Archives for December 2023

Paul Dragos Aligica and Simona Preda: The Institutionalization of Indoctrination: An Exploratory Investigation Based on the Romanian Case Study.  Lanham: Lexington Books, 2022.

 

Thanks to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the grimmest of Soviet-bloc ruling institutions, the Gulag, stands revealed as both symbol and instrument of modern tyrannies. The purposes of such regimes are also well known, having been elaborated by Marxist-Leninist ideologues for many decades. But the institutions the regimes designed to purvey that ideology in an attempt to build an inescapable framework of thought and feeling in their subjects, ‘correct’ habits of mind and heart, remain much more poorly understood. In this “exploratory study,” University of Bucharest sociologists Paul Dragos Aligica and Simona Preda have begun the task of better understanding these institutions of indoctrination, and their work has noteworthy implications for the understanding of institutional ‘capture’ efforts by Leftists in the United States and Europe.

They ask: “How should we conceptualize and theorize about the social and political instrumentation of ideologies in regimes or systems that assume that historical missions of salvation or radical transformations are the stringent organizing and legitimization principles of their very existence?” Ideologists, they answer, “operate by penetrating and planting their units within other existing organizations,” enabling them to monitor and eventually to censor and manage such organizations “from the inside.” “Thus, the entire institutional configuration of the political and social system is pervaded and altered” by “political commissars.” “Universities were among the first targets of any Communist, collectivist regime,” but in the Communist regimes, not only schools but factories, hospitals, and “almost all organizations” saw “a special ideological office or agent, by now defined as ‘ideological worker,'” a person distinct from the political police and informers working for the police. While all regimes seek to transmit their would-be ruling principles to citizens or subjects, “there are some systems” in which this task “grows and spreads to become the defining feature of the system” in a deliberate attempt to establish absolute rule over the horizon of human aspiration.

The authors choose Communist Romania as their ‘case study,’ since the regime there provided such a clear and striking example of the phenomenon in question. But they begin with observations about Communist “ideocracy,” generally. “Ideocracy” was coined by the Swiss economist Peter Bernholz, who defined it as a regime “in which the ideological factor is institutionalized as a supreme principle of government.” (1) An ideology is “a combination of ideas, images, and doctrines claiming absolute truth and historical validity.” It might be added that the claim of historical validity is crucial, inasmuch it brings what might otherwise be a simple assertion of universal principles into play as determinative of practice, past, present, and future. It is one thing to say that all human beings have unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and that these rights should guide political practice, to the extent possible; it is quite another to say that all of human history is somehow determined by those principles and further to claim that rulers shall assume the task of advancing that history in the role of its ‘vanguard.’ This is why ideocratic regimes usually propound “a message promising a better life in the future” and also why they share “the objective to convert all people to the ‘true creed,'” and finally why “force may be needed in order to achieve these goals.” That way leads to ‘historicist’ tyranny or ‘totalitarianism,’ which awaits only “the power of the state” to be “mobilized in support of the ideology in question.” Bernholz distinguishes mere ideocracies—Saudi Arabia, Iran, even the Massachusetts Puritans—from totalitarian regimes—the Soviet Union, Communist China, Nazi Germany, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, North Korea, the Eastern European states during the Cold War, Cuba, and the (thankfully) short-lived regime of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). To this, Aligica and Preda add that all such regimes hold up a model of the ideal human being as one which can be realized in practice by the population generally. Again, all regimes have their heroes; not all regimes expect and demand that their subjects be reshaped into that heroic mold. 

This implies that ideocratic and especially totalitarian regimes share “certain broad beliefs about human nature.” Unlike, for example, Publius writing in The Federalist or indeed the American Puritans, such regimes regard human nature as malleable by means of humanly designed institutions. Publius esteems institutions designed to take human nature as it is and not to transform it but to channel such natural and persistent human characteristics as selfishness, acquisitiveness, and even rapacity into good behavior (rather in spite of ourselves); the Puritans expected the “New Man” to appear only with divine intervention at the End of Days. But “in the end, all plans for radical social change (i.e., Communist, Socialist, totalitarian) move very fast from ideas about social order and institutions (institutional design) to concentrate almost instinctively and obsessively on the problem of indoctrination, mindsets, and the creation of a ‘New Man'” by means of institutionalized indoctrination. Indoctrination is “pivotal to the social engineering of the process of social change and the logic of the government of the system,” which aims to “induce changes of human nature” itself. V.I. Lenin, for example, demanded what he called the “most rigorous control through society and the state” not only to establish and consolidate the new, Communist regime but, in the authors’ words, “to socially engineer and maintain in the citizens’ mindsets, perceptions, and values those adjustments that are deemed necessary for the creation of the ‘new man’—the “new socialist human being”—”and, by implication, the ‘new system.'” 

In order to achieve this goal, ideocrats often found the modern-tyrannical or totalitarian regime. The authors take their definition of totalitarianism from Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski, who define totalitarianism as comprehensive “control of the everyday life” of the population ruled by the regime, especially control of “their thoughts and attitudes as well as their activities.” (2) In practice, this entails not only an ideology but “a single Party typically led by one man, a terroristic police, a communication monopoly, a weapons monopoly, and a centrally directed economy.” All of these characteristics find support in modern technology. Since non-totalitarian regimes may see one or a couple of these features (economic centralization, for example), Aligica and Preda remark that totalitarianism can be imposed all at once or as “a creeping social phenomenon”; “a social or political system may move in a totalitarian direction in a sequence of stages, starting from different sectors of the society in small and partial steps and extending to the level of taking over the entire system.” Friedrich and Brzezinski also take Tocqueville’s point: that a new form of despotism can arise out of “modern democracy,” by which Tocqueville means the civil-social equality that had replaced the old ‘aristocratic’ or oligarchic civil societies. Without any firm social hierarchy embedded in civil society itself, a centralized and despotic regime might be constituted as readily as a federal and republican one. Under such a tyranny, “the entire vocabulary of democracy is taken over and its semantics are twisted” with the deployment of “a rhetoric based on formulaic utterances and conceptual dichotomies” seen in such phrases as “enemies of the cause.”  

With regard to the Communist tyrannies, the Aligica and Preda identify four “logics” at work: Marxism, the manipulation of the ruling doctrine or ‘Party line,’ the careful management of incentives, and the equally careful management of steps toward the construction of the New Socialist Man. Marxism holds that the plasticity of human nature makes the forming of this new human being possible and that both indoctrination and “protection” from heterodox ideas number among the means for doing so. As an example of this, they cite the rather sinister formulation of Soviet ideologist A. S. Makarenko in a 1949 article published in Soviet Studies: the New Socialist Man “must be happy.” (3) Following from this Marxist logic, and in particular from the Marxist emphasis on the ‘dialectical’ twists and turns of ‘history,’ frequent changes in the slogans and announced policies of the regime, the latest often contradicting the one immediately prior, yields a sense of insecurity in the population that induces more ready compliance to the rulers’ edicts. More, the malleability of the Party line is intended to knead the supposedly formless dough of human nature by disorienting the minds of the subjects, giving them few if any fixed convictions—what sociologists call ‘anomie.’ Thus ‘totalitarianism’ means not only total control over the lives and beliefs of the people but “the ‘total’ destruction of the human personality” by “the insertion of a structural uncertainty and insecurity in the system, under an overarching arbitrary power.” Thus, “the entire system operates in undermining any sources of initiative outside the range approved by the Communist leaders at multiple levels.” Like human nature, “doctrine is malleable,” and doctrine is malleable “because its interpretation is malleable.” The two claims are connected, since “a certain alertness to these shifts becomes second nature.” Not only “subservience to leadership” but “a cultivated opportunism and duplicity” prevail. 

