Nous croyons que les armes atomiques doivent être supprimées et nous ne voulons pas en construire, mais si nous en décidions autrement, les États-Unis ne pourraient pas nous en empêcher. L’Iran a pris la décision de renoncer à l’arme atomique « non parce que (sa possession par Téhéran) perturberait les Américains, mais parce que nous considérons, pour des raisons religieuses, que les armes atomiques sont un crime contre l’humanité (…) Ils veulent juste nous empêcher de bénéficier de nos droits légitimes à enrichir de l’uranium et à utiliser l’énergie nucléaire à des fins pacifiques. Khamenei
Khamenei n’aura pas recours à l’arme atomique contre Israël car ceci provoquera la mort de Palestiniens aussi. Bachar El Assad
Si vous pouvez tuer un incroyant américain ou européen – en particulier les méchants et sales Français – ou un Australien ou un Canadien, ou tout […] citoyen des pays qui sont entrés dans une coalition contre l’État islamique, alors comptez sur Allah et tuez-le de n’importe quelle manière. (…) Tuez le mécréant qu’il soit civil ou militaire. (…) Frappez sa tête avec une pierre, égorgez-le avec un couteau, écrasez-le avec votre voiture, jetez-le d’un lieu en hauteur, étranglez-le ou empoisonnez-le. Abou Mohammed al-Adnani (porte-parole de l’EI)
Le Mouvement de la Résistance Islamique aspire à l’accomplissement de la promesse de Dieu, quel que soit le temps nécessaire. L’Apôtre de Dieu -que Dieu lui donne bénédiction et paix- a dit : « L’Heure ne viendra pas avant que les musulmans n’aient combattu les Juifs (c’est à dire que les musulmans ne les aient tués), avant que les Juifs ne se fussent cachés derrière les pierres et les arbres et que les pierres et les arbres eussent dit : ‘Musulman, serviteur de Dieu ! Un Juif se cache derrière moi, viens et tue-le. Charte du Hamas (article 7)
Le Mouvement de la Résistance Islamique croit que la Palestine est un Waqf islamique consacré aux générations de musulmans jusqu’au Jugement Dernier. Pas une seule parcelle ne peut en être dilapidée ou abandonnée à d’autres. Aucun pays arabe, président arabe ou roi arabe, ni tous les rois et présidents arabes réunis, ni une organisation même palestinienne n’a le droit de le faire. La Palestine est un Waqf musulman consacré aux générations de musulmans jusqu’au Jour du Jugement Dernier. Qui peut prétendre avoir le droit de représenter les générations de musulmans jusqu’au Jour du Jugement Dernier ? Tel est le statut de la terre de Palestine dans la Charia, et il en va de même pour toutes les terres conquises par l’islam et devenues terres de Waqf dès leur conquête, pour être consacrées à toutes les générations de musulmans jusqu’au Jour du Jugement Dernier. Il en est ainsi depuis que les chefs des armées islamiques ont conquis les terres de Syrie et d’Irak et ont demandé au Calife des musulmans, Omar Ibn-al Khattab, s’ils devaient partager ces terres entre les soldats ou les laisser à leurs propriétaires. Suite à des consultations et des discussions entre le Calife des musulmans, Omar Ibn-al Khattab, et les compagnons du Prophète, Allah le bénisse, il fut décidé que la terre soit laissée à ses propriétaires pour qu’ils profitent de ses fruits. Cependant, la propriété véritable et la terre même doit être consacrée aux seuls musulmans jusqu’au Jour du Jugement Dernier. Ceux qui se trouvent sur ces terres peuvent uniquement profiter de ses fruits. Ce waqf persiste tant que le Ciel et la Terre existent. Toute procédure en contradiction avec la Charia islamique en ce qui concerne la Palestine est nulle et non avenue.« C’est la vérité infaillible. Célèbre le nom d’Allah le Très-Haut » (Coran, LVI, 95-96). Charte du Hamas (article 11)
The Jews are the most despicable and contemptible nation to crawl upon the face of the Earth, because they have displayed hostility to Allah. Allah will kill the Jews in the hell of the world to come, just like they killed the believers in the hell of this world. Atallah Abu al-Subh (former Hamas minister of culture, 2011)
L’accélérateur est une arme. Le Hamas continue d’appuyer n’importe quelle tactique pouvant être utilisée afin de tuer des civils israéliens. Affiche du Hamas
Il n’est pas suffisant de dire que des colons sont venus, ils doivent être empêchés d’entrer sur le site par tous les moyens. C’est notre Al-Aqsa et notre lieu saint, ils n’ont pas le droit d’entrer et de le désacraliser. Jérusalem est le bijou de la couronne et la capitale éternelle de l’Etat de Palestine. Sans elle, il n’y aura pas d’Etat. Il est important que les Palestiniens soient unis afin de protéger Jérusalem. Mahmoud Abbas
Jérusalem a soif, et ne désaltérera que par le sang. Affiche du Hamas
Cette attaque est une « réponse au meurtre du martyr Youssef Ramouni ». (…) C’est est également « une réponse à la série de crimes de l’occupant à Al-Aqsa ». Le Hamas « appelle à poursuivre les opérations. Sami Abou Zouhri (porte-parole du Hamas)
Nous devons empêcher les juifs d’entrer sur l’esplanade de la mosquée, ils n’ont pas le droit de la souiller. Nous devons les empêcher par tous les moyens. Nous devons les empêcher d’entrer. Dressons-nous devant eux pour protéger les lieux saints. Mahmoud Abbas (17.10.14)
Des éléments récemment découverts par Amnesty International indiquent que des membres du groupe armé qui se fait appeler État islamique (EI) ont lancé une campagne systématique de nettoyage ethnique dans le nord de l’Irak, commettant des crimes de guerre, notamment des enlèvements et exécutions sommaires de masse, contre les minorités ethniques et religieuses. Parmi les minorités ethniques et religieuses prises pour cible dans le nord de l’Irak se trouvent les chrétiens assyriens, les chiites turkmènes et shabaks, les yézidis, les kakaïs et les mandéens sabéens. De nombreux Arabes et musulmans sunnites qui s’opposent, ou sont soupçonnés de s’opposer, à l’EI ont aussi été visés par ce qui semble être des attaques de représailles. Amnesty international
Il s’agit du meilleur moyen pour récupérer notre électorat des banlieues et des quartiers. Benoit Hamon
Sweden’s new government last month recognised the state of Palestine, and Britain’s House of Commons and Ireland’s senate called on their governments to follow suit. Now, France’s governing Socialists plan to bring a similar resolution to the national assembly, while Federica Mogherini, the new EU foreign policy chief, recently announced that she wants to see a Palestinian state established during her term. Is European impatience with Israeli intransigence towards the Palestinians reaching a point of rupture? Is EU frustration with Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister’s expansion of Jewish settlements on occupied Arab land, proscribed by international law, inclining Europeans to force the issue of a Palestinian state? (…) Israel has been slow to realise there has been a change in sentiment in Europe, not sudden but solid, that could eventually present a challenge to its legitimacy. The shift follows a sharp rise in hostility towards Israel in western Europe, with BBC polls carried out by Gallup recording between two-thirds and three-quarters of people in the UK, Spain, Germany, France and Italy holding negative views of Israel’s policy. Sweden, furthermore, is not the first EU member to recognise Palestine. Eight other member states do, even if all of them took that decision before joining the EU. More relevant is that half of the EU, 14 members including France, voted to admit Palestine as an observer state at the UN in December 2012. (…) In February 2011, Germany, which had abstained several times during the second intifada a decade earlier, voted in the UN Security Council to condemn Israel’s settlements, in a 14-1 result vetoed by the US. (…) Recognition of Palestine as a state is likely to grow in and outside the EU; Sweden was the 135th country to sign up. As current, and former, Israeli leaders have warned, Israel faces international ostracism unless it shows itself willing to make a deal on Palestine. Yet if avenues to a separate state continue to be closed, the Palestinians may opt for an apartheid-style struggle for equal rights within a single state. For now, the EU has targeted the settlements. But whatever its intentions, it is not hard to discern an eventual dead end at which Europeans clamour for a more general boycott. The Financial Times
Right now, Israel is much more powerful than Hezbollah and Hamas. Let’s say tomorrow this was reversed. Let’s say Hamas had the firepower of Israel and Israel had the firepower of Hamas. What do you think would happen to Israel were the balance of power reversed? David Wolpe (rabbi of Los Angeles Sinai Temple)
The truth is that there is an obvious, undeniable, and hugely consequential moral difference between Israel and her enemies. The Israelis are surrounded by people who have explicitly genocidal intentions towards them. The charter of Hamas is explicitly genocidal. It looks forward to a time, based on Koranic prophesy, when the earth itself will cry out for Jewish blood, where the trees and the stones will say “O Muslim, there’s a Jew hiding behind me. Come and kill him.” This is a political document. We are talking about a government that was voted into power by a majority of Palestinians. (…) The discourse in the Muslim world about Jews is utterly shocking. Not only is there Holocaust denial—there’s Holocaust denial that then asserts that we will do it for real if given the chance. The only thing more obnoxious than denying the Holocaust is to say that itshould have happened; it didn’t happen, but if we get the chance, we will accomplish it. There are children’s shows in the Palestinian territories and elsewhere that teach five-year-olds about the glories of martyrdom and about the necessity of killing Jews. And this gets to the heart of the moral difference between Israel and her enemies. And this is something I discussed in The End of Faith. To see this moral difference, you have to ask what each side would do if they had the power to do it. What would the Jews do to the Palestinians if they could do anything they wanted? Well, we know the answer to that question, because they can do more or less anything they want. The Israeli army could kill everyone in Gaza tomorrow. So what does that mean? Well, it means that, when they drop a bomb on a beach and kill four Palestinian children, as happened last week, this is almost certainly an accident. They’re not targeting children. They could target as many children as they want. Every time a Palestinian child dies, Israel edges ever closer to becoming an international pariah. So the Israelis take great pains not to kill children and other noncombatants. (…)What do we know of the Palestinians? What would the Palestinians do to the Jews in Israel if the power imbalance were reversed? Well, they have told us what they would do. For some reason, Israel’s critics just don’t want to believe the worst about a group like Hamas, even when it declares the worst of itself. We’ve already had a Holocaust and several other genocides in the 20th century. People are capable of committing genocide. When they tell us they intend to commit genocide, we should listen. There is every reason to believe that the Palestinians would kill all the Jews in Israel if they could. Would every Palestinian support genocide? Of course not. But vast numbers of them—and of Muslims throughout the world—would. Needless to say, the Palestinians in general, not just Hamas, have a history of targeting innocent noncombatants in the most shocking ways possible. They’ve blown themselves up on buses and in restaurants. They’ve massacred teenagers. They’ve murdered Olympic athletes. They now shoot rockets indiscriminately into civilian areas. And again, the charter of their government in Gaza explicitly tells us that they want to annihilate the Jews—not just in Israel but everywhere.(…) The truth is that everything you need to know about the moral imbalance between Israel and her enemies can be understood on the topic of human shields. Who uses human shields? Well, Hamas certainly does. They shoot their rockets from residential neighborhoods, from beside schools, and hospitals, and mosques. Muslims in other recent conflicts, in Iraq and elsewhere, have also used human shields. They have laid their rifles on the shoulders of their own children and shot from behind their bodies. Consider the moral difference between using human shields and being deterred by them. That is the difference we’re talking about. The Israelis and other Western powers are deterred, however imperfectly, by the Muslim use of human shields in these conflicts, as we should be. It is morally abhorrent to kill noncombatants if you can avoid it. It’s certainly abhorrent to shoot through the bodies of children to get at your adversary. But take a moment to reflect on how contemptible this behavior is. And understand how cynical it is. The Muslims are acting on the assumption—the knowledge, in fact—that the infidels with whom they fight, the very people whom their religion does nothing but vilify, will be deterred by their use of Muslim human shields. They consider the Jews the spawn of apes and pigs—and yet they rely on the fact that they don’t want to kill Muslim noncombatants.