Hamas charter of 1988: a "where angels fear to tread" look
It is common for partisans of Israel and of Netanyahu’s government to claim that the official 1988 charter of Hamas calls for genocide against Jews.
Jennifer Rubin mentioned it in a column this week, saying that “the elimination of all of Israel and its Jewish inhabitants” is “the stated goal of Hamas.”1 She links the later phrase to a Reuters article which says:
Hamas's 1988 founding charter called for the destruction of Israel, although Hamas leaders have at times offered a long-term truce, or Hudna in Arabic, with Israel in return for a viable Palestinian state on all Palestinian territory occupied by Israel in the 1967 war. Israel regards this as a ruse.2 [my emphasis]
I don’t have the least interest in putting any generous “best face” on Hamas, an anti-democracy Islamist terrorist group that showed its contempt for human life and the laws of war with their brutal and criminal attack on Israeli civilians on October 7. Reuters notes that Hamas “is designated a terrorist group by Israel, the United States, the European Union, Britain, Canada and Japan.”
But I wanted to see if the charge that the killing of all Israeli Jews is actually an explicitly stated goal of Hamas. I have been assuming that it more-or-less was because it is so often stated and implied. It’s not the least bit a cheerful subject, and I think of it as a where-angels-fear-to-tread kind of thing to even bother. Because it is the actions of Hamas that are decisive, not this or that programmatic statement.
Hebrew University English translation
I had briefly looked at the 1988 Hamas Charter that is much mentioned as specifically calling for the killing of the Jews in Israel as one of its commitments in an English translation by Raphael Israeli of the Harry Truman Research Institute of The Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel at the Federation of Scientists’ website.3 At first look, that version did seem to make such a reading plausible, though not quite explicit.
Hamas is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, which has many variations from more-or-less democratic to hardcore Islamist. The 1988 Hamas program quotes the founder of the Brotherhood, Hassan al-Banna, saying, "Israel will rise and will remain erect until Islam eliminates it as it had eliminated its predecessors." It calls for jihad (holy war, in the most common meaning) against “the Zionist invasion” of Palestine.
Article Seven of the 1988 document quotes the Prophet Muhammad from the hadith, a collection of sayings of the Prophet outside the Qur’an: “The time [the Day of Judgment] 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!”
It calls for Islamic (and Islamist) control of Palestine, of course. It says, “And the Jews will not be pleased with thee, nor will the Christians, till thou follow their creed.” And closely follows it with, “There is no solution to the Palestinian problem except by Jihad.” It describes its national mission as “the struggle against Zionism,” i.e., the project of a Jewish state in Israel.
It does seem to conflate Israelis with Jews more generally in this passage: “When our enemies usurp some Islamic lands, Jihad becomes a duty binding on all Muslims. In order to face the usurpation of Palestine by the Jews, we have no escape from raising the banner of Jihad.”
It also includes stock anti-Semitic tropes like rich Jews having “control of the world media” who also were responsible for inciting “the French and the Communist Revolutions and behind most of the revolutions we hear about here and there.” And others, such as: “They inspired the establishment of the United Nations and the Security Council to replace the League of Nations, in order to rule the world by their intermediary.” And it explicitly endorses the notorious “Protocols”: “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.”
This translation shows that the charter is clearly anti-Semitic and aims explicitly at the end of the Jewish state of Israel as such, to be replaced by an Islamic state. It also accuses Israel of being “Nazi” several times.
Does it explicitly say that the organization’s goal is to physically eliminate the Jews then in Israel? No, it does not.
It does say, “Israel, by virtue of its being Jewish and of having a Jewish population, defies Islam and the Muslims.” But it also says, “Under the shadow of Islam it is possible for the members of the three religions: Islam, Christianity and Judaism to coexist in safety and security.”
Given its clearly rancid anti-Semitism, its nationalist incitement against Israel and the Zionist project of Israel as a Jewish state, and its explicit call for Islamic rule in Palestine, no one could possibly confuse this with Madisonian liberalism!
But there is also nothing there that is nearly as explicit as Hitler’s 1939 public declaration:
[I]f the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevizing of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!4
One could assume from the anti-Semitic portions of the Hamas charter; its explicit goal of eliminating Israel as a Jewish state; the vague hadith quote about fighting Jews; and, maybe assuming that “jihad” means a war of extermination (it doesn’t in Islamic theology), and argue that all this together constitutes an explicit call for genocide against the Israeli Jews.
And of course Hamas’ conduct is more decisive in judging their goals. A formal revision of the charter in 2017 (see below) was clear in saying, “Hamas does not wage a struggle against the Jews because they are Jewish but wages a struggle against the Zionists who occupy Palestine.” Yet the October 7 attack seemed more obviously an attack on Israeli Jews as such than a clear and direct attack against the “occupation”.