The third “logic” of Communist Party tyrannies consisted of a regime-specific version of ‘public choice theory,’ which attempts to show that not only private (and especially economic) choices but also public choices are largely determined by the self-interest of the person or persons making them. Under tyranny, ordinary incentives (material and social rewards such as income, safety, and honor) combine with pervasive coercion and preference manipulation. Not only is “some form or another of violence and conflict…an unyielding ever-presence in those systems” for the ruling class and the ruled alike, but “members of the elite have to be co-opted and kept in a closed and monitored condition.”  This is how “regimes that are authoritarian or even totalitarian may survive using relatively limited coercion and violence,” although it must be said that in practice they have not hesitated to test and surpass those limits.

Finally, Communist strategy, precisely as a form of historicism, recommends that its practitioners proceed in phases, “each phase having its own parameters, constraints, objectives, and dynamics.” The first phase, when the Party is out of power, consists of “a logic and strategy of subversion, generating an organizational structure aligned with the objective of overthrowing a social order from the inside”; once the Party has taken power, the next phase consists of “building and defending” the new regime. In both phases, organizing is the key to Communist success; “effective organization was one of the key strengths of Communist parties and movements in comparison to their competitors and adversaries”; Communist leaders “place[d] their political practice at the forefront of the organizational revolution taking place in the twentieth century.” That is, when Communists said that dialectical practice included taking over the institutions of ‘bourgeois capitalism’ they meant adapting the managerial techniques of corporations to ‘state socialist’ purposes. Instead of manufacturing and selling cars and bars of soap, however, Lenin’s professional revolutionaries, the “vanguard of the proletariat,” were “instruments for an institutional structure targeting the entire polity and society.” They were ‘manufacturing’ the New Man, in part by the means a comprehensive form of advertising, namely, propaganda. Marxism was the tool of the propagandist-manufacturer, who “must go behind surfaces to demonstrate to the masses what the true realities are and how to interpret them once they are demystified,” that is, reduced to the terms of ‘the dialectic,’ socioeconomic class struggle. 

In designing their (pseudo-)science of social engineering, Communists followed a classification system introduced by Georgi Plekhanov, one of the earliest Russian Marxists (albeit a social democrat and sharp critic of Lenin and the Bolsheviks). Plekhanov distinguished between propagandists and agitators. Propagandists “inculcate many ideas to a single person or to a small number of people,” functioning more or less as writers or teachers. Agitators inculcate “a single idea or a small number of ideas” to “a whole class of people,” functioning more or less as orators. But propagandists and agitators will never fully succeed if the persons propagandized and agitated are not then organized, “molded in ways congruous with the Communist designs.” Lenin understood that to do this, “the entire fabric of the social system of the country needs to be penetrated,” not only to shape opinions but to “see and understand the internal springs of the state mechanism,” the better to weaken and coopt it. In so doing, Communist operative should not restrict themselves to speech alone. There is the propaganda of words, but there is also the “propaganda of deeds”: Party operatives “need to manufacture concrete acts as examples to support [the Party’s] claims.” If, for example, propaganda cites the ‘brutality’ of the ‘capitalist police,’ it is surely useful to provoke the police into committing acts that can be presented as specimens of such brutality.

Having “construct[ed] an unprecedented system of propaganda and agitation penetrating state institutions and targeting the proletariat, the peasantry and the army,” Communists could adapt, amplify, and intensify it, once their regime was in place, sending its “political commissars” or “ideological workers” into all institutions from villages to cities, factories and professional associations and, above all, into the educational system, “the core of this enterprise.” “The education system becomes a cradle of propagandists and activists who start to operate in official capacities” in all the other civil-social organizations, now answerable to the socialist state.

Romania was a case in point. As elsewhere within the Soviet empire, Romanian Communists combined Marxist-Leninist internationalism with nationalist themes, the latter to distract Romanians from the fact that they were subordinates within that empire by denouncing the ‘imperialism’ of the United States and its West European allies. This task was helped along by a “conspiracy mindset” and a “blatant Machiavellian and Byzantine spirit.” “There was no room for individualism in this new type of society.” As explained satirically by the novelist and sociologist Alexander Zinoviev in his 1982 book, Homo Sovieticus, all the ‘I’s’ must be unified “into one huge ‘We.'” [4] The Romanian Communist Party, initially consisting of only about a thousand members, “rapidly grew to become a massive party,” ruling a nation of twenty million people while itself being ruled from Stalin’s Moscow. “Stalinization was a radical program: it aimed to annihilate civil society and to control the intellectual life and culture” by means of repression (political police, regular police, and the army) along with a program of indoctrination undertaken by “a massive propaganda apparatus, which maintained constant sociopsychological pressure on the citizens” or, more precisely, subjects.

The Romanian Communists accomplished their revolution in stages, first taking control of the executive branch of the government in March 1945, then the legislature by the means of “rigged elections” a few months later, then forcing the king into exile, “finally proclaiming the Romanian People’s Republic” at the end of 1947. Rival political parties were made to disband. The following year, the Agitation and Propaganda Department (yes, they actually called it that) was instituted within the Central Committee of the Romanian Workers’ Party, “from the very beginning” designed to be “one of the key institutions of the Communist architecture of power”—what Aristotle calls the politeia or ruling offices of a regime. Since “the problem of legitimacy was central” to the founding and perpetuation of the new regime, the Department set about “creat[ing] the New Man and implement[ing] the materialist-dialectical ideology” by “controlling and policing the Romanian cultural scene, recruiting cadres, and deploying them under its direction to implement political ideological lines that reflected the tactical objectives of the party-state.” It was a “cultural revolution” two decades before Mao invented the term. “This structure of the Party apparatus would remain essentially unchanged until the fall of the Communist regime in December 1989.” The main refinement came in 1965, when “the Party believed that society had reached a certain level of understanding…and could do without” the agitators, establishing “lecturers” as “the new elite propaganda workers.” This was during the rule of Communist Party boss Nicolae Ceausescu, who wanted propaganda to focus more narrowly upon the valorization of himself, a “cult of personality” following one of the regime’s brief periods of liberalization, or at least quasi-independence from Moscow. Nationalism came more into the foreground, ‘internationalism’ (the euphemism for strict subordination to the Soviet Union) into the background. The problem with promoting nationalism and Ceausescu at the same time was that the ‘I’ of the ruler could never quite be squared with the ‘We’ of the Romanians, despite the propagandist-lecturers’ best efforts. “The 1989 developments leading to the collapse of the regime demonstrated how large the gap was between the official propaganda and reality.” Nationalism comported well with independence from the Soviets, less well with continued allegiance to the head of a Communist Party that everyone knew to have been directed from Moscow.

