Anyone with a serious interest in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians will be familiar with the oft-cited Charter (or Covenant [mithaq]) of the terrorist group currently ruling the Gaza Strip, Hamas. The Charter (in Arabic here) was published on 18 August 1988. Its proper title is “The Charter/Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement ‘Hamas’ Palestine”, Hamas being an acronym for “the Islamic Resistance Movement”.

This April, the Lebanese news site al-Mayadeen leaked a draft version of a much-revised version of the 1988 Charter, due to be released “in the coming days”. The anti-Israel website Mondoweiss subsequently provided an English translation of the draft, made by someone from the Ayda refugee camp in the West Bank. So far, I have been unable to find the Arabic text of the draft online, even though it has been discussed many times in the wider Arabic media. We shall turn to it later, but it is obviously sensible to look first at the 1988 version as a basis of comparison. And even before that, we need to see how the Hamas Covenant differed from, and resembled, the PLO Covenants of 1964 and 1968.

The full title of the movement is crucial to an understanding of the document and its aims. Hamas had been founded in 1987 as an intransigent extension of the Palestinian Mujamma linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, and was explicitly hardline and neo-Salafi in its religious orientation. This was in conspicuous contrast to its rival Palestinian movement, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), founded by the Arab League in 1964 as an overtly secular and nationalist entity. The two PLO National Covenants of 1964 and 1968 exclude religion as a basis for the anti-Israel struggle.[1]

But in those versions, that secular nationalism takes two distinct forms. The 1964 PLO Charter is based on the concept of pan-Arabism as inspired by the Arab League and Egypt’s president at the time, Gamal Abdel Nasser. Palestinians are simply Arabs among millions of Arabs, and their struggle for liberation was carried out with little emphasis on the creation of a Palestinian state. This view changed, however, after 1967, when the Six-Day War showed the powerlessness of the Arab states to resolve the Palestinian issue. When Egypt and Jordan attacked Israel (Egypt’s closing the Strait of Tiran was a legitimate casus belli, cause for war), Israel repelled them and ended up sitting on land — Gaza, the Sinai Peninsula, Judaea and Samaria — which it immediately offered to return in exchange for recognition and peace. That offer was rejected in a matter of weeks at the Khartoum Conference.

During and after the “peace process” and the Oslo Accords of the 1990s, the Palestinian leadership promised that it would delete the most offensive and anti-peace clauses of the 1968 Charter. Many years later, nothing has been done, and the existing Charter remains unchanged.

Nationalism is not an Islamic concept. Even pan-Arabism falls outside the remit of Islamic ideology and practice. Almost from the beginning, Islam has been predicated on the idea of a global community (the umma), which embraces all Muslims and Islamic regions, allegedly since the beginning of time, with a promise of eventual Islamic control over the Earth. According to a sound tradition in the canonical collection by al-Bukhari, among the five things given to Muhammad that had not been given to any previous prophet was that, “Every Prophet used to be sent to his nation only but I have been sent to all mankind.”[2] In another version, he is recorded as saying: “I have been sent to all mankind and the line of prophets is closed with me.”[3]

This sense of global scale has characterized the Islamic world from its beginning in the form of empires. These started with the Umayyads (661-750) and ended with the Ottomans (1299-1922). The long history of Islamic imperialism had two imperishable effects: it prevented the development of nation-state polity and imposed the theory of religious rule. Self-identification for imperial citizens functioned only through the family, clan, tribe, village or town or city; or according to religious affiliations of various kinds. Everywhere, the only true citizens were orthodox Muslims; subjugated minorities such as Jews and Christians were kept strictly as inferiors, with a separate set of harsh laws and a special tax, the jizya, to pay for “protection”.

This legacy of Islamic dominance, of jihad as a legitimate and regular policy towards non-Muslim Europe, African regions, Central Asia and India, combined with the illegitimacy and unacceptability of Jewish, Christian or secular rule over Islamic territory, has left a deep mark on the Palestinian sense of identity. Formerly subjects of the Ottoman Empire in Syria, almost overnight in the 1920s the Arab Palestinians found themselves adrift in a sea of international rules and regulations concerning territory and national identity. This was the never-acknowledged pivot around which the growing conflict with the Jewish Palestinians revolved — and still revolves.

