They say you can't kill an idea. Who are they? Quite a few people mouth this bromide but let's focus for a moment on Josep Borrell, the European Union's top diplomat.
A 77-year-old Spanish socialist, he has several times asserted: "Hamas represents an idea, and one cannot kill an idea with bombs."
He doesn't say what idea Hamas represents. But I will. It's killing Jews. Exactly what you saw on Oct. 7, 2023.
This is by no means a new idea.
Killing Jews is what the Roman emperor Hadrian did in Judea in the 2nd century to suppress one of history's earliest anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist rebellions.
The Nazis had a similar idea, based not on the refusal of Jews to submit but because the Nazis saw Jews as racially inferior – vermin to be exterminated.
The Nazi idea was assisted by Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, who had moved to Berlin from Palestine, a territory that had been ruled by foreign empires since Roman times. His mission, while a guest of the Reich: to recruit European Muslims to the Nazi idea and broadcast the Nazi idea into the Middle East.
Antisemitism – the word was popularized by Wilhelm Marr, a 19th century German agitator who wanted a more scientific term for Jew-hatred – has always been a mutating virus.
So when contemporary antisemites claim it's not Jews they hate, "only" Israelis or Zionists, reach for a grain of salt.
The Houthi rebels of Yemen, a proxy of Iran's rulers, do not bother to equivocate. The slogan on their flag: "God Is the Greatest, Death to America, Death to Israel, A Curse Upon the Jews, Victory to Islam."
Another of Mr. Borrell's bons mots: "There is no military solution."
He fails to note that both Hezbollah and Hamas vehemently disagree with this assessment.
Hezbollah official Nawaf Moussawi recently boasted: "We are lovers of war. After all, fighting is what we do."
The Hamas Charter (Article 13) asserts: "There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad."
Also in the Charter (Article 7): "The hour of judgment shall not come until the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them."
Their invasion of Israel and the small-scale Holocaust they carried out against concertgoers and farmers a year ago next month was intended, among other things, to undermine the idea of peaceful coexistence between Israelis and their Arab neighbors as expressed in the Abraham Accords and the Oslo Accords.
On university campuses, angry mobs of Islamist agitators, activists with tenured professorships, and their student followers now wave Hamas flags and harass Jews.
Their goal is to kill the Zionist idea. Which is what exactly?
Prior to 1948, Zionism was the belief that Jews had the right and should have the opportunity to exercise self-determination in part of their ancient homeland.
There were reasonable arguments against this idea – not least that it would prove too arduous. For one thing, most of what was to become Israel was either desert or malarial swamp.
Following the re-establishment of the Jewish state – and a failed war launched immediately thereafter by the Arab countries surrounding Israel – Zionism took on a different meaning.
If you agree that Israel – the only democratic society in the Middle East, the only nation-state in the region where Jews, Muslims, Druze, Christians and other ethnic and religious groups enjoy a broad spectrum of rights and freedoms – has a right to continue to exist then, congratulations, you are a Zionist.
If, on the other hand, you demand the eradication of Israel "from the river to the sea," if you support mass-murdering Jews or are indifferent regarding that eventually, then you may consider yourself an anti-Zionist.
Mr. Borrell has expanded upon his assertion that you "don't kill an idea" by adding that "you have to provide an alternative that's better." His better idea is (did you guess?) a "two-state solution."
As he must know, Hamas forcefully rejects such a compromise based on its theological conviction that any territory ever conquered by Muslims – as the land the Romans re-named Palestine was by the imperialist/colonialist army that marched from Arabia in the 7th century – is a waqf, an endowment from Allah to the Muslims for eternity.
I might also note that a proto-two-state solution was what existed after the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in 2005. Two years later Hamas violently ousted the Palestinian Authority and seized power, tolerating no competitors or dissenters.
Huge amounts of aid poured in from "the international donor community." The United Nations provided social services such as health care and education, which soon included anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish indoctrination.
Hamas spent its energies building a mammoth and elaborate subterranean fortress to be used for the "military solution" it was planning. Hamas leaders have sheltered in it, surrounded by hostages abducted from Israel.
Above them, Gazan civilians have served as human shields. Hamas leaders knew from the start that that Israelis would be blamed by UN officials, faux "human rights organizations," much of the media, and others for those human shields who were killed.
Keener minds than Mr. Borrell's have thought about terrible ideas and what to do about them. In World War II, Churchill sought to – if not kill – at least cripple Nazi ideas. He understood that required defeating Nazis on the battlefield.
Of course, there are still Nazis, neo-Nazis, and Nazi apologists in Europe and America.
One of their fundamental ideas, a Europe "cleansed" of Jews, has morphed into the idea behind the Tehran-led multifront war being waged against Israel: a Middle East "cleansed" of Jews.
Mr. Borrell is neither a Nazi nor a jihadist. But he and many others are helping keep a genocidal idea alive.