What is Hamas – The Hamas war doctrine and objectives
In an inversion of science fiction novels where the elite class enjoys life outside on the ground while keeping the lower class working underground in inhuman conditions, Hamas’ war doctrine consists of keeping the dispensable items outside in the open, while the military assets and the elite political and military cadres live and operate underground.
Dispensable items include civilians and civilian buildings and infrastructure: this is what the press and social media see and report, both during normal days and especially during armed conflicts, when emotions run high. These are dispensable items: they are continuously replenished and rebuilt in between armed conflicts, by natural population growth and the influx of money from Muslim states and well-meaning naïve Western European organizations. A significant part of this money is diverted to the military infrastructure, from building a complex system of underground tunnels and installations, to the development and manufacture of military equipment. As in the science fiction novels, health and material conditions of this low-class dispensable population are kept to the minimum necessary to insure the continuation of this regime and the achievement of its objectives. Ideological indoctrination is strictly imposed at the schools from a young age.
Hamas’ ideology is simple and it is this simplicity that makes it so powerful to the masses: “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it”. This declared objective appears right at the beginning of Hamas’ Covenant, as translated and published by the Yale University School of Law [1]
To dispel any doubts between being only “anti-Israel” or just plain “antisemitic”, Hamas’ Covenant spells this explicitly: “The Prophet, Allah bless him and grant him salvation, has said: ‘The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.”
Furthermore, if anyone still thinks that a compromise with Hamas can be achieved, here comes again Hamas’ Covenant. Under the title of “Peaceful Solutions, Initiatives and International Conferences”, Hamas states: “Initiatives, and so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences, are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement … Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors.”
Plain and simple. As were the means used to demonize the Jews by Nazi Germany and as is the demonization of Israel by the fanatic religious regime of the Ayatollahs since they took power in Iran in 1979.
These three regimes, Nazi Germany, Iran’s Ayatollahs and Hamas share the same ideological structure: after clearly stating their objective (despicable as it may be) they then proceed methodically towards achieving this objective. Their reasoning does not differ in one iota from the logic used, for example, by Euclid in his Geometry: state clearly a few basic axioms and then systematically proceed to derive all their consequences. One just has to accept the premises, then anything else is logic and justifiable.
The Western media willfully ignores Hamas’ ideological axioms and then hand-picks selected “facts”, for example, Israel’s “disproportionate” use of force and the “unbalanced” number of casualties on both sides. Hamas launched its first rockets towards Jerusalem and other Israeli cities on May 10, 2021. Since then, it fired during ten days more than 3,500 rockets towards Israeli cities. In response, the Israeli air force launched hundreds of sorties. No one in the media and the press seems to notice the incongruence that after thousands of precise and powerful guided-bombs used by the Israeli air force only about 200 Gazans were killed. Were these pilots all drunk and merit an “F” for abject failure, or is something else going on? What are these pilots targeting then?
By comparison, German civilians – men, women and children – killed by the Allied strategic bombing on Germany soil during World War II ranged between 350,000 to 500,000. Hitler committed suicide in his underground bunker on April 30, 1945, to avoid being captured alive by the advancing American and Russian forces. Only then, Nazi Germany surrendered days later on May 7, 1945.
Eliminate the State of Israel and kill Jews until they submit to Islamic rule. These are not empty slogans from a fringe group. This is an ideology deeply entrenched for centuries in the Muslim world against non-Muslim minorities in their midst. It is taught and inculcated to children from young age. It is clearly stated in Article 11 of the Hamas Covenant [1]: the land [from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea] belongs to the Umma (Islamic communities) and can never be relinquished. The difference between Hamas in Gaza and the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank is only in the means but not in the end result. The PA – having discarded the violent path after the unsuccessful Intifadas launched in 1987 and 2000 – intends to achieve the dissolution of the State of Israel by “non-violent” means: all the peace initiatives between the PA and Israel failed so far because of the refusal of the PA to renounce to the “right of return” of millions of Palestinians to Israel proper. How the Jews will accept this influx of millions of migrants by “non-violent” means is left unexplained.
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[1] “Hamas Covenant 1988 – The covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement”, published by the Yale School of Law:
https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/hamas.asp
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Note: The above is a chapter included in the first edition of my book “Boycott of Israel is wrong: How to fight it”, published on June 3, 2021, following the May 2021 conflagration between Hamas and Israel.