During WWII, film director Frank Capra produced seven films under the theme of Why We Fight.  In these films, Capra explained the war to American service-people and civilians, and urged them to unite in the complex and labor-intensive task of defeating the Axis Powers and defending American values.

Today Americans need to understand why Hamas fights.  Without understanding that their goals are completely antithetical to Western civilization, we cannot fathom either the depths of barbaric depravity Hamas inflicts on the Jewish People and Israel, or make an informed policy decision about the war that began with the Hamas onslaught on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

Gazans hold a deep-seated and millennial-long hatred of Jews and Israel.  To determine  whether it may be possible to “de-program” people with this pathological hatred, as we de-programed Naziism in Germany and militarism in Japan, we must explore the causes of such hatred and determine whether it could even be amenable to change, or whether it cannot be solved at this time, and instead must be beaten back and defeated soundly now, and held down militarily for the foreseeable future; I conclude the latter.

From its inception in 1987, Hamas has been an existential threat to the State of Israel, to all Israeli citizens (Arab and non-Arab Christians, Druze, Muslims, Jews, Baha’i, and others), to all Jewish people and all Christians worldwide.  This hatred is manifest in its Charter and in threats by Hamas to annihilate all Jews, which Hamas has openly renewed since Oct. 7, 2023.

Hatred of Jews prevails among the Gaza civilian population.  Gaza civilians are noncombatants under international law, entitled to certain protections during war, which the IDF assiduously provides.  However, most of these non-combatant civilians are not what the West would call “innocent.”  They are, in fact, fiercely pro-Hamas, anti-Israel, and anti-Jew, hoping that Hamas will defeat Israel and kill all the Jews there.  

As Dr. Victor Davis Hanson explains,

Over 500 Gazan civilians tagged along with Hamas killers to join in the thievery, assault, torture, beheadings, rape, and murder. Many civilians were also among the 20,000 day laborers who worked in Israel and thus lent their knowledge of the geography of the kibbutzim to enable Hamas killers to hunt down Jews.

Hostages who were removed to Gaza were struck and spit upon by throngs of civilians. Trophy corpses trucked back were further desecrated by the frenzied street mobs. The knowledge that hundreds of Jews were being murdered a short distance away did not sober Gazans but sent them into hysterical rejoicing. Occasional reports from released hostages or Israeli captives who attempted to escape confirmed the general support of the people for Hamas’s killing spree. Bonuses were offered to freelancing Gazans–in the fashion of Old West bounty hunters–to bring back Israeli hostages: for the most part, young children, women, and the elderly. Reports of selling live hostages circulated.

The creation of “Palestinian Nationalism” is one cause which led to Hamas’s perceived necessity to carry out the Oct. 7 massacre.  This was explained in a lecture at Shalem College on Jan. 1, 2024 by Haviv Rettig Gur, a Senior Analyst for the Times of Israel.  In his presentation entitled “The Great Misinterpretation: How Palestinians View Israel,” at 1:06 Gur speaks of the,

Themes within Arab culture of Islamic betrayal, . . . Arab betrayal. . . . weakness that functions as a theme of Palestinian history at every turn.  Arab weakness, Muslim weakness, and the desperate desire to be redeemed from that weakness.  . . .   Islamic weakness . . . is at the heart of the Palestinian story.  It’s a theme of how Palestinians think about us, imperial patrons.  . . . We saw how the fact that we were Russian [emigrants to the Holy Land] in 1882 matters as much as the fact that we were Jews.  . . . being Russian was the fear factor toward us, because they’re Ottomans.  . . .  there’s always an imperial patron.

Gur explains that although the original Jewish Russian immigrants in the 1880s–90s were themselves refugees fleeing overwhelming persecution and pogroms, once rid of them Russia viewed “their” Jews in the Middle East as Russian citizens, and negotiated with the Ottoman rulers for extraterritoriality, meaning that the immigrant Jews were not subject to Ottoman and local law.  Thus, however abject the Jews’ poverty and weakness, the Arabs considered them as colonizers, an extension of Russian sovereignty.

As Jewish immigration came from, at different times, Britain, France, and Germany, the Arabs considered these Jews colonists from these countries, although they were, rather, refugees fleeing to escape persecution who were returning to their ancestral home.

