There is a difference between an enemy who hates you in his heart and an enemy who has written his hatred down, published it, and bound himself to it by oath, and the difference is the difference between a mood and a covenant. The movement that governs Gaza did not leave its intentions to be guessed at or inferred from its conduct; it set them down, in 1988, in a founding charter that any literate person may read, and that charter is among the most candid documents of murderous intent produced in the modern age. We propose to read it here—soberly, accurately, and in full awareness of what it is—because a people threatened with annihilation by a published creed is owed the courtesy of having that creed taken seriously, and because the Christian who would stand with Israel must know what is actually written against her.

We hold, as always, to the distinction between a doctrine and the persons swept up in the world it makes. The people of Gaza are not the authors of this charter; they are, in large measure, its hostages, governed by men who have bound an entire population to a covenant of war that the population was never permitted to ratify or reject. To examine the charter is not to condemn the Gazan mother or the Gazan child; it is to understand the men who rule them and the creed in whose name they rule, and to refuse the comfortable fiction that the words on the page do not mean what they say. They mean exactly what they say, and they have been demonstrated to mean it.

A Document, Not a Mood

The Charter of the Islamic Resistance Movement, to give it its proper name, was issued in August of 1988, some months into the first Palestinian uprising, by the movement known by its Arabic acronym as Hamas. It is not a speech given in the heat of a moment, not a slogan chanted in a crowd, not an intemperate remark later walked back. It is a deliberate, structured, thirty-six-article foundational document, the considered self-definition of a movement that intended to last, and it was meant to be read as such. To wave it away as mere rhetoric, the overheated language of a particular bad season, is to misunderstand the nature of the thing entirely. Charters are not written in seasons; they are written for generations, and this one was.

The charter opens by defining the movement’s relationship to the broader current of political Islam, declaring itself, as we have seen in our study of that movement, a wing of the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine. This is the first thing the document tells us about itself, and it is the key to everything that follows, for it places the war against Israel not in the frame of a national liberation struggle but in the frame of a religious mission reaching back to the founding of the Brotherhood and, beyond it, to the foundational texts of the faith. The conflict, the charter announces from its opening, is not finally about Palestinians and Israelis. It is about Islam and the Jew, and it is a chapter in a sacred and unending war.

The Covenant of Annihilation

The seventh article of the charter is the one that ought to be read aloud in every chancellery where men still speak of negotiated settlements, for it forecloses them in advance by grounding the movement’s purpose in an apocalyptic tradition of slaughter. The article quotes, as warrant and as goal, the canonical tradition we examined in our study of antisemitism in the Islamic sources—the saying that foretells a day when the Muslims will fight and kill the Jews, until the Jew hides behind the rock and the tree, and the rock and the tree cry out, O Muslim, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. The charter places this end-times vision of the extermination of the Jews at the very heart of its self-understanding, as the horizon toward which its struggle moves.

Let the gravity of this be felt and not hurried past. A governing movement has written into its founding document, as its animating purpose, the fulfillment of a prophecy of the killing of Jews—not the liberation of a territory, not the redress of a grievance, not the establishment of a state alongside another, but the killing of Jews until the very landscape turns informer against the last of them in hiding. This is not a program that admits of compromise, because there is no halfway point between annihilation and its absence. The seventh article is the reason that every diplomatic initiative premised on the assumption that Hamas seeks a state has foundered, and will founder, for the charter is candid that what it seeks is not a state but an end.

The Land as a Sacred Endowment

The eleventh article supplies the doctrine that makes territorial compromise not merely undesirable to the movement but, in its own logic, forbidden. It declares the whole land of Palestine to be an Islamic endowment—a waqf, in the Arabic, a property consecrated to God and to the Muslim community for all generations until the Day of Resurrection. From this it draws the conclusion that no one, no Arab leader, no Palestinian authority, no assembly of all the Arabs and Palestinians together, has the right to surrender any part of it, for it does not belong to the present generation to give away; it belongs to God, and to all the Muslim generations to come, and to relinquish it is to betray a trust that no living hand has the authority to release.

One sees the iron logic of this and why it matters. If the land is a divine endowment that no human authority may alienate, then the entire framework of negotiation—in which parties trade territory for peace, each conceding something to gain something—is rendered not just unattractive but theologically impossible. There is nothing to negotiate, because the thing the other side wants conceded is the very thing that doctrine forbids conceding. This is why the offer of a Palestinian state on the great majority of the disputed land, made and remade across the decades, has never been enough and could never be enough for the movement of the charter. The objection was never the size of the concession. The objection is the principle of concession itself, which the eleventh article forbids.

