41 Summer 2025 terrorist attacks by the PLO or other Palestinian actors which caused Israel to take such measures and made them necessary to prevent such further attacks.13 The HAW letter of July 31, 2014, follows this well-established pattern of linguistic obfuscation. At the same time, the HAW letter gave evidence of an important and new development in the history of political warfare waged against Israel: the willingness of the secular American left to support Hamas, an organization whose origins lay in a mixture of Islamist religious fundamentalism, raw Jew-hatred, and the after-effects of collaboration with Nazi Germany during World War II and the Holocaust.14 This development was emerging powerfully in Britain as well. Robert Wistrich, the late historian of antisemitism, referred to it as “the Red-Green axis,” that is the tendency of leftist activists in Britain to excuse or even offer solidarity with Islamist terrorist organizations such as Hamas.15 David Hirsh, a British sociologist and analyst of contemporary antisemitism, once pointed out that a similar development took place in 2014 and 2015 with the election of Jeremy Corbyn, who made his sympathies for Hamas well known to the leadership of the British Labor Party.16 The HAW letter of summer 2014 was a chapter in this developing “RedGreen axis.” While the radical left in the U.S. had expressed support for various communist movements and states, including Mao’s China, communist Vietnam, Cuba, and the secular leftism of the PLO, the HAW statement of summer 2014 marked a turning point. It indicated that 2,200 historians both in and outside the U.S. or signatories who at least called themselves historians, supported a position that embraced the interpretation of the war offered by Hamas. Thus, they supported Hamas in its attacks on Israeli civilians in southern Israel. The July letter echoed the propaganda of Hamas. “Objectively” with the consequences of that partisanship in view, the letter was evidence that a “pro-Hamas” left had emerged in a part of the American historical profession.17 Unlike the collaboration between Nazi Germany and Islamists in the 1940s, which rested on both shared political interests as well as profound ideological meeting points that reflected what were essentially reactionary values (to say the least), the novelty of the Red-Green axis was that the secular left was making common cause with organizations deeply at odds with the values from which the modern left emerged since the French Revolution. It revealed that the animus against Israel and “American imperialism” was so profound that selfdescribed leftists were willing to repeat the arguments of Hamas, a reactionary organization rooted in Islamist religious hatred of Jews that viewed its wars with Israel as a religious duty of all Muslims. By 2014, the historians who signed the July letter had ready access to an English-language translation of the Hamas Covenant of 1988. In 2008, editors of the Avalon Project: Documents on Law, History and Diplomacy at Yale Law School posted the covenant on its website, which had become well-known for presenting extensive documentation from the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials. With a few mouse clicks, those historians could read that the founders of Hamas had selected passages from the Qur’an and its commentaries to present theological justifications for their “war against the Jews.” They could learn that the Hamas Charter blamed “the Jews” for the French Revolution, World War I and World War II; that it echoed the conspiracy theories of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion about Jewish and “Zionist” domination of other countries, and included phrases echoing Nazi Germany’s Arabic-language propaganda during the Holocaust, which other historians had been documenting for many years.18 13. On these patterns and implicit language rules, see Jeffrey Herf, UNDECLARED WARS WITH ISRAEL: EAST GERMANY AND THE WEST GERMAN FAR LEFT, 1967-1989 163-164 (Cambridge University Press 2016). 14. On the collaboration with Nazi Germany, see Jeffrey Herf, NAZI PROPAGANDA FOR THE ARAB WORLD (Yale University Press 2009). On the origins in religious fundamentalism, see Matthias Küntzel, NAZIS, ISLAMIC ANTISEMITISM AND THE MIDDLE EAST (Routledge 2024); see also Jeffrey Herf, “Why They Fight: Hamas’ TooLittle-Known Fascist Charter,” in Jeffrey Herf, THREE FACES OF ANTISEMITISM: RIGHT, LEFT AND ISLAMIST 203-210 (Routledge 2024). 15. Robert Wistrich, “The Red Green Axis,” in A LETHAL OBSESSION: ANTI-SEMITISM FROM ANTIQUITY TO THE GLOBAL JIHAD 399-434 (Random House 2010). 16. David Hirsh, CONTEMPORARY LEFT ANTISEMITISM (Routledge 2018). 17. Jeffrey Herf, “A Pro-Hamas Left Emerges,” THE AMERICAN INTEREST (Aug. 26, 2014), https://www.theamerican-interest.com/2014/08/26/a-pro-hamas- left-emerges/ 18. Herf, supra note 14; Küntzel, supra note 14; Bernard Lewis, SEMITES AND ANTISEMITES: AN INQUIRY INTO CONFLICT AND PREJUDICE (W.W. Norton 1999); David Motadel, ISLAM AND NAZI GERMANY’S WAR (Harvard University Press 2014).
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