As it was in 2001 – and God knows how many times before – liberal campus kids are now celebrating Islamist fascists. The habit of humanities students in wealthy countries imaginatively transforming various mutations of extremism into forms of noble defiance is a long one – long enough to constitute a pattern of wilful ignorance. But then, wilful ignorance often precedes the pleasures of indulging moral simplicity.
Hamas are medieval goons who’ve long enjoyed the patronage of Iran’s vampiric ayatollahs. They consider Jews to be a disease, and their very existence in the Middle-East as a cosmic stain – a stain against which all violence is justified to cleanse. However ignorantly Western activists may invoke it, “From the river to the sea” is a vision of cleansing Jews from the land. It’s a battle-cry for the violent dissolution of Israel.
Here’s the founding charter for Hamas, written in 1988. It makes explicit their mission of genocide. In 2017, the group issued a revised version – one which neither superseded nor disavowed the first, but seemed to soften, rhetorically at least, its view of Israel as existentially repugnant. The likelihood that this was merely a rebranding exercise, rather than a major philosophical adjustment, was shown repeatedly by various blood-thirsty statements in the years subsequent. Here’s Hamas MP Marwan Abu Ras speaking on television in 2019: “Everything people say about massacres and Holocaust – these are all lies. Hitler may have hated them, but it was because of their deeds and crimes.”
And here’s former Hamas MP and current member of the group’s political bureau, Fathi Hammad, the same year:
“You seven million Palestinians abroad, enough warming up! There are Jews everywhere! We must attack every Jew on planet Earth – we must slaughter and kill them, with Allah’s help… We will die while exploding and cutting the necks and legs of the Jews. We will lacerate them and tear them to pieces, Allah willing!”
There’s an abundance of similar quotes – they’re not outliers.
When Hamas released their revised Charter, Aaron David Miller, the vice president of the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars and a former Middle-East negotiator for the US government, wrote:
Significant though it is, the new manifesto was clearly a transactional response to the organization’s circumstances rather than a transformative statement. Hamas is politically isolated. Its economic management of Gaza is reaching crisis proportions. It is under pressure from the Palestinian Authority, which won’t pay the Israelis to supply electricity. The group is also out of step with Egypt, which borders Gaza.
Hamas have been in power in Gaza for 17 years now. Long enough, certainly, for us to contemplate their achievements for their people. It’s poor. They’ve funnelled vast amounts of foreign aid into building tunnels and stockpiling weapons. They’ve overseen graft and economic chaos. They’ve executed their own military leaders for being gay. They’ve purposefully embedded themselves in civilian populations – including schools and hospitals – preferring military asymmetry to their people’s protection. And they have, repeatedly, spoken of their divine mission to destroy the Israeli state.
Should I repeat that? They have defined their mission as killing Jews and destroying the Israeli state – not as a function of territorial dispute or sovereignty, but as a fundamentally cosmic matter: that Jews are sub-human, and Allah has blessed their annihilation.
They wrote this down. But, as it was with al-Qaeda twenty years ago, Western fools ignored what they were actually saying, and interpreted their violence as the work of heroic freedom fighters: al-Qaeda were not murderous religious fanatics, but proud men rebelling against Western hegemony.
And yet, there’s a reason that Egypt has closed its borders to Gazan refugees; and another that Jordan has offered its airspace to the US. “This is Islam, that was ahead of its time with regards to human rights in the treatment of prisoners, but our nation was tested by the cancerous lump that is the Jews in the heart of the Arab nation,” Hamas official, and then speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council, Sheikh Ahmad Bahar, said in 2007. “Make us victorious over the community of infidels... Allah, take the Jews and their allies. Allah, take the Americans and their allies... Allah, annihilate them completely and do not leave anyone of them.”
So, two things. First, the resonant absence of the word “Hamas” (or “al-Qassam Brigade”) in the mouths of pro-Palestine protestors here in Australia. Please: Say it. Say their name. Think about them. Read their charter. Consider their Iranian patronage and their illiberal fanaticism. Contemplate their crimes of October 7; their use of rape as a tool of terror. And ask the question: over almost two decades, how much money was invested in guns and tunnels, versus schools and hospitals? Then ask yourself: how would I, as a bi-sexual Foucauldian scholar, fare under Hamas rule?