(…) Now imagine reversing the roles here. Imagine how fatuous—indeed comical it would be—for the Israelis to attempt to use human shields to deter the Palestinians. (…) But Imagine the Israelis holding up their own women and children as human shields. Of course, that would be ridiculous. The Palestinians are trying to kill everyone. Killing women and children is part of the plan. Reversing the roles here produces a grotesque Monty Python skit. If you’re going to talk about the conflict in the Middle East, you have to acknowledge this difference. I don’t think there’s any ethical disparity to be found anywhere that is more shocking or consequential than this. And the truth is, this isn’t even the worst that jihadists do. Hamas is practically a moderate organization, compared to other jihadist groups. There are Muslims who have blown themselves up in crowds of children—again, Muslim children—just to get at the American soldiers who were handing out candy to them. They have committed suicide bombings, only to send another bomber to the hospital to await the casualities—where they then blow up all the injured along with the doctors and nurses trying to save their lives. Every day that you could read about an Israeli rocket gone astray or Israeli soldiers beating up an innocent teenager, you could have read about ISIS in Iraq crucifying people on the side of the road, Christians and Muslims. Where is the outrage in the Muslim world and on the Left over these crimes? Where are the demonstrations, 10,000 or 100,000 deep, in the capitals of Europe against ISIS? If Israel kills a dozen Palestinians by accident, the entire Muslim world is inflamed. God forbid you burn a Koran, or write a novel vaguely critical of the faith. And yet Muslims can destroy their own societies—and seek to destroy the West—and you don’t hear a peep. (…) These incompatible religious attachments to this land have made it impossible for Muslims and Jews to negotiate like rational human beings, and they have made it impossible for them to live in peace. But the onus is still more on the side of the Muslims here. Even on their worst day, the Israelis act with greater care and compassion and self-criticism than Muslim combatants have anywhere, ever. And again, you have to ask yourself, what do these groups want? What would they accomplish if they could accomplish anything? What would the Israelis do if they could do what they want? They would live in peace with their neighbors, if they had neighbors who would live in peace with them. They would simply continue to build out their high tech sector and thrive. (…) What do groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda and even Hamas want? They want to impose their religious views on the rest of humanity. They want stifle every freedom that decent, educated, secular people care about. This is not a trivial difference. And yet judging from the level of condemnation that Israel now receives, you would think the difference ran the other way. This kind of confusion puts all of us in danger. This is the great story of our time. For the rest of our lives, and the lives of our children, we are going to be confronted by people who don’t want to live peacefully in a secular, pluralistic world, because they are desperate to get to Paradise, and they are willing to destroy the very possibility of human happiness along the way. The truth is, we are all living in Israel. It’s just that some of us haven’t realized it yet. Sam Harris
The Hamas Covenant of 1988 notably replaced the Marxist-Leninist conspiracy theory of world politics with the classic anti-Semitic tropes of Nazism and European fascism, which the Islamists had absorbed when they collaborated with the Nazis during World War II. That influence is apparent in Article 22, which asserts that “supportive forces behind the enemy” have amassed great wealth: « With their money, they took control of the world media, news agencies, the press, publishing houses, broadcasting stations, and others. With their money they stirred revolutions in various parts of the world with the purpose of achieving their interests and reaping the fruit therein. With their money, they took control of the world media. They were behind the French Revolution, the Communist revolution and most of the revolutions we heard and hear about here and there. With their money, they formed secret societies, such as Freemason, Rotary Clubs, the Lions and others in different parts of the world for the purpose of sabotaging societies and achieving Zionist interests. With their money they were able to control imperialistic countries and instigate them to colonize many countries in order to enable them to exploit their resources and spread corruption there. Jeffrey Herf
Hamas doesn’t accept, or even nominally recognize, the right of Israelis to exist as a free people. As Khalidi says, we should pay attention when Netanyahu tells Israelis about controlling their security on the West Bank. So shouldn’t we also listen when Hamas tells Palestinians that they should never accept the existence of Israel—and that victory will not come until they have wiped out not only the Jewish state but all the Jews? If you take an interest in the war in Gaza, you should read the Hamas charter, but Oz sums up its biggest idea handily enough: “It says that the Prophet commands every Muslim to kill every Jew, everywhere in the world.” If Khalidi has a problem with this, he keeps it to himself. While Oz has no problem saying that Israel’s violent occupation is unjust to Palestinians and endangers its own people, Khalidi refuses to acknowledge that Hamas exists to end Israel’s existence and thrives on Palestinian wretchedness. In the heat of his moral condemnation of Israel—and of America for supporting Israel against Hamas—the hardest line that he will allow himself against Gaza’s categorically genocidal leadership is that “we may not like” it. What would he lose to say that we must not? Philip Gourevitch
Pour comprendre pourquoi la paix en Palestine n’interviendra pas avant des années, si ce n’est des décennies, il suffit de penser aux réjouissances organisées par les Palestiniens après le meurtre de cinq Israéliens dans une synagogue de Jérusalem, dont trois jouissaient d’une co-citoyenneté américaine. Deux Palestiniens, des cousins, munis d’un hachoir à viande et d’une arme à feu, avaient attaqué des fidèles juifs pendant les prières du matin, et leur réponse fut une explosion de joie dans les rues. Le Front Populaire de Libération de la Palestine a revendiqué l’opération tandis que le Hamas se réjouissait de ces assassinats, « une réponse aux crimes incessants des Israéliens. » Le principal obstacle à la paix ne provient pas dans les implantations juives de la ville multiconfessionnelle de Jérusalem. La barrière est la culture de la haine contre les Juifs alimentée par les dirigeants palestiniens. Le premier ministre palestinien, Mahmoud Abbas à condamné les assassinats, mais non sans appeler Israël à interrompre ce qu’il a qualifié « d’invasion » de la mosquée sacrée Al Aqsa de Jérusalem. M. Abbas avait précédemment prétendu que le Mont du Temple avait été souillé par les Juifs, en dépit des assurances du premier ministre Benjamin Netanyahou que le Dôme du Rocher et la mosquée Al Aqsa continueraient d’être réservés au seul culte musulman. (…) Le but de ce nouveau djihad est d’affoler les Israéliens pour leur faire accepter la division de Jérusalem, la première exigence formulée par les Palestiniens au cours des négociations de paix qui ont récemment échoué. Cependant, c’est seulement sous la loi israélienne que toutes les religions ont pu être librement exercées à Jérusalem. Le président Obama a condamné l’attaque, mais son gouvernement a contribué en partie à semer le trouble en dénonçant les constructions dans la municipalité de Jérusalem. Dans une lettre à l’ancien premier ministre Ariel Sharon, l’administration précédente, celle de Georges W Bush, avait assuré en 2004 que tout accord de paix à venir garantirait des ajustements de la frontière de la Rive occidentale du Jourdain en fonction des réalités du terrain. En 2009, Hillary Clinton prétendit que la lettre de Bush n’avait pas de statut juridique, encourageant les rêves de division de Jérusalem des Palestiniens. Ce dont Israël a besoin aujourd’hui, c’est que les États-Unis ne donnent pas des gratifications aux actes de djihad en traînant M. Netanyahou dans des négociations avec M. Abbas. Le premier ministre israélien est en droit de refuser de rencontrer M. Abbas jusqu’à ce que l’Autorité palestinienne mette un terme à l’incitation à la violence. Le meilleur moyen d’empêcher une troisième Intifada, c’est de rassurer Israël sur le soutien des États-Unis dans des opératipns d’autodéfense et d’avertir les Palestiniens qu’ils n’auront pas de patrie tant qu’ils édifieront une société qui glorifie les meurtres d’innocents au nom de la religion. WSJ
It (…) seems reasonable to worry about the intentions of those Iranian leaders who deny or minimize the Holocaust while hoping to annihilate the Jewish state, and who have funded and trained groups—Hezbollah and Hamas—that have as their goal the killing of Jews. It is a dereliction of responsibility not to try to understand the goals and beliefs of Islamist totalitarian movements. (…) While it is true that Hamas is expert at getting innocent Palestinians killed, it has made it very plain, in word and deed, that it would rather kill Jews. The following blood-freezing statement is from the group’s charter: “The Islamic Resistance Movement aspires to the realization of Allah’s promise, no matter how long that should take. The Prophet, Allah bless him and grant him salvation, has said: ‘The day of judgment will not come until Muslims fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jews will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say ‘O Muslims, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.” This is a frank and open call for genocide, embedded in one of the most thoroughly anti-Semitic documents you’ll read this side of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Not many people seem to know that Hamas’s founding document is genocidal. Sometimes, the reasons for this lack of knowledge are benign; other times, as the New Yorker’s Philip Gourevitch argues in his recent dismantling of Rashid Khalidi’s apologia for Hamas, this ignorance is a direct byproduct of a decision to mask evidence of Hamas’s innate theocratic fascism. (…) What do we know of the Palestinians? What would the Palestinians do to the Jews in Israel if the power imbalance were reversed? Well, they have told us what they would do. For some reason, Israel’s critics just don’t want to believe the worst about a group like Hamas, even when it declares the worst of itself. We’ve already had a Holocaust and several other genocides in the 20th century. People are capable of committing genocide. When they tell us they intend to commit genocide, we should listen. There is every reason to believe that the Palestinians would kill all the Jews in Israel if they could. Would every Palestinian support genocide? Of course not. But vast numbers of them—and of Muslims throughout the world—would. Needless to say, the Palestinians in general, not just Hamas, have a history of targeting innocent noncombatants in the most shocking ways possible. They’ve blown themselves up on buses and in restaurants. They’ve massacred teenagers. They’ve murdered Olympic athletes. They now shoot rockets indiscriminately into civilian areas. (…) After each of these attacks, Hamas leaders issued blood-curdling statements claiming credit, and promising more death. “The Jews will lose because they crave life but a true Muslim loves death,” a former Hamas leader, Abdel-Aziz Rantisi, told me in an interview in 2002. In the same interview he made the following imperishable statement: “People always talk about what the Germans did to the Jews, but the true question is, ‘What did the Jews do to the Germans?’” (…) Hamas is an organization devoted to ending Jewish history. This is what so many Jews understand, and what so many non-Jews don’t. The novelist Amos Oz, who has led Israel’s left-wing peace camp for decades, said in an interview last week that he doesn’t see a prospect for compromise between Israel and Hamas. « I have been a man of compromise all my life, » Oz said. « But even a man of compromise cannot approach Hamas and say: ‘Maybe we meet halfway and Israel only exists on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.' » In the years since it adopted its charter, Hamas leaders and spokesmen have reinforced its message again and again. Mahmoud Zahar said in 2006 that the group « will not change a single word in its covenant. » To underscore the point, in 2010 Zahhar said, « Our ultimate plan is [to have] Palestine in its entirety. I say this loud and clear so that nobody will accuse me of employing political tactics. We will not recognize the Israeli enemy. » In 2011, the former Hamas minister of culture, Atallah Abu al-Subh, said that « the Jews are the most despicable and contemptible nation to crawl upon the face of the Earth, because they have displayed hostility to Allah. Allah will kill the Jews in the hell of the world to come, just like they killed the believers in the hell of this world. » Just last week, a top Hamas official, Osama Hamdan, accused Jews of using Christian blood to make matzo. This is not a group, in other words, that is seeking the sort of peace that Amos Oz—or, for that matter, the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas—is seeking. People wonder why Israelis have such a visceral reaction to Hamas. The answer is easy. Israel is a small country, and most of its citizens know someone who was murdered by Hamas in its extended suicide-bombing campaigns; and most people also understand that if Hamas had its way, it would kill them as well. Jeffrey Goldberg