Not that the regime’s core source of legitimacy, Marxism-Leninism, was abandoned. “The requirement was that each lecture be clear and concise, shedding light on the core ideas of a text and giving a systematic exposition to Marxism-Leninism as a science of societal development, a science of the oppressed and exploited masses, a science of the coming victory of Socialism in all countries, as well as a science of constructing Communist society.” Unfortunately for the regime, Marxism-Leninism proved no better in explaining Romanian reality than nationalism or the much-proclaimed wisdom of Mr. Ceausescu. All this, despite requirements of liveliness and sincerity in the lecturer, his “tactfulness and solicitude,” his avoidance of contradicting known facts, his mastery in “making appeals to human emotions,” his “transparent and accessible language,” his ability to relate matters to “the problems of regular folk,” his dramatic “unmasking” of “international imperialism and class enemies within the country,” his timely use of current events—each aimed at what Machiavelli had long ago called “the effectual truth,” that is, the desired results in the audience.

While the regime lasted, “the propagandist’s duty was to execute the orders received from the political center through the ideological-political chain of the Party.” “The physical presence of the propagandist was thought of as the symbolic presence of power,” especially since he not only laid down the current Party line but conveyed “information from the field” back up the chain to the Party hierarchy. This “informational double flow” served as a ruling instrument “inherent to the systemic effort of the regime to achieve total control” and to “improve its functioning and stability, based on endogenous feedback.” 

Propagandists and agitators received training beyond that on offer in the public education system. “Party Education” paralleled state education in Romania as well as in the other Soviet bloc countries. In the words of General Secretary Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej in a speech before the Romanian Workers’ Party Congress of February 1948, “we should grant the appropriate attention to Party education, in order to elevate cadres who are at once honest and vetted, with a solid ideological training.” Nearly three decades later, the rector of the inspirationally-named Gheorghiu-Dej Academy elaborated: “Any leadership cadre, no matter what specialized domains he may be active in, is primarily a revolutionary militant, a political man tirelessly engaged in the execution of RCP internal and international policy, and will prove himself to be boundlessly devoted to the Party to our socialist nation, as well as applying in his life the principles of socialist ethics and socialist fairness, of socialist humanism.” The numbers of such militants increased as the decades wore on, perhaps in an attempt to shore up that widening gap between the Party line and the inglorious social and economic realities faced by Romanians. 

Propaganda campaigns followed a set formula. First, the Department defined the group or group to be targeted for the message (“for instance, preschoolers, high school and university students”); then determining the most effective “psychological approach” for target audience; preparing media for each group (“written materials, meetings, public manifestations, and mobilizations”); and, finally, supervising the campaign. Propagandists understood that each group consisted of subgroups, and “active minority” of about ten percent and the remaining “passive majority.” Activists were carefully evaluated for possible promotion within the Party, in which “the development of a critical and self-critical spirit” would serve as a model for the school children. Despite all of this, reality stubbornly resisted “official rhetoric,” inasmuch as “the very core of the ideological myths and wishful thinking around which the Communist regime had been built” consisted of, well, ideological myths and wishful thinking. Tested, Marxist ‘scientific socialism’ proved unscientific and anti-social.

The authors pay particular attention to the universities, which “were at the forefront of this process” of institutionalization. From 1948 on, “propagandist professors were assigned to all area of higher education,” with mandatory courses in “scientific materialism” in every field and during every semester. For example, the Mihai Eminescu School of Literature, named after Romania’s national poet, was founded in order to “train the new generations of prose writers, disconnecting them from the past and national history tradition”—a nationalism separated from all previous generations of the nation, including Mihai Eminescu, who survived in name only, as a sort of vague invocation of patriotic sentiment. Meanwhile, over at the University of Bucharest, students were required to write autobiographies fact-checked and otherwise vetted by supervisory “ideological workers” in the school’s administration. Any “deviation to the Right,” “real or imaginary,” could then be corrected. Peer pressure was added by the Union of Working Youth, whose members were on “a fast track to the higher levels of the social ladder,” with “opportunities for comfortable job in the administration, education, or the army.” The Union became “a genuine lever for control and surveillance of young persons, its alumni including four future Communist Party heads, including Ceausescu—not one a slouch when it came to controlling and surveilling. 

In keeping with the spirit of self-criticism, or at least criticism of their subordinates, Party elites never judged these attempts at institutionalizing Marxist-Leninist ideologies to have been adequate. “The ‘New Man’ did not seem to be able to emerge and function autonomously and required an ongoing effort of the apparatus.” Rather than criticizing the ideology itself, the regime’s raison d’être, they inclined to assume that there must be something wrong with the means in which the ideology was being delivered. And indeed there were several things wrong. Teacher competence was dubious. The crisis of 1956, when Hungarians rebelled and had to be disciplined with Soviet tanks, and the crisis of 1968, when students imitated the protest movements ongoing in the United States and Western Europe, rattled Party leaders. A 1968 Party report admitted that “discrepancies continue to exist between the demands of our developing socialist society and the activity of the Marxist-Leninist teaching staff, between the scientific, ideological and educational resources available to these chairs and their actual contribution to solving social, economic and political problems, as well as to the intellectual life of institutes and universities on the national ideological front.” Horror of horrors, “leftover religious ideas” were still discernible. Universities displayed a tendency, as the authors put it, “to foster views that clashed with scientific materialism” more than any other set of educational institution in the country. Eventually, no less a figure than “Nicolae Ceausescu himself” would chair the Protocol of the Central Committee of the Romanian Communist Party’s Secretariat, which he had charged with the task of improving such things. “Measures will be taken,” the eventual report solemnly intoned, “necessary steps” to reform education, particularly in the social sciences. “Yet, despite all these efforts, things never seemed to get aligned to the was intended and desired by the authorities and the indoctrination apparatus.” Passive resistance often prevailed, as when teachers assigned with political education at the Institute of Art History lingered on the ancient Greeks and never quite got to Marx’s place on the syllabus.

In sum, the “process of ongoing institutional change and never-ending tribulations” was “never fully successful, even by the self-congratulatory standards used by the agents and leaders of the Communist Party” in Romania. The triumphant march of Socialism toward a regime of Communism populated by New Men never made it to its appointed destination. “How difficult it is to implement and maintain a program of indoctrination geared toward social change, even when one controls the entire apparatus of the modern state and ruthlessly runs it on totalitarian principle,” the authors drily remark. Although the RCP’s strategy was more sophisticated than an attempt merely “to indoctrinate the masses or to take control of the government in the traditional revolutionary style” but aimed also to control civil-social groups in order to transform them into “influence bases in society”—mirroring the emphasis on intraparty organization during the pre-revolutionary period—it transpired that individuals “do not act purely based on the scripts and expectations of their formal roles.” In their recalcitrance, they cause “conflicts, dilemmas, and trade-offs” which throw sand into the machine constructed by the ‘social engineers.’ Ruling institutions take on “a life of their own,” despite the intentions and the actions of their founders and overseers. This, despite the fact that the regime established “a special group of people that had their social identities and their careers tied to their places and roles in the system,” and which “defined their social life and structured their relationships with the rest of the society.” To borrow a familiar phrase from the Leninist lexicon, what is to be done?

