Hamas doesn’t want peace between Israel and Palestine, its goal ‘is to wipe Israel and its people from the face of the earth’, writes Henry Ergas

A Jewish man prays at a spot overlooking the Western Wall plaza.

Russia’s war is a war of subjugation; Hamas’s is a war of extermination. Its goal neither is, nor has it ever been, to reach a peaceful settlement of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. As is apparent from its charter, it is to wipe Israel and its people from the face of the earth.

It would be a mistake to view that genocidal objective, which is actively backed by Iran, Hezbollah and a galaxy of Islamist groups, as a recent aberration, born from the unending cycle of violence between Israelis and Palestinians.

Rather, just as the Nazis’ genocidal project arose from a long-term radicalisation of Christian anti-Semitism, so Islamism’s exterminationist goal emer­ged from a deeply engrained tradition of Muslim anti-Semitism.

Initially, that anti-Semitism reflected an element of scriptural ambivalence. The Koran both proclaimed Islam as the only true faith and – notably in relating Muhammed’s war with the Jewish tribes in Medina – seemed to endorse the Jews’ outright elimination. But it also mandated respect for “the people of the book”, a category which, along with Christians and Zoroastrians, included Jews.

The tension between those prescriptions was addressed through the Pact of Umar, which is usually attributed to caliph Umar ibn al-Khattab, who ruled from 634 until his assassination in 644.

Building on aspects of the Byzantine Empire’s legal code, the pact allowed the “people of the book” to practice their faith so long as they remained strictly subordinate to Muslims. The pact’s implementation differed greatly from region to ­region; but almost everywhere, the harshest restrictions on “dhimmis” – that is, non-Muslims – applied to Jews.

Particularly in the Arab lands, to be a Jew was to experience a lifetime of humiliation. Umar said the pact “gave dhimmis a place consistent with the abject lowliness God has imposed on them”; travelling through North Africa in 1876, the French writer Joseph Halevi described it as “reminding Jews that their Arab masters could do whatever they wanted” – including killing them, with Jews being four times more likely to be murdered in 19th century Morocco than Muslims.

Yet precisely because the presence of Jews allowed even the poorest Muslim to enjoy a sense of social superiority, dhimmitude was never inherently exterminationist. However, new pressures, which came into play in the second half of the 19th century, dramatically altered that picture.

A man waves the Palestinian flag during the funeral of three Hezbollah fighters

To begin with, although their implementation was extremely patchy, the Ottoman Empire’s sweeping reforms in 1839 and 1856 abolished dhimmitude. Every bit as importantly, Ottoman property law was overhauled in 1858, creating a functioning market in land; along with a series of free trade agreements, that change reshaped the Ottoman economy.

The consequences were two-fold. An expansion in the size and efficiency of agricultural holdings forced many small farmers off the land, inducing an exodus that caused clashes between impoverished Muslims flooding into urban areas and the largely urbanised Jewish population.

At the same time, the Jews, who had always had relatively high levels of literacy, proved well placed to take advantage of the opportunities created by the ­reforms, provoking a wave of ­hostility from traditional and emerging Muslim elites.

As those processes were under way, Islam itself experienced a fundamental transformation. Formed after the failure of the 1857 Indian Mutiny had signalled Islam’s political defeat in the subcontinent, the Deobandi movement in northern India heralded the rise of a drastically purified, more rigorous form of Islam, which, like 17th century Christian Puritanism, was congenitally intolerant of other faiths.

Adamantly rejecting religious freedom, including the limited tolerance mandated by the Koran, rehabilitating the notion of holy war and glorifying martyrdom, that movement’s myriad successors – along with Shia Islam’s equally virulent equivalents – elevated hatred into a ­virtue, preventing more liberally minded Muslim reformers from making durable inroads.

Combined, those changes had a profound effect on Arab nationalism, as it took shape over the period from 1890 to 1940. Even in its most secular versions, it was almost always infected by anti-Semitism, attempting to cement a largely artificial ethnic or national identity by opposition to (among others) the “arrogance” of the supposedly all-mighty Jews; its more widely prevalent religious versions added an apocalyptic imaginary to their fury, foreshadowing a jihad that would lead to Islam’s global ­triumph and the Jews’ complete extirpation.

The result was a transition from dhimmitude’s anti-Semitism of subordination to an anti-Semitism of extermination.

Almost immediately, that led to a steep increase in the frequency and geographical spread of massacres. Attacks on Jews swept Morocco from 1894 and Algeria from 1897, long before Zionism had any presence in Palestine; they spread rapidly across the Middle East, and then morphed into the even more violent riots – marked by cries of “Itbah al Yahud!” (“Butcher the Jews!”) – that became a common occurrence in the Arab lands throughout the inter-war years.

It was in the midst of that gathering storm that the propaganda of European anti-Semitism, which theorised and legitimated extermination, gained enormous resonance in the Muslim world during the 1920s and 1930s; and while the crushing of Nazi Germany marginalised exterminationist anti-Semitism in Europe, it not only survived but prospered in the Arab countries, surfacing with great vehemence even when World War II had just ended.

Israeli soldiers carry the casket of a fellow soldier during a funeral.

Typified by the Muslim Brotherhood’s pledge in 1946 that it would “repeat the German massacres and destroy (the Jews) entirely”, and the Arab League’s proclamation soon thereafter of “a war of extermination which will eclipse the massacres of the Mongols”, Islamic exterminationism defined a mindset that both ensured war without end in the Middle East and became increasingly extreme with every ­calamitous Arab political failure and military fiasco.

Hamas, Hezbollah and the Iranian regime are merely that mindset’s latest incarnation. Trapped in a vision that admits of no compromise, they view Israel’s destruction and the massacre of its people as the crucial prelude to the coming of the Islamic millennium. Given the immensity of the stake, the human toll is entirely irrelevant: their own dead, they say, will be eternally rewarded in heaven; as for Israel’s innocent civilians, they simply deny any such people exist.

Obviously, fanaticism alone cannot make Hamas’s genocidal project succeed. There is, however, no prospect whatsoever of Hamas abandoning its exterminationist objective, which is now as firmly entrenched in the Islamist identity as eliminating the Jews was in that of the Nazis. Nor is there any reason to believe Hamas will, for so long as it survives, resile from its goal of making Israelis’ daily life a nightmare, in which the fear of death and ­destruction pervades every aspect of existence.

Today’s battle in the Middle East is therefore not a clash of ­civilisations; it is a war that has been developing for more than a century between civilisation and exterminationist barbarism. Unless and until that barbarism is comprehensively defeated, this world of ours will know no peace.