One of the key documents of this fusion was the Hamas Covenant of 1988. It has been readily available in English on the internet since soon after 9/11 at the Yale Law School’s Avalon Project website. Reflecting its origins in the Islamist ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood, the covenant based its complete rejection of any Jewish state anywhere in what it calls “Palestine” on its reading of the Koran and commentaries.
Armed struggle—that is, war—was essential to destroy the Jewish state. Compromise with it was religious heresy. As was the case in Nazi propaganda aimed at the Middle East during World War II, the Hamas Covenant drew on Nazism’s antisemitic conspiracy theories as it blamed Jews and Zionists for the two world wars. Despite the fact that the Hamas Covenant has long been publicly available, scholars in the United States who regard themselves as leftists have bizarrely sought to present Hamas as perhaps an extreme element of an otherwise progressive global endeavor. Anyone who reads the text can immediately recognize the aftereffects of the Nazi-Islamist ideological fusion that emerged four decades before Hamas published its statement of beliefs.
