Hamas' Blood Charter 1988

The World Had the Document. It Chose Not to Read It.

This post continues the argument from “We Need This Blood: Some Thoughts on The Meaning of Blood in Hamas’s Psychotic Mind,” published on Substack May 2, 2026. AI translations in Hebrew, Portuguese, and French can be found in subsequent posts.

Haniyeh told us they need the blood. The Covenant told us why — in 1988, in plain language, on a website at Yale Law School where it has sat for decades. The question was never what Hamas believes. The question is why so much of the world refused to believe them, and what that refusal cost.

I. SPEAKING FROM INSIDE

Saddam Hussein wrote a Quran in his own blood. The Hamas Charter of 1988 was written in blood too — less literally, and far more consequentially.

My doctorate is in Islamic literature. I then trained as a psychoanalyst with a specialty in trauma and PTSD. In 1989, I sued the University of Minnesota under a sex discrimination decree — the case went all the way to the Supreme Court, though what it was really about was antisemitism. Two decades later I became a military contractor, slated to deploy to Helmand Province, Afghanistan in 2008 with the Human Terrain Program. I did not deploy. Due to antisemitism within the program, I was denied that opportunity — despite having graduated and received JPAS security clearance from the United States government.

These are not footnotes. They are the argument. I have spent my entire professional life not only believing what Hamas says but being penalized, institutionally, for insisting that others believe it too. I know the texture of that refusal. I know how it dresses itself up as sophistication, as complexity, as nuance. It is none of those things.

What I continue to do is study the mind and body language of the jihadis: their earliest developmental failures, the preverbal wounds that precede ideology, the way those wounds are coextensive with, mutually enhancing of, and ultimately inseparable from the tactical and strategic architecture of their terror. The inner world and the operational world are not separate domains in jihadi violence. They are the same domain. The psychosis I described in the previous post was not merely psychological. It was written down. Codified. Published. And the world’s refusal to read it is one of the defining moral failures of our time.

II. THE DOCUMENT

The Hamas Covenant, published August 18, 1988, is available in English on the Yale Law School’s Avalon Project website. Its preamble does not speak of occupation, borders or a Palestinian state:

“Our struggle against the Jews is very great and very serious... until the enemy is vanquished and Allah’s victory is realised.” — Hamas Covenant, Preamble, 1988

Not against Israel. Not against Zionism. Against Jews. Article 7 makes the terminal logic explicit, quoting Sahih al-Bukhari — one of the two most authoritative collections in Sunni Islam:

“The Day of Judgement will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews, when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say: O Muslims, O Abdullah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.” — Hamas Covenant, Article 7

The stones will speak. This is not metaphor. This is the movement’s declared terminal destination — an apocalyptic, divinely mandated hunt for Jews wherever they hide, until the Day of Judgment arrives. Article 22 adds a conspiracy theory lifted almost verbatim from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion — the Tsarist forgery that helped construct the intellectual architecture of the Holocaust — incorporated as established fact. My grandfather was a rav from Riga. I do not read Article 22 as scholarship. I read it as a document written in hatred of everything he was and everything he passed on to me.

This is Hamas’s antisemitism in its own words. It does not require interpretation. It requires reading.

III. THE DEVELOPMENTAL ROOTS

The ideology is the adult superstructure. Beneath it is something much earlier: a preverbal wound, an arrest in the developmental process that should allow a child to separate from the mother’s body, to tolerate frustration, to build a self that can bear ambiguity without fragmenting into violence. In shame-honor cultures those needs are systematically unmet. The male child must separate from the mother — dependency is coded as shameful — but the tools for healthy separation are not available. What grows in that space is not resilience. It is a chronic psychological emergency expressed outward as the need to dominate, to humiliate, to shed the blood of the other as proof that one is not the one who bleeds.

“We need this blood” is not only political strategy. It is a developmental confession. An organization that needs blood to feel alive never completed the earliest psychological work of becoming alive in any other way. This is coextensive with the tactical: the human shield, the tunnel beneath the hospital, the camera rolling as the killing happens. The Covenant is not only a political manifesto. It is a developmental arrest written into theology — the paranoid position systematized, given divine sanction.

IV. THE PRECEDENT

Mein Kampf was published in 1925. Diplomats read it. Intellectuals read it. The world decided Hitler’s stated intentions were not to be taken literally. We know how that reasoning ended.