Why the failure? “The problem was that the interactions generated” among the rulers, their subordinates, and the many groups within Romanian society “incentives, identities, and aspirations that clashed profoundly with the motivation and mission of the organizational units that ideological workers were part of.” A modern state is simple too big and complex for the comprehensive rule the RCP attempted to exert. Longstanding social structures formed a pre-existing system “more resilient than the Marxist ideology was expecting and predicting it to be,” possibly at least in part because human nature is more resilient than Marxism takes it to be. And the failure of the regime to deliver on its promises of increased prosperity made the sacrifices it exacted (the “radical censorship of the late 1980s” being only one example) increasingly unpalatable to ordinary Romanians, detaching even those who had been indoctrinated by the regime from the regime. “People do not see themselves as mere instruments of organizational structures, even if those organizations may be defined in relationship with missions that claim to have historical magnitudes, such as to create a ‘new society’ or a ‘New Man.'” This put the propagandists in an exceedingly awkward position between the Party bosses and the people, neither satisfied with them. The bosses subjected them to regular regulation and assessment while the people regarded them as professional liars in the service of tyranny, a regime of “control, surveillance, suspicion, double talk, and manipulation.” That is, “the need for monitoring, control, and top-down authoritarian management” in such a regime “comes to clash with and undermine the very organization and functioning of the propaganda and indoctrination institutions.”

A “striking question” remains: “Whether the presence of any of the traits associated with ideocracy in a liberal democratic (or simply nonauthoritarian) system denotes the existence of a potential trend toward totalitarianism.” On that, time will tell.

 

 

Notes

1. Peter Bernholz: Totalitarianism, Terrorism, and Supreme Values. New York: Springer International Publishing, 2017.
2. Carl J. Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski: Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956.
3. Such an impulse is not confined to Communist regimes in particular, or even tyrannies generally. The public elementary school attended by your reviewer, not so many years after Makarenko’s article was published, had students sing the ‘school song,’ which contained the lines, “We are students of Forrestdale School, and we all like it very well. / We are to be happy, in our work and play.” That “are to be” phrase always struck him as a bit ominous, even at the age of six.
4. The term Homo Sovieticus was itself invented as an ironic counterpart to “the New Soviet Man,” and the impish Zinoviev sometimes abbreviated it into a slang term meaning, simply, “Homo.”

 

How the Stars at Churchill’s Birth Formed the Constellation of His Life.

Speech at the Birthday Dinner for Sir Winston S. Churchill, The Right Honourable Winston Spencer Churchill Society of Alaska, Anchorage, Alaska, November 30, 2023.

 

The stars I’m talking about tonight have nothing to do with the ones in the sky—with neither astronomy nor astrology. You will be relieved to know that I’m also not talking about the ‘stars’ held up to us by the entertainment industry. I am talking about some prominent individuals born in the year 1874: Winston Churchill, Herbert Hoover, Guglielmo Marconi, Carl Bosch, and Chaim Weizmann. Of these men, all but Weizmann became Nobel Laureates.

That year saw Great Britain at or near the zenith of its long imperial history. Queen Victoria’s empire ruled nearly 25 percent of the land on earth with some 33 percent of its population. And of course, Britannia ‘ruled the waves,’ keeping open the sea lanes in a worldwide commercial as well as military and political empire. It was the newly elected prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli, who had Victoria named Empress of India, a move that rather endeared him to her.

Disraeli was a founder of the modern British Conservative Party. The Conservatives were animated by an aristocratic sense of noblesse oblige. In response to the rise of modern democracy in America and elsewhere, Conservatives implemented the second of the two Reform Acts that widened the electoral franchise. Disraeli himself had been instrumental in the passage of the 1867 Reform Act, which doubled the number of British voters in Parliamentary elections. This began what would later be called “Tory Democracy,” a phrase coined by none other than one of Disraeli’s successors in the prime ministry, Randolph Churchill. Under Disraeli, Tories also began, albeit in piecemeal fashion, another characteristic feature of modern politics, the welfare state, which was intended to stave off the more extreme forms of socialism—a strategy Winston Churchill, as Liberal Party Home Secretary prior to the First World War, would continue. Nor would Conservatives move seriously to cut it back until Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s tenure, more than a century after Disraeli.

The dominant foreign policy crisis of Disraeli’s term in office derived from what was called the Eastern Question: Who would benefit from the ongoing decline of the Ottoman Empire? Disraeli wanted to make sure it wasn’t Russia, whose czar would invade Ottoman territory in 1877, hunting in wild mountains of the Balkans, where the Bulgarians and the Serbs had revolted against weakening Turkish rule. Russia won that war; Bulgaria and Serbia got out of the empire. Russia’s push southward alarmed the British, for whom the Mediterranean served as the geopolitical buckle between their island and their own imperial holdings in the East. The Disraeli government’s purchase of the Suez Canal in 1875 was one major piece of British strategy in the region, which also included pressuring the Turks to cede Cyprus to Great Britain. These moves all instantiated a strategy aimed at containing Russia in the south. Disraeli had used the British navy to prevent Russian entry into the Dardanelles, and it is arguable that Churchill’s interest in the Dardanelles during both world wars flowed from similar geopolitical considerations, now centered on Germany but very much with an eye on Russia, too. 

One last thing to recall about Disraeli: He was Jewish—thoroughly ‘assimilated,’ to be sure, but a sort of marker for a man like Churchill, who enjoyed cordial relations with British Jewish leaders throughout his career. Would or could Jews be assimilated into British society, and into European society generally? Disraeli’s example said ‘yes’; the Russian czar and, a few decades later, the French Right and then the Hitlerites would say ‘no.’ Churchill supported both Jewish rights in Great Britain and the right of Jews to a homeland of their own. In a 1920 article, “Zionism versus Bolshevism:  As Struggle for the Soul of the Jewish People,” he quoted Disraeli as saying, “The Lord deals with the nations as the nations deal with the Jews.” Churchill commended Zionism for providing an alternative to both democratic socialism and communism, movements in which Jewish leaders had gained prominence, following Marx. While Russian czars and, later, the Nazis, would kill Jewish bodies, Churchill worried that Marxism would kill Jewish souls.

In 1874, Herbert Hoover’s America was still recovering from the devastation of the first fully modern war, that new trial of American souls. The French Revolution had begun, and Napoleon had perfected, the democratization of war, following the democratization of civil society, with the mass mobilization of armies that also fought en masse, but the American Civil War had added the devastating power of modern weaponry—long-range rifles, exploding bullets—weapons capable of killing en masse. As it happened, German military strategists denigrated this New-World lesson of slaughter. Americans were incompetent, they said, amateurs at war. When we Germans fight, it is different, as we proved in the Franco-Prussian War, only three years earlier. The German debacles of 1918 and 1944 would prove otherwise, and not only Churchill and Hoover but Marconi, Bosch, and Weizmann would all figure in the world constellation that formed in the twentieth century, as a result of the geopolitical alignment that had crystallized in the last quarter of the nineteenth.

