Given all the ink spilled about the current Gaza war, and the innumerable tragic photos, it’s strange that the Western press hasn’t inquired into why one of the parties is fighting. That would be Hamas, of course; the turgid psychologizing about Israel’s motives is quite familiar. But what about its Islamist enemy, penned up in a barren territory from which it launches rockets and digs tunnels under Israeli kibbutzim and kindergartens? For what was all that concrete poured, into the ground as part of the offensive, instead of above ground as the foundation of schools, factories, and homes?

It’s not exactly hard to find out. Hamas published a “Covenant” of 36 articles on August 18, 1988, that details its aims and ideology precisely. Its philosophy is rooted in the totalitarianism and radical anti-Semitism that has undergirded Islamism since its rise in the 1930s and 1940s. Far from moderating its core ideology, Hamas’ seizure of power in 2007 gave it the opportunity to make policy based on its guiding goal—namely, the destruction the state of Israel.¹ But even though the Covenant is the declaration of intent of a group now governing millions of people, it goes unnoticed by reporters, editors, and pundits who race to comment on Hamas’ war with Israel.

There is no reason for this ignorance. The briefest Google search brings one to an English translation of the Covenant, provided by the Avalon Project of the Yale Law School over a decade ago. Hamas has not revised or modified its Covenant in all that time. The public statements of its leaders and its continued terror offensive against Israel are clear evidence that Hamas in 2014 remains inspired by the ideas expressed in founding text. This should be every policy maker’s, and every journalist’s, first stop in their efforts to understand Hamas. And it is of utmost importance that they read the text itself, as any student of literature will tell you. There is no substitute; to understand a person one must read him in his own words, noting everything from the cadence and syntax to the allusions to key figures of his ideological tradition. The Gaza war will be incomprehensible to anyone who refuses to take Hamas at its word—these words…

…If you had any doubts about what the conquest would entail, the Covenant’s Article 13 makes the political implications of these religious demands clear. Diplomatic efforts such as “peaceful solutions, initiatives and international conferences” are “in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement.” In fact, there is “no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are a waste of time and vain endeavors.”⁴ Nor can any individual Muslim abstain from warfare, according to document. Article 15 declares, “Jihad for the liberation of Palestine is an individual duty. In the face of the Jews’ usurpation of Palestine, it is compulsory that the banner of Jihad be raised.” Many anti-Zionist assaults have been bloody, but Hamas’s distinctive contribution was the theological sanction of violence.

Though Islamism owes a considerable debt to Nazism, the Hamas Covenant claims that it is Israel that is the equal of Nazi Germany. In Article 20, the authors write that they confront “a vicious enemy which acts in a way similar to Nazism, making no differentiation between man and women, between children and old people….”⁵ The “Israelis as Nazis” canard has been a staple of both secular and religious anti-Zionist propaganda since the 1960s. When the secular anti-Zionists such as Nasser, Arafat, and Assad, Sr., spoke about global conspiracies against the Arabs, they attributed a mythical conspiracy against the Arabs to “U.S. imperialism” and its Israeli “spearhead”—echoing the propaganda of their patrons, the Soviets.⁶ Indeed, the Hamas Covenant of 1988 notably replaced the Marxist-Leninist conspiracy theory of world politics with the classic anti-Semitic tropes of Nazism and European fascism, which the Islamists had absorbed when they collaborated with the Nazis during World War II. That influence is apparent in Article 22, which asserts that “supportive forces behind the enemy” have amassed great wealth:

With their money, they took control of the world media, news agencies, the press, publishing houses, broadcasting stations, and others. With their money they stirred revolutions in various parts of the world with the purpose of achieving their interests and reaping the fruit therein. They were behind the French Revolution, the Communist revolution and most of the revolutions we heard and hear about, here and there. With their money, they formed secret societies, such as Freemason, Rotary Clubs, the Lions and others in different parts of the world for the purpose of sabotaging societies and achieving Zionist interests. With their money they were able to control imperialistic countries and instigate them to colonize many countries in order to enable them to exploit their resources and spread corruption there.

The above paragraph of Article 22 could have been taken, almost word for word, from Nazi Germany’s anti-Jewish propaganda texts and broadcasts…”