“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!”  Hamas Char­ter, Arti­cle VII

“Under­stand­ing Hamas [and] Hezbol­lah as social move­ments that are pro­gres­sive, that are on the left, that are part of a glob­al left, is extreme­ly impor­tant.”  Berke­ley Pro­fes­sor Judith But­ler

The war that pits Israel against the pro­gres­sive social move­ment known as Hamas has returned to dor­man­cy.  The most recent out­break of blood­shed did not end with rocks and trees turn­ing Jews over to their Mus­lim pur­suers for exter­mi­na­tion.  The glob­al left will have to wait for his­to­ry to progress to that geno­ci­dal outcome.

The shoot­ing has stopped for now, giv­ing time to reflect on its caus­es.  We can begin by con­sid­er­ing the nature of Hamas – its moti­va­tions, its inten­tions, how it con­ceives and defines itself.  Until quite recent­ly, I’d nev­er heard of the Hamas Char­ter, much less read it.  It is an ele­gant­ly writ­ten man­i­festo that seam­less­ly weaves mali­cious rhetoric with reli­gious pro­nounce­ments.  It seethes hatred.  It reeks of resent­ment.  It is punc­tu­at­ed with rever­ies of vengeance.

West­ern­ers who chas­ten Israel for its sup­posed intran­si­gence on a “two-state solu­tion” might con­sid­er that Hamas regards the exis­tence of a Jew­ish state to be a vio­la­tion of Islam­ic law.

The Islam­ic Resis­tance Move­ment [Hamas] believes that the land of Pales­tine has been an Islam­ic Waqf through­out the gen­er­a­tions and until the Day of Res­ur­rec­tion, no one can renounce it or part of it, or aban­don it or part of it…Any demarche in vio­la­tion of this law of Islam, with regard to Pales­tine, is base­less and reflects on its per­pe­tra­tors.  [Arti­cle XI]

Expelling the Jews from the Mid­dle East is a reli­gious and patri­ot­ic duty.

Hamas regards Nation­al­ism (Wataniyya) as part and par­cel of the reli­gious faith. Noth­ing is lofti­er or deep­er in Nation­al­ism than wag­ing Jihad against the ene­my and con­fronting him when he sets foot on the land of the Mus­lims. And this becomes an indi­vid­ual duty bind­ing on every Mus­lim man and woman.  [Arti­cle XII]

Any talk of peace with Israel is hereti­cal, nego­ti­a­tions a treachery.

[Peace] ini­tia­tives, the so-called peace­ful solu­tions, and the inter­na­tion­al con­fer­ences to resolve the Pales­tin­ian prob­lem, are all con­trary to the beliefs of the Islam­ic Resis­tance Movement…Those con­fer­ences are no more than a means to appoint the non­be­liev­ers as arbi­tra­tors in the lands of Islam…There is no solu­tion to the Pales­tin­ian prob­lem except by Jihad.  [Arti­cle XIII]

And yet, Pres­i­dent Oba­ma is report­ed­ly “enraged” with the Israeli gov­ern­ment after the fail­ure of US-ini­ti­at­ed nego­ti­a­tions over a two-state solu­tion.  That is the judg­ment of the President’s for­mer Spe­cial Envoy for Pales­tin­ian-Israeli nego­ti­a­tions, Mar­tin Indyk, who not­ed that the recent hos­til­i­ties in Gaza have had a “very neg­a­tive impact” on US-Israeli relations.

Rage, as the Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens observed, does not typ­i­cal­ly afflict our Pres­i­dent.  Stephens finds it odd that he reserves his rage, not for Russ­ian Pres­i­dent Vladimir Putin or Hamas, whose con­tin­u­al provo­ca­tions and acts of aggres­sion brought about the most recent vio­lent erup­tion, but for Israel.

What is per­haps more sur­pris­ing is that Amer­i­cans who have fol­lowed main­stream report­ing on the Mid­dle East in recent decades would find his rage so unsur­pris­ing.  That report­ing has typ­i­cal­ly rep­re­sent­ed the Pales­tini­ans as agents of progress and the Israelis as inflex­i­ble.  For­mer Asso­ci­at­ed Press Mid­dle East cor­re­spon­dent Mat­ti Fried­man argued in a recent essay that media cov­er­age has been delib­er­ate­ly dis­tort­ed to con­form to the polit­i­cal tastes of news-gath­er­ing organizations.

