43 Fall 2024 way” for the establishment of Israel, recalled Nazi Germany’s Arabic-language radio broadcasts that asserted, for example, that “the Jews kindled [World War II] in the interest of Zionism.”32 The Nazi influences in the Hamas Charter of 1988 were now also visible to a scholarly and policymaking readership.33 An important theme of Nazi Germany’s Arabiclanguage propaganda was that a Jewish state in Palestine would threaten other Arab states. Article 32 stated: Today it is Palestine, tomorrow it will be one country or another. The Zionist plan is limitless. After Palestine, the Zionists aspire to expand from the Nile to the Euphrates. When they will have digested the region they overtook, they will aspire to further expansion, and so on. Their plan is embodied in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and their present conduct is the best proof of what we are saying.34 By 2008, with the posting of the English text at the Yale Law School Avalon Project website, the Englishreading scholarly and legal audiences now had textual evidence of the blend of religious fundamentalism with Nazi ideology, which together fanned the flames of a religious war against the Jews and therefore against the existence of the State of Israel. The Charter did not receive extensive attention in democratic countries. On January 5, 1993, The Washington Post published five paragraphs from the 36 articles, and 9,000-words of the Hamas Charter.35 The first mention of the Charter in the New York Times appeared on April 16, 2009, in a very good 220-word letter to the editor by the late Israel political theorist, Shlomo Avineri.36 In the years since, The Times has not published extensive sections of the Charter, nor has it offered its readers an article that fully presented its core arguments and language. In 2003, in the aftermath of Al Qaeda’s attacks of 9/11, Ça Ira, a small left-leaning press in Germany, published Matthias Küntzel’s Jihad und Judenhass: Über den neuen jüdischen Krieg (Jihad and Jew-Hatred: On the New Anti-Jewish War).37 As far as I know, Küntzel’s work was the first extended public description of the Charter and its significance by any scholar in Israel, Europe, or the United States. He described the Charter as “probably the most important programmatic document of contemporary Islamism.”38 In 2010, Meir Litvak, a historian at the Department of Middle Eastern and African History, and Research Fellow at the Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies at Tel Aviv University, published “‘Martyrdom Is Life’: Jihad and Martyrdom in the Ideology of Hamas” in the specialist journal, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism.39 Yet what Litvak called the “most important document of contemporary Islamism” aroused little interest beyond scholarly specialists. The lack of attention in the academy to the Charter’s Islamic dimension of Jew-hatred and hatred of Israel found a counterpart in the paucity of attention in public discussion. Further, with the coining of the term “Islamophobia,” those who examined the topic risked being accused themselves of racism.40 In 2017, Hamas issued a statement that adopted more of the secular language of anti-Zionism made famous by the Palestine Liberation Organization. Yet despite this change in language, that text remained true to the spirit of the founding Charter. It rejected “any alternative to 32. Radio Broadcast: VOICE OF FREE ARABISM, PALESTINE BETWEEN THE BOLSHEVIKS AND THE JEWS (Axis Broadcasts in Arabic, 1943), as cited in Herf, NAZI PROPAGANDA FOR THE ARAB WORLD, supra note 10, at 184. 33. Jeffrey Herf, “Why They Fight: Hamas Too-Little Known Fascist Charter,” THE AMERICAN INTEREST (Aug. 1, 2014), available at https://www.the-american-interest. com/2014/08/01/why-they-fight-hamas-too-little-knownfascist-charter/ 34. Id. 35. “For the Record: From the Hamas Charter,” WASHINGTON POST (Jan. 5, 1993), available at https://www.proquest. com/hnpwashingtonpost/docview/140807192/F5A6C9 67F78D4476PQ/2?accountid=14696&sourcetype=His torical%20Newspapers 36. Shlomo Avineri, “What the Hamas Charter Says About Jews,” N.Y. TIMES (Apr. 15, 2009), available at https:// www.nytimes.com/2009/04/16/opinion/l16hamas.html 37. Matthias Küntzel, JIHAD UND JUDENHASS: ÜBER DEN NEUEN JÜDISCHEN KRIEG (Freiburg: ca ira Verlag 2003). 38. Id. at 109. Küntzel referred to an English translation of the Charter that was then available at www. palestinecenter.org/cpap/documents/charter.html 39. Meir Litvak, “‘Martyrdom Is Life’: Jihad and Martyrdom in the Ideology of Hamas,” Vol. 33, No. 8 STUDIES IN CONFLICT AND TERRORISM 716-734 (July 2019), available at https://doi.org/10.1080/1057610X.2010.494170 40. Pascal Bruckner, AN IMAGINARY RACISM: ISLAMOPHOBIA AND GUILT (Cambridge, UK and Medford, MA: 2018); see also Bassam Tibi, ISLAMISM AND ISLAM (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press 2012).
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