Richard Landes: Hamas as a Millennial Movement
This is post-colonial rhetoric at its most threadbare. The perspective he formulates in the least attractive way possible, has nothing to do with real racism since all the players involved embody not race but ideological and cultural phenomena. Calling it by the inflated term ‘racist’ impoverishes the historical debate and crams our vision into 75-year old struggle for Palestinian rights, not an 85-year old marriage of Nazi and Palestinian Muslim eliminationist antisemitism. If such accusations were carry weight (and apparently they do), it would forbid us from discussing the role of Hamas since 1988 in carrying the millennial aspiration of that hadith into an active apocalyptic phase, where the first order of business is to kill a Jew, and barring that, get a Jew to kill a Palestinian.Elliott Adrams: American Jewish Anti-Zionist Diasporism: A Critique
In what historical seminar studying movements such as these, say, of the Annales school of mentalités, would someone analyse a case where two such unusually dangerous movements appear two generations apart, and share such striking similarities, without discussing the many connections and parallels? Who would begin an historical reconstruction of the later movement in the three years after the defeat of their predecessors and allies in 1945, and begin with (their own failure to commit genocide in) 1948 when Israel ‘deprived Palestinians of their rights,’ rather than the late 1930s, when Jihadis and Nazis first joined forces? What historian of mentalités would discuss the rise of multiple, genocidal Jihadi cults in the Muslim world in the subsequent generations, without examining their relationship to the double genocidal failures of the 1940s? Not any seminar I or Omer attended back in the early 1970s, the years before Orientalism took over.
If ‘civilisation’ arises from the organisational treasuring of life, then is this conflict not a civilisational battle with a death cult, which even Muslims find alarming? And is that cult not showing alarming strength? There are historical cases when an active cataclysmic apocalyptic movement ‘took’ inside a given civilisation. And none have happy endings.
And just as it is appropriate to see the two world wars of the 20th century as one ‘thirty-year’s war’ with a brief respite, how much the more likely, in the perspective of an historian, is it to see this battle over the land twixt river and sea as the only, still active, battle front of World War II? Or, worse, the opening of the next round of a global struggle with totalitarian cults of hatred and death that is, apparently, far from over.
Back in the 1990s, when people began to warn about Caliphators (Jihadis, Islamists), about a religious war brewing between the agnostic West and the zealous Middle East, most of us who heard that these true believers were fighting to take over the world and create a global Caliphate, dismissed it as ludicrous fantasy, or, especially after 9-11, dangerous ‘Islamophobia.’ And the only way a millennial historian could respond to that incredulity was to point out that in millennial movements, wrong does not mean inconsequential. Look at the damage done by twelve years of the Tausendjährige Reich.
Now, a generation later the landscape looks more menacing. While we slept…
One of the key moments in the history of all movements that, as millennial analyst Henri Desroche put it, ‘take’ like a forest fire, is the moment they show their real face in public. In most cases, the public gaze repels them and their radical, impossible ideas, sometimes violently. But in the rare and famous cases where ‘going public’ sparks excitement and enthusiasm, the movement gains public authority and a path to taking and exploiting power.
7/10 was the day of revelation. Faced with the savagery of their brethren, the civil-society, human rights Palestinian community cheered. And they were joined by people who, in principle, supported them according to their progressive claims. What is the meaning of these demonstrations on our campuses and around the country. These celebrations of savage sadism, with their attendant cries of ‘revolution’ and accusations of ‘genocide,’ bode ill for the liberal societies in which they appear. They hail a death cult. Why on earth would progressives jump for joy?
Go to enough anti-Israel protests in the U.S., and you’ll inevitably see a few members of the stridently anti-Israel haredi group Neturei Karta, which has taken to mimicking the slogans of radical leftists and Islamists. Elliott Abrams observes that left-wing Jewish anti-Zionists share with these religious opponents of Israel the basic assumption that “a Jewish state cannot exist until the messianic age arrives because the one we have, built by men and women, is not pure enough.”Mob Education at the Ivies
This view exhibits what Abrams calls “moral blindness,” which he illustrates with an anecdote about the Hungarian-born Holocaust survivor and Nobel Prize-winning author Imre Kertesz, told by the Jewish activist Andres Spokoiny:
During a visit to Israel, a foreign journalist, aware of Kertész’s humanist and pacifist leanings, asked him, “How does it feel for you to see a Star of David on a tank?” “Much better than seeing it on my concentration camp uniform,” he answered.
For Kertesz, moralizing about the existence of a Jewish army made little sense when the alternative was the mass murder of Jews. But for today’s generation of American Jews, who share the liberal leanings of their parents and grandparents and face anti-Israel sentiment of unprecedented ferocity, Kertesz’s straightforward answer will seem anything but obvious. And they will have to make difficult choices, especially since, as Abrams writes, the principles of liberalism are themselves changing:
we have seen the many efforts to redefine them on American campuses since October 7. No doubt this was a joyous moment for many leftist Jews, as they watched tent encampments built, classes disrupted, and Israel defamed. But for other American Jews, not quite so far left, it was no doubt painful. Among Jewish students themselves, many had to choose between supporting the Jewish state and the Jewish people—or being ostracized by former friends, excluded from clubs and cliques they had happily joined, and even facing physical danger.
The American Zionist movement dates back to the end of the 19th century and the Zionist consensus dates back over 80 years. The anti-Zionist efforts now underway to shred it are the most energetic, the best financed, and the most dangerous American Jews have experienced. . . . Will younger American Jews see a model for how to live as a Jew and a moral human being in their behavior—or in the siren song of the left as it maneuvers to undermine the Jewish people and the Jewish state?
The developments at Princeton, Brown, and Harvard demonstrate that these institutions of higher learning have lost sight of why they exist in the first place—educational excellence.
Education—especially an Ivy League education—involves acquiring values and priorities that will carry over beyond the four years within the walls of any university. These values are meant to shape young students, who enter college in their late teen years and emerge as adults.
Being an adult means internalizing that actions have consequences and that accountability is vital for the functioning of civil society. On campuses across the country, students are taking away a very different message—a message of entitlement. You can interfere with the learning of your fellow students, trespass on private property, and blatantly disobey direct orders without fear of serious repercussions. In fact, if you double down on the path of obstinacy, intimidation, and harassment, the world will accede to your demands.
What I have found most troubling these last seven months is that this ethos, which represents an inversion of the values an American university ought to impart to its students, has been mainstreamed.
This is the same message that the world has long sent the Palestinians and that our own government has broadcast since Oct. 7. Hamas brutally murdered, raped, mutilated, and burned alive innocent Israeli civilians. In return, they received hundreds of millions in aid, a U.N. General Assembly resolution urging the Security Council to grant Palestine member status, and the U.S. prioritizing the creation of a Palestinian state. Today’s college students are learning the lesson Hamas has internalized: Violence brings rewards.