One of the most shocking aspects of the murderous attack on a Jerusalem synagogue this morning by men with guns and axes is not the attack itself—we’ve seen, from time to time, this sort of sectarian barbarism take place in places like Jerusalem, and Hebron. The most shocking aspect is the wholesale endorsement of this slaughter by Hamas, a group that, during this summer’s war in Gaza, half-succeeded in convincing the world that it wasn’t what it actually is: a group with actual genocidal intentions. (…) This is how a Hamas spokesman reacted to the massacre of Jews at prayer: « The new operation is heroic and a natural reaction to Zionist criminality against our people and our holy places. We have the full right to revenge for the blood of our martyrs in all possible means. » Twenty years ago, shortly after the Jewish fanatic Baruch Goldstein massacred Muslims at prayer in Hebron, the then-prime minister of Israel, Yitzhak Rabin, said of the killer, « You are not part of the community of Israel. … You are a foreign implant. You are an errant weed. Sensible Judaism spits you out. » Hamas’s endorsement of the massacre of Jews at prayer in their holy city confirms—as if we needed confirming—that its goal is the eradication of Israel and its Jews. We should pray for the day when the leaders of Gaza react to this sort of massacre in the manner of Yitzhak Rabin. The Palestinian Authority leader, the more moderate Mahmoud Abbas, has condemned the attack, but it is also fair to say that he helped create the atmosphere in which attacks like this one become more likely. As the Times reports, the attackers « were described as being motivated by what they saw as threats to the revered plateau [the Temple Mount] that contains Al Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock. Although Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has repeatedly asserted that he will not alter the status quo at the site, where non-Muslims can visit but not openly pray, President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority has called on his people to protect the area and has warned of a ‘holy war’ if it is ‘contaminated’ by Jews. » The Temple Mount, of course, is the holiest place in Judaism. Abbas’s belief that the presence of Jews « contaminates » the Mount speaks to his own smallness, and to his susceptibility to Muslim supremacist ideology. The status quo should absolutely be preserved, for the sake of peace, and those Israeli politicians currently calling for a change in the status quo should put away their gasoline cans. But the events of the past couple of weeks in Jerusalem suggest that a core issue of the conflict remains the unwillingness of many Palestinian Muslims to accept the idea that Jews have rights in their ancestral homeland. And in the case of Hamas and like-minded groups, that Jews have a right to live. Jeffrey Goldberg
Attention: un génocide peut en cacher un autre !
Alors qu’un récent rapport d’Amnesty international confirme qu’un nettoyage ethnique est bien en cours en Irak …
Et à l’heure où le plus grand canard boiteux de l’histoire américaine moderne pousse les feux pour obtenir coûte que coûte un accord sur le nucléaire avec un pays qui prône l’effacement de la carte d’un de ses voisins …
Et où, nous avertit le Financial times après les reconnaissances effectives ou annoncées – électorat musulman oblige – de nombre de pays européens, « la patience de l’UE pour l’Etat hébreu est à bout » …
Pendant que, suite à un nouveau massacre de civils dans une synagogue, le Hamas salue comme « acte héroïque » et « appelle à poursuivre » les assassinats à l’arme blanche ou à la voiture bélier lancées, comme on le sait, par l’Etat islamique …
Et que le président de l’Autorité palestinienne renouvelle ses appels à « protéger la mosquée Al Aqsa de la contamination juive » …
Comment ne pas voir, avec Jeffrey Goldberg, la nature proprement génocidaire du projet palestinien ?
Hamas Endorses a Massacre
Understanding the true genocidal nature of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch
Jeffrey Goldberg
The Atlantic
Nov 18 2014
One of the most shocking aspects of the murderous attack on a Jerusalem synagogue this morning by men with guns and axes is not the attack itself—we’ve seen, from time to time, this sort of sectarian barbarism take place in places like Jerusalem, and Hebron. The most shocking aspect is the wholesale endorsement of this slaughter by Hamas, a group that, during this summer’s war in Gaza, half-succeeded in convincing the world that it wasn’t what it actually is: a group with actual genocidal intentions.
According to witnesses, the two attackers entered the synagogue, in the Har Nof neighborhood, and began killing worshipers with pistols and axes. (Both assailants were killed by police, but not before they murdered four worshipers and injured at least six others, including two police officers.)
“To see Jews wearing tefillin [phylacteries] and wrapped in the tallit [prayer shawls] lying in pools of blood, I wondered if I was imagining scenes from the Holocaust,” said Yehuda Meshi Zahav, who leads an emergency-response team, according to The New York Times. « It was a massacre of Jews at prayer.”
This is how a Hamas spokesman reacted to the massacre of Jews at prayer: « The new operation is heroic and a natural reaction to Zionist criminality against our people and our holy places. We have the full right to revenge for the blood of our martyrs in all possible means. »
Twenty years ago, shortly after the Jewish fanatic Baruch Goldstein massacred Muslims at prayer in Hebron, the then-prime minister of Israel, Yitzhak Rabin, said of the killer, « You are not part of the community of Israel. … You are a foreign implant. You are an errant weed. Sensible Judaism spits you out. »
Hamas’s endorsement of the massacre of Jews at prayer in their holy city confirms—as if we needed confirming—that its goal is the eradication of Israel and its Jews. We should pray for the day when the leaders of Gaza react to this sort of massacre in the manner of Yitzhak Rabin.
The Palestinian Authority leader, the more moderate Mahmoud Abbas, has condemned the attack, but it is also fair to say that he helped create the atmosphere in which attacks like this one become more likely. As the Times reports, the attackers « were described as being motivated by what they saw as threats to the revered plateau [the Temple Mount] that contains Al Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock. Although Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has repeatedly asserted that he will not alter the status quo at the site, where non-Muslims can visit but not openly pray, President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority has called on his people to protect the area and has warned of a ‘holy war’ if it is ‘contaminated’ by Jews. »
The Temple Mount, of course, is the holiest place in Judaism. Abbas’s belief that the presence of Jews « contaminates » the Mount speaks to his own smallness, and to his susceptibility to Muslim supremacist ideology. The status quo should absolutely be preserved, for the sake of peace, and those Israeli politicians currently calling for a change in the status quo should put away their gasoline cans. But the events of the past couple of weeks in Jerusalem suggest that a core issue of the conflict remains the unwillingness of many Palestinian Muslims to accept the idea that Jews have rights in their ancestral homeland. And in the case of Hamas and like-minded groups, that Jews have a right to live.
Voir aussi:
What Would Hamas Do If It Could Do Whatever It Wanted?
Understanding what the Muslim Brotherhood’s Gaza branch wants by studying its theology, strategy, and history
Jeffrey Goldberg
The Atlantic
Aug 4 2014
In the spring of 2009, Roger Cohen, the New York Times columnist, surprised some of his readers by claiming that Iran’s remaining Jews were “living, working and worshiping in relative tranquility.”
Cohen wrote: “Perhaps I have a bias toward facts over words, but I say the reality of Iranian civility toward Jews tells us more about Iran—its sophistication and culture—than all the inflammatory rhetoric.”
Perhaps.
In this, and other, columns, Cohen appeared to be trying to convince his fellow Jews that they had less to fear from the Iran of Khamenei and (at the time) Ahmadinejad than they thought. To me, the column was a whitewash. It seemed (and seems) reasonable to worry about the intentions of those Iranian leaders who deny or minimize the Holocaust while hoping to annihilate the Jewish state, and who have funded and trained groups—Hezbollah and Hamas—that have as their goal the killing of Jews.
Cohen’s most acid critics came from within the Persian Jewish exile community. The vast majority of Iran’s Jews fled the country after the Khomeini revolution; many found refuge in Los Angeles. David Wolpe, the rabbi of Sinai Temple there, invited Cohen to speak to his congregants, about half of whom are Persian exiles, shortly after the column appeared. Cohen, to his credit, accepted the invitation. The encounter between Cohen and an audience of several hundred (mainly Jews, but also Bahais, members of a faith persecuted with great intensity by the Iranian regime) was tense but mainly civil (you can watch it here). For me, the most interesting moment came not in a discussion about the dubious health of Iran’s remnant Jewish population, but after Wolpe asked Cohen about the intentions of Iran and its allies toward Jews living outside Iran.
“Right now,” Wolpe said, “Israel is much more powerful than Hezbollah and Hamas. Let’s say tomorrow this was reversed. Let’s say Hamas had the firepower of Israel and Israel had the firepower of Hamas. What do you think would happen to Israel were the balance of power reversed?”
“I don’t know what would happen tomorrow,” Cohen answered. This response brought a measure of derisive laughter from the incredulous audience. “And it doesn’t matter that I don’t know because it’s not going to happen tomorrow or in one or two years.” Wolpe quickly told Cohen that he himself knows exactly what would happen if the power balance between Hamas and Israel were to be reversed. (Later, Wolpe told me that he thought Cohen could not have been so naïve as to misunderstand the nature of Hamas and Hezbollah, but instead was simply caught short by the question.)
At the time, Cohen suggested that he was uninterested in grappling with the nature of Hamas and its goals. “I reject the thinking behind your question,” he said. “It’s not useful to go there.”
“Going there,” however, is necessary, not only to understand why Israelis fear Hamas, but also to understand that the narrative advanced by Hamas apologists concerning the group’s beliefs and goals is false. “Going there” also does not require enormous imagination, or a well-developed predisposition toward paranoia. It is, in my opinion, a dereliction of responsibility on the part of progressives not to try to understand the goals and beliefs of Islamist totalitarian movements.
