“
Hamas made clear that Muslim values were a vital component of its worldview: ‘The Jews asked: will these people act without outside support?’ said another leaflet: They expected the generation that grew up after 1967 to be wretched and cowed, a generation brought up on hashish and opium, songs and music, beaches and prostitutes, a generation of occupation, a generation of poisoners and defeatists. What happened was the awakening of the people. The Muslim people is avenging its honour and restoring its former glory. No to concessions, [not] even a grain of dust from the soil of Palestine.72 Sentiments like these were codified in the Hamas charter, which was published in August 1988 and designed as an alternative to the PLO covenant.73 Its thirty-six articles defined the movement as a wing of the Muslim Brotherhood, hailed the martyr Izzedin al-Qassam, and described Palestine as a religious endowment (waqf), ‘consecrated for Muslims until judgement day’. In the face of the ‘Jews’ usurpation of Palestine’ no part of it could be surrendered. Its liberation was a religious duty. ‘There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavours. The Palestinian people know better than to consent to having their future, rights and fate toyed with.’ It referenced anti-Semitic notions about Jewish world domination, responsibility for the French and Communist revolutions, control of the media and the aspiration to expand from the Nile to the Euphrates in a plan embodied in a notorious Russian forgery, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It opposed the PLO’s support – though that
”
”
Ian Black (Enemies and Neighbors: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917-2017)