The emergence of various nationalisms in the Islamic world since the early twentieth century (such as Pakistan, Bangladesh, or Syria) owes little or nothing to traditional Islam and much, if not everything, to the impact of the West, where nationalism first developed. Some Muslim states (such as Iran, Morocco or Egypt) have always had a sense of territorial identity, but most have been provinces of imperial systems. When the League of Nations set up three Class A mandates for Syria/Lebanon, Palestine/Transjordan, and Mesopotamia (Iraq), it created five nations out of two provinces. The Arab states that reject Israel today forget that they themselves would not exist without the Mandate system – a point seldom if ever acknowledged in public forums where the legitimacy of Israel is debated.

Palestinian nationalism is, therefore, an extension of the wider Arab nationalisms created out of the mandates, both in terms of the Palestinian Kingdom of Jordan and the long-postponed future state of Palestine. If there is any Palestinian desire for a two-state solution, it is questionable: according to current maps of “Palestine,” and the New Hamas Charter, it is supposed to be on its neighbouring state, Israel; not next to it. The wish of Palestinian leaders to have a Palestinian state is never realized solely due to the unending rejection of their Jewish neighbour.

So long as the PLO dominated the political landscapes of the West Bank and Gaza, an eventual shift, through reasonable political compromise presumably from both sides, to a two-state solution, remained the only game in town. The secular-nationalist position of the Palestinians offered some hope of political normalization and the publication of a new Covenant. That changed in 1987 with the emergence of a major rival to the secular-nationalist position in the form of a new resistance organization, Hamas, founded shortly after the start of the First Intifada. Hamas is an acronym for harakat al-muqawama al-islamiyya (“Islamic Resistance Movement”). One year later, in 1988, Hamas made waves when it released its own Charter, an uncompromising document that took the PLO commitment to the abolition of Israel into deeper and little-charted waters, including the elimination of all Jews everywhere.

While both Hamas and the PLO/Fatah dreamed — and still dream — of a single Palestinian nation to replace Israel and its surrounding disputed territories, they differed in one major respect: the Hamas nation of Palestine would be an Islamic state, governed by Islamic values and shari’a law. Things had changed regionally since the two PLO Covenants were made public.[4]

The Middle East and the Islamic world in general were experiencing a shift: from Western-influenced political values based on modern states ruled by man-made law and based on secular governments whether democratic (as in Lebanon) or dictatorial (as in Syria) towards a return to and intensification of traditional Islamic theories of governance, made and governed solely by Allah (God, although their qualities are quite different, if not opposite).

Some form of Salafi Islam had existed from the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979, together with the financial windfall from oil and the rise of jihadi movements such as al-Qaeda, brought violent radicalism to the fore, not only in the Shi’i world, but across Sunni countries from Egypt to Afghanistan.

Hamas had started life through connections with Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, which, although fundamentalist in orientation, originally was not particularly violent. Hamas, however, clearly engaged with the broadening current of anti-Western terrorism justified by jihad, a current that culminated later in the emergence of the Islamic State.

Hamas’s 1988 Charter reflects this. It notes more than once that Palestinian nationalism should be religious in nature and quite distinct from other secular forms of national expression:

“Nationalism, from the point of view of the Islamic Resistance Movement, is part of the religious creed… If other nationalist movements are connected with materialistic, human or regional causes, nationalism of the Islamic Resistance Movement has all these elements as well as the more important elements that give it soul and life. It is connected to the source of spirit and the granter of life, hoisting in the sky of the homeland the heavenly banner that joins earth and heaven with a strong bond.” (1988 Charter, Article 12)

“Nationalism of the Islamic Resistance Movement is part of its religion. Its members have been fed on that. For the sake of hoisting the banner of Allah over their homeland they fight.” (1988 Charter, Article 13)

Notably, other parts of the 1988 Hamas Charter resemble the 1968 PLO Covenant. For example, in Article 13, we read:

“There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors.” (1988 Charter, Article 13)

This comes very close to the PLO’s secular use of “armed struggle” (al-kifah al-musalah):

“Armed struggle is the only way to liberate Palestine. This is the overall strategy, not merely a tactical phase. The Palestinian Arab people assert their absolute determination and firm resolution to continue their armed struggle and to work for an armed popular revolution for the liberation of their country and their return to it” (1968 PLO Charter, Article 9).

