Berlin 1941 – Gaza 2025: The Ideology of Hatred Connecting the Mufti to Hamas

The contemporary debate over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict demands an understanding of its historical roots. A deep and frequently silenced root is the figure of Haj Amin al-Husseini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem during the British Mandate and the ideological father of a foundational strand of modern Palestinian nationalism.

Before the State of Israel existed, al-Husseini promoted a systematic hatred of Jews and fueled waves of violence throughout the 1920s and 1930s. His rhetoric exceeds the political: it is religious, viscerally anti-Jewish, and driven by a theological vision. His ambition demanded the annihilation of the nascent Zionist project, which was beginning to organize in Europe and take shape with the first Jewish migrations to Palestine.

The Mufti in Berlin and the Nazi Alliance

Al-Husseini cast his lot with the Nazi camp during the Second World War. Having fled Iraq after the failed pro-Nazi coup of Rashid Ali al-Gaylani in 1941, he settled in Berlin as a guest of the Third Reich and remained there until the end of the war. There he met Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, and other Nazi leaders, openly backed the “Final Solution,” and broadcast antisemitic propaganda in Arabic over German radio, urging Muslim peoples to kill Jews wherever they found them. He also helped recruit Bosnian Muslims into the SS, notably in the Handschar Division.

An Ideological Inheritance Never Deactivated

The Nazi character of al-Husseini’s ideology did not die with him.

Ahmed Shukeiri, the first chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), proclaimed in 1967 that “the only destiny for the Jews in Palestine is the sea.”

For Yasser Arafat, a nephew of the Grand Mufti according to various sources, al-Husseini’s influence dictated his beginnings. According to those records, “during the first Arab-Israeli war, between 1948 and 1949, Arafat served in the Futuwah (the Youth Vanguard), a brigade of Palestinian fighters organized by Husseini as the armed wing of his party.”

Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) wrote a doctoral thesis in Moscow in the 1980s that concluded the Holocaust had been a joint project of the Nazis and the Zionist movement.

That vision persists, amplified, in Hamas. Its own documents state: “The Prophet, peace be upon him, said: The Day of Judgement will not come until the Muslims fight the Jews and the Muslims kill them, until the Jew hides behind a stone or a tree and the stone or the tree says: Muslim, servant of God, here is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.” The Islamic Resistance Movement aspires to fulfill this promise, however long it may take.

The Hamas Model: Ideological Continuity and Theological War

Hamas, founded in 1987, updates the ideology of hatred that al-Husseini articulated decades earlier. Its 1988 Founding Charter breathes religious and political antisemitism, and raises the conflict with Israel from territorial dispute to holy war between Islam and Judaism. The text denies the Jewish state’s right to exist and relies on classic conspiracy theories of European origin to justify its struggle.

Foremost among those references is the inclusion of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a libel manufactured by the Tsarist police at the start of the twentieth century that describes a supposed Jewish plan for world domination. Long unmasked as a forgery, its presence in Hamas’s founding ideology consolidates modern antisemitism as the doctrinal foundation of its political and military project.

Like al-Husseini, Hamas seeks the total destruction of the Jewish state. The struggle obeys an inflexible religious cause, alien to the 1967 borders or the viability of a state. Its spokesmen constantly reiterate that “all of Palestine, from the river to the sea”, must be “liberated.”

Hamas inherits the Mufti’s pedagogy: it indoctrinates with messages of hatred, glorifies martyrdom, and turns the murder of Jewish civilians into a gesture of honor. Children’s programs, educational books, cartoons, and school festivals show children with rifles longing to “become martyrs like their older brothers.” Hamas also uses the children of Gaza as instruments of war and indoctrination. Human rights groups documented, as far back as 2008, the use of minors as labor in Gaza’s tunnel economy, with the de facto authority doing nothing to stop it.

The Conflict Distorts Perceptions

The conflict distorts perceptions within Israeli society. Nurit Peled-Elhanan, of the Hebrew University, has noted that certain official educational approaches present the Palestinian, in sweeping terms, as an existential threat. That representation reinforces stereotypes, feeds a logic of suspicion, and contributes to reciprocal dehumanisation. It replaces understanding with reflex. Over the long term, that narrative erodes the prospects for coexistence grounded in mutual recognition.

War as an Eternal Religious Mandate

Hamas refuses to conceive of the conflict as a territorial dispute. In its doctrine, the war against Israel is sacred, existential, and perpetual. Its founding charter states: “there is no solution to the Palestinian question except through jihad.” The declaration is a theological conception, alien to metaphor or tactics.

Every negotiation or truce operates as a strategic pause. Hamas has used the Islamic concept of hudna (a temporary truce) to rearm, maintaining the destruction of Israel as an unchanging objective. Its phased strategy, marhalia, envisages gradual advances, never genuine concessions. Dialogue is part of the war plan.

The 2017 Document: Apparent Moderation

In 2017, Hamas presented a political document that softened the most radical elements of its original charter. It declared its struggle against the “Zionist project” and feigned acceptance of a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders as a temporary solution of national consensus.

That document kept the 1988 Founding Charter in force; its leaders never abandoned the rhetoric of extermination. The pogrom of 7 October 2023 revealed the 2017 document as temporary cover: a tactic to win international legitimacy while the underlying project remained intact.

The Muslim Brotherhood: The Ideological Root of Hamas

Hamas is rooted in its parent organization: the Muslim Brotherhood (al-Ikhwān al-Muslimūn), founded in Egypt in 1928 by Hasan al-Banna. That Islamist movement pioneered a political vision of Islam, dictating religious rule over the whole of life and consecrating jihad as a permanent duty against the enemies of Islam. Al-Banna held that “the Jews are the agents of change and Westernization, and are responsible for the decline of the West, as well as of Islam.”