By 1874, however, America was teaching itself another lesson, namely, that the political aftermath of a costly military victory is as important as the victory itself. You must win the peace, too, and Reconstruction of the former rebel states of the South was failing. Churchill would write one of his greatest books on exactly this topic: The Aftermath, part of his monumental history of The Great War. In it, he argued that the aftermath of the Allied victory in World War I left the Eastern Question reconfigured but not resolved—even worsened, given the Bolshevik Revolution—and what might be called the Western Question—What will become of Germany?—resolved, but unsatisfactorily. That is, the decline of the Ottoman Empire and the new regime in Russia menaced Germany, Great Britain, and France immediately, given the Soviet network of Communist Party members in those countries, while Germany remained a potential menace to Russia, Great Britain, and France, given Germans’ resentments over the postwar settlement.

When asked what his strategy was for winning the Second World War, Churchill reportedly said, in an uncharacteristically laconic way, “Drag the Americans in.” A dedicated Quaker whose greatest achievement was to organize the American relief effort in Europe during the aftermath of the Great War, hoping to see that the reconstruction of Europe had a chance not to end as the American Reconstruction had done, Herbert Hoover devoted a decade of his life attempting to present Americans from getting dragged into another cataclysm an effort he chronicled in his long-suppressed memoir, Freedom Betrayed. His great work aiming to win the peace began to falter during his presidency, with the ever-increasing weakness of German democratic republicanism and the beginning of the Great Depression, as Stalin’s Russia hovered to take advantage and the Hitler movement marched on in Germany.

Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany: Both Churchill and Hoover understood the greatest moral and political threat of their careers as statemen: the perverse yoking of modern technology with ideologies purporting to justify aggressive war by mass, mechanized militaries, ideologies that justified the tyrannical form of mass politics—taken together, ‘totalitarianism.’ Both men immediately saw the Soviet Union for what it was: a lethal threat to the lives and liberties of citizens, to all human beings who refused to be subjects of a self-styled “dictatorship of the proletariat.”

Churchill equally saw Nazi Germany for what it was, the twin brother of Bolshevism, organized not around hatred of a social class, the bourgeoisie and its ‘capitalism,’ but around the hatred of a race, a race Hitler charged with surreptitiously ruling the United States, Great Britain, and all the republics—ruling them from the banking houses of the capitalism Hitler despised as much as Lenin and Stalin did.

Hoover understood Hitler as a threat, as well. Unlike Churchill, he met the man, describing how certain topics would ‘trigger’ him into a rage. His thumbnail portrait of Hitler in the pages of Freedom Betrayed is a telling description of what a later writer would call Germany’s “insane tyrants.”

Why, then, did they diverge in their strategies in the 1930s? Hoover hoped and expected that the two brother tyrants would commit fratricide, deadlock militarily over Eastern and Central Europe. If so, America’s best course was to stay out of any future European war, as George Washington had recommended. What Hoover didn’t anticipate, and never fully saw, was the close collaboration of Hitler and Stalin in the years immediately prior to the war; nor did he foresee that Stalin and his generals could do to Hitler what Czar Alexander I and his generals had done to Napoleon—allow the winter to wear down his army, then counterattack with a larger army backed by initially shorter supply line. In a way, Hoover’s hope was the photographic negative of Stalin’s who expected, in good Marxist-Leninist fashion, that the capitalist republics of France and Britain and the supposedly capitalist tyranny of Hitler would finish off each other, giving his Soviet Union the opportunity to sweep up the spoils. That is, Hoover and Stalin both indulged in wishful thinking. With his far more realistic analysis of the geopolitics of his time, Churchill frustrated his well-intentioned American rival and his malign Russian enemy—to say nothing of the Axis powers.

A citizen of the least of those future powers, Italy, the class of 1874’s Guglielmo Marconi won a Nobel Prize in 1909 for inventing the first technology that could use radio waves for long-distance communication—radio the only intimate means of mass, democratic communication, the only means by which a stateman can speak to every citizen, every family, one-to-one. Radio enabled Churchill to hold English spirits firm as the RAF and the Luftwaffe fought it out in the English skies. Marconi had acquired funding for his research in London, where he obtained a British patent in 1896 and not incidentally got in touch with the Admiralty, an institution the young Churchill would eventually oversee. The capacity of British naval vessels to communicate over long distances with each other and with bases on shore contributed substantially both to British military preparedness in the years prior to the First World War (in which Italy was an ally) and to the maintenance of the Empire.

Unfortunately, in 1923 Marconi would join the Italian Fascist Party. Mussolini made him president of the Royal Academy of Italy and thereby a member of the Fascist Grand Council. In that post, Marconi went so far as to compare his joining of electric rays into a bundle with the fasces, the joining of rods symbolizing, as Marconi put it, “all the healthy energies of Italy into a bundle, for the future greatness of Italy.” What he didn’t know was that Churchill’s (genuinely) Great Britain and Mussolini’s pseudo-Roman Italy would collide some twenty years later, and that his own discovery would be used by the British statesman to help prevent the future greatness of Italy.

In Germany, the weightier of the Axis powers in Europe, Carl Bosch, another member of the birth-class of 1874, also became a Nobel laureate, in honor of his work in high-pressure industrial chemistry. In the years before World War I, working for the BASF corporation, he figured out how to produce mass quantities of synthetic nitrate, used in manufacturing many products to this day, including the nitrogen fertilizers that helped to feed a substantial portion of the world population. After that war, he extended these techniques to the production of synthetic fuels, which would power German tanks in the next war. Founding and heading the I. G. Farben corporation in 1925, of which BASF became one component, he initially collaborated with the Nazis when they came to power in 1933, receiving a contract to expand production of synthetic fuel. But Nazi anti-Semitism repelled him—a number of his engineer colleagues were Jewish—and this led to his dismissal a few years later, in 1937, after which he descended into depression and alcoholism. He died in 1940. A few years later, I. G. Farben would supply, through a subsidiary firm, Zyklon B gas for the death chambers of the Reich.

The Hitler genocide spurred worldwide support for the Zionist movement, which Churchill had supported for decades. Still another man born in 1874, Chaim Weizmann, became the first president of modern Israel in 1949, after almost exactly a half century’s work on behalf of the Zionism. Born in Russia, Weizmann was a Ph.D. biochemist, an expert on industrial fermentation, especially the process that produces acetone, which is used in the manufacture of cordite explosives. This brought him to the favorable attention of British officials. Churchill, who encouraged Weizmann to mass-produce acetone for use by the Navy in the First World War, had already met Weizmann in 1905 while Churchill was campaigning for a seat in the House of Commons in Manchester, opposing the Conservative Party’s Aliens Bill, which would have excluded Russian Jews fleeing Czarist Russia from Great Britain. Five years later, as Home Secretary, Churchill signed Weizmann’s citizenship papers. More important in Zionist terms, Weizmann became friendly with Arthur Balfour, persuading him to select Palestine as the Jewish homeland in a conversation that occurred in the fateful year of 1914; the Balfour Declaration was issued three years later. The British pushed the Ottomans out of Palestine. In effect, the “Jewish Question” of the twentieth centuries came out of the “Eastern Question” Disraeli had addressed in the previous century. For his part, in a White Paper prepared in 1922, Churchill declared that Jews live in Palestine “of right and not of sufferance,” a right resting upon their “ancient historic connection” to the land.