And the use of “jihad” by Hamas comes even closer to the PLO’s “Commando action” (al-‘amal al-fida’i), literally “self-sacrificial action”. (1988 Charter, Article 10). Fida’i is from the same Arabic root that gives us fida’iyin (Fedayeen).

Hizbullah, Israel’s greatest military threat in Lebanon, is, like Hamas, a revolutionary religious organization inspired by the Shi’i clerical regime that has been ruling Iran since 1979. Although Hamas is a Sunni entity, it has been as happy to accept arms and money from the Islamic Republic as Iran has been delighted to give them. This is of major significance. The assault on Israel is only part of what we see now as an international religious undertaking, one that incorporates the Iranian regime, Hizbullah in Lebanon and Syria, the Islamic State in the Middle East and Europe, al-Qaeda, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and dozens of Islamic actors from ideological movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood and Pakistan’s Jama’at-i Islami to outright terrorists such as the Taliban in Afghanistan or Boko Haram in Nigeria.

Hamas, then, is far from being alone. While it may have ideological differences that make it hard to form a unity coalition with Fatah in Gaza and the West Bank, it is clearly open to alliances with Iran, Hizbullah, and whatever remains of the Islamic State in Sinai, Libya or elsewhere.

Armed Hamas militiamen on parade with a mock rocket in Gaza. (Image source: i24 News video screenshot)

However, the announcement of a new Charter this year, along with its supposedly reformed content, has suggested to some that Hamas may be about to enter a new phase. But is this so? Even a cursory glance will show that it is not.

The truth is that the new Charter, though vaunted as a major shift for the group, is, in reality, little more than a public-relations exercise. Hamas leaders have got smart, but have not changed their spots.

The most obvious change lies in the wording concerning Jews and Israelis. Whereas the Charter Mark I of 1988 contained numerous examples of pure anti-Semitism, singling Jews out as repellent enemies of God and calling for their wholesale destruction, it has finally dawned on the leadership that racist, anti-Semitic and genocidal words do not fare well in many Western states, even in ones with an anti-Zionist agenda.

The result is now a presumed distinction between Jews and Zionists/Israelis. Thus, we read:

“Hamas differentiates between Jews as people of the holy book, and Judaism as a religion and the occupation and the Zionist Project as something separate, and it sees that the conflict is with the Zionist Project not with the Jewish people because of their religion. And Hamas does not have a conflict with the Jews because they are Jews, but Hamas has a conflict with the Zionists, occupiers and aggressors.” (New Charter 2017, Article 15)

However, this article follows one that is quite different:

“The Zionist Project is a racist, aggressive and separatist project based on violating others’ rights and is against Palestine’s people and its vision for freedom, liberation, sovereignty and the return of the refugees. And the Israeli state is the tool of this project and its foundation.” (New Charter 2017, Article 13)

Needless to say, it is alleged that Hamas cannot possibly be anti-Semitic — evidently trying to block out the 3,000 years of documented history that took place before World War II:

“Hamas sees that the Jewish problem and the “anti-semitism” and the injustice against the Jewish people is a phenomenon related to European history, not to the history of Arabs and Muslims or their heritage.” (New Charter 2017, Article 16)

This is, of course, mere bluster that ignores the fact that outright anti-Semitism is to be found in the Qur’an, the Sacred Traditions (ahadith), shari’a law regarding the treatment of Jews and Christians as dhimmi inferiors to Muslims, or the countless persecutions and pogroms carried out against Jews in Muslim countries.[5]

In Article 16 of the New Charter, propaganda dominates the narrative and distracts us from Hamas’s underlying commitment to traditional Islamic thinking about Jews and Judaism.

The difference between Hamas’s unchanged jihad ideology and the image it now wants to project may be found in Articles 8 and 9 of the New Charter:

“8. Hamas understands Islam in all its details, and it is appropriate for all places and times in its neutral spirituality, and Hamas believes that it is the religion of peace and forgiveness, and under its shadow all different religious followers live safe and in safety. As well as it believes that Palestine was and will stay as an example of coexistence, forgiveness and civilian innovation.” (New Charter 2017, Article 8)

“9. Hamas believes that the message of Islam came with morals of justice, truth, dignity and freedom, and is against injustice in all its shapes, and criminalizes the criminals whatever their sex, color, religion or nationality are. Islam is against all shapes of religious extremism, sectarian extremism and ethnic extremism, and it is the religion that teaches its followers to fight against the tyranny and help weak people and it teaches its followers to sacrifice their time, money and themselves in the defense of their dignity, land, people and holy places.” (New Charter 2017, Article 9)

Here, we see in a fuller form the same connectivity to religion that characterized the first Charter.

