pogrom like it carried out Oct. 7, murdering 1,200 people, wounding thousands, taking 250 people hostage and raping and mutilating dozens of women and men.
Advances by the Israel Defense Forces in Gaza and the fighting spirit of Israeli soldiers — Jewish, Muslim, Druze, and Ethiopian immigrants alike — are having a significant impact.
Despite threats to retaliate against Israel for the killing of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran July 31 and Hezbollah military leader Fuad Shukr in Beirut the day before, both Tehran and Hezbollah have hesitated, weighing the serious consequences of any provocative action they might take.
Hezbollah — despite its stockpile of more than 150,000 missiles, including GPS guided — is no match for the Israeli army, although an all-out war would mean widespread casualties in Israel. The same is true for Tehran, whose antiquated air defense systems Israel can breach. Even more worrisome to Iran’s capitalist rulers is the widespread opposition by working people in Iran to its expansionary military adventures in the region and attacks on Israel.
Israeli troops have killed thousands of Hamas fighters, destroyed hundreds of tunnels, and taken control of Gaza’s border with Egypt, blocking the Islamist outfit from getting weapons and ammunition. They have also killed more than 350 Hezbollah fighters in response to Hezbollah missile and drone attacks on northern Israel.
Hamas is getting weaker by the day. One sign of this is its return to encouraging individual suicide bombers to blow themselves up inside Israel’s borders. On Aug. 18, a Hamas supporter’s backpack bomb exploded prematurely in Tel Aviv, injuring a passerby. On Aug. 19 Hamas prominently featured on its internet site a poster in English, Arabic and Hebrew titled “We are coming,” with the painting of a suicide bomb vest in front of the remains of a passenger bus in Tel Aviv. Hamas has sworn that it will continue to organize pogroms until all the Jews are dead or gone.
The Joseph Biden administration and the Kamala Harris presidential campaign want to put an end to the war in Gaza and the skirmishes between Israel and Hezbollah. The U.S. capitalist rulers look to turn their attention to advancing their economic and strategic interests and broader alliances in the region, including reaching a detente with the rulers in Tehran. This includes a nuclear deal.
They are pressing the Israeli government to accept a hostage deal and permanent cease-fire, regardless of whether it would leave Hamas intact and capable of organizing new deadly attacks on Jews. In his speech at the Democratic Party convention Aug. 19, Biden said that pro-Hamas protesters outside “have a point. A lot of innocent people are being killed on both sides.”
But Hamas bears full responsibility for both its pogrom against Jews in Israel and for the deaths and destruction in Gaza. Hamas uses Palestinian civilians as human shields, placing its command posts, prisons and weapon stores in schools, mosques and hospitals. They say any Palestinians killed there are martyrs to their Jew-hating cause.
Hamas is also the biggest obstacle Palestinian workers and farmers face in being able to defend their national aspirations and to freely join with others — including Jewish workers — to defend their class interests. After defeating Fatah, its main rival, in bloody street fighting in 2007, Hamas set about breaking unions, restricting women’s rights, and jailing, torturing and assassinating political opponents.
Hamas was set up in 1987 as the Gaza chapter of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, which like its close ally, Amin al-Husseini, the decadeslong Mufti of Jerusalem, collaborated with the Nazis in World War II. Al-Husseini met personally with Adolf Hitler in November 1941 and helped organize an SS force in Bosnia, hoping to bring Hitler’s war to the Jews in the Middle East.
Hamas’ goal is to complete the Nazis’ Final Solution — the removal of the Jews from the face of the earth. This is explicit in its founding covenant.
Israeli troops have found copies of Arabic translations of Hitler’s Mein Kampf in Hamas strongholds in Gaza.
Jew-hatred has taken new meaning in the imperialist epoch. It gets a hearing among middle-class layers, who face ruin by the dog-eat-dog workings of capitalism. When the crisis of capitalism deepens, wings of the capitalist rulers will finance and foster fascist groups. This is the lesson of the rise of the Nazis in the 1930s.
To defend the dictatorship of capital, they will scapegoat Jews and unleash Nazi thugs to destroy and demoralize the labor movement and divert attention from the real enemy, the capitalist system itself. This is why the fight against Jew-hatred is a life-and-death question for the working class.