Since it is indeed self-contradictory within an Arab context, a more accurate term to describe certain Palestinian and/or Arab attitudes towards Jews might be ‘anti-Jewish’. In their historic context, the indigenous Muslims, Christians and Jews of the Middle East lived together with a remarkable degree of coexistence, particularly when compared with the lack of religious tolerance and the predominance of religious fanaticism in medieval Christian Europe. Jews in particular enjoyed a ‘golden era’ of centuries-long peaceful living under Islamic rule, in what is known now as the Middle East and North Africa, and particularly in Andalusia. Tolerance toward Jews and Christians in Islamic tradition and societies is underpinned by the Quran, where the common roots of Islam, Judaism and Christianity in the Old Testament are acknowledged, and respect for Jews and Christians by Muslims is required. Thus, in principle there is no theological basis for religious (as well as ethnic or racial) discrimination that could lead to European-type anti-Semitism and its manifestations.
Ironically, the strong anti-Jewish feelings that crept into the Middle East by the start of the twentieth century originated in Europe, from European ideas compounded by European actions. Since the early twentieth century, European Zionism exploited the ever-growing European desire to resolve the ‘Jewish question’ (a question astoundingly and notoriously exacerbated by the events of World War II in Nazi-occupied Europe), ultimately by exporting the Jewish populations outside Europe and marrying the solution with the Jewish aspiration of creating a Jewish state in Palestine. With the establishment of Israel by dictat and at the expense of the indigenous Palestinians who had peaceably occupied their lands for over 2000 years, Jews and Zionists, and Judaism and Zionism, became conjoined. With half of the Palestinian people forced out of their homes and lands on the eve of the formation of Israel in 1948, the western-exported Jewry forcibly replaced them, all under the approving eye of Europe and the United States. Thus, the Jews/Zionists came to be seen in the eyes of Palestinians and Arabs as a form of colonial military occupation, consequently destroying the peaceful coexistence of Muslims and Jews that had prevailed in the region for centuries.
The spurious ‘anti-Semitic’ book The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (which also originated in Europe) described the Jews as masterminding a global conspiracy to control the world. It suddenly found a ripe climate in Palestine because of the creation of Israel in the Palestinian homelands in 1948. This date ended the peaceful period of coexistence between Muslims and Jews, and unfolded a new chapter of bloody relationships and hatred. Unless this background is taken into account, any understanding of the explicit or implicit attitudes in Hamas to Jews is unlikely. Intrinsically and religiously Hamas could not be antiJewish. By virtue of Islamic religious teachings, Hamas, or any other Islamic individual or group, is prohibited from inflicting any harm on Jews simply because they are Jews (or Christians, or any other group for that matter). So to be factually correct, Hamas is strongly anti-Zionist, not anti-Jew, with the term Zionist defined as ‘a person or group whose focus is the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine’. (The name comes from Zion, the hill upon which the oldest part of Jerusalem was built.) Although in the early years of its inception Hamas made little effort to differentiate between Judaism as a religion and Zionism as a political movement, in later and recent years Hamas has completely clarified its thinking on this issue. It is anti-Zionist, not anti-Jew.
Hamas: Ideological and Religious Themes
