Hamas Charter Quotes

The entire Hamas Charter, from its preamble to the last article, pursues only one purpose: the violent elimination of Israel.

A few months after its creation, in August 1988, Hamas issued its charter, “The Charter of Allah: The Platform of the Islamic Resistance Movement (HAMAS).”98 This document introduced the movement and outlined its mission, values, and goals. It defined Hamas’s motto as “God is its goal; The messenger [the Prophet Mohammed] is its Leader; The Quran is its Constitution; Jihad is its methodology; and Death for the Sake of God is its most coveted desire.

Accordingly, the Hamas Charter calls the existence of the state of Israel on the land that was formerly held by Muslims a “Zionist invasion.”163 It therefore pledges to wage “jihad in the face of the oppressors, in order to deliver the land and the believers from their filth, impurity, and evil”164 in order to “[return the homeland to its rightful owner] and “to raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine”165 no matter how long it takes.166 Hamas does not want “peace” with Israel, and it will not negotiate a permanent peace agreement with Israel. Instead, it will only agree to intermittent “truces” when its military capabilities have been so degraded that it needs time to recuperate and rearm.

To Hamas, duly elected by the Palestinians – yet subverted by Fatah – nothing short of the destruction of Israel is an acceptable final outcome to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It’s in their charter. They do not hide it. They proclaim it with full candor: “Israel with exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated all others before it.

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

In France, officials promoted Islam as a weapon against left-wing radicalism in enclaves teeming with Algerian immigrants. Still in shock over the murders of several members of its team at the Munich Olympiad of 1972—i.e., in the years before the emergence of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, and Hamas—Israel, too, deluded itself into nurturing a Palestinian religious turn. The government naively imagined this development would be a boon for Israel: a burr in the saddle of the Yasser Arafat, whose Palestine Liberation Organization was robustly backed by the Soviets. Like Nasser, however, Arafat was a shrewd Leftist who appreciated the necessity of accommodating Islam. Though Arafat was a domineering Marxist, the PLO was, and is, an amalgam of entities that always incorporated Islamist elements as well as socialists, secularists, and Arab nationalists. Transparently, the American Left’s motive for pinning the purely “secular” label on the PLO and, particularly, on Fatah (Arafat’s base within it), is to promote the fiction that Fatah (now the ruling party in the “Palestinian Authority”) is “moderate” and worthy of U.S. support. The idea is to draw a flattering contrast to the incorrigible Islamist terrorists of Hamas. As we’ve seen, though, Fatah is not strictly secular—the claim that it is relies on the savage zealotry of Hamas to overwhelm the facts. Fatah was propelled by jihadist rhetoric and theory, its charter regards the duty to “liberate” Jerusalem as a religious obligation, and it has a decades-long history of rationalizing terror on Islamic scriptural grounds—these are “moderates” who maintain their own terrorist wing, the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades. Similarly astute were Pakistan’s Leftists. Zulkifar Ali Bhutto’s legacy, the Pakistan People’s Party, has always couched its secular-socialist ambitions in Islamic rhetoric. With echoes of the Muslim Brotherhood’s slogan, the PPP’s motto remains, “Islam is our faith; democracy is our politics; socialism is our economy; all power to the people.” And for all her pretensions to Western liberalism, Benazir Bhutto, who followed her father’s footsteps to become Prime Minister, was midwife to the Taliban in Afghanistan and stoked jihadist terror in Kashmir—all part of her geopolitical maneuvering against India. Sadat and both Bhuttos were ultimately killed by Islamists: Sadat slain by the Muslim Brotherhood; Bhutto père executed in the Zia coup d’état, after which Pakistani society underwent a thoroughgoing Islamicization; and daughter Benazir murdered by the Taliban when she reincarnated herself as a crusader for democracy. Fatah, similarly, is holding on for dear life: ousted from the Gaza Strip by Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch, it is hunkered down in the West Bank—hoping that the democracy it purports to champion isn’t taken too seriously (notoriously corrupt, Fatah would be likely to lose a true popular election) and praying that Hamas decides jointly annihilating the Zionist entity is a higher priority than crushing an intramural competitor. There is a moral to these stories. Revolutionaries of Islam and the Left make fast friends when there is a common enemy to besiege. Leftists, however, are essentially nihilists whose hazy vision prioritizes power over what is to be done with power. They are biddable. Islamists, who have very settled convictions about what is to be done with power, are much less so. Even their compromises keep their long-term goals in their sights. Thus do Leftists consistently overrate their ability to control Islamists. Factoring the common denominator, power, out of the equation, something always beats nothing.