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

you think you have heard all this somewhere before, Article Thirty-Two, “The Attempts to Isolate Palestinian People,” confirms it. “Zionist scheming,” the Covenant claims, “has no end, and after Palestine they will covet expansion from the Nile to the Euphrates . . . Their scheme has been laid out in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and their present conduct is the best proof of what is said there.”
    It is like one of those novels in which the hero encounters an archaic or ancient legend which has somehow managed to survive, still potent, to the modern day. So, a Palestinian child in a Gazan class at the beginning of the twenty-first century may well be hearing things written by a Parisian lawyer about Napoleon III 140 years earlier, falsified by a Russian spy three decades later, and used as a pretext for racial mass murder in Germany.
    Inside one of these concrete houses in Gaza, its walls and stairs bare, I met the man who was then Hamas’s number two. Abdel-Aziz Rantisi wore tan slacks and one of those ubiquitous checkered shirts that are the new uniform for men in the Middle East. A serious-looking man with dark eyebrows, he had once been a pediatrician, his radicalization dating from a period he spent exiled to a no-man’s-land on the Lebanese-Israeli border with four hundred others. Here in Gaza, in a room with curtains closed against spying eyes, containing a child’s model of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem and a picture of al-Banna, we conducted a short interview. He spoke partly in English and partly in Arabic.
    Toward the end, I asked him directly about the Protocols and what they were doing in the Hamas Covenant . Rantisi frowned. “You know,” he said, “when I first heard about this document, I didn’t want to believe it. But then I saw what was happening in Palestine and I could see that it was genuine.” It fitted then, it fits now. Reality provides the best commentary. Hamas was then the second-largest organization among all Palestinians, and was growing fast as hope for peace receded. Rantisi, however, was dead within a few months. The second attempt on his life by a helicopter gun-ship succeeded. He was by that time the leader of Hamas, having replaced the assassinated blind Sheikh Yassin some weeks previously.
    What I learned on that journey was that invocations of the Protocols and other manifestations of European anti-Semitism were rife in the Arab and wider Muslim world. Take just one example, from the “Political National Education” page of the Palestinian Authority daily newspaper Al-Hayat al-Jadida (January 25, 2001). There it claimed that “disinformation has been one of the bases of moral and psychological manipulation among the Israelis . . . The Protocols of the Elders of Zion did not ignore the importance of using propaganda to promote the Zionist goals.” And it directly quoted our old friend Protocol Twelve, though leaving out any archaic references to the god Vishnu.
    The Palestinians are few in number and the nature of their grievance against some Jews is well understood. The tensions in the Middle East also exemplify the danger that the Protocols still represent. At the time of this writing, there is considerable concern that the Islamic Republic of Iran might be developing a nuclear weapon. As the prime target for such a weapon, Israel might seek to take preemptive action—action which could lead to a wider war—as it did in 1981, when it bombed the first Osirak nuclear reactor in Iraq.
    In April 2004, an Iranian TV station broadcast a documentary series titled Al-Sameri wa al-Saher . The series’ purpose was to explain to Iranians how the Jews control Hollywood. For example, Funny Girl— starring “the ugly Jewish actress Barbra Streisand”—was one of a number of movies designed to depict the Jews favorably. Tootsie was another. Yentl “ dealt with the Zionists’ wish to benefit from feminism.” The Matrix was a “meeting point between Hollywood