No Solution But the Sword

Lest there be any ambiguity, the thirteenth article states the consequence directly, and it is worth setting down plainly: there is, the charter declares, no solution to the question of Palestine except by jihad. The initiatives of the diplomats, the international conferences, the proposals and the peace processes—all of these the article dismisses as a waste of time and a vain endeavor, contrary to the movement’s creed, and it scorns the notion of resolving the conflict by any means but holy war. The charter does not leave the rejection of negotiation to be inferred from its other principles; it announces it as a principle in its own right. The men who wrote it wanted no one to be confused on the point, and only the willfully deaf have been confused.

Here the document refutes, in advance and in its own words, the entire edifice of wishful diplomacy that has been built around it for a generation. Every envoy who has flown to the region certain that the right combination of pressure and incentive would coax the movement to the table has been negotiating against a document that declares the table itself illegitimate. This is not stubbornness that the right concession might overcome; it is doctrine that forbids the concession from being received. To read the thirteenth article honestly is to understand that the search for a negotiated settlement with the movement of the charter is not difficult but impossible, foreclosed not by circumstance but by creed, and that the energy spent pretending otherwise has been energy that prolonged the agony rather than ending it.

The Protocols and the Paranoia

If the charter were merely a territorial and military manifesto, it would be frightening enough; but it is also, in its twenty-second article and elsewhere, a document of full-blown conspiratorial antisemitism, and this reveals the depth of the hatred beneath the political program. The article attributes to the Jews a hidden hand behind virtually every upheaval of the modern world—the great revolutions, the world wars, the secret societies, the control of the world’s media and finance—in a litany lifted directly from the European conspiracy literature we examined in our study of imported antisemitism, including the infamous forged Protocols that the charter elsewhere cites as though it were established fact. The Jew of the charter is not merely a national adversary; he is the secret author of the world’s evils, the cosmic conspirator, the hidden enemy of mankind.

This is the tell that exposes the true character of the document, for one does not negotiate borders with a conspiracy. The moment the adversary is recast not as a rival people with interests that might be accommodated but as a satanic plot behind every calamity of history, the conflict passes out of the realm of politics altogether and into the realm of demonology. A border dispute can be settled; a cosmic conspiracy can only be destroyed. The twenty-second article tells us, more clearly than any military communiqué, that the war the charter declares is not a war over land between two peoples but a war against an imagined metaphysical enemy, and such a war, by its nature, has no terminus short of the enemy’s elimination.

The Question of the 2017 Revision

Honesty requires that we address the revision, for in 2017 the movement issued a new document of general principles that softened the language of the original in several respects, and its defenders present this as evidence of evolution toward pragmatism. The newer document spoke of accepting a Palestinian state along the lines of 1967 as a formula of national consensus, framed the conflict as one with the Zionist project rather than with Jews as such, and omitted the cruder conspiratorial passages of the original. These are real changes in the text, and the fair examiner notes them rather than pretending the 2017 document does not exist.

But the fair examiner also notes what the revision did not do, and the omissions are decisive. The 2017 document did not abolish or replace the 1988 charter, which remains the movement’s foundational covenant; it sat beside it. Its acceptance of a 1967-line state was explicitly provisional and was paired with a refusal to recognize the legitimacy of Israel’s existence, framing the arrangement as a stage rather than a settlement—the classic posture of the truce that interrupts a war without ending it. And the distinction it drew between Zionists and Jews, while welcome on paper, was belied by the conduct that followed. A document that leaves the covenant of annihilation in force, accepts a partial state only as a way station, and withholds recognition of the adversary’s right to exist has not repented of the original; it has merely learned to speak more carefully to a foreign audience. The proof of which document governs came not in the language of 2017 but in the deeds of a later October.

October and the Charter Enacted

For on a single morning the question of which document truly governed the movement was answered, not in words but in blood, when the men of the charter poured across the border and carried out against Jewish civilians the largest slaughter of Jews in a single day since the Holocaust. They did not attack a military formation in a border skirmish; they fell upon families in their homes and young people at a festival, and they murdered, tortured, raped, burned, and took captive, with a savagery that announced its own meaning. This was not the conduct of a national movement seeking a state at a negotiating table. It was the seventh article of the charter translated into action—the killing of Jews pursued as an end in itself, with the exultation of men fulfilling a sacred and long-deferred purpose.

