Hatred for Israel drives the pro-Hamas voices
‘Hamas has been looking forward to implement Allah’s promise whatever time it might take …. ‘The time will not come until Muslims will fight the Jews (and kill them); until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees, which will cry: O Muslim! there is a Jew hiding behind me, come on and kill him!’”
Thus reads article 7 of the Hamas charter, the founding principles adopted by the group on its formation in August 1988. From the outset, Hamas’s core goal has been to violently eradicate Israel and extend Muslim domination over “every inch of Palestine”.
To that end, it has perpetrated innumerable terror attacks in which thousands of Israelis, the great majority of them civilians, have been killed or injured. However, none of these previous “operations” came remotely close to matching the sheer carnage that occurred on October 7, the Jewish festival of Simchat Torah. On that day, in what was the worst mass killing of Jews since the Nazi murder factories ceased operating eight decades ago, invading Hamas gunmen systematically butchered 1,500 Jews in southern Israel, some in the most barbaric ways, while more than 200 were taken as hostages back to Gaza.
For Hamas, never before had article 7 of its founding charter been so triumphantly realised. The organisation lost little time in publicising and celebrating its “victory” by releasing gruesome video footage of the massacre and parading its hostages — women, young children and the elderly — before cheering crowds in Gaza’s streets.
The lessons of past genocides make plain that before exterminating a population it is necessary to dehumanise them. Such a process of dehumanisation, and demonisation, of the Jewish people has been under way in Palestinian society for decades, through the state-controlled media, educational system, religious teachings and political leadership.
The Hamas charter, which peddles theories of a Jewish plot for world domination, is a further source of this indoctrination: “Their scheme has been laid out in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and their present [conduct] is the best proof of what is said there,” claims the charter. “The Jews stood behind World War 2 where they collected immense benefits from trading with war materials … The Jews inspired the establishment of the United Nations and Security Council … in order to rule the world by their intermediary … There was no war that broke out anywhere without their fingerprints on it.”
I challenge anyone to compare the above to a certain publication called Mein Kampf and explain how they differ.
What happened on October 7 was the culmination of an ongoing series of cross-border attacks by the Hamas regime in Gaza since the early 1990s. These attacks progressively intensified even after Israel, as a gesture of good faith in resurrecting the moribund Oslo peace process, unilaterally withdrew both its military and the entire Jewish civilian population from Gaza in 2005.
And we know what Hamas’s response was. After routing its Fatah rivals in a brief and bloody civil war, it established an Islamist dictatorship over the territory and used it as a base from which to pursue an all-out war against Israel proper. In the ensuing 17 years, literally tens of thousands of rockets and mortars were fired at Israel’s towns and multiple attempts made to infiltrate Israel through an elaborate system of cross-border tunnels. In all of this Hamas, along with other extremist movements such as Hezbollah, has been funded and equipped by Iran, a fellow Islamist regime that shares its aim of wiping Israel off the map.
Throughout this time, Hamas has based its terror operations in the heart of Gaza’s civilian population, knowing full well that this places innocent people in deadly danger. This humanshield tactic, in itself a war crime, has cost, and tragically is still costing, the lives of ever-mounting numbers of ordinary Palestinians.
All this begs a crucial question: when people one claims to genuinely care about act in a manner that is irrational and self-destructive, surely basic common sense dictates that they be urged to desist from doing so?
Ever since Israel’s withdrawal, Gaza has been in the vice-like grip of a tyrannical regime of religious fundamentalists bent on wiping out the Israeli state. To that end it has continually bombarded Israeli population centres and ceaselessly tried to infiltrate Israeli territory to massacre soldiers and civilians alike.
It is to prevent these attacks that Israel, as it has every right to do, has implemented rigorous border controls and a tight blockade, not because it wishes to cause hardship to the Gaza population. To carry out all these attacks, Hamas has deliberately embedded its weapons, fighters and military infrastructure within the civilian population, including in and around hospitals and schools, and even calls upon its civilians to ignore warnings to evacuate areas where counterattacks are imminent.
Now, in what is another outright war crime, Hamas is holding more than 200 civilians hostage in Gaza. Is there any country in the world that wouldn’t do everything it could to rescue its citizens? Any discussion on how to end the current conflict must have as its starting point the release of these hostages.
It has to be asked why those purporting to care about the plight of the people of Gaza, the South African government and ruling party among them, are not calling out the Hamas regime for engaging in tactics that cause even more harm to its own people than they do to Israel. Why, indeed, have condemnations of Hamas been all but nonexistent throughout this and previous conflicts, even though the greatest sufferers have self-evidently been ordinary Palestinians simply trying to get on with their lives?
Finally, why is it Israel that has instead been made the object of so much calumny and irrational invective? All this does is provide a violent, tyrannical and racist Islamist movement with propaganda victories, thereby making those responsible complicit in bringing about the deaths of innocents they purport to deplore.
One cannot avoid the conclusion that what really motivates the fury and moral outrage that we are seeing, in our own country and around the world, is not concern about the suffering of Palestinians. It is simply hatred for Israel, the nation state of the Jewish people, and support — tacit or otherwise — for those intent on its destruction.
At this time of such polarisation and anger on all sides, let us remember that it was Hamas that initiated this conflict by carrying out a wholesale massacre of Israelis in the certain knowledge that Gaza’s own people would be in the firing line when Israel responded. Let this be uppermost in people’s minds in the days and weeks to come as the bombs continue to fall, bullets continue to fly and people on both sides continue to die even as Hamas, whose acts of sheer evil have brought about this tragic state of affairs, clamours for the world at large to rescue it from the consequences of its criminal conduct.