During the 1930s, anticipating war with Germany, Weizmann wrote a letter assuring British leaders of his firm support in any future conflict, and in 1944 he met with Churchill to discuss the partition of Palestine in the aftermath of that war.

England’s Disraeli, America’s Hoover, Italy’s Marconi, Germany Bosch, the future Israel’s Weizmann: the stars at Churchill’s birth formed the constellation of his life.

 

Postscript

Had Churchill not been Prime Minister during the Second World War, he would be remembered today primarily as a literary figure, author not only of major histories of the world wars but of The River War and The Life of Marlborough. Two other important writers were also born in 1874: G. K. Chesterton and Gertrude Stein, a pair who could scarcely have been more distant from one another in conviction and sensibility. Churchill met Chesterton, although they were never close; the two men concurred in their sympathies with Zionism and their antipathies for Hitler, but Chesterton was a ‘Little Englander,’ not an imperialist, and they took opposite positions on the eugenics controversy that roiled English politics in the years before the First World War. As a Catholic Christian, Chesterton firmly opposed forced sterilization of mentally handicapped persons, whereas Churchill endorsed legislation (which failed) in its favor. The American expatriate Stein, who spent most of her life in Paris, never met Churchill, who traveled in rather different circles. During World War II, Stein became an ardent admirer of Marshall Philip Pétain, head of the collaborationist Vichy regime during the Nazi occupation. She escaped arrest and detention in a concentration camp because she was friendly with one of the French Nazis, who protected her from persecution. One might be forgiven for suspecting that she liked the Vichyites not for any political reason but simply because she would do anything to remain in her beloved France.

Khaled Hroub: Hamas: A Beginner’s Guide. London: Pluto Press, 2010. 

 

Founded in 1987, in 2006 the Iranian-backed Islamist organization Hamas surprised the world, very much including its own members, by winning an impressive electoral victory in Gaza, taking control of the Palestinian Legislative Council, which Hroub describes as a “quasi-parliament with limited sovereign powers.” Hamas defeated its “main rival,” Fatah, the main secular party among Palestinians. In the years between its founding and its election, Hamas had become “deeply entrenched socio-political and popular force,” combining “military confrontation” against what Hroub calls the “Israeli occupation” of Palestine with “grass roots social work, religious and ideological mobilization and public relations networking with other states and movements.” (He eventually concedes that Hamas ties receipt of its social service to Islamic religious conformity.) Hroub, a Palestinian who teaches at Northwestern University in Qatar and serves as a senior research fellow at the Centre for Islamic Studies at the University of Cambridge, assures his readers that this is no “apologetic treatise about Hamas,” but he could have fooled me. This notwithstanding, he does provide some useful information about the group and, by his own manner of presentation, alerts readers to the rhetorical tactics deployed on university campuses to win sympathizers to the Palestinian ’cause.’ [1]

Seven years after this book’s publication, Hamas published a new iteration of its charter, well worth consulting before reading Hroub’s “guide.” In it, Hamas asserts that Palestine, defined as the land which “extends from the River Jordan in the east to the Mediterranean in the west and from Ras al-Naqurah in the north (along the Israel-Lebanese border) to Umm al-Rashrash in the south” (a.k.a. the Gulf of Aqaba). It is not only “an Arab Muslim land,” a “blessed sacred land,” it is “the spirit of the Ummah and its central cause” and indeed “the soul of humanity and of its living conscience”—large claims, all.

Since 1948, however, parts of Palestine have been “seized by a racist, anti-human and colonial Zionist project” founded on “a false promise,” namely, the 1917 Balfour Declaration supporting the establishment of a “national home” for Jews in Palestine. Hamas’s “goal is to liberate Palestine and confront the Zionist project, retaking Jerusalem, “not one stone” of which “can be surrendered or relinquished.” All Palestinians living in other lands have the “natural right” to return to Palestine, an “inalienable right “confirmed by all divine laws as well as by the basic principles of human rights and international law.” “Hamas affirms that its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion.” The “Jewish problem, anti-Semitism and the persecution of the Jews are phenomena fundamentally linked to European history and not to the history of the Arabs and the Muslims or to their heritage.”

As one might suppose, the truth is somewhat more complicated and difficult to ascertain. ‘Palestine’ itself, originally organized as a unit by the Romans, has seen numerous border changes over the centuries. At least until 2012, Fatah spokesmen defined Palestine to include Jordan, whose Hashemite rulers have said the same thing, although not recently. At the beginning of the last century, the Ottoman Empire ruled the area, but the Ottomans made the mistake of choosing the wrong allies in the First World War, while Jews in Europe and the United States backed the eventual winners. After the Ottoman defeat and the ruin of their empire, the Zionist movement, founded by Theodore Herzl in the 1890s, found a hearing for its proposal to open part of Palestine for Jewish immigration, although Jews had been present on the land for millennia and there already had been a recent influx of Jews from eastern and central Europe, fleeing the pogroms that followed the assassination of Czar Alexander II, which was blamed on ‘the Jews.’ [2] Numerous other peoples had lived in the area in ancient times, as the Bible records; by contrast, the Arabs are called as the “peoples of the east,” its tribes including the Amalekites, Ishmaelites, and Sabeans. This notwithstanding, according to the Bible, Moses himself married an Arab woman, and “Father Abraham” came from Ur, in southern Mesopotamia. Other distinct peoples, notably the Assyrians, Babylonians, and Egyptians—imperialists all—conquered the area and mingled their blood with the conquered. Modern Palestinian Arabs often trace their origin to the Canaanites or to the Philistines, which gives them a stronger claim to at least a share of the land than their ‘Arab’ identity could do. It is hard to resist the suspicion that rival origin stories cannot settle matters, even ‘in theory.’

After the Ottomans ceded the area in 1918, the League of Nations assigned the mandate for its rule to Great Britain in 1920; the border between ‘Palestine’ and ‘Transjordan’ was also established at that time. In the language of the League, the British were to rule the two regions “until such time as they are able to stand alone.” The British awarded rule of Transjordan to the Hashemites, who had administered it under the Ottomans but who had led the Arab Revolt against the Ottomans in 1916, sending that empire into its final collapse. The League designated Palestine as a “national home” for the Jews while stipulating that this must in no way prejudice the rights of existing non-Jewish communities or to weaken the rights of Jews who did not choose to emigrate there. The Versailles Treaty had solemnized the principle of national self-determination. As British Foreign Secretary, Winston Churchill oversaw the partition and anticipated that Palestine might become a sovereign Jewish state, over time, as its population grew. 

