41 Fall 2024 Amin El-Husseini will continue the struggle. The Lord Almighty did not preserve Amin for nothing. There must be a divine purpose behind the preservation of the life of this man, namely, the defeat of Zionism. Amin! March on! God is with you! We are behind you! We are willing to sacrifice our necks for the cause. To death! Forward march.20 Al-Banna’s remarkable statement made clear that Husseini would “continue the struggle” against the Jews, and that now this “struggle” was “the defeat of Zionism.” As Matthias Kuentzel articulated in his Nazis, Islamic Antisemitism and the Middle East, the rejection of the UN Partition Resolution of 1947 and the Arab decision to wage war against the new State of Israel were “aftershocks” and continuations of the war against the Jews in which Husseini had collaborated during the Holocaust.21 The war of religion was announced in Islam and the Jews in 1937 and continued in the war of 1948. It was a war which, for the Islamists, was never only about land and borders but was always about eliminating any Jewish presence in the former British Mandate of Palestine. The Islamist’s rejection of any Jewish state in Palestine after World War II, as well as their decision to collaborate with the Nazi regime during the war, were both due to deep-seated ideological convictions. From 1948 to the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran by 1980, Islamist organizations faded into the political background. Their support for Nazi Germany and their religiously grounded hatred of Judaism, the Jews, and therefore of the State of Israel, were disqualifying features in a postwar world with fresh memories of the horrors of Nazism. During the crucial years of 1947-1948, the diplomatic and military support of the Soviet Union and Soviet bloc was crucial for the establishment of the State of Israel. Indeed, it stood in contrast to the opposition to the Zionist project in the U.S. State and Defense Departments. However, once it became clear to Stalin that the new State of Israel was not going to be an instrument of Soviet expansion in the Middle East – as he had hoped, and George Marshall’s State Department had feared – Stalin turned against Israel. From there followed four decades of Soviet anti-Zionism, decades which comprised a secular bridge between the Islamists of the 1940s and those of the 1980s. Soviet propagandists rewrote the history of the war of 1948, repressed the anti-colonial, anti-racist, and anti-Nazi nature of the State of Israel, and articulated a tale of Zionist perfidy, racism, and colonialism that echoed 20. “Contents of Secret Bulletin of Al Ikhwan al Muslimin dated 11 June 1946,” Cairo (July 23, 1946), Office of Strategic Services to Washington, NACP, cited in Herf, NAZI PROPAGANDA FOR THE ARAB WORLD 243-244; see also Herf, THREE FACES OF ANTISEMITISM, supra note 10, at 77-78. 21. Matthias Küntzel, NAZIS, ISLAMIC ANTISEMITISM AND THE MIDDLE EAST (N.Y.: Telos Press Publishing 2019). 22. Jeffrey Herf, UNDECLARED WARS WITH ISRAEL: EAST GERMANY AND THE WEST GERMAN FAR LEFT, 1967-1989 (Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press 2016); see also Jeffrey Herf, “East Germany form Antifascism to Undeclared Wars with Israel, 1967-1989,” in THREE FACES OF ANTISEMITISM 123-147 (London: Routledge 2024). 23. The Hamas Covenant 1988: Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement, available at https://avalon.law. yale.edu/20th_century/hamas.asp; see also “The Document in Full,” MIDEAST EYE, (May 2, 2017), available at https:// www.middleeasteye.net/news/hamas-2017-document-full around the world. The Soviet Union placed the global prestige of anti-fascism in the service of the campaign to delegitimize the State of Israel. In the process it succeeded in making the word “Zionist” a term of abuse and the cause of “the Palestinians” a cause célèbre of the radical left. What had been “the Jewish question” before 1948 became “the Israel question.” The Palestine Liberation Organization engaged in terrorist attacks on Israel, all the while insisting that it was “only” opposed to Zionism and not to the Jews. The effect of these decades of secular antagonism toward Israel was the justification of armed assaults on what it described as a racist and settler colonialist state and to make that view compatible with the outlook of the international radical left.22 With the Iranian revolution of 1979 and the consolidation of the Islamic Republic in the following years, Islamists assumed the leadership of the assault on Israel. The issuing of the Hamas Charter in 1998 was evidence of that shift. It is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the attacks of October 7 and everything else Hamas has done since then to attack Israel. In 2008, an English translation was posted on the website of the Avalon Project in Law, History and Diplomacy of the Yale Law School.23 Its opening paragraph, which was written “In the name of the most merciful Allah,” quotes “the Martyr, Imam Hassan al-Banna, of blessed memory” who stated that “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated
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