Those who had spent decades insisting that the charter was mere rhetoric, that the movement had matured, that the 2017 document represented the real Hamas, were answered on that morning with a finality that admitted no reply. The deeds interpreted the documents. When a movement that has written down its intention to kill Jews is given the opportunity to kill Jews, and takes it with evident joy, the question of its true creed is settled. The charter was never rhetoric. It was a plan, awaiting only the capacity to execute it, and on that morning the capacity and the will met, and the world saw what the charter had always meant. The believer who had read the document was horrified but not, in the deepest sense, surprised. He had been told.

The Charter and the Child

A covenant survives only if it is transmitted, and the men of the charter have understood this better than their adversaries. The ethos of the document does not remain on the page; it is poured into the rising generation through every channel a governing movement commands—the school assembly and the television program, the summer camp where children are trained in arms and taught to revere the martyr, the public square where the killer of Jews is honored with a memorial and a stipend to his family. A child raised in this atmosphere absorbs the charter long before he could read its articles, drinking in as the very air of his world the conviction that the Jew is the enemy of God and that to die killing him is the highest glory a life can reach. The covenant is not merely preserved; it is replanted, season after season, in soil deliberately prepared.

This is the cruelest dimension of the whole enterprise, and the one that should most move the Christian to grief and to prayer. The first victims of the charter are not across the border; they are the movement’s own children, robbed of their childhood and conscripted into a death-cult before they are old enough to choose, taught to hate before they are taught to reason, and offered as the fuel of a war they did not start and cannot understand. To break the charter’s grip on a people, one must somehow reach the children before the charter does, and that is a labor of generations that no military operation can accomplish. The believer who grasps this prays not only for the safety of Israel but for the deliverance of the Gazan child from the creed that would spend his life, and he refuses the lie that to pity that child and to defend the Jew are opposed; they are the same compassion, facing two ways.

The Inversion of the Shield

The charter’s exaltation of death in the cause of God produces a moral inversion that the Western mind struggles to grasp, and it must be named, for it governs the conduct of every war the movement wages. To a creed that holds the death of its own people in jihad to be not a tragedy but a victory—the martyr’s instant entry into paradise, the bereaved family’s honor and stipend—the ordinary calculus of protecting one’s population is stood on its head. The movement does not shield its fighters behind its civilians by accident or in desperation; it does so by design, because the death of those civilians under the adversary’s fire serves the cause twice over, supplying both the martyrs the creed reveres and the images of suffering the propaganda requires. The population is not protected by the movement; it is expended by it.

This inversion is the source of the cruelest dilemma imposed on the nation that must defend itself against the charter, and the Christian must understand it to judge rightly. When a movement fights from within hospitals and schools and homes, deliberately fusing its war machine to its civilians, it manufactures a situation in which the defender cannot strike the combatant without endangering the innocent—and then parades the resulting deaths before a watching world as the defender’s crime. The moral responsibility for those deaths lies with the party that chose to fight from behind the child, not with the party forced to choose between striking through the shield and surrendering to the annihilation the charter promises. To invert that judgment—to blame the defender for deaths the aggressor engineered—is to reward the human-shield strategy and to guarantee its repetition. The charter’s exaltation of death has made even the world’s compassion into a weapon, and the discerning believer refuses to let his compassion be conscripted against the truth.

The Defenders’ Case

We owe even here a fair statement of the contrary view, for serious people make it. They argue that the 1988 charter is a dated artifact of a particular moment, that the movement is not a monolith but contains pragmatists as well as zealots, that the 2017 revision shows a capacity for change, and that Hamas’s genuine social and political role among Palestinians—its clinics, its administration, its electoral mandate—cannot be reduced to the apocalyptic language of a founding text few of its voters have read. They warn that treating the charter as the whole truth of the movement risks foreclosing any path to de-escalation and condemning the region to endless war. These are not frivolous points, and the honest examiner weighs them.

Yet the weighing does not go where the defenders wish. That the charter is old is true, but it was never revoked, and its central article was enacted in living memory. That the movement contains pragmatists is true, but the pragmatists have not prevailed, and it was the maximalists who launched the slaughter. That the 2017 document shows a capacity for tactical adjustment is true, but tactical adjustment toward a foreign audience is not repentance of the creed. And that Hamas plays a social and political role is true, but a movement that runs clinics and also keeps a covenant of annihilation is not thereby acquitted; it is merely shown to be, like the parent Brotherhood, an organization that wraps an exterminationist core in the services that purchase a population’s acquiescence. The defenders establish that Hamas is complex. They do not establish that the charter is dead, and the events of October proved it alive.

