Why Gaza must be de-Hamasified

 This article appears in the edition of the Jerusalem Report dated 7 June 2021

November 1944. World War Two is moving towards its close, and an Allied victory is assured. From Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF), a document is issued setting forth one of the major war aims of the United Nations ­– the de-Nazification of Germany.

          “It is the declared war aim of the United Nations to extirpate both Nazism and militarism in Germany”, reads the introductory paragraph. The document proceeds to set out the objectives, which in brief were to destroy the Nazi Party, its political organizations and government agencies; to purge and re-organize the police; and to dismiss from government offices and other position of influence all active Nazis, their sympathizers and leading military figures. Very shortly after the end of the war, the programme was set in train.

Why was it done? Because Nazism, with its wild-eyed philosophy of Aryan racial superiority, its virulent antisemitism, its brutal disregard for human rights, its cynical manipulation of the law to serve its own ends, was seen as a virus that had infected the German state and its population, and had to be eliminated.

The programme was fraught with enormous difficulties. It was only made possible because the Allies had won total victory and extracted an unconditional surrender from Germany.

Hamas is an extremist military organization that shares much of the Nazi philosophy. It is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, whose leaders in the 1930s and 1940s not only supported, but were actively involved in carrying through, the Nazi’s ”Final Solution to the Jewish problem” – the Holocaust.  The Allies’ carefully considered plans for ridding the world of Nazism are a template for dealing with its modern manifestation in Gaza.

As Professor David Patterson demonstrates in his seminal article “How Antisemitism prevents peace”, the jihadists’ virulent hatred of Jews can be traced back to three founding fathers of Sunni extremism: Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna, jihadist ideologue Sayyd Quth, and the leader of the Palestinian Arabs from the 1920s to the 1940s, the Jerusalem mufti Hajj Amin al-Husseini.

Al-Banna was an open admirer of Hitler and Nazi methods of antisemitic propaganda; modern jihadists take their lead from him. They not only repeatedly quote the long-discredited forgery “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” as proof of a world-wide Jewish conspiracy, but deny the Holocaust.

Sayyd Quth followed the Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg in arguing that all Jews were evil and must be annihilated. The Nazis contended that Jews were poisoning the Aryan race; Quth provided an Islamist slant by asserting that Jews were “by nature determined to fight God’s truth and sow corruption and confusion.” Just like the Nazis, he argued, the jihadists must eliminate this source of evil that threatens all humanity. In short, hatred of Jews and their extermination is obligatory for Muslims, as it was for Nazis.

The Sunni jihadist who more than any other espoused the Nazis’ loathing of Jews, and their aim of exterminating them, was Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the one-time mufti of Jerusalem. “He who kills a Jew is assured of a place in the next world” was his rallying cry to the Arabs of Palestine in 1929, when they rose against the British mandate government and went on a frenzy of killing.

Just two months after Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, Husseini met the Nazi Consul General in Jerusalem, Heinrich Wolff, and arranged for the Nazis to provide support for the Muslim Brotherhood. He later indicated that the Arab revolt that he instigated in 1936, starting with rioting against the Jews of Jaffa, was engineered with the help of the Nazis.

In October 1937, shortly after the Peel Commission had recommended partition as the best way to resolve the Arab-Jewish conflict, Husseini had his first meeting with Adolf Eichmann, head of the Gestapo’s Department of Jewish Affairs. By November 1941 he was in Germany, conferring with Hitler. Before the end of the year, Husseini again met Eichmann, now responsible for carrying out the Final Solution. Eichmann’s deputy later stated that the mufti was directly involved in its initiation and execution, and in advising Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS and its architect.

On 2 November 1943, at a rally in the Luftwaffe Hall in Berlin, Husseini declared, “The Germans know how to get rid of the Jews. They have definitely solved the Jewish problem. [This makes] our friendship with Germany permanent and lasting…” In a series of broadcasts, he proclaimed that there are “considerable similarities between Islamic principles and those of National Socialism.” He enjoined Muslims to “kill the Jews wherever you find them.”