Hamas defines itself explicitly as “one of the branches of the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine.” The organizational affiliation consecrates a doctrinal inheritance. Just as al-Banna and his disciple Sayyid Qutb conceived of Judaism as a global conspiracy against Islam, Hamas adopts that core: the demonisation of the Jew, history as religious confrontation, and martyrdom as redemption.

Long before Hamas was founded, the Muslim Brotherhood already claimed al-Husseini as an Islamic hero and a forerunner of the struggle against Zionism. His alliance with Hitler was a strategic convergence. That is the ideological genealogy Hamas embraces, updating it with missiles, international networks of sympathisers, and human shields.

The Propaganda Machine: Narrative, Manipulation, and Victims

As part of its ideological war, Hamas has perfected a propaganda apparatus that combines social media, the language of human rights, and media allies such as Al Jazeera to spread its narrative worldwide. This occurred even during the massacre of 7 October 2023. That machinery finds an echo in part of the Western press: statements from Gaza’s Health Ministry and aligned reports from UN agencies become unquestioned primary sources. The case of the Al-Ahli hospital, whose initial accusation of an Israeli bombing collapsed before the evidence, illustrates a pattern: inflated figures, staged scenes, and civilian victims turned into a symbolic weapon. The tragedy is instrumentalized to turn it into a political slogan: to impose the accusation of “genocide” as irrefutable truth while Hamas is absolved of all responsibility.

Hamas has systematically turned humanitarian aid into a weapon. It confiscates supplies, resells them, taxes them, or diverts them. It uses the money and the aid to recruit young men and finance its war machine. It sabotages the distribution points beyond its control, spreads disinformation to render them inaccessible, and threatens civilians to stop them receiving food handed out without its approval.

The Art of Playing Victim: War Propaganda

Hamas has perfected the art of turning its own brutality into a weapon of war against Israel. It places rocket launchers in hospitals, schools, and densely populated neighborhoods, uses civilians as shields, and does not evacuate children from combat zones. It builds no shelters to protect the population; it builds tunnels to hide its leaders. The death of those children activates the cameras to blame Israel and feed the victim narrative.

To provoke a military response, expose civilians, and exploit their suffering as proof of genocide constitutes the core of its communication strategy. Meanwhile, in international forums, truth blurs between headlines and carefully selected photographs.

Antisemitism as a Functional Constant

The ideological continuity from al-Husseini to Hamas operates as an engine of internal cohesion against division and as a justification for sustained violence, dressed in religious and political language. Beyond tactical or territorial differences, hatred of the Jew operates as the great meeting point. In Antiquity the Jews were harassed for their monotheism; in the Middle Ages, as “deicides”; in modern Europe, as outcasts or as the influential, bankers or revolutionaries, poor or rich, depending on the need. Today the pattern is reactivated under anticolonial discourse. The Jews are branded oppressors, genocidal killers, child-killers. The discourse changes; the substance persists: the Jew portrayed as the existential enemy licenses demonisation.

That narrative serves a strategic function: to draw sympathy in sectors of the West, particularly where antisemitism has mutated in form and old narratives present the Jews, now embodied in Israel, as the latest expression of the imperial oppressor. So powerful is that construction that it becomes a passionate conviction: an act of faith, an almost religious absolutism that operates without any real awareness.

The Price of Pragmatism: Israel’s Mistakes

Over the decades, several Israeli governments fell into short-sighted pragmatism: they tolerated and even indirectly favored the rise of Hamas as a counterweight to more immediate threats, such as the PLO or the Palestinian Authority. The price has been enormous. Today Hamas exceeds the military threat: it is an ideological project with deep roots, a theocratic actor that combines religious doctrine with totalitarian strategy. The mistake was to ignore its own terms: the organization obeys a rigid, unreformable worldview, alien to political evolution.

Hamas Instrumentalises Pain; Israel Must Keep Victory from Costing its Soul

The struggle against Hamas exceeds tunnels and borders: it embraces ideas, history, morality.

Israel faces a strategic dilemma: to dismantle Hamas, entrenched in civilian infrastructure, without becoming trapped in the genocide narrative. For Hamas, civilian suffering is a tactical resource: it provokes it, exploits it, instrumentalizes it.

Added to this are Israel’s internal political conflicts, the lack of national unity, and the unacceptable statements of individuals who weaken the legitimacy of an entire country. Such is the case of the current finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, who stated: “Nobody will let us cause two million civilians to die of hunger even though it might be justified and moral until our hostages are returned.”

Israel faces an almost infinite challenge: to act in legitimate self-defense and rescue its hostages without losing sight of the principles that sustain its democracy. In a conflict dominated by international perceptions, preserving moral integrity constitutes the anchor. To yield to the logic of dehumanisation undermines even a legitimate cause.

The defeat of Hamas does not demand the surrender of the values worth protecting. The traps lie in wait at every step: losing the moral compass exacts a price as high as losing the war.

The Truth Speaks Louder

Hamas acts as a regional theocratic project, with deep ideological roots, a messianic vision of political Islam, and an explicit aim: the disappearance of the Jewish state. Its war pursues a theological imperative, alien to justice or to self-determination. It adjusts its language to its audience: moderate towards the West, exterminationist towards its own circles.

Reality leaves no room for naïve interpretations: the pogrom of 7 October, the systematic education for hatred, the cult of martyrdom, the glorification of the murder of civilians. Hamas has perfected the art of lying, of manipulating images, of presenting itself as a victim while acting as the executioner.

Propaganda does not annul the fact: it administers its distortion. The military collision is subordinate to a semantic war. On this field, intellectual surrender yields the same effect as armed defeat.

Moral relativism is the final alibi of terror. Lucidity demands the recovery of measure: not all pain is equivalent, not every cause is just, not every victimhood is innocent.