38 No. 72 JUSTICE would not have been thousands of collaborators and supporters. Together with government statements from the Islamic Republic of Iran in the years following 1979, the Hamas Charter of 1988 has the same significance for the history of antisemitism as Mein Kampf, Hitler’s prophecy speech of January 30, 1939, or Goebbels’s essays such as “The War and the Jews.”3 In prose that was crystal clear, and available on the internet in English translation by 2008, the Islamic Resistance Movement in Gaza proudly announced its intention to wage a war against the Jews in the name of its interpretation of Islam with the purpose of destroying the State of Israel. Hamas was not and is not a carbon copy of Nazism. The cultural references, religious background, and ideological heroes are different. Yet long before the massacre of October 7, 2023, Hamas had declared its murderous intentions and did so with pride and confidence.4 Yet, despite the seemingly widely understood connection between antisemitic ideology and murderous intentions during the Holocaust, a second era of underestimation took place in which governments, human rights organizations, the United Nations, and selfidentified leftists combined underestimation with apologia and even justification.5 Tragically, the policy of the government of Israel shared some of these illusory hopes.6 In the aftermath of October 7, there were Open Letters and signed statements in our universities placing the attacks of that day into a distinct “historical context” – that of 75 years of Israeli occupation, and the disposition and repression of the Palestinians.7 In universities, the press, and famous human rights organizations, one heard less about another historical context: the core ideological beliefs of Hamas and the now more than almost 90-year history of Islamism, a distinct interpretation of the religion of Islam that emerged first in Egypt and Palestine in the 1920s and 1930s with the Muslim Brotherhood.8 Islamists attained global attention when they collaborated with Nazi Germany during World War II and the Holocaust. They were crucial to the Arab decision to reject the United Nations Partition Resolution of 1947, launch the war of 1948, and reject every effort at compromise since. The Hamas Charter of 1988 updated the blend of Islamist Jew-hatred with the modern conspiracy theories of Nazism that emerged during the years of collaboration and fusion during World War II and the Holocaust. Hamas terrorist attacks in Israel’s cities in the 1990s, its seizure of power in Gaza in 2007, establishment of a dictatorship that turned the Gaza strip into an underground and aboveground fortress to wage war on Israel, the thousands of rockets fired at Israel since, and the mass murders of October 7 were all translations of its core beliefs into policy and action.9 I assume that this history is familiar to many if not most of you, but it is not well known to the majority of academics in American universities or the general public in the world’s democracies. Here are some key texts and events in the tradition of Islamist hatred of Jews, and therefore of Israel. In September 1937, Haj Amin al-Husseini, appointed in the 1920s by the British to be the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, was a man on the run because the British authorities were seeking to arrest him for his role in supporting terror against the Jews in Palestine. In his absence, he had a text read at a pan-Arab conference in 3. Jeffrey Herf, THE JEWISH ENEMY: NAZI PROPAGANDA DURING WORLD WAR II AND THE HOLOCAUST 209-211 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). 4. “The Ideology of Hamas in its Own Words,” MIDDLE EAST MEDIA AND RESEARCH INSTITUTE (MEMRI), (Oct. 23, 2023), available at https://www.memri.org/reports/ ideology-hamas-%E2%80%93-its-own-words 5 Jeffrey Herf, “October 7: The Problem of Underestimation Yet Again,” in “Responses to October 7,” Vol. 8. ANTISEMITISM STUDIES No. 1 (Spring 2024), available at https://antisemitismstudies.com/jeffrey-herf.html 6. Michael Milshtein, “Why Is It So Difficult for Israel to Decipher Hamas?” JERUSALEM STRATEGIC TRIBUNE (Dec. 2023), available at https://jstribune.com/milsthein-whyis-it-so-difficult-for-israel-to-decipher-hamas/ 7. Omer Bartov et al., “An Open Letter on the Misuse of Holocaust Memory,” N.Y. REV. OF BOOKS (Nov. 20, 2023), available at https://www.nybooks.com/ online/2023/11/20/an-open-letter-on-the-misuse-ofholocaust-memory/; see also “On the Israel and Palestine issue, context matters,” DIAMONDBACK (Nov. 16, 2023), available at https://dbknews.com/2023/11/16/umd-mustprovide-room-to-express-all-views-on-israel-palestineissue/; “Joint Statement by Harvard Palestine Solidarity Groups on the Situation in Palestine,” INSTITUTE FOR PALESTINE STUDIES (Oct. 10, 2023), available at https:// www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/1654370 8. Jeffrey Herf, Norman Goda et al. “An Exchange on Holocaust Memory,” N.Y. REV. OF BOOKS (Dec. 8, 2023), available at https://www.nybooks.com/online/2023/12/08/ an-exchange-on-holocaust-memory/ 9. Jeffrey Herf, “The Ideology of Mass Murder,” QUILLETTE (Oct. 10, 2023), available at https://quillette. com/2023/10/10/the-ideology-of-mass-murder/
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