(This post, you should know, is not a commentary on the particulars of the war between Israel and Hamas, a war in which Hamas baited Israel and Israel took the bait. Each time Israel kills an innocent Palestinian in its attempt to neutralize Hamas’s rockets, it represents a victory for Hamas, which has made plain its goal of getting Israel to kill innocent Gazans. Suffice it to say that Israel cannot afford many more “victories” of the sort it is seeking in Gaza right now. I supported a ceasefire early in this war precisely because I believed that the Israeli government had not thought through its strategic goals, or the methods for achieving those goals.)
While it is true that Hamas is expert at getting innocent Palestinians killed, it has made it very plain, in word and deed, that it would rather kill Jews. The following blood-freezing statement is from the group’s charter: “The Islamic Resistance Movement aspires to the realization of Allah’s promise, no matter how long that should take. The Prophet, Allah bless him and grant him salvation, has said: ‘The day of judgment will not come until Muslims fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jews will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say ‘O Muslims, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.”
This is a frank and open call for genocide, embedded in one of the most thoroughly anti-Semitic documents you’ll read this side of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Not many people seem to know that Hamas’s founding document is genocidal. Sometimes, the reasons for this lack of knowledge are benign; other times, as the New Yorker’s Philip Gourevitch argues in his recent dismantling of Rashid Khalidi’s apologia for Hamas, this ignorance is a direct byproduct of a decision to mask evidence of Hamas’s innate theocratic fascism.
The historian of totalitarianism Jeffrey Herf, in an article on the American Interest website, places the Hamas charter in context:
[T]he Hamas Covenant of 1988 notably replaced the Marxist-Leninist conspiracy theory of world politics with the classic anti-Semitic tropes of Nazism and European fascism, which the Islamists had absorbed when they collaborated with the Nazis during World War II. That influence is apparent in Article 22, which asserts that “supportive forces behind the enemy” have amassed great wealth: « With their money, they took control of the world media, news agencies, the press, publishing houses, broadcasting stations, and others. With their money they stirred revolutions in various parts of the world with the purpose of achieving their interests and reaping the fruit therein. With their money, they took control of the world media. They were behind the French Revolution, the Communist revolution and most of the revolutions we heard and hear about here and there. With their money, they formed secret societies, such as Freemason, Rotary Clubs, the Lions and others in different parts of the world for the purpose of sabotaging societies and achieving Zionist interests. With their money they were able to control imperialistic countries and instigate them to colonize many countries in order to enable them to exploit their resources and spread corruption there. »
The above paragraph of Article 22 could have been taken, almost word for word, from Nazi Germany’s anti-Jewish propaganda texts and broadcasts.
The question Roger Cohen refused to answer at Sinai Temple was addressed in a recent post by Sam Harris, the atheist intellectual, who is opposed, as a matter of ideology, to the existence of Israel as a Jewish state (or to any country organized around a religion), but who for practical reasons supports its continued existence as a haven for an especially persecuted people, and also as a not-particularly religious redoubt in a region of the world deeply affected by religious fundamentalism. Referring not only to the Hamas charter, Harris writes that, “The discourse in the Muslim world about Jews is utterly shocking.”
Not only is there Holocaust denial—there’s Holocaust denial that then asserts that we will do it for real if given the chance. The only thing more obnoxious than denying the Holocaust is to say that it should have happened; it didn’t happen, but if we get the chance, we will accomplish it. There are children’s shows in the Palestinian territories and elsewhere that teach five-year-olds about the glories of martyrdom and about the necessity of killing Jews.
And this gets to the heart of the moral difference between Israel and her enemies. …
What do we know of the Palestinians? What would the Palestinians do to the Jews in Israel if the power imbalance were reversed? Well, they have told us what they would do. For some reason, Israel’s critics just don’t want to believe the worst about a group like Hamas, even when it declares the worst of itself. We’ve already had a Holocaust and several other genocides in the 20th century. People are capable of committing genocide. When they tell us they intend to commit genocide, we should listen. There is every reason to believe that the Palestinians would kill all the Jews in Israel if they could. Would every Palestinian support genocide? Of course not. But vast numbers of them—and of Muslims throughout the world—would. Needless to say, the Palestinians in general, not just Hamas, have a history of targeting innocent noncombatants in the most shocking ways possible. They’ve blown themselves up on buses and in restaurants. They’ve massacred teenagers. They’ve murdered Olympic athletes. They now shoot rockets indiscriminately into civilian areas.
The first time I witnessed Hamas’s hatred of Jews manifest itself in large-scale, fatal violence was in late July of 1997, when two of the group’s suicide bombers detonated themselves in an open-air market in West Jerusalem. The attack took 16 lives, and injured 178. I happened to be only a few blocks from the market at the time of the attack, and arrived shortly after the paramedics and firefighters. Over the next hours, a scene unfolded that I would see again and again: screaming relatives; members of the Orthodox burial society scraping flesh off walls; the ground covered in blood and viscera. I remember another Hamas attack, on a bus in downtown Jerusalem, in which body parts of children were blown into the street by the force of the blast. At yet another bombing, I was with rescue workers as they recovered a human arm stuck high up in a tree.
After each of these attacks, Hamas leaders issued blood-curdling statements claiming credit, and promising more death. “The Jews will lose because they crave life but a true Muslim loves death,” a former Hamas leader, Abdel-Aziz Rantisi, told me in an interview in 2002. In the same interview he made the following imperishable statement: “People always talk about what the Germans did to the Jews, but the true question is, ‘What did the Jews do to the Germans?’”
I will always remember this interview not only because Rantisi’s Judeophobia was breathtaking, but because just as I was leaving his apartment in Gaza City, a friend from Jerusalem called to tell me that she had just heard a massive explosion outside her office at the Hebrew University (not far, by the way, from an attack earlier today). A cafeteria had just been bombed, my friend told me. This was another Hamas operation, one which killed nine people, including a young woman of exceptional promise named Marla Bennett, a 24-year-old American student who wrote shortly before her death, “My friends and family in San Diego ask me to come home, it is dangerous here. I appreciate their concern. But there is nowhere else in the world I would rather be right now. I have a front-row seat for the history of the Jewish people.”
Hamas is an organization devoted to ending Jewish history. This is what so many Jews understand, and what so many non-Jews don’t. The novelist Amos Oz, who has led Israel’s left-wing peace camp for decades, said in an interview last week that he doesn’t see a prospect for compromise between Israel and Hamas. « I have been a man of compromise all my life, » Oz said. « But even a man of compromise cannot approach Hamas and say: ‘Maybe we meet halfway and Israel only exists on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.' »
In the years since it adopted its charter, Hamas leaders and spokesmen have reinforced its message again and again. Mahmoud Zahar said in 2006 that the group « will not change a single word in its covenant. » To underscore the point, in 2010 Zahhar said, « Our ultimate plan is [to have] Palestine in its entirety. I say this loud and clear so that nobody will accuse me of employing political tactics. We will not recognize the Israeli enemy. »
In 2011, the former Hamas minister of culture, Atallah Abu al-Subh, said that « the Jews are the most despicable and contemptible nation to crawl upon the face of the Earth, because they have displayed hostility to Allah. Allah will kill the Jews in the hell of the world to come, just like they killed the believers in the hell of this world. » Just last week, a top Hamas official, Osama Hamdan, accused Jews of using Christian blood to make matzo. This is not a group, in other words, that is seeking the sort of peace that Amos Oz—or, for that matter, the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas—is seeking. People wonder why Israelis have such a visceral reaction to Hamas. The answer is easy. Israel is a small country, and most of its citizens know someone who was murdered by Hamas in its extended suicide-bombing campaigns; and most people also understand that if Hamas had its way, it would kill them as well.
Voir également:
An Honest Voice in Israel
Philip Gourevitch
The New Torker
August 2, 2014
Shortly before the announcement Thursday night of the ceasefire in Gaza that went into effect Friday morning and was immediately broken, the Deutsche Welle, the German radio station, posted the transcript of an interview with the Israeli novelist Amos Oz. Here’s how it started:
OZ: I would like to begin the interview in a very unusual way: by presenting one or two questions to your readers and listeners. May I do that?
DEUTSCHE WELLE: Go ahead!
QUESTION 1: What would you do if your neighbor across the street sits down on the balcony, puts his little boy on his lap, and starts shooting machine-gun fire into your nursery?
QUESTION 2: What would you do if your neighbor across the street digs a tunnel from his nursery to your nursery in order to blow up your home or in order to kidnap your family?
Oz is no hawk. He is the godfather of Israeli peaceniks: in 1967, right after the Six-Day War—in which he fought—left Israel in control of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, he was the first Israeli to call publicly for the creation of an independent Palestinian state in those territories, writing, “Even unavoidable occupation is a corrupting occupation.” He has always opposed the establishment of Israeli settlements on Palestinian land, and, in 1978, he was a founder of Peace Now. He is a steadfast critic of the policies toward Palestinians of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and, in the Deutsche Welle interview, advocated once again an Israeli deal with the Palestinian President, Mahmoud Abbas. “My suggestion,” he said, is “a two-state solution and coexistence between Israel and the West Bank: two capitals in Jerusalem, a mutually agreed territorial modification, removal of most of the Jewish settlements from the West Bank.”
Although Netanyahu has said that he accepts the two-state idea, he has doggedly resisted efforts to realize it, and his resistance has carried a terrible price for both Israelis and Palestinians. Oz argues cogently that such an agreement, followed by heavy Israeli investment in the success of the West Bank, would do more to destroy Hamas’s hold over Gaza than all of Israel’s wars there have managed. “The people in Gaza will be very jealous of the freedom and prosperity enjoyed by their brothers and sisters on the West Bank in the state of Palestine,” he said.
Oz’s interview is not only one of the most sober reckonings of Israel’s current position that you can find, his insistence that Israel and Palestine really could do vastly better by each other also makes it one of the most optimistic. While Oz finds it impossible to oppose Israel’s current war on principle—he calls it “justified, but excessive”—his longstanding commitment to the end of settlements and a two-state peace deal means that he is convinced that this war could have been avoided. In this, the peacenik novelist sounds very much like the six former Israeli spy chiefs profiled in the powerful documentary “The Gatekeepers,” all of whom left Israel’s national-security apparatus convinced that there can be no military solution to their conflict with the Palestinians, only a political one. That is Oz’s point in asking the brutal questions at the start of his interview: “For Israel,” he said, “it is a lose-lose situation.”
Meanwhile, on newyorker.com, the Columbia professor and former Palestinian diplomat Rashid Khalidi brushes aside the sort of questions that Oz poses—“What would you do if … ”—as mere “pretexts” and “red herrings” to excuse wanton Israeli aggression. Just last month, Netanyahu told Israelis, as he has repeatedly, that they must never relinquish “security control” over the West Bank, and Khalidi interprets this to mean that Israel’s war in Gaza “is not really about Hamas.” No, he writes, “It is not about rockets. It is not about ‘human shields’ or terrorism or tunnels. It is about Israel’s permanent control over Palestinian land and Palestinian lives.” In short, Khalidi claims, Israel’s only purpose is the collective punishment of Palestinians for resisting Israeli subjugation, and it follows that the unjustifiability of Israeli violence justifies Palestinian violence. After all, he writes, “Gaza is a ghetto and ghettos will inevitably fight back against those who ghettoize them.”