Despite the claim that Islam is “the religion of peace and forgiveness, and under its shadow all different religious followers live safe and in safety”, it soon becomes clear that Hamas’s intentions towards Israel and the rest of the non-Muslim world have not changed in the least. First, the New Charter declares the Balfour Declaration, the British Mandate, and the 1947 UN partition resolution to be “illegal from the beginning” (New Charter 2017, Article 17), meaning that there can be little room for manoeuver about Israel’s right to exist. That is driven home in the next article:

“We do not recognize the Zionist state. All shapes of occupation, settlements, Judaization and the forgery of truth are illegal. These rights do not dissolve with time.” (New Charter 2017, Article 18)

And that is followed by a return to the jihad doctrine:

“Hamas confirms that no peace in Palestine should be agreed on, based on injustice to the Palestinians or their land. Any arrangements based on that will not lead to peace, and the resistance and Jihad will remain as a legal right, a project and an honor for all our nations’ people.” (New Charter 2017, Article 21)

Article 19 of the New Charter repeats that there will never be peace so long as Israel still exists. It declares:

“We do not leave any part of the Palestinian’s land, under any circumstances, conditions or pressure, as long as the occupation remains. Hamas refuses any alternative which is not the whole liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea.” (New Charter 2017, Article 19)

The New Charter is mere window-dressing; even a casual reading of it should show that the new Hamas is the old Hamas wearing a different face to try to disguise the true intransigence and hatred that have always characterized it.

Dr. Denis MacEoin is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Gatestone Institute, where he writes about Islam, Israel, Left-wing and Christian anti-Semitism and the Middle East.

It all occurred in the same week. A German judge banned a comedian, Jan Böhmermann, from repeating “obscene” verses of his famous poem about Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. A Danish theater apparently cancelled “The Satanic Verses” from its season, due to fear of “reprisals.” Two French music festivals dropped Eagles of Death Metal — the U.S. band that was performing at the Bataclan theater in Paris when the attack by ISIS terrorists (89 people murdered), took place there — because of “Islamophobic” comments by Jesse Hughes, its lead singer. Hughes suggested that Muslims be subjected to greater scrutiny, saying “It’s okay to be discerning when it comes to Muslims in this day and age,” later adding:

“They know there’s a whole group of white kids out there who are stupid and blind. You have these affluent white kids who have grown up in a liberal curriculum from the time they were in kindergarten, inundated with these lofty notions that are just hot air.”

As Brendan O’Neill wrote, “Western liberals are doing their dirty work for them; they’re silencing the people Isis judged to be blasphemous; they’re completing Isis’s act of terror.”

A few weeks earlier, France’s most important publishing house, Gallimard, fired its most famous editor, Richard Millet, who had penned an essay in which he wrote:

“the decline of literature and the deep changes wrought in France and Europe by continuous and extensive immigration from outside Europe, with its intimidating elements of militant Salafism and of the political correctness at the heart of global capitalism; that is to say, the risk of the destruction of the Europe and its cultural humanism, or Christian humanism, in the name of ‘humanism’ in its ‘multicultural’ version.”

Kenneth Baker just published a new book, On the Burning of Books: How Flames Fail to Destroy the Written Word. It is a compendium of so called “bibliocaust,” the burning of books from Caliph Omar to Hitler, and includes the fatwa on Salman Rushdie. When Nazis incinerated books in Berlin they declared that from the ashes of these novels would “arise the phoenix of a new spirit.” The same hatred is coming from Islamists and their politically correct allies. We do not even have a vague idea of how much Western culture we have surrendered to Islam.

