University image by Chenyu Guan via Unsplash
BESA Center – Rabbis for Hamas & Figuring Out Hamas’s Strategy
By Dr. Asaf Romirowsky-BESA CENTER
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Ever since the 1960s, the Western academy has been churning out “scholar-activist-warriors” who carry the mantle of activism in lieu of scholarship. The result is generations of well-meaning yet ill-informed and brainwashed students, especially with regard to the Middle East. So warped are the perceptions of Western academics of both Israel and its enemies that even American Jewish rabbinical students are effectively shilling for an Islamist terror organization committed to killing Jews wherever they are.
The recent flare-up between Israel and Hamas once again forced American Jews to pick sides: Israel versus their universal ideals, which they see as incompatible with the Zionist enterprise. A case in point: a group of American rabbinical students enrolled in non-orthodox institutions issued a public letter accusing Israel of apartheid and calling on American Jewish communities to hold Israel accountable for its alleged “violent suppression of human rights.”
In many ways, these rabbinical students are a microcosm of young American Jews who see the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the American prism of race compounded by the formula of diversity, equity, and inclusion that is dominant in American society today. It also coincides with today’s quasi-religious practice of being seen doing acts of “justice” rather than participating in worship or prayer.
The rabbis-to-be state in their letter, “Our institutions have been reflecting and asking, ‘How are we complicit with racial violence?… And yet, so many of those same institutions are silent when abuse of power and racist violence erupts in Israel and Palestine.” All of this begs the question—do these caring individuals understand what Hamas is and what it stands for?
An offshoot of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood as it proudly pronounces in its Charter, Hamas has always been very clear about its goals and methods. A glance at the Hamas Charter makes them explicit: the Islamic Resistance Movement “strives to raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine,” “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it,” and “Initiatives, and so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences, are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement.”
Lest any of that fail to clarify the group’s mission, the Charter makes the following unequivocal statement:
[T]he Islamic Resistance Movement aspires to the realization of Allah’s promise, no matter how long that should take. The Prophet, Allah bless him and grant him salvation, has said:
“The Day of Judgement will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Muslims, O Abdullah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews.”
Hamas Political Bureau nember and former Interior Minister Fathi Hammad recently called on the “People of Jerusalem, we want you to cut off the heads of the Jews with knives. With your hand, cut their artery from here. A knife costs five shekels. Buy a knife, sharpen it, put it there, and just cut off [their heads]. It costs just five shekels. With those five shekels, you will humiliate the Jewish state.”
The future American rabbis embody apathy, religious ignorance, and the deliberate substitution of “social justice” for traditional Jewish liturgy. This accounts for their decline in engagement with Israel. These liberal and American instincts highlight the danger of placing antipathy toward the Jewish state of Israel at the center of religious belief. The growth of disdain and guilt regarding Israel within American Jewry is particularly acute on the cultural left, which is trying to grapple with what Zionism means to them, their children, and their grandchildren in the absence of any strong feelings about Judaism or fellow Jews.
The misplaced sense of guilt is deliberately amplified by statements emanating from members of the pro-Hamas “squad,” such as Rep. Rashida Tlaib, who stated, “Too many are silent or dismissive as our U.S. tax dollars continue to be used for this kind of inhumanity. I am tired of people functioning from a place of fear rather than doing what’s right because of the bullying by pro-Israel lobbyists. This is apartheid, plain and simple.”
She latter stated at a rally in front of the US State Department, during which she accused Israel of engaging in “ethnic cleansing,” that “What they are doing to the Palestinians is what they are doing to our Black brothers and sisters here. As you all are marching for freedom of Palestine, please know that you must be marching for everybody’s freedom. It’s all interconnected.”
Young American Jews in particular wrestle with Zionism, which in the 21st century has become a source of debate, controversy, embarrassment, and guilt as they try to come to terms with the activities of the Jewish state and its elected officials. Consequently, many seek to detach themselves from what used to embody the core of modern Jewish identity.
Historically, from the pre-state era through the aftermath of the 1967 Six-Day War, there was an appreciation of Israel—not only as the fulfillment of the ancient longing for return, but also as a haven. In the aftermath of the Holocaust the threat of annihilation was understood to be real. Zionism was viewed as part and parcel of American Jewish identity, especially in the years leading up to 1967. There was no contradiction between being a liberal American and a Jew.
Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis expressed this well:
Let no American imagine that Zionism is inconsistent with patriotism… There is no inconsistency between loyalty to America and loyalty to Jewry. The Jewish spirit, the product of our religion and experiences, is essentially modern and essentially American…Indeed, loyalty to America demands rather that each American Jew become a Zionist. For only through the ennobling effect of its striving can we develop the best that is in us and give to this country the full benefit of our great inheritance.
Today, in contrast to Brandeis, the ideology of liberal groups is more Marxist than democratic, aiming for “equity” rather than equality. So in Marx’s footsteps they create social revolutions through identity politics and do their best to undermine the American value structure. So far, this effort has been unsuccessful, given that the US is still grounded in nationalistic anchors that are absent in Europe.
But sturdier Zionist anchors are needed within the Jewish community to overcome self-reproach over Israel’s existence. Collective historical memory is lacking from today’s discourse on Zionism, especially in America. While there are Zionists on the left and right who still appreciate Jewish history and believe in Jewish destiny, Zionist renewal outside Zion is needed.
