is here merely functioning as politically correct code for “the Jews.” That impression is confirmed when one learns from Article 17 of the 2017 version, ostensibly containing a further attempt to distance Hamas from the antisemitism so roundly embraced in the 1988 charter, that the Zionist project is able to summon the Western powers to its assistance. “Hamas is of the view that the Jewish problem, anti-Semitism and the persecution of the Jews are phenomena fundamentally linked to European history and not to the history of the Arabs and the Muslims or to their heritage. The Zionist movement, which was able with the help of Western powers to occupy Palestine, is the most dangerous form of settlement occupation, which has already disappeared from much of the world and must disappear from Palestine.”
The 2017 charter does not, as the 1988 version did, call for the slaughter of Jews wherever they live in the world. However, the difficulty of establishing who is a Zionist (Any Jew who supports Israel? Any non-Jew who supports Israel?) makes it difficult to establish precisely who remains outside the range of the license to kill claimed in Article 25 of the 2017 charter: “Resisting the occupation with all means and methods is a legitimate right guaranteed by divine laws and by international norms and laws. At the heart of these lies armed resistance, which is regarded as the strategic choice for protecting the principles and the rights of the Palestinian people.”
“All means and methods” have, as actually implemented, included successful attempts on civilian lives by means ranging from rocket attacks from the Gaza zone, suicide bombings, the use of cars and lorries to run down pedestrians in the street, casual stabbings, and more. All of these, according to “international laws and norms,” constitute war crimes. However, the 2017 charter offers no prospect of these ending at any point short of the complete destruction of Israel “from the river to the sea.” International attempts to resolve the crisis have of course since 1948 involved the creation of a Palestinian state coexisting with Israel. Hamas, though in the 2017 charter it professes itself prepared to accept such a state—described in Article 20 in terms that could hardly survive any actual negotiation—makes it clear that it would regard such a development not as a solution but at most as a halfway house to the total destruction of Israel.
Hamas believes that no part of the land of Palestine shall be compromised or conceded, irrespective of the causes, the circumstances and the pressures and no matter how long the occupation lasts. Hamas rejects any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea. However, without compromising its rejection of the Zionist entity and without relinquishing any Palestinian rights, Hamas considers the establishment of a fully sovereign and independent Palestinian state, with Jerusalem as its capital along the lines of the 4th of June 1967, with the return of the refugees and the displaced to their homes from which they were expelled, to be a formula of national consensus.
Reading through this new charter, it is difficult not to agree with “Robert F.,” who posted the following comment on the Middleeasteye.net website:
I suppose the major difference between this Hamas Charter and the previous one is that the previous one called for the slaughter of the Jews no matter where they live, whether in Israel or anywhere else in the world. It was profoundly anti-Semitic. It was profoundly Nazi.
The present new Hamas Charter does not contain this language. But the omission is in the interest of legitimating themselves in the world of diplomacy. Nothing has changed. They still educate their children to hate and murder Jews. However, Hamas has learned a valuable lesson from the Europeans. If you want to hate Jews, call them “Zionists” rather than Jews and it becomes politically correct in some circles.
We shall have occasion in later chapters to reflect at length on the pros and cons of his concluding remarks.
NOTES
1. I really do mean “Islamist” and not “Islamic.” Those who think that to be a Muslim is necessarily to be infected with Jew hatred would do well to spend a little time in the company of websites such as http://arabsforisrael.blogspot.co.uk. A Google search for “Muslim/Arab friends of Israel” will turn up many more such sites representing both groups and individuals.
2. Küntzel 2007, 7–8.
3. Rich 2016, 174–75.
4. Transcribed from the library of documents in law, history, and diplomacy maintained by Avalon Project of the Yale Law School and available at their website: http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/hamas.asp.
5. Arjan El Fassed, “EU Poll: ‘Israel Poses Biggest Threat to World Peace,’” Electronic Intifada, November 3, 2003, https://electronicintifada.net/content/eu-poll-israel-poses-biggest-threat-world-peace/4860.
6. See, for instance, John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008).
7. Austin 1962, 5.
8. For an excellent recent study of the long history of the blood libel, see Rose 2015.
9. Cohen 1998.
10. Hersh 1991.
11. Rosenbaum 2011.
12. Rosenbaum 2011, 141–42.
13. The 2017 version of the charter is available in full at the website of Middle East Eye: http://www.middleeasteye.net/news/hamas-charter-1637794876.
“PROFITING” FROM THE HOLOCAUST
There is [in Holocaust Studies] a distinct danger of escaping from the reality of the Nazi regime and its consequences into a nebulous general humanism, where all persecutions become holocausts, and where a general and meaningless condemnation of evil helps to establish a curtain between oneself and the real world. This escapism must of course be fought.
—Yehuda Bauer, The Holocaust in Historical Perspective
PRELIMINARIES
My second example of antisemitism operating as a type of pseudo-explanatory political fantasy moves from European polls and Islamist rodomontade to the groves of American academe. It concerns the long-running dispute over the question of whether the Holocaust was a “unique” event. This has divided academic opinion since roughly the start of the 1990s. An excellent account that surveys its various stages and its main contributors can be found in an outstanding new book by Gavriel Rosenfeld.1 My concern in this chapter will not be to contribute to this debate but rather to question the intellectual and moral solidity of some of the assumptions underlying it.
Several features of the uniqueness debate mark it out from the general run of academic or scholarly controversies. There is, for instance, the unusual degree of acrimony with which it has frequently been conducted. Another curious feature of the debate is its power to unite academic solemnity at one extreme with political scurrility at the other. The academic end of this spectrum of opinion has for almost