I am not drawing a straight line between 1933 and 1988. But the epistemological failure is identical: a recurring Western refusal to believe that people mean what they say when what they say concerns the annihilation of Jews. There is a word for the belief that Jewish blood is cheaper, that Jewish death requires more context before it can be condemned. That word is antisemitism. The historian Jeffrey Herf notes that the 1988 Covenant “aroused little interest among journalists, human rights organizations, most scholars focused on the Middle East, or even Jewish and Israel studies.”

V. THE INTELLECTUALS

In 2006, Judith Butler told a campus audience it was “extremely important” to understand “Hamas and Hezbollah as social movements that are progressive, that are on the left.” After October 7, she condemned the massacre — then immediately turned to “the horrors of the last seventy years” as the necessary frame. German critics noted that Butler made “individual atrocities disappear” through contextualization. One called it “the reversal of guilt.”

The concession is not the content. The content is what comes after the but. After October 7 the but arrived within hours of the bodies. At Columbia, Professor Joseph Massad published a piece calling the attack “awesome,” “astounding,” “incredible” — praising “innovative Palestinian resistance” without a word of condemnation for the murdered. At Harvard, more than thirty student groups held Israel “entirely responsible” before the bodies were identified.

What exactly is not simple? The hadith calling for the killing of Jews behind stones and trees? Haniyeh’s declaration that they need the blood? The GoPro footage of men filming their own ecstasy? The same institutions that spent two decades building frameworks around the violence of words discovered, when confronted with the actual violence of murdered Jews, a sudden commitment to complexity. The selectivity has a shape. That shape is antisemitism wearing the costume of the contemporary academy — something I encountered long before October 7, in Minneapolis decades earlier.

VI. WHAT BLOOD GIVEN TELLS US — AND WHAT IT DOESN’T

In “We Need This Blood” I told the story of my dissertation advisor — the Lebanese Christian scholar from Bogotá who had not wanted to train a Jew, whom I visited as he was dying of a blood cancer specific to the Mediterranean gene pool. I gave blood at the hospital. It was credited to his account. Something in the room shifted — because in his world, organized entirely around the obligations of kinship, I had crossed a threshold. I had become, in the most literal biological sense his culture recognized, family.

As he was dying he gave me his invitation to a conference in La Marsa, Tunisia — three hundred scholars, Saudi-funded. I was the only Jew, my assigned roommate a member of the PLO. I was there because a dying man decided the blood I had given him was worth repaying.

When he died I eulogized him at the funeral home. A muezzin. A priest. A Jewish woman who spoke for the Jews. It almost sounds like a joke but it wasn’t — the three Abrahamic faiths. I quoted Job: V’ha-chokhmah me’ayin timatzeh — “But where shall wisdom be found?”

After he died, the family asked me to buy his enormous library. I declined. Only years later did I understand: they had seen me as the “rich Jew” all along. The blood I gave had opened a door — for a while. Then the stereotype returned. It reminds me of Dara Horn’s People Love Dead Jews. Blood given can make family where there was none. It cannot dissolve a prejudice that runs deeper than any single act of generosity. Hamas knows this.

VII. WHAT MORAL CLARITY REQUIRES

The most devastating enemy of Palestinian freedom is not Israel. It is Hamas. A Jewish woman whose grandfather was a rav from Riga, who sued the University of Minnesota and watched the case go to the Supreme Court because the academy could not tolerate her presence, who was denied deployment to Afghanistan because she was a Jew despite a U.S. government security clearance, who sat as the only Jew among three hundred scholars with a PLO member — has earned the right to say the uncomfortable plain thing.

Hamas has governed Gaza since 2007. It has executed political rivals, suppressed civil society, married children to abuse them while raping little boys, and diverted billions in international aid into tunnels beneath homes and hospitals. Every dollar that went into those tunnels did not build a future for a Gazan child. This was not corruption. It was consecration.

You cannot oppose genocide while refusing to name genocidal intent when it is written into a founding charter, preached from pulpits, declared on video, and enacted by men with cameras who experienced it as divine fulfillment.

The blood Quran in Baghdad still exists. Saddam does not. That is not an accident of history — it is history’s judgment on men who sanctify slaughter and call it scripture. Hamas wrote its own verdict into its charter. The world has not enforced it. That too is a verdict.

Author's most recent book: A Soldier's Guide to Hamas' Genocidal Psychosis: The Unconscious in Psychological Warfare — Beyond Ideology, Before Words. Atzmaut Press, 2025.

Forthcoming book: Between Empire and Covenant —1977 The Jewish Bond, The Refuseniks and The Bukharan Jews.