37 Fall 2024 e cannot know if after Hamas issued its founding Charter in 1988, it could have been stopped from gaining adherents, seizing power in 2007, and launching its attacks on Israel culminating in the barbarism of October 7. What we do know is that outside Israel, the governments of democratic states, the editors of prestige newspapers, and major electronic media in Europe and the United States did nothing substantial to publicize and examine the contents of that evil text. Despite its translation of ideology into suicide bombs in the 1990s, and establishment of a dictatorship in Gaza, Hamas did not receive the condemnation it deserved in our universities, and among the graduates who entered government, journalism and politics. Instead, a set of ideas which in the late 1960s and 1970s had been relegated to the radical left around the world gradually filtered into parts of the tenured faculty in the universities. These are the ideas that justified the terrorism of the Palestine Liberation Organization; declared Zionism to be a form of racism and Israel to be an apartheid state; and transformed criticism of Islamist Jew-hatred to be a form of a new racism called “Islamophobia.” The leftist illusion of the epoch was that any group, however reactionary, that sought to destroy the State of Israel by force of arms, would be counted among the progressive forces of the global left. The half-century of political habits of distortions about the nature of Israel, the history of its conflict with the Arab states and Palestinian organizations, and the resulting justification of terror in the name of secular leftism, paved the way for the absurdity of incorporating a reactionary phenomenon such as Hamas into the forces of the global left. One result of this illusion was a second era of what we Nazi-era historians call the “problem of underestimation.”1 The phrase is one of the most famous observations that emerged from the historical scholarship on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. It refers to the failure of far too many people, including Communists, Socialists, liberals and conservatives, to realize that Hitler and his associates were deadly serious about intending to murder the Jews of Europe. British and French advocates of appeasement in the mid- and late 1930s thought satisfying Hitler’s territorial demands would curtail his desire for further aggression. In 1939, Stalin thought Hitler was a tool of the capitalists whose primary enemies were the Soviet Union and the German proletariat. Those who took Hitler’s intentions with the seriousness they deserved were a minority, and not a powerful one. After the Holocaust, historians known by the euphemism “intentionalists” emerged who saw the Holocaust as clear proof of an infamous unity of theory and practice, ideology and policy. Whether dissenting from Machiavelli, Hobbes, Adam Smith, Marx, or Lenin, what these historians had in common was the conviction that, at least in this case, and probably in many others, political decisions were not always the result of economic and political interests but could be the result of deeply held ideological convictions.2 Within the historical profession, the weight of the evidence of the connection between word, deed, ideology, and policy became a consensus. Simply put, without radical Jew-hatred at the top levels of the Nazi regime there would have been no Final Solution; without centuries of Jew-hatred in Europe, there Hamas in Historical Context: Islamism, Nazism and the Aftershocks of World War II and the Holocaust* Jeffrey Herf * First delivered as a lecture at The Goldstein-Goren Diaspora Research Center, Lester and Sally Entin Faculty of Humanities, Tel Aviv University, June 24, 2024; and at the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism, and the European Forum, at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, June 26, 2024. 1. Karl Dietrich Bracher, “The Role of Hitler: Perspectives of Interpretation,” in FASCISM: A READER’S GUIDE: ANALYSES, INTERPRETATIONS, BIBLIOGRAPHY 211-225 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976). 2. Lucy Dawidowicz, THE HOLOCAUST AND THE HISTORIANS (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983). W
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