Hamas and the Origins of Islamic Antisemitism

Discussion Part of the program series The Origins and Ideology of Hamas Admission: Free Watch the video

During and after World War II and the Holocaust, the collaboration of leading Palestinian nationalists with the Nazi regime was a major issue in the press and politics, especially liberal politics, in New York and Washington. In the past several decades, historians in Israel, Germany and the United States have examined the details and nature of this collaboration and of the ideas of Islamists that led them to lend support to Hitler. The ideology of Hamas, famously expressed in its Charter of 1988, echoes themes of Jew-hatred in the key Islamist texts written eighty years earlier. In this conversation historians Matthias Küntzel and Jeffrey Herf will discuss the origins of Hamas, the history of Islamic antisemitism, and its causal significance in the war of 1947-1948.

Read Jeffrey Herf’s remarks from this program.

Read Matthias Küntzel’s remarks from this program.

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This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.

About the Speakers

Jeffrey Herf studies the intersection of ideas and politics in modern European history, specializing in twentieth century Germany. He has published extensively on Germany during the Weimar Republic, Nazi Germany, the Holocaust, and on West and East Germany during the Cold War. His research interests now focus on the Nazi period and German and European history in post World War II decades up to the collapse of Communism and the end of the Cold War in 1989.

Matthias Küntzel is a political scientist based in Hamburg, Germany. Between 2004 and 2015, he was an external research associate at the Vidal Sassoon International Centre for the Study of Antisemitism (SICSA) at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His published works include Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism, and the Roots of 9/11 (2007) and Nazis, Islamic Antisemitism and the Middle East: The 1948 Arab War against Israel and the Aftershocks of World War II (2024). He is a member of the German Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin and the Advisory Board of United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI) in New York.