Mahmoud al Zahar, one of the principal Hamas leaders in Gaza, delivered a blood-curdling speech in which he stated that Islamists had the right to murder Jewish children anywhere in the world in the light of Israel’s operation in Gaza. “They have legitimized the killing of their people all over the world by killing our people,” he said.

So it is somewhat disquieting to see the op-ed pages of mainstream newspapers carrying articles by al Zahar’s colleagues in which they doggedly stick to the line that Hamas is a bona fide resistance movement, rather than the bunch of antisemitic murderers we know them to be.

In The Guardian, Khaled Meshal writes:

For six months we in Hamas observed the ceasefire. Israel broke it repeatedly from the start.

This is a blatant lie. It was Hamas which announced that it would not renew the ceasefire - in reality, more of a lull - and it was Hamas which fired 35 rockets into southern Israel in the two days prior to the expiration of the ceasefire. Go back further - say to the night of November 4th - and you will see that Hamas fired 46 rockets and 16 mortars in those few hours; they did so after Israeli forces uncovered “a tunnel about 300 yards (250 meters) inside the central Gaza Strip that militants planned to use to abduct Israeli soldiers.”

Cast an eye over the entire period of Hamas rule in Gaza, and you can only conclude that its goal has been to bring in as much weaponry as possible in preparation for renewed confrontation with Israel. Where it could have made meaningful concessions, for example by releasing kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit, it didn’t. All the while, Hamas has blocked and obfuscated, imposing a false symmetry on the conflict which camouflages the reality of a legitimate state endlessly provoked by a terrorist entity.

As borne out by Meshal’s piece, Hamas invents its own victimhood in order to justify its eliminationist program towards Israel. Writing in the LA Times, Musa Abu Marzouk, one of the Hamas leaders benefiting from the largesse of the Syrian dictatorship in Damascus, gives us more of the same:

Renewed calls today for our movement to “recognize the right of Israel to exist,” in the face of murderous onslaught, ring as hollow as Israel’s continuing claims to be acting in “self-defense” as her jets bomb civilians. Without debating here the Zionist state’s fictive, existential “right,” which of the many Israels, precisely, would the West have us recognize? Is it the Israel that militarily occupies land belonging to three of its neighbors, ignoring international law and scores of U.N. resolutions over decades? Is it the Israel that illegally settles its citizens on other people’s land, seizes water sources and uproots olive trees? Is it the Israel that in 60 years has never acknowledged the forced expulsion of Palestinians from their farms and villages as the foundational act of its statehood and denies refugees their right to return?

No, Abu Marzouk - the Israel you are being asked to recognize is the Israel which is a member state of the United Nations, whose legitimacy was enshrined by the UN in 1947 and whose right to exist in peace and security has been underlined in subsequent Security Council resolutions, most obviously Resolution 242 which followed the 1967 war. The Israel you are being asked to recognize is the Israel you have refused to recognize in defiance of the conditions of the Quartet, which also demanded that you end the campaign of violence and respect existing agreements.

But, as Abu Marzouk makes clear to the readers of the LA Times, Israel isn’t a state like any other state. It is a “Zionist” state. A priori, it cannot ever be anything more than a usurper. And when that same usurper responds to your attacks, the argument that the recognition issue is both an insult and a deviation from what really matters becomes very convenient, especially when it is guaranteed a sympathetic audience on both sides of the Atlantic.

Yet it cannot mask two basic facts about Hamas: its transcendental hatred of Israel and the utter contempt it has for the well-being of the Palestinian people. In the wake of the Jabalya school tragedy, which claimed 30 lives, Jeffrey Goldberg notes that the Israeli army “can be a big, rough bulldozer of an army.” He adds:

One story the media isn’t telling, because it’s impossible to get this story in these circumstances (especially because Israel stupidly won’t allow foreign reporters into Gaza) is how much resentment the Hamas policy of using Palestinians as human shields causes among Gaza civilians. Early reports indicate that Hamas mortar teams were firing from the UN School. This shouldn’t surprise anyone.

And this last paragraph of Goldberg’s shouldn’t surprise anyone either:

One more thing, speaking of pornography — we’ve all seen endless pictures of dead Palestinian children now. It’s a terrible, ghastly, horrible thing, the deaths of children, and for the parents it doesn’t matter if they were killed by accident or by mistake. But ask yourselves this: Why are these pictures so omnipresent? I’ll tell you why, again from firsthand, and repeated, experience: Hamas (and the Aksa Brigades, and Islamic Jihad, the whole bunch) prevents the burial, or even preparation of the bodies for burial, until the bodies are used as props in the Palestinian Passion Play. Once, in Khan Younis, I actually saw gunmen unwrap a shrouded body, carry it a hundred yards and position it atop a pile of rubble — and then wait a half-hour until photographers showed. It was one of the more horrible things I’ve seen in my life. And it’s typical of Hamas. If reporters would probe deeper, they’d learn the awful truth of Hamas. But Palestinian moral failings are not of great interest to many people.

They are not. And it reminds me of of an observation of Heidegger’s that Berel Lang, in writing about the philosopher’s deafening silence on the Holocaust, not surprisingly seized upon: “Man speaks by being silent.”