When Oz speaks of the neighbor who shoots at you with a child on his lap, he is speaking, of course, of Hamas, and he consistently makes the distinction clear between Hamas and Palestinian civilians, for whom this war has been a devastating bloodbath. Oz does not absolve Israel from its responsibility for the death and destruction in Gaza—that would be impossible—but he sees Hamas as more than an equal partner in it. That is what he means, he explains, when he describes the war as lose-lose for Israel: “The more Israeli casualties, the better it is for Hamas. The more Palestinian civilian casualties, the better it is for Hamas.” There is no end of argument about how to parcel out responsibility for this war and its ghastly toll on Gazans, but Oz is hardly alone in his view of Hamas’s strategy. My colleague Lawrence Wright, in his deep reporting and one-man theatre piece about Gaza, is unsparingly critical of the Israeli occupation. But, when he turns to Hamas’s attitude towards Gaza’s disproportionately young population, he concludes, “These children are being groomed to die.”
Khalidi, however, hasn’t got a bad word for Hamas. He says, “We might not like Hamas or some of its methods, but that is not the same as accepting the proposition that Palestinians should supinely accept the denial of their right to exist as a free people in their ancestral homeland.” Right—of course it’s not the same. But that doesn’t negate the fact that Hamas doesn’t accept, or even nominally recognize, the right of Israelis to exist as a free people. As Khalidi says, we should pay attention when Netanyahu tells Israelis about controlling their security on the West Bank. So shouldn’t we also listen when Hamas tells Palestinians that they should never accept the existence of Israel—and that victory will not come until they have wiped out not only the Jewish state but all the Jews?
If you take an interest in the war in Gaza, you should read the Hamas charter, but Oz sums up its biggest idea handily enough: “It says that the Prophet commands every Muslim to kill every Jew, everywhere in the world.” If Khalidi has a problem with this, he keeps it to himself. While Oz has no problem saying that Israel’s violent occupation is unjust to Palestinians and endangers its own people, Khalidi refuses to acknowledge that Hamas exists to end Israel’s existence and thrives on Palestinian wretchedness. In the heat of his moral condemnation of Israel—and of America for supporting Israel against Hamas—the hardest line that he will allow himself against Gaza’s categorically genocidal leadership is that “we may not like” it. What would he lose to say that we must not?
Ultimately, Khalidi’s argument seems to be that might makes wrong. Israel, he says, is “the stronger party.” He sees that strength as entirely dependent on America, and he argues that, if America seriously wants to make peace, it must cut Israel loose. Khalidi’s aim is to drive a wedge between Israel and what he sees as the only thing it has going for it—American support—but, by blinding himself to Hamas’s reality, or by denying it, he trips himself up. As we have seen since the breakdown on Friday of the American-brokered ceasefire in Gaza, the dastardliness of Hamas has, in fact, created a greater sense of common cause between Obama and Netanyahu than we have ever seen before. Oz cannot be happy about that, but he can surely understand it, whereas Khalidi’s magical thinking invites incomprehension. That is the real difference that Oz represents: whatever you may think of his position, you cannot but recognize that he is that rarest thing in this war—an honest voice.
Voir de plus:
Why They Fight: Hamas’ Too-Little-Known Fascist Charter
The American interest
As the Gaza conflict rolls on, the Western press has virtually ignored Hamas’s 1988 “Covenant,” which precisely details the terror group’s radical anti-Semitism and intellectual debt to Nazi ideology.
Given all the ink spilled about the current Gaza war, and the innumerable tragic photos, it’s strange that the Western press hasn’t inquired into why one of the parties is fighting. That would be Hamas, of course; the turgid psychologizing about Israel’s motives is quite familiar. But what about its Islamist enemy, penned up in a barren territory from which it launches rockets and digs tunnels under Israeli kibbutzim and kindergartens? For what was all that concrete poured, into the ground as part of the offensive, instead of above ground as the foundation of schools, factories, and homes?
It’s not exactly hard to find out. Hamas published a “Covenant” of 36 articles on August 18, 1988, that details its aims and ideology precisely. Its philosophy is rooted in the totalitarianism and radical anti-Semitism that has undergirded Islamism since its rise in the 1930s and 1940s. Far from moderating its core ideology, Hamas’ seizure of power in 2007 gave it the opportunity to make policy based on its guiding goal—namely, the destruction the state of Israel.1 But even though the Covenant is the declaration of intent of a group now governing millions of people, it goes unnoticed by reporters, editors, and pundits who race to comment on Hamas’ war with Israel.
There is no reason for this ignorance. The briefest Google search brings one to an English translation of the Covenant, provided by the Avalon Project of the Yale Law School over a decade ago. Hamas has not revised or modified its Covenant in all that time. The public statements of its leaders and its continued terror offensive against Israel are clear evidence that Hamas in 2014 remains inspired by the ideas expressed in founding text. This should be every policy maker’s, and every journalist’s, first stop in their efforts to understand Hamas. And it is of utmost importance that they read the text itself, as any student of literature will tell you. There is no substitute; to understand a person one must read him in his own words, noting everything from the cadence and syntax to the allusions to key figures of his ideological tradition. The Gaza war will be incomprehensible to anyone who refuses to take Hamas at its word—these words.
The Covenant’s first words place it into the longer tradition that historians call “Islamism,” that is, a distinct twentieth-century interpretation of the religion of Islam that emerged in the 1930s and 1940s in Egypt and Palestine. Islamism’s key figures included the Nazi sympathizer Haj Amin-El Husseini, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al-Banna, and the Brotherhood’s leading ideologue of the 1950s and 1960s, Sayyid Qutb. According to them, Islam was an inherently anti-Jewish religion. Through selective quotation from the Koran and various commentaries, they claimed Islam’s holiest book supported their racist and anti-Jewish views. The Islamists also opposed liberal democracy, celebrated terrorism, supported the Nazis during World War II, and have been the most implacable enemies of Zionism since long before Israel’s founding in 1948.2 The authors of the Hamas Covenant traced their origins to “the struggle against the Zionist invaders” in 1939, to the Moslem Brotherhood and its role in the 1948 war, and to the “Jihad operations of the Moslem Brotherhood in 1968 and after.” Hamas is one variation of an Islamist tradition that also drives al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, the government of Iran, Boko Haram in Nigeria, and most recently, ISIS. These terrorist organizations have fought one another at times, but they share the views that the religion of Islam is at its core hostile to the Jews and that the state of Israel should be destroyed by force.
The authors of this charter make their allegiance to Islamism clear from the outset, distinguishing themselves from other, secular anti-Zionist groups. They cite Hassan al-Banna, the iconic founder of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, who said, “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.” Furthermore, the Covenant claims that the destruction of Israel is a religious obligation, that is, for Muslims; it is a “response to Allah’s command.” In contrast to the secular radicalism of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which by 1988 was beginning to lose favor with its Soviet patrons, the Covenant offered an unambiguously religious justification for hating Jews. While the PLO Charter of 1968 also called for the destruction of Israel by force, the eventual collapse of the Soviet bloc deprived it of its major arms supplier and military adviser, not to mention its champion at the United Nations. As secular anti-Zionism was losing its key support, the religious wave was cresting in the wake of the Iranian Revolution in 1979 and the failure of the secular anti-Zionists to destroy Israel.
Hamas, like all varieties of Islamist politics, dispensed with the PLO’s dubious assertion that anti-Zionism was not identical to hatred of the Jews as Jews. On the contrary, the writers declare, “our struggle against the Jews is very great and very serious”—the ultimate goal, not merely a tactic. To Hamas, this cause is both great and serious because it is explicitly religious. The Covenant is a Manichean document; it divides politics into true or false, just or unjust, alternatives. It promises to remake the world in the name of Islam, which, it regrets, has been wrongly driven from public life. This is its slogan: “Allah is its target, the Prophet is its model, and the Koran is its constitution: Jihad is the path and death for the sake of Allah is the loftiest of its wishes.” This celebration of martyrdom and death had been a key theme in Hassan al-Banna’s writings and subsequently became a commonplace for Islamists.
Not only is it fighting the Jews themselves. Hamas is devoted to destroying their nation, Israel. It strives to “raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine, for under the wing of Islam followers of all religions can coexist in security and safety with their lives, possession and rights are concerned.” It goes without saying that no one, least of all the Jews, would take seriously Hamas’ promise that all religions would “coexist” under Islam. The Arab nations expelled their Jewish populations after Israel’s founding in 1948. But leaving aside its risible attempt at reassurance, this excerpt illustrates that from the outset Hamas sought to recover “every inch of Palestine,” in other words, the entire state of Israel. The Covenant states, “the land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf (or inalienable religious endowment of property) consecrated for future Moslem generations until Judgment Day. It, or any part of it, should not be squandered: it, or any part of it, should not be given up.” For Hamas, a two-state solution that left any part of Israel intact would constitute religious apostasy.3
If you had any doubts about what the conquest would entail, the Covenant’s Article 13 makes the political implications of these religious demands clear. Diplomatic efforts such as “peaceful solutions, initiatives and international conferences” are “in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement.” In fact, there is “no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are a waste of time and vain endeavors.”4 Nor can any individual Muslim abstain from warfare, according to document. Article 15 declares, “Jihad for the liberation of Palestine is an individual duty. In the face of the Jews’ usurpation of Palestine, it is compulsory that the banner of Jihad be raised.” Many anti-Zionist assaults have been bloody, but Hamas’s distinctive contribution was the theological sanction of violence.
Though Islamism owes a considerable debt to Nazism, the Hamas Covenant claims that it is Israel that is the equal of Nazi Germany. In Article 20, the authors write that they confront “a vicious enemy which acts in a way similar to Nazism, making no differentiation between man and women, between children and old people….”5 The “Israelis as Nazis” canard has been a staple of both secular and religious anti-Zionist propaganda since the 1960s. When the secular anti-Zionists such as Nasser, Arafat, and Assad, Sr., spoke about global conspiracies against the Arabs, they attributed a mythical conspiracy against the Arabs to “U.S. imperialism” and its Israeli “spearhead”—echoing the propaganda of their patrons, the Soviets.6 Indeed, the Hamas Covenant of 1988 notably replaced the Marxist-Leninist conspiracy theory of world politics with the classic anti-Semitic tropes of Nazism and European fascism, which the Islamists had absorbed when they collaborated with the Nazis during World War II. That influence is apparent in Article 22, which asserts that “supportive forces behind the enemy” have amassed great wealth:
With their money, they took control of the world media, news agencies, the press, publishing houses, broadcasting stations, and others. With their money they stirred revolutions in various parts of the world with the purpose of achieving their interests and reaping the fruit therein. They were behind the French Revolution, the Communist revolution and most of the revolutions we heard and hear about, here and there. With their money, they formed secret societies, such as Freemason, Rotary Clubs, the Lions and others in different parts of the world for the purpose of sabotaging societies and achieving Zionist interests. With their money they were able to control imperialistic countries and instigate them to colonize many countries in order to enable them to exploit their resources and spread corruption there.