But before the partition, and indeed before the Balfour Declaration, a wartime exchange of letters occurred between the British High Commissioner in Egypt, Lieutenant-Colonel Henry McMahon and the Sherif of Mecca, Hussein bin Ali. Hussein wanted an “Arab Caliphate of Islam”; McMahon wanted the Arabs to fight against the regnant Ottomans, a British opponent in the war. The Arab Revolt of June 1916-October 1918 drew Ottoman attention away from the European front and contributed to the empire’s collapse. But although Palestinian Arabs, including Hamas, contend that the Balfour Declaration violated the terms of the agreement, Palestine was mentioned as a proposal by Hussein, and Hussein was a Hashemite, not a Palestinian; further, McMahon never explicitly agreed to turn over control of Palestine to either Arab group. What is more, in still another agreement between British representative T. E. Lawrence, the leader of the Arab Revolt, and Hussein bin Ali’s son, Feisal ibn-Hussein, the two sides agreed to Arab sovereignty over Baghdad, Amman, and Damascus in exchange for Emir Feisal’s relinquishment of his father’s claim to Palestine; in this agreement, Feisal would rule Baghdad as Feisal I of Iraq and his brother, Abdullah Feisal, would rule Transjordan. In a 1922 White Paper, Churchill maintained that Palestinian had been excluded from Arab control, although British Foreign Secretary Lord Grey demurred, a year later, saying that Palestine was indeed included, and a 1939 British report sided with Grey’s position.

What is indisputable is that at the time of the Palestine Mandate Palestine, including Transjordan, had a population of fewer than a million persons, ten percent of whom were Jews. Arabs now enjoyed civil rights, which they did not have under the Ottomans. During the Nehi Musa Riot of 1920, in which Palestinian Arabs attacked Jews in the Old City, chanting, “We will drink the blood of the Jews,” no nice distinction between Jews and Zionists was observed. In 1937, Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann proposed what is now called a ‘two-state solution’ to the problem, which would have allocated eighty percent of the land west of the Jordan to Arabs, a suggestion the Mufti of Jerusalem, a Hitler ally, scornfully rejected. Jewish immigration was restricted in the years prior to the Holocaust. Other two-state proposals have foundered on Palestinian Arab ambition. Hamas prefers not to mention much of any this tortured history, and not primarily for nationalist reasons.

Turning from nationality to religion, while the Hamas Charter claims that “Islam is a religion of peace and tolerance,” the peace and tolerance Muslims have in mind presupposes the subordination of other religious groups—the condition of ‘dhimmitude.’ The distinction between Jews and Zionists is valid in principle, since not all Jews have been, or are now, Zionists. [3] However, all Zionists are Jews and thus subject to dhimmitude, according to the Islamic law upheld by Hamas. “Resisting the [Zionist] occupation with all means and methods is a legitimate right guaranteed by divine laws and by international norms and laws”; “at the heart of these lies armed resistance” aimed at the establishment of “a fully sovereign Palestinian state on the entire national Palestinian soil, with Jerusalem as its capital.” This is “the central cause” not only for Palestinian Arabs but “for the Arab and Islamic Ummah.”

The 2017 Charter affirms that this sovereign state shall be built on “sound democratic principles, foremost among them [being] free and fair elections.” As Hroub emphasizes, Hamas won such an election in 2006, although he concedes that no such elections have occurred since then, after the military wing of Hamas took over from the civilians in 2008. He explains the electoral victory as the result of Fatah/Palestinian Liberation Organization repeated failures to progress toward rule of Palestine. Founded in 1965, the PLO vowed to retake the land “occupied in the war of 1948” and the war of 1967—i.e., all of modern Israel. Although Hroub carefully avoids mentioning it, the PLO, led for years by Yasr Arafat, aligned itself with the Soviet Union for the first quarter-century of its existence, “recognizing Israel and its right to exist” and “drop[ping] the armed struggle as a strategy” only at the end of the 1980s, when the Soviet empire collapsed. Arafat compounded his folly when he backed yet another loser, Saddam Hussein, in his 1991 war with the United States; this weakened his negotiating position still further. The two Oslo Agreements, negotiated with the United States as the broker, Palestinians won self-government but not statehood in Gaza and elsewhere in the area. The Agreements split Palestinians, with Hamas and other irredentist elements continuing to demand full Palestinian statehood over all lands west of the Jordan River. Meanwhile, “Israel did everything possible to worsen the life of Palestinians and enhance its colonial occupation in the West Bank” (i.e., Judea and Samaria); Hroub makes no mention of the several thousand Israelis killed or wounded by attacks from Hamas and other Palestinian groups who aimed at undermining the Agreements; the first suicide bombing by Hamas occurred in 1994, in retaliation for an attack by “a fanatical Jewish settler” who gunned down twenty-nine worshippers at a mosque in Hebron. Hroub ignores the prompt condemnation of the act by both Prime Minister Itzak Rabin and opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu and the banning of the far-right Kach organization, to which the mass murderer, beaten to death on the spot by Palestinians, belonged. He also ignores the retaliatory attacks on Jews by Palestinians, including a murderous assault on schoolchildren in Brooklyn, New York, by an individual who shouted “Death to the Jews.” 

Hroub has his moments of honesty. Describing the 2006 election victory, he writes, “Many Palestinians support the nationalist/liberationist and social work of Hamas, but not its religious ideal. Hama purposefully overlooks this fact, and instead considers any vote for its political agenda as a vote for its religious one too.” He recounts that Hamas entered the election period itself with a miscalculation, hoping not to win but to obtain enough seats in the legislature to leave “the ‘dirty’ business of day-to-day governing” to Fatah, while holding effective veto power over Fatah’s attempts to negotiate a ‘two-state solution’ to the Palestinian question with Israel. He acknowledges that Hamas’s governance of Gaza was hobbled by Fatah and “groups in the Gaza Strip”—rival Islamists, he should have remarked—who, along with “Israeli efforts to bring down Hamas’s government”—that is, to police the area in accord with the Oslo Agreements—all “precipitated Hamas’s preemptive, violent military take-over of Gaza in June 2007—displacing the remaining Fatah leadership and controlling all security forces.” He never quite gets around to mentioning that no further elections have been permitted by Hamas since then. In a particularly entertaining formulation, Hroub avows that “Hamas is as genuine in its democratic conviction as any other political party, in a region inexperienced in this form of governance.” As to his complaint that “the United States rejected the outcome of Palestinian democracy,” the very regime change it had long advocated throughout the Middle East, Hroub would do better to understand that Americans founded their regime based on consent of the governed within the framework of the principle of an unalienable right of all human beings to life, liberty, and property—none of which suicide-bombing Islamist terrorists much respect. And given the fact that “Hamas’s political leadership is kept almost in complete darkness about any detailed timing and places of attacks beforehand” by a military wing that “functions virtually independently,” albeit “governed by a political strategy that is drawn and exercised by the political leadership,” prospects for democratic governance by Hamas look dim.