The Laundering of the Word

There remains a phenomenon that the Christian must learn to see, for it is the charter’s most effective ally in the West, and it is the laundering of its language by men who ought to know better. The covenant of annihilation does not travel abroad in its own words; it is translated, on its journey to the Western campus and newsroom and parliament, into a vocabulary of resistance and liberation and anticolonial struggle, until the movement sworn in writing to the killing of Jews is received in polite company as the champion of the oppressed. The seventh article does not appear on the placard; the slogan does. And so a creed that any honest reader of the original would recognize as exterminationist is recirculated, scrubbed and respectable, by people who would be horrified to learn—or who have taken care not to learn—what the document they are defending actually says.

This laundering is not a small thing, for it supplies the charter with something it could never win on its own merits: the moral endorsement of the very societies its parent movement has sworn to destroy from within. When the language of a covenant of annihilation is dressed in the borrowed robes of justice and human rights, the people who march under it imagine themselves on the side of the angels, and the men who wrote the covenant could not have asked for a more useful army. The Christian’s task here is unglamorous but essential: to insist, patiently and against the fashion, on the plain text—to bring the conversation back, every time, from the laundered slogan to the actual article, from the abstraction of resistance to the concrete sentence about the rock and the tree and the Jew who hides behind them. The euphemism is the charter’s passport into the decent world. To revoke that passport, one need only read the document aloud.

Why It Cannot Be Appeased

The conclusion presses itself upon any honest reader, and it is a hard one: the movement of this charter cannot be appeased, because what it seeks is not a grievance that concession can satisfy but an outcome—the end of Jewish sovereignty and, in the seventh article, of Jewish life—that no concession short of self-destruction can supply. Israel cannot trade territory for a peace the charter forbids the other side to accept; cannot satisfy with a state a movement that holds the land a divine endowment no one may divide; cannot reason with a conspiracy theory or negotiate with an apocalypse. The whole apparatus of appeasement, however well-intentioned, founders on the simple fact that the thing the movement wants is the thing that cannot be given without ceasing to exist.

This is why the Christian friend of Israel must refuse, gently but absolutely, the chorus that demands she make peace with the men of the charter as though peace were on offer and only her stubbornness withheld it. There is no peace on offer from a covenant of annihilation; there is only the demand that the victim cooperate in her own destruction, dressed in the language of compromise. To tell Israel to negotiate her existence with those sworn to end it is not to counsel peace; it is to counsel suicide by installments, and it is no kindness and no wisdom. The charter has told us what it wants. The only responsible response is to believe it, and to stand with the people it has marked.

The Believer’s Response

How shall the Christian respond to a document of such darkness without his own heart being darkened? Not by answering hatred with hatred, for he is forbidden it, and not by despairing, for despair forgets God. He responds first by telling the truth—by reading the charter plainly and refusing every euphemism that would soften it, because the lives of the threatened depend on the threat being named. He grieves for the people of Gaza held hostage to this creed, who are among its first victims, and he longs and prays for their deliverance from the men who rule them in its name. And he stands, without flinching and without apology, with the nation the charter has sworn to destroy, because to stand with the threatened against a written covenant of their annihilation is not partisanship; it is the minimum that decency and Scripture alike require.

And he lifts his eyes, finally, above the charter to the older covenant that overrides it, for there is a document more ancient and more binding than the one written in 1988, and it was written by the finger of God. Against the covenant of annihilation stands the covenant of preservation, in which the Keeper of Israel swore that the people of His promise would not be destroyed, that no weapon formed against them would prosper, that the gates of death would not prevail against His purpose for them. The men of the charter have pitted their covenant against His, and it is no contest, though the road be long and bloody. They have written that the Jew shall be hunted from behind the last tree; He has written that He shall gather the scattered and keep them as a shepherd keeps his flock. One of these covenants is the word of men who kill. The other is the word of the God who cannot lie, and it is the last word, and it stands. The men of 1988 bound themselves to a prophecy of extermination; the God of Abraham bound Himself, long before them, to a promise of preservation, and history has been the slow vindication of the second covenant over the first. Empires mightier than Hamas have sworn the same oath against the same people and have gone down into the dust while the people remained. The charter will take its place in that long procession of broken vows, and the nation it was written to destroy will outlive it, as she has outlived them all, because her Keeper neither slumbers nor sleeps.