The above paragraph of Article 22 could have been taken, almost word for word, from Nazi Germany’s anti-Jewish propaganda texts and broadcasts.7 Echoing the European, but also American, anti-Semites of the twentieth century, Hamas repeated the assertion that the Jews used their money to control both “the world media” and the established social order. At the same time, these Jewish scions of the status quo were “behind” the French and Communist revolutions—one of European fascists’ favorite theories during their heyday. In the same manner as their anti-Semitic predecessors, the authors of the Hamas Covenant claimed that the Jews “control imperialistic countries” and advocate colonization and exploitation of other nations. Notably, it is Israel that controls the U.S. in this account, a reversal of the Soviet-era anti-Zionist propaganda. This paranoid vision of powerful, wealthy, and evil Jews echoes such works as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Hitler’s Mein Kampf, and the daily diet of Nazi newspapers and Arabic-language radio broadcast from Nazi Berlin by Arab collaborators. The Covenant is so devoted to the fantasy that Jews engineer every world event that it blames the Jews for starting World War I:
You may speak as much as you want about regional and world wars. They were behind World War I, when they were able to destroy the Islamic Caliphate, making financial gains and controlling resources. They obtained the Balfour Declaration, formed the League of Nations through which they could rule the world. They were behind World War II, through which they made huge financial gains by trading in armaments, and paved the way for the establishment of their state. It was they who instigated the replacement of the League of Nations with the United Nations and the Security Council to enable them to rule the world through them. There is no war going on anywhere, without their having their finger in it.
For anyone with the slightest knowledge of modern European history and the causes of World War I, the assertion that the Jews, a stateless minority scattered among many nations of Europe, had anything at all to do with its outbreak is preposterous. More, it is a depressing confirmation of the intellectual backwardness and historical ignorance of the authors of this document, and of Muslim Brotherhood’s success in diffusing anti-Semitic propaganda in the decades after World War II. The charge that Jews masterminded the League of Nation is no less befuddling; it hardly needs saying that the Jewish people were in no position to found a conference of international heads of state. These delusions have next to nothing to do with actual events; whatever path history takes, in the anti-Semitic imagination, it is the Jews who are dictating it. In this fantasy, the powerful Jew is timeless; indeed, his power is as total today as it was in past centuries.8
It should come as no surprise, then, that the fevered minds who wrote this document claim the Jews were behind World War II, from which they supposedly made huge amounts of money. This, too, was an idea they adopted from their forebears, the Nazis. It was the central assertion of German propaganda from 1939 to 1945, one that Hitler, his Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, and other Nazi leaders repeated endlessly on radio and in the press. The charge that an actual political actor called “the Jew” or “International Jewry” had launched the war against Nazi Germany played a large role in Hitler’s justification for murdering Europe’s Jews.9 As had been the case for the Nazis, the description of the Jews as evil and powerful led Hamas to promote genocide against them.10If Jews were responsible for all wars, as it claimed, the path to peace demanded their extermination.11
If the previous sections articulated Hamas’ theory that the Jews control the world and foment all wars, the later articles make that supposed threat personal: the Jews’ first order of business, states Article 22, is to wipe out the Arab countries one by one, starting with Palestine. That appears to be Hamas’ characterization of the Camp David Accords. Naturally, Hamas is the first to stand against the Zionists: It seeks “to prevent the success of this horrendous plan….Today it is Palestine, tomorrow it will be one country after another. The Zionist plan is limitless. After Palestine, the Zionists aspire to expand form the Nile to the Euphrates.” In this as well, Hamas is indebted to Nazis, who also promoted the idea that Zionists coveted a land empire stretching from the “the Nile to the Euphrates.” Via short wave radio from Berlin, Arab-language Nazi propaganda not only claimed that the Jews were responsible for the war in Europe, but that in addition “the Jews kindled this war in the interest of Zionism.”12 Again, the influence of the famous forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is apparent. For the Muslim Brotherhood in 1948 and Hamas forty years later, the sheer existence of the state of Israel was sufficient evidence to confirm the truth of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.
We don’t know whether Hamas would have been weakened and war avoided if the political leaders of the West had spoken out against this poisonous declaration in 1988, or in any way considered its likely effect on Hamas’ governance later in 2007. Like any other movement, Hamas has core beliefs, chillingly on display in its Covenant, yet they are far too frequently ignored. A misplaced reticence and a condescending desire not to offend have only made it easier for Hamas to grow stronger and more dangerous. Now is a good time for anyone with an interest in understanding Hamas to read its founding document and see its debt to Nazism and European fascism presented in its own words. Only then will an observer know why Hamas started this and previous wars and why peace demands that its odious ideology be examined and delegitimated.
1On this issue see the excellent essay by Tzipi Livni, Israel’s Minister of Justice, “Three Boys, One Terrorist Group and a Message for Democracies,” Wall Street Journal, June 25, 2014. On the use of democracy to destroy democracy, see the now classic work by Karl Bracher, The German Dictatorship (New York, 1970) and more recently, Ian Kershaw, Hitler: A Biography (W.W. Norton, 2010).
2On Islamism, see Paul Berman, Terror and Liberalism (W.W. Norton, 2003); Bassam Tibi, Islamism and Islam (Yale University Press, 20012); Matthias Kuentzel, Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Nazism, Islamism and the Roots of 9/11 (Telos Press, 2007); Jeffrey Herf, Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World (Yale University Press, 2009). On the Western reluctance to speak frankly about Islamism see Paul Berman, The Flight of the Intellectuals (Melville House, 2010).
3Hamas leaders have repeated such views in recent years. For example on August 10, 2012, Ahmad Bahr, Deputy Speaker of the Hamas Parliament, stated in a sermon that aired on Al-Aqsa TV: “If the enemy sets foot on a single square inch of Islamic land, Jihad becomes an individual duty, incumbent on every Muslim, male or female. A woman may set out [on Jihad] without her husband’s permission, and a servant without his master’s permission. Why? In order to annihilate those Jews…. O Allah, destroy the Jews and their supporters. O Allah, destroy the Americans and their supporters. O Allah, count them one by one, and kill them all, without leaving a single one.” “Hamas Official Ahmad Bahr Preaches for the Annihilation of Jews and Americans,” Middle East Media Research Institute MEMRI, Clip No. 3538, August 10, 2012; and Greg Tepper, “Hamas leader prays for annihilation of Jews, Americans,” The Times of Israel, (August 20, 2012); and Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu, “Video: Hamas MP: ‘Annihilate Jews and Americans,” Israel National News, August 26, 2012.
4The Covenant found support for this intransigence in the following “honorable Hadith: The people of Syria are Allah’s lash in His hand. He wreaks his vengeance through them against whomsoever He wishes among His slaves. It is unthinkable that those who are double-faced among them should prosper over the faithful. They will certainly die out of grief and desperation.”
5On the history of the comparison of Israelis to Nazis in postwar Arab political and intellectual life, see Meir Litvak and Esther Webman, From Empathy to Denial: Arab Responses to the Holocaust (London: Hurst, 2009).
6On the place of Israel in the conspiracy theory of the secular left in the Cold War, see Jeffrey Herf, “At War with Israel: East Germany’s Enthusiastic Participation in Soviet Policy in the Middle East,” forthcoming, Journal of Cold War Studies (Summer 2014).
7Jeffrey Herf, The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust (Harvard University Press, 2006).
8The scholarship is large. Recently see Herf, The Jewish Enemy and Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World, op. cit; Robert Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession: Antisemitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad (Random House, 2010); and Alvin H. Rosenfeld, ed., Resurgent Antisemitism: Global Perspectives (University of Indiana Press, 2013).
9Herf, The Jewish Enemy.
10On Islamist Holocaust justification see Litvak and Webman, From Empathy to Denial; and Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession.
11Leaders of Hamas repeated such views in recent years. In an interview with Al-Aqsa TV in September 12, 2012, Marwan Abu Ras, a Hamas MP, who is also a member of the International Union of Muslim Scholars, stated (as translated by MEMRI): “The Jews are behind each and every catastrophe on the face of the Earth. This is not open to debate. This is not a temporal thing, but goes back to days of yore. They concocted so many conspiracies and betrayed rulers and nations so many times that the people harbor hatred towards them…. Throughout history—from Nebuchadnezzar until modern times…. They slayed the prophets, and so on…. Any catastrophe on the face of this Earth – the Jews must be behind it.” “Hamas MP Marwan Abu Ras: The Jews Are Behind Every Catastrophe on Earth,” MEMRITV, September 12, 2012.
12See, for example, “Palestine between Bolsheviks and the Jews,” November 3, 1943, cited in Herf, Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World, p. 184.
Irak : un nettoyage ethnique est en cours
[02/09/2014]
Des éléments récemment découverts par Amnesty International indiquent que des membres du groupe armé qui se fait appeler État islamique (EI) ont lancé une campagne systématique de nettoyage ethnique dans le nord de l’Irak, commettant des crimes de guerre, notamment des enlèvements et exécutions sommaires de masse, contre les minorités ethniques et religieuses.
Parmi les minorités ethniques et religieuses prises pour cible dans le nord de l’Irak se trouvent les chrétiens assyriens, les chiites turkmènes et shabaks, les yézidis, les kakaïs et les mandéens sabéens. De nombreux Arabes et musulmans sunnites qui s’opposent, ou sont soupçonnés de s’opposer, à l’EI ont aussi été visés par ce qui semble être des attaques de représailles.
Un nouveau document, Ethnic cleansing on historic scale: the Islamic State’s systematic targeting of minorities in northern Iraq, présente des témoignages glaçants de personnes ayant survécu à des massacres.
MASSACRES ET ENLÈVEMENTS
Certains de ces récits décrivent la manière dont des dizaines d’hommes et de garçons de la région de Sinjar, dans le nord de l’Irak, ont été rassemblés par des combattants de l’État islamique, entassés dans des pick-up et conduits à l’extérieur de leur village pour être massacrés en groupe ou abattus individuellement. Des centaines de femmes et d’enfants, peut-être même des milliers, ainsi que des dizaines d’hommes appartenant à la minorité yézidie ont également été enlevés depuis que l’EI a pris le contrôle de cette zone.
Les massacres et les enlèvements auxquels procède l’État islamique prouvent une nouvelle fois qu’une vague de nettoyage ethnique visant les minorités balaye le nord de l’Irak.
L’État islamique commet des crimes abjects et a transformé les zones rurales autour de Sinjar en terrains d’exécution imbibés de sang avec sa campagne implacable visant à oblitérer toute trace des populations non arabes et non sunnites. »
Donatella Rovera, conseillère d’Amnesty International en matière de réaction aux crises qui se trouve actuellement dans le nord de l’Irak.
