Free Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History by David Aaronovitch

part in the delivery of French Jews to their wartime deaths by his complete belief in the authenticity of the Protocols . No wonder that after the war and the Holocaust, the philosopher Hannah Arendt, in a reflexive echo of Mein Kampf , argued that the provenance of the Protocols was not its main significance. “The chief political and historical fact of the matter is that the forgery is being believed. This fact is more important than the (historically speaking, secondary) circumstance that it is a forgery.” 34
    Nor did the Protocols entirely die as a consequence of the Second World War. Idi Amin promoted them in his mad Ugandan fiefdom. New translations were produced in Pakistan, Malaysia, and Croatia. No less than twelve editions of the Protocols were published after 1945 in Argentina, which had (and has) both sizable Jewish and German populations. In the 1970s, there was a sudden rash of conspiracy stories in the Argentinian popular press, in which it was claimed that a “Chief Rabbi Gordon” of New York City was involved in a plot to create a second Jewish state, this time in Patagonia, to be called Andinia. The tale sparked a dozen books elaborating on this conspiracy, many carrying direct excerpts from the Protocols . Needless to say, there was no Rabbi Gordon and no plot. 35 In 1994, a car bomb went off outside the Jewish Argentine Mutual Association in Buenos Aires, killing eighty-five people. It was not only the worst terrorist outrage in Latin American history, it was the worst act of anti-Semitic terrorism since the death of Hitler.

    The Protocols and the Middle East
    Gaza City, when I visited it in May 2003, was a terrible place: its beach a parody with smashed concrete and rusting iron, the city a warren of unfinished houses and tangled electric cables. On three sides, and overhead, were the Israelis, penning a population of more than a million Palestinians into a narrow strip of dust. The strongest political and social association among the Palestinians had come to be the group known as the Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas. That spring, I was there to see one of the leaders of Hamas, and to ask him about a most extraordinary aspect of his group’s program.
    The Hamas Covenant is about twenty pages long and made up of thirty-six articles. It is a mixture of political manifesto, historical observation, and exaltation to the faithful. It begins with a quotation from the 1920s founder of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Hassan al-Banna—“Israel will rise and will remain erect until Islam eliminates it as it has eliminated its predecessors”—and sets out the nature and duties of the membership, who must be good and pious Muslims.
    Article Seventeen is about “the role of Muslim women” but contains a digression concerning the enemies of Hamas, who will use every effort to further their cause, including education curricula, movies, and culture, “using as their intermediaries their craftsmen who are part of the various Zionist organizations which take all sorts of names and shapes such as: the Free Masons, Rotary Clubs . . . and the like . . . Those Zionist organizations control vast material resources, which enable them to fulfill their mission amidst societies, with a view of implementing Zionist goals.”
    By the time the reader reaches Article Twenty-two , “ On the Powers That Support the Enemy,” the scale of this malign mission has expanded.
    This wealth [allowed the Zionists to] take over control of the world media . . . They used this wealth to stir revolutions in parts of the globe . . . They stood behind the French and Communist Revolutions . . . They stood behind World War I so as to wipe out the Islamic Caliphate . . . They obtained the Balfour Declaration and established the League of Nations . . . They also stood behind World War II . . . and inspired the establishment of the United Nations . . . There’s no war that broke out anywhere without their fingerprints on it.
    And if