WHAT would Joe Biden and Kamala Harris mean for peace in the Middle East and Israel? Biden has promised to dismantle much of President Trump’s extraordinary legacy and return to the bad old Obama days. Harris, whose chief of staff has been described as a radical Israel hater, has already pledged to start refunding the Palestinian organisations that Trump defunded because of their links to terrorism. A must-read piece in the Australian Spectator a week or so ago by Dr David Adler details all this.
But to understand what this shift in US policy really means, we need to renew our acquaintance with the ideology – in the form of the two Palestinian Charters – that drive modern Palestinian nationalism.
The movement we know today is a fairly recent phenomenon dating from the mid-1960s. It grew out of Arab nationalism which originated in the mid-1920s with the rabid anti-Semitism of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini (latterly a Nazi collaborator) and led to the massacres of Hebron’s and Safed’s Jewish populations, both in 1929.
The ‘Palestinian’ cause developed in earnest only after Israel reclaimed sovereignty of Judea and Samaria – the West Bank – from the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan after the 1967 war. The Palestinian leadership under Arafat amended, expanded and created their ‘manifesto’, the Charter of 1968, from a 1964 document which made no mention of any claim on Jerusalem, supposedly at the heart of Palestinian nationalism. Perhaps this is not so surprising since Jerusalem is never mentioned in the Quran and is important to Islam only when another religion seemingly has control of it.
This 1968 Charter is still current, taught within the Palestinian education system funded by the UNWRA and various other UN and NGO organisations and a variety of Islamic ‘charities’.
A second charter was created for all Palestinians, in competition and running parallel with the original 1968 Charter, in September 1988. This is the Hamas Charter – The Charter of Allah and The Platform of the Islamic Resistance Movement Hamas. It forms part of the Hamas curriculum and is taught to the children living under the control of Hamas in Gaza.
There are numerous similarities between the two, and to most reasonable, independent-minded readers some of their content can only be considered morally indecent and shocking.
The 1968 Charter has 33 Articles, not one of which allows, recommends or encourages any peaceful resolution to achieve the Palestinian objective, which is of total domination of the geography and Zionist extermination. Numerous Articles demand commando and military action as the only means by which Palestinians will be permitted to complete their aims.
Articles 7 through to 11 are most inciteful.
Article 7: ‘It is a national duty to bring up individual Palestinians in an Arab revolutionary manner’;
Article 8: ‘ . . . working for the retrieval of Palestine only through armed struggle’;
Article 9: ‘Armed struggle is the only way to liberate Palestine’;
Article 10: ‘Commando action constitutes the nucleus of the Palestinian war. This requires its escalation, comprehensiveness and the mobilisation of all the Palestinian popular and educational efforts and involvement in the armed revolution’.
The other Articles sometimes swerve from the main theme of armed struggle in the attempt to cement Arab unity but there is a return to the theme in Article 15 which ‘aims for the elimination of Zionism’.
It is at this point that one despairs at the moral indecency of this ideology of hate – an ideology that cannot be negotiated with when the objective appears to be the entire extermination of the legal entity of the Jewish State of Israel and those (Arabs and Christians as well as Jews) residing within it. Nor does the Charter reveal how the Palestinians themselves are going to segregate Zionists from others in the event they achieve their objectives. And given the recent history of the ethnic cleansing of some one million Jews from Arab countries since 1948, the evidence is such that even Jewish non-Zionists would be at huge risk.
It is however Article 22 which is the jewel in the Palestinian crown and which has secured global support from the Left-wing so-called progressive intelligentsia – those who I refer to as the Dreyfus Mob for whom Jew-hating is conveniently subsumed in the notion of anti-Zionism. Zionism is a political movement supporting the rights of Jewish people to self-determination in their historical homeland.
But according to Article 22, Zionism is a movement associated with imperialism, antagonism . . . racist and fanatic . . . aggressive, expansionist . . . and fascist . . . etc, etc. These lies have morphed into facts in the minds of the Dreyfus Mob and antipathy to Zionism has become a convenient way to justify a latent anti-Semitism without admitting to it.
The theme of the remaining Articles is relentless: extermination of a people by military action with no attempt at peaceful resolution. It is frightening that such hateful content continues to be the basis for educating current and future generations.
If the First Charter was sickening, you may wish to turn your eyes away from the rants within the Hamas Charter of 1988. It demands the elimination of Israel and extermination of Jews in the opening two paragraphs of the introduction.
Articles 2 to 7 justify the Jew genocide by reference to Islamic religious teachings and confirm this again in Article 8 which demands land conquest under Sharia law.
Article 7 commands: ‘Muslims will fight and kill the Jews who will hide behind rocks and trees . . .’
It also, in Article 12, provides an alarming example of the influence over Palestinian behaviour and culture of extreme Islamist misogyny and slavery: ‘. . . a woman must fight the enemy without authorisation and a slave without his master’s permission . . .’
One wonders what the liberal thinkers within the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and Corbyn’s supporters think of that. Or indeed Kamala Harris and the supposedly gender equality-promoting Joe Biden.
Again, with its 37 Articles, there is not one which promotes or even allows for peace with Israel. Article 13 reiterates this: ‘. . . there is no solution to the problem except by Jihad’.
And Article 17 of the Hamas Charter will surely make even the most biased Palestinian supporters think twice unless they are fundamentally and unashamedly sympathetic to the Nazi ideology. Mimicking the 1930 Nazi rules, the Article calls for the wiping out of all Jewish charitable organisations and those who belong to, assist and contribute to charitable organisations.
Articles 22 and 28 reiterate the command to exterminate those charities alluded to above in addition to ‘news agencies, the press, broadcasters and publishers’. Oh, the irony – the Palestinians want to exterminate those organisations which have been supporting their cause over the last six decades!
Article 31 demands all other races and religions become subservient to Islam: ‘The members of other religions must desist from struggling against Islamic sovereignty . . .’
Each and every Article of both Palestinian Charters are themed towards racism, Islamic superiority, war and no compromise for any peaceful resolution. It is terrifying that the educated West can consider endorsing any Palestinian movement based on such a virulent ideology.