Nous avons rassemblé des éléments prouvant que plusieurs massacres ont eu lieu dans la région de Sinjar en août. Deux des épisodes les plus sanglants sont survenus quand des combattants de l’EI ont lancé un raid sur les villages de Qiniyeh, le 3 août, et de Kocho, le 15. Pour ces deux seuls villages, le nombre de tués atteint plusieurs centaines. Dans les deux cas, des groupes d’hommes et d’adolescents, dont certains d’à peine 12 ans, ont été capturés par des activistes de l’EI, emmenés et abattus.
LES VICTIMES PRISES AU HASARD
« Il n’y avait pas d’ordre particulier, ils [les membres de l’EI] ont juste rempli les véhicules au hasard », nous a expliqué un survivant du massacre de Kocho.
Saïd, qui a échappé de justesse à la mort avec son frère Khaled, a reçu cinq balles. Trois dans le genou gauche, une dans la hanche et une dans l’épaule. Ils ont perdu sept frères dans le massacre. Un autre survivant, Salem, qui a réussi à se cacher et à survivre près du lieu du carnage pendant 12 jours, nous a décrit l’horreur d’entendre les cris de douleur des autres blessés.
« Certains ne pouvaient pas bouger et n’ont pas pu se sauver. Ils sont restés allongés là, à attendre la mort en souffrant atrocement. Ils ont eu une mort horrible. J’ai réussi à me traîner à l’écart et j’ai été sauvé par un voisin musulman. Il a risqué sa vie pour me sauver. C’est plus qu’un frère pour moi. Pendant 12 jours, il m’a apporté à manger et à boire toutes les nuits. Je ne pouvais pas marcher et n’avais aucune chance de pouvoir m’enfuir et ça devenait de plus en plus dangereux pour lui de me garder là », a-t-il expliqué.
Il a par la suite réussi à fuir à dos d’âne dans les montagnes, puis vers les zones contrôlées par le Gouvernement régional du Kurdistan.
UNE POPULATION TERRORISÉE
Les massacres et les enlèvements ont réussi à terroriser la totalité de la population du nord de l’Irak, poussant des milliers de personnes à fuir pour sauver leur vie.
On ignore toujours le sort réservé à la plupart des centaines de yézidis enlevés et maintenus captifs par l’État islamique. Nombre des personnes retenues par l’EI ont été menacées de viol ou d’agression sexuelle ou ont subi des pressions visant à les obliger à se convertir à l’islam. Dans certains cas, des familles entières ont été enlevées.
Un homme qui a fourni à Amnesty International une liste sur laquelle figuraient les noms de 45 de ses proches, uniquement des femmes et des enfants, a indiqué : « On a des nouvelles de certains d’entre eux, mais les autres ont disparu et on ne sait pas s’ils sont morts ou vivants ni ce qui leur est arrivé. »
Au lieu d’envenimer la situation en feignant de ne pas remarquer les milices confessionnelles ou en armant les milices chiites contre l’État islamique, comme l’ont fait les autorités jusqu’à présent, le gouvernement irakien devrait se concentrer sur la protection de tous les civils, quelles que soient leur origine ethnique ou leurs convictions religieuses ».
Donatella Rovera
La population du nord de l’Irak mérite de vivre libre de toute persécution sans avoir à craindre sans arrêt pour sa vie. Les donneurs d’ordre, les exécutants et les complices de ces crimes de guerre doivent être appréhendés et traduits en justice.
Depuis qu’ils ont pris le contrôle de Mossoul, le 10 juin, les activistes de l’EI ont aussi systématiquement détruit ou endommagé des lieux de culte autres que ceux de l’islam sunnite, y compris des mosquées et des temples chiites.
Voir par ailleurs:
Netanyahu is losing Europe’s goodwill, even Germany’s
David Gardner in Beirut
Israel slow to realise a change in sentiment over Palestine that could challenge its legitimacy
The Financial Times
November 10, 2014
Sweden’s new government last month recognised the state of Palestine, and Britain’s House of Commons and Ireland’s senate called on their governments to follow suit. Now, France’s governing Socialists plan to bring a similar resolution to the national assembly, while Federica Mogherini, the new EU foreign policy chief, recently announced that she wants to see a Palestinian state established during her term.
Is European impatience with Israeli intransigence towards the Palestinians reaching a point of rupture? Is EU frustration with Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister’s expansion of Jewish settlements on occupied Arab land, proscribed by international law, inclining Europeans to force the issue of a Palestinian state?
Europe has always had a more complicated relationship with Israel than the US, the indispensable and invariably unconditional patron of the Jewish state. While Europe recognised Palestinians’ right to their own homeland almost four decades ago, Israel has tended almost to patronise the EU as a politically negligible economic power, several of whose member states, not just Germany with its history of the Nazis and the Jewish Holocaust, have a history of anti-Semitism for which to atone.
Until recently, successive Israeli governments somehow managed to convince Europeans that any political pressure would result in their being excluded from peace talks that long ago ceased even to be mere process. But Israel has been slow to realise there has been a change in sentiment in Europe, not sudden but solid, that could eventually present a challenge to its legitimacy. The shift follows a sharp rise in hostility towards Israel in western Europe, with BBC polls carried out by Gallup recording between two-thirds and three-quarters of people in the UK, Spain, Germany, France and Italy holding negative views of Israel’s policy.
Sweden, furthermore, is not the first EU member to recognise Palestine. Eight other member states do, even if all of them took that decision before joining the EU. More relevant is that half of the EU, 14 members including France, voted to admit Palestine as an observer state at the UN in December 2012. The Netanyahu government dismissed that vote as a non-event, yet moved heaven and earth diplomatically to influence it and was stung when Germany abstained.
That should not have been a surprise. In February 2011, Germany, which had abstained several times during the second intifada a decade earlier, voted in the UN Security Council to condemn Israel’s settlements, in a 14-1 result vetoed by the US.
Chancellor Angela Merkel lost all trust in Mr Netanyahu long ago. But German diplomats say Berlin is coming to the conclusion that neither this nor any other likely Israeli coalition is willing or able to roll back the occupation to boundaries that would make a Palestinian state viable. And that while all Israeli governments have intended the main settlements to be permanent, Mr Netanyahu’s revival of plans to expand settlements east and south of Jerusalem places a viable and contiguous Palestinian state beyond reach.
Without German support, the EU last year would probably not have adopted rules prohibiting grants to Israeli entities operating in illegal settlements. Yet the EU still let Israel into its Horizon 2020, the only non-member state in this €80bn research and development programme, making Israeli high-tech high fliers eligible for European public money provided it is not spent in the settlements.
While these rules are quite distinct from the international campaign to boycott Israel until it withdraws from the occupied West Bank and Arab East Jerusalem, they are in the same political ballpark and some European pension funds have started pulling their investments in Israeli banks with branches in the settlements, acting on EU rules but probably also in response to activists.
Recognition of Palestine as a state is likely to grow in and outside the EU; Sweden was the 135th country to sign up. As current, and former, Israeli leaders have warned, Israel faces international ostracism unless it shows itself willing to make a deal on Palestine. Yet if avenues to a separate state continue to be closed, the Palestinians may opt for an apartheid-style struggle for equal rights within a single state. For now, the EU has targeted the settlements. But whatever its intentions, it is not hard to discern an eventual dead end at which Europeans clamour for a more general boycott.
Voir aussi:
Djihad à Jérusalem
Pas d’Etat pour une société qui glorifie le meurtre au nom de la religion
The Wall Street Journal
21 novembre 2014
Ce n’est pas avec des assassinats que les Palestiniens paveront la voie d’un Etat autonome
Pour comprendre pourquoi la paix en Palestine n’interviendra pas avant des années, si ce n’est des décennies, il suffit de penser aux réjouissances organisées par les Palestiniens après le meurtre de cinq Israéliens dans une synagogue de Jérusalem, dont trois jouissaient d’une co-citoyenneté américaine. Deux Palestiniens, des cousins, munis d’un hachoir à viande et d’une arme à feu, avaient attaqué des fidèles juifs pendant les prières du matin, et leur réponse fut une explosion de joie dans les rues.
Le Front Populaire de Libération de la Palestine a revendiqué l’opération tandis que le Hamas se réjouissait de ces assassinats, « une réponse aux crimes incessants des Israéliens. » Le principal obstacle à la paix ne provient pas dans les implantations juives de la ville multiconfessionnelle de Jérusalem. La barrière est la culture de la haine contre les Juifs alimentée par les dirigeants palestiniens.
Le premier ministre palestinien, Mahmoud Abbas à condamné les assassinats, mais non sans appeler Israël à interrompre ce qu’il a qualifié « d’invasion » de la mosquée sacrée Al Aqsa de Jérusalem. M. Abbas avait précédemment prétendu que le Mont du Temple avait été souillé par les Juifs, en dépit des assurances du premier ministre Benjamin Netanyahou que le Dôme du Rocher et la mosquée Al Aqsa continueraient d’être réservés au seul culte musulman. Le site d’information MEMRI rapporte que le numéro du 29 octobre du quotidien palestinien Al-Hayat Al-Jadida était plein de fausses accusations pour faire croire qu’Israël était en train de saccager les lieux saints de Jérusalem.
Le secrétaire d’état John Kerry a attribué l’attaque de mardi à un climat général de «provocation », mais M. Abbas était l’un des provocateurs.
Ces meurtres sont les pires de la récente vague d’attentats palestiniens, qu’on qualifie parfois de troisième Intifada spontanée, ou de soulèvement contre Israël. Mais il y a peu d’évènements spontanés dans une société dominée par des factions militaires armées. La dernière Intifada, qui est intervenue après l’échec des conversations de paix de l’an 2000, avait aussi été qualifiée de spontanée jusqu’à ce qu’il ne soit évident que Yasser Arafat l’avait déclenchée.
Le but de ce nouveau djihad est d’affoler les Israéliens pour leur faire accepter la division de Jérusalem, la première exigence formulée par les Palestiniens au cours des négociations de paix qui ont récemment échoué. Cependant, c’est seulement sous la loi israélienne que toutes les religions ont pu être librement exercées à Jérusalem. Au moment du 25ème anniversaire de la chute du Mur de Berlin, le monde ne devrait plus diviser à nouveau de grandes villes.
Le président Obama a condamné l’attaque, mais son gouvernement a contribué en partie à semer le trouble en dénonçant les constructions dans la municipalité de Jérusalem. Dans une lettre à l’ancien premier ministre Ariel Sharon, l’administration précédente, celle de Georges W Bush, avait assuré en 2004 que tout accord de paix à venir garantirait des ajustements de la frontière de la Rive occidentale du Jourdain en fonction des réalités du terrain. En 2009, Hillary Clinton prétendit que la lettre de Bush n’avait pas de statut juridique, encourageant les rêves de division de Jérusalem des Palestiniens. Ce dont Israël a besoin aujourd’hui, c’est que les États-Unis ne donnent pas des gratifications aux actes de djihad en traînant M. Netanyahou dans des négociations avec M. Abbas. Le premier ministre israélien est en droit de refuser de rencontrer M. Abbas jusqu’à ce que l’Autorité palestinienne mette un terme à l’incitation à la violence.