Many of the peo­ple decid­ing what you will read and see from [Israel] view their role not as explana­to­ry but as polit­i­cal. Cov­er­age is a weapon to be placed at the dis­pos­al of the side they like.

And the side they like, accord­ing to Fried­man, is the Pales­tin­ian one.  That pre­dis­po­si­tion not only influ­ences what you read but, some­times more impor­tant­ly, what you don’t.  He notes, for exam­ple, that when for­mer Israeli Prime Min­is­ter Ehud Olmert made a peace offer to the Pales­tini­ans, AP edi­tors spiked the sto­ry. The deci­sion, as you might expect, was not pop­u­lar with reporters.

Some staffers were furi­ous, but it didn’t help.  Our nar­ra­tive was that the Pales­tini­ans were mod­er­ate and the Israelis recal­ci­trant and increas­ing­ly extreme. Report­ing the Olmert offer—like delv­ing too deeply into the sub­ject of Hamas—would make that nar­ra­tive look like non­sense.  And so we were instruct­ed to ignore it, and did, for more than a year and a half.

But what is more dam­ag­ing than sup­press­ing par­tic­u­lar sto­ries is man­u­fac­tur­ing false nar­ra­tives.  One such nar­ra­tive, Fried­man writes, is that the Pales­tini­ans are seek­ing their own state that would peace­ful­ly coex­ist with Israel.

The West has decid­ed that Pales­tini­ans should want a state along­side Israel, so that opin­ion is attrib­uted to them as fact, though any­one who has spent time with actu­al Pales­tini­ans under­stands that things are (under­stand­ably, in my opin­ion) more com­pli­cat­ed. Who they are and what they want is not impor­tant: the sto­ry man­dates that they exist as pas­sive vic­tims of the par­ty that mat­ters [Israel].

This “moral­i­ty play” nar­ra­tive, as Fried­man describes it, requires us to believe things about Pales­tini­ans that they do not believe about them­selves.  Near­ly 7 in 10 Gazans, accord­ing to a recent Pew Foun­da­tion poll, believe that a Pales­tin­ian state can­not exist along­side a Jew­ish one.  These views are no doubt linked to a more gen­er­al antipa­thy toward the Jews.  An ear­li­er Pew Foun­da­tion poll found that 90 per­cent of peo­ple liv­ing in the Mid­dle East had an unfa­vor­able opin­ion of Jews.  We nev­er­the­less choose to look past the Pales­tini­ans’ own view­point to con­struct a dialec­tic of oppres­sor vs. oppressed, per­pe­tra­tor vs. vic­tim. That frame­work, Fried­man argues, does not square with reality.

The ascen­dant force in our part of the world is not democ­ra­cy or moder­ni­ty. It is rather an empow­ered strain of Islam that assumes dif­fer­ent and some­times con­flict­ing forms, and that is will­ing to employ extreme vio­lence in a quest to unite the region under its con­trol and con­front the West.

Jihadism has many faces: Hamas, Hezbol­lah, Tal­iban, al Qae­da, and the Islam­ic State among them.  For all their dif­fer­ences, they are vir­tu­al­ly indis­tin­guish­able in their moti­va­tions, their tac­tics, and their hatred of democ­ra­cy, moder­ni­ty and West­ern val­ues. Our insis­tence that the Islam­ic State is a man­i­fes­ta­tion of jihadism that must be destroyed, while Hamas is a prod­uct of Israeli aggres­sion that must be tol­er­at­ed, twists real­i­ty and pro­duces a for­eign pol­i­cy that is incon­sis­tent and unfail­ing­ly ineffective.

Hatred and bru­tal­i­ty are not relics of an ear­li­er age. They are flour­ish­ing in the 21st cen­tu­ry. His­to­ry does not move in a straight line, much less trace an upward course.  Roman­ti­ciz­ing groups like Hamas to fit some pro­gres­sive con­ceit about his­to­ry’s tra­jec­to­ry is wrong-headed.

Hamas has told us who they are.  We should rid our­selves of delusions.