My second point is about campus protests. The encampments. Fine. Great. Leave class. Pitch your tents. Exercise your rare freedom and pronounce your barely digested sense of history. But your freedom of speech ends when it intimidates others, or prevents the basic function of a university.
Is it not curious to those out in Australian streets, protesting the bloody aggression of Israel, that the worst enablers of this bloodshed are Aussie universities and our federal government? Are there not more intimate agents to this slaughter? Gaza shares two borders: one with Israel, and the other with Egypt. The latter has denied the access of any refugees, but I’ve yet to hear any condemnation of them. Should protestors not camp outside the Egyptian embassy, rather than Monash University?
That would require some reading, though – including about Hamas’ historic association with Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, and the realisation that Hamas’s military arm, the al-Qassam Brigade, were influential, through assassinations and suicide bombings, in killing the Oslo Accords of the 1990s/early 2000s.
In early 2000, Israel was prepared – through Prime Minister Ehud Barak and the insistent brokerage of President Clinton – to make radical concessions to Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Liberation Organisation. Barak’s new concessions were so great, in fact, that they surprised both Clinton and the PLO. As Clinton’s then-advisor, Sidney Blumenthal, recalls in his memoir The Clinton Wars:
“President Clinton brought both sides to the Cabinet Room in the White House and formally read to them terms that had been worked out for a final settlement. The main elements were: The Palestinians would gain 95 percent of the West Bank and all of the Gaza strip, whose size would be increased by one-third, and a safe land link between the two would be established; the Arab sections of East Jerusalem would become the capital of the new Palestinian state; Palestinians would have authority over Muslim holy places in Jerusalem; Israel would withdraw from sixty-three settlements on the West Bank; and Palestinian refugees would have the right to resettle in the new state and receive compensation from a $30 billion reparation fund (this amount did not include the tens of billions Clinton had promised he would raise for economic development).”
But Arafat said no – defying, and shocking, his own advisors in doing so. George W. Bush was elected later that year and history’s door closed. Perhaps Arafat didn’t want to compromise his reputation as a gun-slinging, battle-scarred freedom fighter by signing diplomatic papers with the devils of the US and Israel; or, relatedly, perhaps the prevailing fear was simply death – he didn’t want to invite a bullet or detonated suicide vest from a Hamas assassin. Either way, Hamas were bitterly opposed to the accords and murderously fought them.
And so was Benjamin Netanyahu – first elected leader of the conservative Likud party in 1993, and elected his country’s youngest ever prime minister three years later – fiercely opposed to the Accords. Today, we have Netanyahu and Hamas as the prevailing antagonists in the bloodshed – and both tightly embraced in a grisly death-grip.
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Your right to protest doesn’t extend to closing parts of a university and denying others their classes. If you choose to do so, as an expression of your conviction, then very well: but you do so with the expectation that there will be consequences. This is one major point of civil protest: that you publicly render the importance of your belief by risking something.
But nothing has been risked. University administrators have anxiously indulged protests that have turned into partial blockades and the cancellation of lectures. Ones in which the offices of Jewish staff have been broken into and defiled with piss. Ones which have periodically spouted anti-Semitism, and, with malicious irony, made the Hitler salute.
And here’s Beatrice Tucker, an ANU student who’s helped organise the pro-Palestine protests on campus when asked on ABC radio about what message she might send to Hamas: “This is a very common question the media often throws at pro-Palestine activists,” she said. “It’s seen as a bit of a scapegoat … it’s a distraction from the issue at hand, which is actually there’s a genocide going on. Hamas deserve our unconditional support – not because I agree with their strategy – complete disagreement with that, but the situation at hand is if you have no hope … nothing can justify what has been happening to the Palestinian people for 75 years.”
Bit of a scapegoat? Can I suppose that the awesome contradiction of that statement is sufficiently obvious without my commentary? I hope so. But Tucker’s young, so I’ll sympathetically add that she precociously displayed the political talent of glib evasion: smoothly dismissing an awkward question as mere cynicism, and then, intellectually triumphant, returning to the issue at hand.