Theo Van Gogh’s movie, “Submission,” for which he was murdered, disappeared from many film festivals. Charlie Hebdo‘s drawings of the Islamic prophet Mohammed are concealed from the public sphere: after the massacre, very few media reprinted these cartoons. Raif Badawi’s blog posts, which cost him 1,000 lashes and ten years in prison in Saudi Arabia, have been deleted by the Saudi authorities and now circulate like forbidden Samizdat literature was in the Soviet Union.

After the massacre of Charlie Hebdo‘s staff, very few media reprinted their Mohammed cartoons. Pictured above, Stéphane Charbonnier, the editor and publisher of Charlie Hebdo, who was murdered on January 7, 2015 along with many of his colleagues, is shown in front of the magazine’s former offices, just after they were firebombed in November 2011.

Molly Norris, the American cartoonist who in 2010 drew Mohammed and proclaimed “Everyone Draw Muhammad Day,” is still in hiding and had to change her name and life. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York pulled images of Mohammed from an exhibition, while Yale Press banned images of Mohammed from a book about the cartoons. The Jewel of Medina, a novel about Mohammed’s wife, was also pulled.

In the Netherlands, an opera about Aisha, one of Mohammed’s wives, was cancelled in Rotterdam after the work was boycotted by the theater company’s Muslim actors, after it became evident that they would be a target for Islamists. The newspaper NRC Handelsblad headlined its coverage “Tehran on the Meuse,” the river that passes through the Dutch city.

In England, the Victoria and Albert Museum took down Mohammed’s image. “British museums and libraries hold dozens of these images, mostly miniatures in manuscripts several centuries old, but they have been kept largely out of public view,” The Guardian explained. In Germany, the Deutsche Opera cancelled Mozart’s opera Idomeneo in Berlin, because it depicted the severed head of Mohammed.

Christopher Marlowe’s “Tamburlaine the Great,” which includes a reference to Mohammed being “not worthy to be worshipped,” was rewritten at London’s Barbican theater, while Cologne’s Carnival cancelled Charlie Hebdo‘s float.

In the Dutch town of Huizen, two nude paintings were removed from an exhibition after Muslims criticized them. The work of a Dutch Iranian artist, Sooreh Hera, was yanked from several Dutch museums because some of the photographs included the depictions of Mohammed and his son-in-law, Ali. According to this disposition, one day London’s National Gallery, Florence’s Uffizi, Paris’ Louvre or Madrid’s Prado might decide to censor Michelangelo, Raffaello, Bosch and Balthus because they offend the “sensibility” of Muslims.

The English playwright Richard Bean has been forced to censor an adaptation of Aristophanes’s comedy, “Lysistrata“, in which the Greek women hold a “sex strike” to stop their men from going to war (in Bean’s script, Muslim virgins go on strike to stop suicide bombers). Several Spanish villages stopped burning effigies of Mohammed in the commemoration ceremony celebrating the reconquest of the country in the Middle Ages.

There is a video filmed in 2006, when the death threats against Charlie Hebdo became worrisome. Journalists and cartoonists are gathered around a table to decide on the next cover for magazine. They speak about Islam. Jean Cabu, one of the cartoonists later murdered by Islamists, puts the issue this way: “No one in the Soviet Union had the right to do satire about Brezhnev.”

Then another future victim, Georges Wolinski, says, “Cuba is full of cartoonists, but they don’t make caricatures about Castro. So we are lucky. Yes, we are lucky, France is a paradise.”

Cabu and Wolinski were right. Democracies are, or at least should be, custodians of a perishable treasury: freedom of expression. This is the biggest difference between Paris and Havana, London and Riyadh, Berlin and Tehran, Rome and Beirut. Freedom of expression is what gives us the best of the Western culture.

Thanks to the Islamists’ campaign, and the fact that now only some “crazies” still venture in the exercise of freedom, are we now going to be just fearful? “Islamophobic” cartoonists, journalists and writers are the first Europeans since 1945 who have withdrawn from public life to protect their own lives. For the first time in Europe since Hitler ordered the burning of books in Berlin’s Bebelplatz, movies, paintings, poems, novels, cartoons, articles and plays are literally and figuratively being burned at stake.

