The Ideology of Mass Murder
10th October 2023
The terrorist invasion of Israel by Hamas on October 7th, 2023, is the worst instance of mass murder of Jewish civilians since the Holocaust. Its barbarity may be shocking to many observers, but it will not have surprised those familiar with the ideology of the perpetrators. This latest outburst of violence is the logical outcome of the Jew-hatred that Hamas has openly expressed since 1988, and it rests on a strand of Islamic antisemitism that emerged in the early 20th century and fueled the Arab war of rejection in 1948. The ideology that inflames the Hamas leadership was the product of the fateful fusion of Nazism and Islamism in the 1930s and 1940s, and it has always rejected the legitimacy of a Jewish state (or indeed any polity that isn’t explicitly Islamist) anywhere in what, before 1948, had been British Mandate Palestine.