A few weeks ago, Professor Peter Morgan, who heads European Studies at Sydney University, was giving a lecture when three masked protestors entered the hall and began “haranguing” the assembled students. “The speaker then shouted me down, accusing me of political cowardice and of supporting genocide,” Morgan told The Australian. “He was verging on physical menace. I again insisted, now extremely angry, that they get out of the lecture hall immediately, at which they began to move away, chanting ‘for shame’.”
Morgan wrote to the university’s chancellor that he was left on the “verge of tears of frustration that after so much warning and so many signs of appalling anti-Semitism this can still be allowed to happen” and that the “university has effectively encouraged this behaviour”. Behaviour, he wrote, that seems acceptable nowhere but in Australian universities.
To my eye, unis have tolerated the disruption of classes and hate-speech not from a sense of conviction, but the absence of it. These days, universities are “career providers” and not bastions of intellectual freedom, and they know which way the wind blows.
As it is, I once knew Professor Morgan. I took one of his European studies courses almost twenty years ago. It was one of few courses that I now remember – it was intellectually thrilling, and Professor Morgan, recognising my enthusiasm, showed me great support. Regardless, I’d still commend the strength he’s shown here by speaking out. It should not be courageous to publicly condemn the hijacking of a European history lecture, and the intimidation of its professor, but alas it is.
As for students, only a few years ago it was certain speech that was hysterically picketed – now what’s fought for is the freedom to publicly support a terror organisation, wish the dissolution of Israel, and to interrupt or suspend the classes of other students. What happened to demanding trigger warnings for studies of The Great Gatsby?
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Obviously, I write narrowly here. By focusing upon Hamas, I don’t imply a moral carte blanche to Israel. The Israeli response is bloody, seemingly interminable and without any obvious end. The recent, “accidental” ignition of a civilian camp in Rafah was abhorrent – and I agree with Waleed Aly’s commentary on it here.
But the bloodshed was also predictable – as Hamas knew. I write narrowly, because one side refuses to accept — or, worse, openly celebrates — the medieval tyrannies of a terror group incapable of protecting its people. And so, I repeat: say Hamas. Invite complication into your mind. Invite grim historical ironies. Invite, in the du jour term, the “intersections” of freedom and religious fanaticism. The existence of Hamas isn’t a “common question thrown at pro-Palestine activists” – they’re a reality, with their own long history and agency.
It’s comically naïve for an activist to declare “unconditional support” for Hamas, while saying that the campus is a “safe place” for Jews because, well, some of their own activists are Jewish. In that one sentence, we can find both the consideration of history and the personal ramifications of one’s own actions crushed into a dense entity of uncomplicated moral righteousness.
There has been some supremely simplistic – but presumably comforting – conflations. No, not all criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic – but anti-Semitism abounds. And just as the Israeli government may cynically invoke anti-Semitism as an alibi, so too can protestors enjoy their own elastic rhetorical comforts.
Consider the pro-Palestine protests that massed before Sydney’s Opera House a mere 48 hours after Hamas’ orgy of murder and rape and which occurred before Israel had retaliated: there were chants of “Fuck the Jews” and “Where’s the Jews?” while police advised Jewish folk to stay clear of the area. Protests that were promoted by Greens MPs.
What I want to emphasise here is the grossly officious dispute about whether, specifically, “Gas the Jews” was chanted. Some months later, when an independent inquiry initiated by NSW police, found that this particular phrase had likely not been chanted, it was leapt upon as some kind of vindication (and implicitly treated as evidence that Jews, once again, were exaggerating their victimhood). How pathetically grasping to find vindication in such a thing – and how easily the actual chants, disturbing in themselves, were dismissed.
This piece is narrow and not intended as an implicit endorsement of Bibi. Or the IDF. Or the extravagant and shameless expansion of Israeli settlements. I don’t write as a tit-for-tat, or to assume that my apprehensions are somehow intellectually triumphant.
Rather, this piece is narrowed to those who refuse to think about Hamas. Those dumb enough to continue their protests without knowing them; and those cynical enough to know but to say nothing. Which includes the Australian Greens.
I won’t surrender to the prevailing mood that any doubt or difference of opinion is tantamount to genocidal support – or evidence of some moral sickness. I have no illusions about my influence – which is none – but I can recognise the personal importance of defying oppressive sanctimonies and the self-censorship which follows.