As the war turned against Germany, Husseini began to fear that it might end before the extermination of the Jews could be accomplished. He wrote to Himmler twice, urging greater speed in completing the enterprise.

Exemplified by Hamas, the modern jihadist movement has remained faithful to its origins. The Hamas charter expands on the theme of the God-approved duty of every Muslim to kill Jews. A good Muslim mother must prepare her children for the fighting that awaits them, for, as article 28 asserts: “The Zionist invasion of the world…[aims] at undermining societies, destroying values…and annihilating Islam.  Israel, Judaism and Jews challenge Islam and the Muslim people.”

The essential pre-requisite for a de-Hamasification programme in the Gaza strip would be either total victory by Israel following a ground invasion – a procedure fraught with overwhelming difficulties because of the inevitable extent of civilian deaths – or a fail-safe method of emasculating and out-manoeuvering Hamas through political means.

The disbanding of Hamas would need to be a well-conceived, comprehensive and fully worked-out plan, prepared and ready to put into action as soon as the moment was ripe. Back in May 2003, when the de-Ba’athification programme was initiated in Iraq by the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), only half the necessary elements were in place. The goal was to remove the Ba’ath Party’s influence in the new Iraqi political system.  Accordingly all public sector employees affiliated with the Ba'ath Party were removed from their positions and banned from future employment in the public sector. But the CPA had no plans to fill the vacuum in administration it had created, and the policy failed. It was officially rescinded a year later.

The de-Ba’athification exercise is an object lesson in how not to proceed in the case of Gaza.  In any event the current conflict will almost certainly not provide the opportunity for Israel to achieve a convincing victory against Hamas and initiate a de-Hamasification programme. International pressure to agree a cease-fire will pre-empt any sort of decisive outcome.  Once again a cease-fire will simply provide Hamas with a breathing space in which to regroup and re-arm in preparation for the next encounter.

Limited conflicts followed by ineffective cease-fires cannot go on forever. If not on this occasion, the time will eventually arrive when Israel will be forced to undertake a sustained, all-out effort to gain the upper hand against Hamas. With military means ruled out because of the unacceptable collateral damage in terms of civilian casualties, Israel, must devise a political strategy that will achieve the desired objective.

Out-of-the-box thinking is called for. One possible answer could lie in peace negotiations brokered, perhaps, by the Middle East Quartet (UN, EU, US and Russia), aimed at establishing not only a sovereign Palestine, but a political structure designed to support the new configuration in the region.  A sovereign Palestine could be established as part of a new legal entity – a Confederation embodying Jordan, Israel and Palestine.  A Confederation is a system in which sovereign states agree to collaborate in certain spheres such as security, defence, economic development or infrastructure.

Coming into legal existence simultaneously with the new Palestine, the Confederation  would be dedicated to providing hi-tech security and economic growth for all its citizens. The Israel Defense Forces would act in concert with the defence forces of the other parties to guarantee the security of Israel and that of the Confederation as a whole.

Gaza would, of course, be included within the new sovereign Palestine, and from the moment it came into legal existence, the Confederation could make it clear that any subsequent armed opposition, from whatever source, including Hamas, would be disciplined and crushed from within. 

          This is a configuration offering the possibility of spiking Hamas’s guns permanently.  It would allow the introduction of a de-Hamasification programme.  Hamas leaders and adherents would be dislodged from their positions of power within Gaza, the malevolent Hamas philosophy would be eliminated root and branch, and its Nazi-based anti-Jew, anti-Judaism and anti-Israel ideology extirpated from the Palestinian body politic. Gaza’s citizens would finally be freed from the social and economic deprivation they have endured for too long.

Published in the Jerusalem Post website, 24 May 2021
https://www.jpost.com/jerusalem-report/why-gaza-must-be-de-hamasified-668967