But, again, that 1988 text does not include any explicit call for physical extermination of Israeli Jews. The hadith quote seems to be the closest. However, Footnote 16 on this point says that it “has been often quoted in Islamic literature, old and modern,“ but makes no mention of it being a genocidal statement of intent. The quote is vague, as End Times invocations often are. Certainly no one is likely to take that portion of the text as being philo-Semitic.
The translators’ footnotes also do not provide an interpretation that the charter calls for the physical killing of all Israeli Jews. Footnote 60 says:
Despite their protestation to the contrary, the Hamas uses Jews and Zionism interchangeably. The thrust of their assault is against Zionism, but by introducing incidentally anti-semitic themes, such as the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion," which preceded the birth of Zionism, they expose their real intent against Jews in general.
And if that means that the text is straightforwardly anti-Semitic and conflates Judaism and Zionism, that is obviously so.
Another English version from Yale’s Avalon Project has a more reader-friendly format.5
Hamas revised its charter in 2017 without explicitly dropping the 1988 version:
By 2017, it appeared that Hamas wanted to reshape, or at least clarify, its public image in some quarters. It took steps to soften some of the most extreme language of its 1988 charter by issuing new statements and declarations that, while not repealing or superseding the original document, supplemented it with more ambiguous terms and rhetoric. For example, the original charter called it "compulsory that the banner of Jihad be raised." In 2017, Hamas portrayed itself as a resistance movement aiming to “liberate Palestine and confront the Zionist project.” In 1988, Hamas explicitly acknowledged its links to the Muslim Brotherhood, but the 2017 Hamas Charter is devoid of references to the Brotherhood. In 1988, Hamas declared that the “Day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight Jews and kill them.” By 2017, Hamas claimed its mission wasn’t “a struggle against Jews or Judaism,” but a “struggle…against the Zionist occupation….”6 [my emphasis]
Mark Green goes on to say: “In 2017, Hamas dressed up their terrorist objectives in more ambiguous, less violent terms. But in 2023, they made clear what they really stood for—in President Biden’s words, ‘the destruction of the State of Israel and the murder of Jewish people’.”
Again, the actions of Hamas tell us more about what they stand than their official statement of goals.
Middle East Eye provides an English text of the 2017 revisions, a key one being this:
Hamas affirms that its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion. Hamas does not wage a struggle against the Jews because they are Jewish but wages a struggle against the Zionists who occupy Palestine. Yet, it is the Zionists who constantly identify Judaism and the Jews with their own colonial project and illegal entity.7
There are certainly cases of Hamas figures being quite explicit about killing Jews as such. For example:
But our brothers [in the diaspora] are still preparing. They are trying to prepare. They are warming up. A long time has passed with them warming up. All of you 7 million Palestinians abroad, enough of the warming up. You have Jews everywhere and we must attack every Jew on the globe by way of slaughter and killing, if God permits. Enough of the warming up.8
Statements like “there is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad” could be taken as genocidal if one assumes that jihad means what “Amalek” seems to mean for Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. But that has never been the meaning of the jihad concept in Islam generally.
Devorah Margolin of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) - not a group known for any sympathy for jihadist movements! - explains that the brutality indiscriminately targeted at Israeli civilians in the October 7 attack was a departure from Hamas’ previous general approach to even its terrorist attacks.9
Rubin, Jennifer (2023): Elite colleges failed to fight antisemitism. But these academics did. Washington Post 11/05/2023. <https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/11/05/fighting-antisemitism-campuses/> (Accessed: 2023-05-11).
What is the Palestinian group Hamas? Reuters 11/06/2023. <https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/what-is-palestinian-group-hamas-2023-10-30/.> (Accessed: 2023-06-11).
The Charter of Allah: The Platform of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) provided by the Information Division of the Israel Foreign Ministry. Federation of American Scientists website, n/d. <https://irp.fas.org/world/para/docs/880818.htm> (Accessed: 2023-02-02).
Mommsen, Hans (1997): Hitler's Reichstag Speech of 30 January 1939. History and Memory 9:1-2, 147. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/25681003> (Accessed: 2023-06-11).
Hamas Covenant 1988: The Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement 18 August 1988. Yale Law School Avalon Project 2008. <https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/hamas.asp> (Accessed: 2023-02-02).
Green, Mark A. (2023): Hamas: Words and Deeds… Wilson Center 10/24/2023. <https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/hamas-words-and-deeds> (Accessed: 2023-02-02).
Hamas in 2017: The document in full. Middle East Eye 05/02/2017. <https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/hamas-2017-document-full> (Accessed: 2023-05-11).
Rasgon, Adam (2019): Hamas official walks back call to Palestinian Diaspora to kill ‘Jews everywhere’. Times of Israel 07/15/2019. <https://www.timesofisrael.com/hamas-distances-itself-from-official-who-urged-murder-of-jews-everywhere/> (Accessed: 2023-05-11).
Margolin, Devorah (2023): A Major Pivot in Hamas Strategy. War on the Rocks 10/16/2023. <https://warontherocks.com/2023/10/a-major-pivot-in-hamas-strategy/> (Accessed: 2023-05-11).