The young French mathematician Jean Cavailles, to explain his fateful involvement in anti-Nazi Resistance, used to say: “We fight to read ‘Paris Soir’ rather than ‘Völkischer Beobachter’.” For this reason alone, it is self-defeating to quibble about the beauty of cartoons, poems or paintings. In the West, we have paid a high price for the freedom to do so. We should all therefore protest when a German judge bans “offensive” verses, when a French publisher fires an “Islamophobic” editor or when a music festival bans a politically incorrect band.

Or is it already too late?

As U.S. President Barack Obama continues to seek a negotiated deal on Iran’s nuclear program, the Iranians have been working hard in recent weeks to infiltrate the Palestinian arena and re-establish ties with their erstwhile ally, Hamas.

Emboldened by Obama’s obsession with the nuclear negotiations, which are set to resume next month, Iran’s leaders apparently trust that the Obama Administration is prepared to turn a blind eye to whatever they do.

So the Iranians are apparently feeling free to meddle once again in the internal affairs of the Palestinians, to strengthen their hand still further in the Middle East.

With bases in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iraq, Iran has surrounded Saudi Arabia and all the oil fields of the Persian Gulf. This encirclement can be comfortably backed with Iran’s forthcoming nuclear weapons program.

Tehran’s main goal is to regain control over the Palestinian Islamist movement so that it can turn itself into a player in the Israeli-Arab conflict.

The Iranians already have Hezbollah sitting on Israel’s northern border. All they need now is another terror group in Gaza to the south, in order to create a similar encirclement. And they are working hard to achieve this goal.

Relations between Iran and Hamas had become strained after Hamas’s refusal to support the regime of Iran’s client, Syria’s Bashar Assad, in his fight against the Syrian opposition forces.

Iran and Hamas need each other badly. Iran wants Hamas because it does not have many Sunni allies left in the region. An alliance with Hamas would enable Iran to rid itself of charges that it is leading a Shiite camp fighting against the Sunnis.

Hamas, for its part, is desperate for any outside support, especially in wake of its increased isolation in the Palestinian and international arenas.

Hamas is also beginning to feel the heat at home in light of its failure to rebuild the Gaza Strip after last summer’s war with Israel. Hamas leaders are now hoping that Iran will resume its financial aid to the movement and avoid a situation where Palestinians might revolt against it.

Egypt’s tough security measures along its border with the Gaza Strip, including the demolition of hundreds of smuggling tunnels and the creation of a security zone, have also tightened the noose on Hamas.

Hamas leaders say they have taken a “strategic” decision to restore their ties with Iran. Ismail Haniyeh, the former prime minister of the Hamas government in the Gaza Strip, announced recently that his movement is working toward establishing “open relations” with Iran.

Another Hamas leader, Osama Hamdan, announced that the differences between his movement and Iran have been resolved. He said that Hamas establishes its relations with all parties on the basis of providing support for the Palestinian cause. “We welcome any party that supports the Palestinian cause,” Hamdan said. “Relations between Iran and Hamas have returned to normal.”

As part of Hamas’s efforts to appease the Iranians, the Islamist movement’s armed wing, Izaddin al-Qassam, issued a rare statement “thanking Iran for providing money and weapons” to Hamas and other Palestinian groups in the Gaza Strip over the past few years.

Hamas knows that improving its relations with Iran also means rapprochement with Tehran’s proxies in Hezbollah. That is why Hamas has taken a number of steps over the past week to restore its ties with Hezbollah.

The commander of Izaddin al-Qassam, Mohamed Deif, last week sent a letter of condolence to Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah over the death of some senior Hezbollah operatives, who were killed in an Israeli air strike in Syria.

In his letter, Deif called on Hezbollah to join forces with Hamas against “the real enemy — the Zionist entity.”

The Hamas-Iran rapprochement is yet another sign of Tehran’s effort to use its allies in the Middle East to destroy Israel. Hamas leaders are now hoping that Iran will resume not only its financial aid to their movement, but the supply of weapons as well.

Iran is not interested in the reconstruction of the Gaza Strip or providing shelter to thousands of Palestinian families who lost their homes during the last war. The only thing Iran is interested in there is turning Hamas into another Iranian-backed army that would be used to attack Israel. This is all happening at a time when the Obama Administration is busy preparing for another round of talks with Iran over its nuclear program. It is obvious by now that Tehran is using these negotiations to divert attention from its efforts to deepen its involvement in the Middle East, with the hope of taking over the oil fields and eliminating Israel.