Le meilleur moyen d’empêcher une troisième Intifada, c’est de rassurer Israël sur le soutien des États-Unis dans des opératipns d’autodéfense et d’avertir les Palestiniens qu’ils n’auront pas de patrie tant qu’ils édifieront une société qui glorifie les meurtres d’innocents au nom de la religion.
Titre original : Jihad in Jerusalem
Review and Outlook in Wall Street Journal, publié le 18 novembre 2014
Traduction: Jean-Pierre Bensimon
Voir par ailleurs:
Hamas Threatens Genocide against Israelis and Vows Jihad
Palestine militant group marks ‘Sigil Stone Operation’ with anti-Israeli rhetoric.
Vasudevan Sridharan
international Business Times
November 22, 2013
Palestinian Hamas militants take part in a military parade marking the first anniversary of the eight-day conflict with Israel, in Gaza City Reuters
The militant group Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, has warned that Israelis will be persecuted and slaughtered when it gains more power in the region.
Marking the first anniversary of « Sigil Stone Operation », known as Operation Pillar of Defence, the Palestine-based group issued threats to Israel over its settlement plans and vowed jihad.
Hamas claims victory in the week-long fighting that took place last year in which the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) and Hamas traded several rockets killing scores of people.
During victory speeches to commemorate the fighting, Hamas leaders have pledged to carry out genocide of « Zionists » once they control the region.
« Zionists, you have no place on the land of Palestine….we shall expel you from our land and will fight against you on it. We will kill you or expel from it when you are submissive … the jihad and the martyrdom in the way of Allah are our road and our track which are meant to fulfil our triumphs and fulfil and protect our [Islamic] nation, » said Khalil al-Hayya, a senior Hamas parliamentarian and a key member of the group.
According to Jonathan Dhoah Halevi’s blog post in Alternative Angle, other Hamas leaders who were participating in the anniversary gathering also made similar pledges against Israelis.
« The resistance [Palestine groups] will sooner or later pursue this occupation, and it will pursue it everywhere, and our country will be prohibited to the occupier… the fate of the occupation is disappearance and destruction, and the shortest way for the occupation is to leave out land and flee before the hand of justice and the hand of the struggle of the Palestinian people and the Arab and the Islamic nation reach it, » said Abu Ubaidah, spokesperson for the militant wing of Hamas- al-Qassam.
At a separate event to mark the same occasion, Hamas leaders warned Israel that the militant group’s latest missiles can reach up to the north of Tel Aviv.
Voir encore:
Monde
Moyen-Orient: Abbas appelle les Palestiniens à protéger la mosquée Al-Aqsa
Le président palestinien Mahmoud Abbas a appelé vendredi ses compatriotes à empêcher l’accès à la mosquée Al-Aqsa à Jérusalem aux colons israéliens et à utiliser « tous les moyens » pour protéger le site.
20 minutes
17.10.2014
Le président palestinien Mahmoud Abbas a appelé vendredi ses compatriotes à empêcher l’accès à la mosquée Al-Aqsa à Jérusalem aux colons israéliens et à utiliser «tous les moyens» pour protéger le site.
Ces déclarations surviennent quelques jours après des heurts entre policiers israéliens et des Palestiniens protestant contre la venue de fidèles juifs sur le site, vénéré à la fois par les juifs et les musulmans.
«Il n’est pas suffisant de dire que des colons sont venus, ils doivent être empêchés d’entrer sur le site par tous les moyens», a affirmé M. Abbas lors d’une conférence de presse à Ramallah, en Cisjordanie.
«C’est notre Al-Aqsa et notre lieu saint, ils n’ont pas le droit d’entrer et de le désacraliser», a-t-il ajouté, soulignant que défendre Al-Aqsa signifiait défendre Jérusalem, dont les Palestiniens entendent faire la capitale de l’Etat auquel ils aspirent.
«Jérusalem est le bijou de la couronne et la capitale éternelle de l’Etat de Palestine. Sans elle, il n’y aura pas d’Etat», a-t-il dit, ajoutant: «Il est important que les Palestiniens soient unis afin de protéger Jérusalem».
Plus tôt vendredi, des centaines de Palestiniens ont défilé à Gaza à l’appel du mouvement islamiste Hamas contre ce qu’ils dénoncent comme des agressions israéliennes contre Al-Aqsa.
Les manifestants ont brûlé le drapeau israélien dans la rue lors de ce rassemblement après la prière du vendredi, auquel se sont joints les sympathisants d’autres organisations comme le Jihad islamique.
Ismail Radwan, un dirigeant du Hamas, organisation islamiste radicale qui contrôle de fait la bande de Gaza, a appelé «notre peuple à Jérusalem et en Cisjordanie à défendre Al-Aqsa».
Al-Aqsa est le troisième lieu saint de l’islam après La Mecque et Médine en Arabie saoudite.
L’esplanade sur laquelle elle se trouve est le théâtre de heurts chroniques. Mais ceux-ci sont devenus encore plus réguliers et plus violents depuis quelques mois, sous l’effet des tensions entre Israéliens et Palestiniens et juifs et musulmans, et de la guerre cet été dans la bande de Gaza.
Pour les juifs, le site est le lieu du second Temple, détruit en l’an 70 par les Romains. Le mur des Lamentations, vestige du second Temple, est situé en contrebas de l’esplanade.
A l’occasion de la fête juive de Souccot, la police avait autorisé lundi des groupes de fidèles juifs, y compris des extrémistes de droite, à se rendre sur l’esplanade, à certaines heures et sous stricte surveillance. La venue des pèlerins juifs a déclenché la colère de certains fidèles musulmans et des heurts ont éclaté sur l’esplanade entre les policiers et des jeunes Palestiniens, repoussés et enfermés dans l’enceinte de la mosquée.
Les musulmans dénoncent les restrictions imposées par les autorités israéliennes au nom de la sécurité à leur accès à l’esplanade et s’indignent de provocations de la part de certains juifs y accédant. Ils s’inquiètent aussi que les autorités israéliennes puissent finir par donner aux juifs le droit de prier sur l’esplanade.
Vendredi, environ 5.000 fidèles musulmans y ont pris part à la prière, qui s’est tenue sans incident, a dit une porte-parole de la police israélienne. La police avait cependant interdit l’accès aux hommes de moins de 50 ans.
Le secrétaire général des Nations unies Ban Ki-moon a exigé lundi la fin des «provocations» sur ce site. Le Premier ministre Benjamin Netanyahu a répondu qu’Israël ne touchera pas au «statu quo» régissant l’esplanade.
Il est 7 heures locales, quand deux Palestiniens armés d’un pistolet, de haches et de couteaux, pénètrent hier dans la synagogue Kehilat Yaacov du paisible quartier juif orthodoxe de Har Nof à Jérusalem-Ouest pour semer la mort pendant l’office du matin aux cris de « Allah Akbar! ».
Enveloppés dans leurs châles de prières, quatre fidèles s’effondrent sous les coups des tueurs opérant à visage découvert, qui seront ensuite tués par deux policiers israéliens accourus sur place. Trois des victimes israéliennes étaient également de nationalité américaine, la quatrième avait aussi la nationalité britannique. Huit fidèles ont été par ailleurs blessés, dont un se trouvait hier dans un état critique tandis que trois autres étaient sérieusement atteints.
Les terroristes, des cousins âgés d’une vingtaine d’années, venaient du quartier arabe de Jabal Moukaber, à Jérusalem-Est (annexée). Ils sont parvenus jusqu’à la synagogue sans rencontrer la moindre difficulté. Les 270 000 Arabes de la Ville sainte, sur un total de 800 000 habitants, peuvent en effet circuler librement en Israël.
À Gaza, des tirs de joie ont éclaté et le Hamas a salué « un acte héroïque ». Mais, à Ramallah (Cisjordanie), le président palestinien Mahmoud Abbas a vivement condamné cet attentat « visant des civils, dans un lieu sanctifié ». Dans la foulée, il a aussi dénoncé « les attaques contre Al-Aqsa et les mosquées ».
Le secrétaire d’État américain, John Kerry, s’est indigné contre l’attaque. « Ce matin à Jérusalem, des Palestiniens ont attaqué des juifs qui priaient dans une synagogue. Des gens venus prier Dieu dans le sanctuaire d’une synagogue (…) ont été assassinés dans ce qui constitue un acte de pure terreur, d’une brutalité insensée », a fustigé le chef de la diplomatie américaine.
Invoquant l’intensification de la colonisation israélienne et les provocations de juifs radicaux à l’Esplanade des mosquées (troisième lieu saint de l’islam), appelé le Mont du Temple (de Salomon) par les juifs, les Palestiniens multiplient les manifestations et les attaques depuis l’été dernier (lire « Repères »).
« Il faut absolument préserver le statu quo à l’Esplanade pour éviter de transformer le conflit israélo-palestinien en conflit religieux », affirme Yoram Cohen, chef du Shin Beth (service de sécurité intérieure). Il ajoute: « Mahmoud Abbas n’encourage en aucune façon le terrorisme, mais ses propos sont déformés par une partie de son opinion. » Selon lui, les attentats de ces derniers mois sont le fait d’individus isolés et n’annoncent pas une troisième Intifada.
Le premier ministre Benyamin Netanyahou a cependant accusé l’Autorité palestinienne d’être responsable d’« incitations à la haine » et d’avoir répandu la rumeur que des juifs radicaux ont assassiné un chauffeur d’autobus arabe de la compagnie israélienne Egged retrouvé pendu lundi dans son véhicule, alors que l’autopsie a conclu au suicide.
Les partenaires radicaux de Benyamin Netanyahou appellent, quant à eux, à la création d’un « gouvernement sioniste d’union nationale », pour faire face à la guerre déclarée par les Palestiniens. Plusieurs élus du parti « Foyer juif » d’extrême droite veulent priver de leur nationalité israélienne les Palestiniens de Jérusalem-Est ou les Arabes israéliens mêlés à des attentats terroristes. Des vigiles vont désormais monter la garde devant les jardins d’enfants à Jérusalem, et des policiers vont patrouiller près des écoles. À titre dissuasif, le gouvernement préconise de détruire les maisons ayant abrité les auteurs d’attentats.
« Je vais lever dans les prochaines heures certaines restrictions sur le port d’armes », a affirmé le ministre de la sécurité intérieure Yitzhak Aharonovich. Selon lui, cette mesure va concerner les Israéliens détenteurs d’un port d’armes comme les officiers de l’armée, en dehors de leur service, ou les « gardiens d’école ou de jardins d’enfants » qui pourront rapporter leurs armes à la maison. La police a déployé 1 500 hommes supplémentaires à Jérusalem, où des dirigeables et des drones repèrent les fauteurs de troubles pour les photographier. Des centaines de suspects ont été appréhendés. Le maire, Nir Barkat, promet « la tolérance zéro pour le terrorisme ».
Voir enfin:
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