Alan Johnson in The New Statesman writes
The Hamas Charter targets Jews as Jews in registers both pious and profane. It cites a hadith in common usage among Sunni Islamist organisations: “The Day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews (killing 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.” But the Charter also includes passages of classic secular anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, accusing Jews “with their money” of being behind “the French Revolution, the Communist revolution and most of the revolutions we heard and hear about, here and there.”
Of course, Israel could have decided Hamas was being ironic. Muhammed Deif said in 2005 after Israel’s disengagement from the Strip, “We promise that tomorrow all of Palestine will become hell for you.” But perhaps he was just being discursively playful? Hamas ‘foreign minister’ Mahmoud al-Zahar said in 2006, “Israel is a vile entity that has been planted on our soil, and has no historical, religious or cultural legitimacy. We cannot normalise our relations with this entity.” Just a play at rhetoric? And when Ahmad Al-Jabri (the Hamas military commander killed by Israel on day one of this conflict) called Jews “rats” to be killed in the cause of liberating “Jerusalem, the West Bank, and then Haifa, Jaffa, and Tel Aviv,” Israel could have decided he was merely playing by the well-worn but essentially symbolic rules of ‘anti-imperialist’ discourse, and so not to be taken seriously.
If you want to engage in that kind of ‘translation’ then you will find abundant resources within western intellectual culture. Unfortunately it’s not like that in Israel’s neighbourhood. There, when someone says they intend to kill you, they probably intend to kill you.