Asaf Romirowsky is executive director of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME) and a senior non-resident fellow at the BESA Center.
Hamas members on parade, image via IDF website
By Anoop Kumar Gupta,-BESA CENTER
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Israel largely achieved its military objectives in its recent war with Hamas, but the terror organization managed to achieve its political objectives despite its massive losses. This is only the beginning of a Hamas campaign to establish itself as the standard bearer for all Palestinians, including Israel’s Arab citizens.
During its recent war with the Hamas terror organization, which ended in a ceasefire on May 21, Israel significantly eroded the group’s military capabilities. It thwarted relentless barrages of rocket fire from Gaza, inflicted heavy damage on Hamas’s rocket arsenal, killed a good number of its military commanders, spoiled its malign intentions in the Mediterranean, and destroyed a significant portion of its underground tunnel network.
Yet despite its losses, Hamas is celebrating victory over Israel. It is basking in the glory of having united all Palestinians, including Israel’s Arab citizens, under its leadership to resist the might of the Jewish state. Even as it scored wins against Hamas rocket fire, Israel faced a crisis from within and seemed to be under siege—a result that represents a great success for Hamas.
This most recent war between Hamas and Israel was certainly not the last. The next will occur when the Islamist terror organization has recovered from the beating it just took and is able to reconstitute its command structure.
Hamas, the Palestinian offshoot of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, has caused trouble for Israel ever since its inception in 1987, and particularly after it forcibly evicted Fatah and seized exclusive control of the Gaza Strip in 2007. With Iran’s aid and support, Hamas has significantly increased its massive rocket and missile arsenal in terms of quantity, quality, intensity, and range. The current ceasefire will not stop Hamas from improving its military capabilities even further, and it will begin to do as soon as possible.
Hamas’s use of air and naval drones is a matter of serious concern to Israel. In view of the strategic lessons Hamas learned during this most recent engagement, it could decide to enhance its air and naval power for the purpose of bleeding Israel slowly and increasing the economic costs Israel suffers. To give some sense of the relative collateral damage caused to the two sides in the latest round of the conflict, one Tamir missile from the Iron Dome anti-missile system costs approximately $80,000 while the Hamas rocket it is designed to thwart costs about $800.
Never losing sight of its ultimate goal of destroying Israel so as to “raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine,” Hamas sparked the latest war with a view of asserting its leadership over the West Bank Palestinians. It did so by using the oldest Palestinian trick in the book: the supposed Jewish threat to Islam’s holy shrines in Jerusalem.
Having ostensibly achieved this goal, with the added (and probably unexpected) “bonus” of the Israeli Arabs’ nationwide assault on their Jewish compatriots, Hamas will likely continue to insert itself into matters related to non-Gazan Palestinians so as to consolidate its grip over them. And given the international community’s massive pressure on Israel to stop fighting whenever it seems on the brink of crushing the Islamist terror organization— as happened in 2008/9, 2012, 2014, and 2021—Hamas might have concluded that another war would invariably be a win-win situation for it, no matter how much its military might is degraded, let alone how much more its long-oppressed Gaza subjects are made to suffer.
Hamas can also be expected to intensify its efforts to take over control of the Palestinian Authority (PA) by ballot. Having won the Palestinian parliamentary elections in January 2006, Hamas was (illegally) prevented by PA President Mahmoud Abbas from translating its win into control of the PA. It has been thwarted ever since by Abbas, who has refrained from holding the long overdue election for the (well-founded) fear of a repeat PLO electoral defeat. Indeed, Abbas’s latest calling-off of the elections was the spark that enticed Hamas into setting in train the escalation process that led to the 2021 war.
Should Hamas seize control of the West Bank, as is bound to happen sooner or later, the phony interest in peace feigned by the PLO since the onset of the Oslo “peace process” in 1993 will likely evaporate, as Hamas has never hidden its ultimate goal of destroying Israel. And while the West’s infinite capacity for self-delusion regarding the Palestinian leadership’s genocidal intentions in general, and the PLO/PA’s true colors in particular, may enable the Islamist terror organization to sustain the PLO’s “peace” pretense for some time, it will never sign a full-fledged peace agreement with the Jewish State, because in its view “[T]he land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf [Islamic religious endowment] consecrated for future Muslim generations until Judgment Day.”
Though Hamas may not be able to stop the Arab states from normalizing relations with Israel, it can damage the favorable political environment necessary for the spirit of the Abraham Accords to be advanced. Perhaps more importantly, Hamas will likely intensify its efforts to broaden its influence among Israel’s Arab citizens (around 21% of the total population), as their continued radicalization not only poses a serious threat to Israel’s social fabric but could also culminate in a full-fledged armed insurrection in the event of a new war, on a far wider scale than that of October 2000 and May 2021. This is why its chief, Ismail Haniyeh, declared immediately after the current ceasefire that Hamas had successfully foiled Israel’s attempts to integrate into the Arab world, not only on a regional level and but also on a domestic level.
Dr. Anoop Kumar Gupta has been visiting researcher at Hebrew University and is an alumnus of the School of International Studies, JNU New Delhi. The views expressed are his own.