Hroub outlines the origins of Hamas in the Muslim Brotherhood, the first important modern Islamist organization. The Palestine branch was founded in Jerusalem in 1946, “two years before the establishment of the state of Israel.” Hamas derives much of its orientation from the minority, radical elements of the Brotherhood, many of them persuaded by the arguments of Sayyed Qutb, who advocated the founding of Islamic states throughout the Middle East, “with the ultimate utopia of uniting individual Islamic states into one single state representing the Muslim Ummah.” Hamas has positioned itself apart from the more peaceful Brotherhood members but does not go so far as al-Qaeda, which targets not only “foreign occupying powers” in the region but “legitimate national governments.” Hamas has no interest in knocking down buildings and murdering people on American soil. This notwithstanding, the Brotherhood did recognize Hamas as “an adjunct organization with the specific mission of confronting the Israeli occupation” just before the first intifada, which began in December 1987. According to one Hamas document, “Islam is completely Hamas’s ideological frame of reference.” If so, and if the Muslim Brotherhood has allied with it formally for more than three decades, Islam must justify suicide bombing, according not only to Hamas but the Brotherhood. In a 1993 “Introductory Memorandum,” Hamas averred that “confronting and resisting the enemy in Palestine must be continuous until victory and liberation”; the “holy struggle” of confrontation and resistance consist of “fighting and inflicting harm on enemy troops and their instruments”—evidently, the civilians who support those troops. Overall, Hamas has consistently aimed at the “liberation of Palestine” from the Zionist ‘occupation’ and “the Islamization of society (or the establishment of an Islamic state),” both goals consistent with those of the Muslim Brotherhood. Much to Hroub’s relief, Hamas has not hesitated to form “alliances with leftist groups” who are scarcely religious. How long that alliance would last were it victorious, he prefers not to say, although it is noteworthy that the Muslim-secular Left alliance that brought down the Shah of Iran ended with the demise of the leftists, too. Iran is Hamas’s principal backer, as Hroub mentions in passing but takes care not to emphasize, and Hamas depends upon its backing, along with the Iran-based Islamists of Hezbollah in Lebanon, to achieve its stated aims. Iran in turn depends upon these proxies to gain dominance over the rival Sunni Muslims states, especially Saudi Arabia, in its geopolitical effort to reconstitute a caliphate, this time on Shi’a terms. Hroub himself credits Iran with Hezbollah’s “astonishing performance” against the Israelis in the 2006 war.

Is Hamas anti-Semitic? After observing that Arabs are as much Semites as Jews, Hroub invokes the claim that Muslims, Christians, and Jews of the Middle East “lived together with a remarkable degree of coexistence” for centuries, a veritable “‘golden era’ of centuries-long peaceful living under Islamic rule, in what is known now as the Middle East and North Africa, and particularly in Andalusia,” acknowledging the “common roots of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity in the Old Testament.” There is “in principle…no theological basis for religious (as well as ethnic or racial) discrimination that could lead to European-type anti-Semitism and its manifestations.” As mentioned above, this did not prevent Islam’s own form of anti-Judaism and its manifestations, perhaps most notoriously during the 1930s and 1940s, culminating in the expulsion of approximately 800,000 Jews from Muslim countries in 1948. In 1990, Hamas published a document quoted by Hroub distinguishing Judaism from Zionism, promising not to “adopt a hostile position in practice against anyone because of his ideas or his creed,” except when “those ideas and creed are translated into hostile or damaging actions against our people.” He also admits that “ordinary people, including Hamas members, do use the terms ‘Jew,’ ‘Zionist’ and ‘Israeli’ interchangeably.” 

How, then, could Jews be allowed to survive in a future Palestine, were it ruled by Muslims? By making Palestine part of an Arab-Muslim caliphate in which Jews “would lose any numerical superiority” they might continue to live in Palestine itself, Hroub suggests. Obviously, this “one-state solution,” as opposed to the ‘two-state solution’ envisioned by many in the United States and Europe, and indeed by some Palestinians, would result in a new dhimmitude. More modestly, “a treaty in which Palestinian rights were acknowledged and granted in a manner likely to be satisfactory to the Palestinians” would satisfy Hamas, Hamas spokesmen say; “the democratically elected Hamas will abide by whatever the Palestinian people concerning their own fate, in a free and democratic referendum.” Hroub affects to believe that, while admitting that Hamas and “the Palestinian left” haven’t played nice with one another: “In the end, suspicion and ideological differences overrode common cause and pragmatism.” It seems unlikely that either Palestinian secularists or Palestinian Islamist will tolerate a government of the other.

Contending that its strategy of armed resistance caused Israelis to withdraw from Gaza in 2006, and from southern Lebanon in 2000, after Hezbollah employed the same strategy, Hamas extends the lesson to the West Bank. There, “Hamas believes that carrying out cycles of confrontation against the occupation will make the cost of the Israeli presence there unsustainable; that multiplying Israeli costs in terms of human loss, draining of resources, mounting internal tension and deteriorating image worldwide will eventually bear fruit.” This was the rationale behind the several intifadas, the many suicide bombings, and indeed the raid-massacres of October 2023. So far, the strategy has been ineffective.

It may be that prior to their vicious terror raid in 2023 Hamas officers assumed that Israel could do little to injure them, based upon their experience with the Israeli counterattacks on them in December 2008, in which the Israeli Defense Forces killed only 400 of an estimated 15,000 “Hamas strong fighters,” leaving Hamas leadership largely unscathed and increasing its prestige both in Gaza itself and in the region. Most casualties were civilians, most of them women and children. This seems not to have fazed Hamas, and indeed rather to have encouraged its militants. Israel’s crushing assault on Gaza in response to the 2023 attack has killed many more civilian deaths and injuries than in 2008, a humanitarian crisis indeed, and one that could be ended if Hamas surrendered. The fact that no one even conceives of such a possibility, much less proposes it, may be taken as a measure of the world’s estimation of the character of Hamas.

Writing in 2010, Hroub hangs his hat on future moderation of Hamas both with respect to its demand for Islamization of Arabs, its practice of jihad, and its resistance to a two-state solution. As he puts it, “Hamas in power felt the burning need to repackage its positions in a more political format.” He gives no evidence that this is any more than rhetoric, and none has been forthcoming in subsequent years. After all, “the route to Palestinian legitimacy and leadership has always hinged upon offering a plausible strategy to resist and reverse the Israeli occupation,” but neither negotiation nor warfare has achieved any such thing. Indeed, Israel has gotten bigger and more powerful with each decade of its existence. 

 

Notes

1. His publisher, London-based Pluto Press, describes itself as an “anti-capitalist, internationalist and independent publisher,” “emerging from the Marxist tradition.” It was originally associated with the Socialist Workers Party. Hroub himself is decidedly a ‘man of the Left.’ He explains his otherwise anomalous support for Hamas thusly: “As a secular person myself, my aspiration is for Palestine, and for all other Arab countries for that matter, to be governed by human-made laws. However, I see Hamas as a natural outcome of un-natural, brutal occupational conditions,” the “predictable result of the ongoing Israeli colonial project in Palestine.” The enemies of his enemies—the United States, Britain, ‘the West’ generally—are his friends, at least for now.
2. Anti-Jewish sentiments had been weak or nonexistent in Russia for centuries, but the conquest of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and a portion of the Ottoman Empire in the period 1772-1815, places where important Jewish settlements existed, fired antagonisms, making conspiracy theories concerning the assassination plausible to Russians.
3. The first, 1988 Hamas Charter contained what Hroub called and “embarrassing” passage condemning Jewish bankers for the French Revolution, the Communist Revolution, the First World War “in which they destroyed the Islamic Caliphate” (the Ottoman Empire), the League of Nations, and the Second World War. Such claims have been excised from subsequent iterations of the Charter.