The Arabs’ inability to destroy the Jews through massacres and other pressure over the years came to be seen as a stain on Arab and Muslim honor.

Beyond Islamic nationalism, there is also the Islamic religious component of Israel being an illegal occupier of “Palestine,” known as “Waqf.”

A main feature of the Islamic movement is the trope that all of modern day Israel is land held in trust for Allah, and that Jews are occupying that land illegally.  This provides a religious rationale for the chant “From the River to the Sea,” but this is a legal definitional overreach, bringing Islamic trust law into the sphere of religiosity beyond the bounds of its legal language.

“Waqf,” usually translated as “endowment,” is the Arabic term for land held in trust for religious purposes.  The authoritative handbook for the modern practice of Islam, “Reliance of the Traveller,” explains this Islamic charitable civil/religious endowment concept:

k30.0 ESTABLISHING AN ENDOWMENT (WAQF)

. . . In Sacred Law, it refers to the retention of any property that can be benefited from while the property itself still remains, by suspending disposal of it; with the financial proceeds of it going to some permissible expenditure. The scriptural basis for it is the hadith related by Muslim that the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) said.

This trust concept has its counterparts in Western law where an individual or charity donates irrevocably a piece of land or an apartment building.  The capital asset can never be relinquished, and the produce or rent generated are property of the recipient, to be disposed of in accordance with the terms of the endowment.  In the case of Islamic waqf, this must be for religious purposes.

Although it is clear that waqf involves a voluntary donation or endowment from a person (such as an apartment building owned by an individual) for religious purposes, Hamas has preempted the Islamic legal definition of the waqf concept to conclude that an endowment has been made by God to the Muslim community where the capital of this endowment is the entire land where the State of Israel is located.  As Robert Spencer states in his essay “The Qur’an: Israel Is Not for the Jews”:

The Hamas charter asserts that ‘the Islamic Resistance Movement [i.e. Hamas] regards Palestine as an Islamic Waqf consecrated for future generations until Judgment Day.’ A waqf is a religious endowment bestowed by God. Consequently, ‘neither it, nor any part of it, should be squandered: Neither it, nor any part of it, should be given up. Neither a single Arab country nor all Arab countries, neither any king or president, nor all the kings and presidents, neither any organization nor all of them, be they Palestinian or Arab, possess the right to do that. Palestine is an Islamic Waqf land consecrated for Muslim generations until Judgment Day.’

The education system for Arab children in both Gaza and Judea and Samaria (the West Bank), created by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), continues to reinforce the anti-Israel and anti-Jew mindset of the Arab residents and their children.

For decades, Arab children have been taught in their schools and summer camps to hate and despise Jews and Israel, and are recruited to take up arms against the Jewish State.  The literature and the school textbooks demonstrate conclusively the pernicious part played by UNRWA and Hamas in this education system. 

Researcher and reporter David Bedein has been following the UNRWA education processes for years.  In an op-ed in Israel National News on Oct. 2, 2023, five days before the Hamas onslaught in southern Israel, Bedein reported on a research study of the strategic threat to Israel and Jews posed by UNRWA:

UNRWA oversees 59 refugee camps that comprise more than five million descendants of Arab refugees relocated by the 1948 war.

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UNRWA has educated the next generation to blindly believe in a sacred ‘right of return’ by force of arms to the very homes which they left back in ’48, homes that no longer exist, in villages that have since grown into Israeli cities, collective farms and woodlands.

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On April 7 of this year [2023], three ‘graduates’ of UNRWA school educational system living in the UNRWA Askar refugee camp near Nablus murdered [Rabbi Leo Dee’s] wife Lucy and two daughters, Rina and Maia, in a drive-by shooting.

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[T]he parents who spoke with pride in their sons’ willingness to kill Jews in order to achieve the right of return to villages that no longer exist.

Hamas must be defeated, unequivocally, and following the end of the present wars against Hamas, a multi-generational effort by the civilized world will be required to reeducate the Middle East to renounce Jew hatred among the Muslims of Gaza, Hezbollah-dominated Lebanon, and Judea and Samaria.

Michael S. Goldstein is Arizona State Director of Proclaiming Justice to the Nations.  He is a 30-year veteran of the United States Navy and of the U.S. intelligence community.  His articles appear in American Thinker.

Image: Free image, Pixabay license.