The first time I witnessed Hamas's hatred of Jews manifest itself in large-scale, fatal violence was in late July of 1997, when two of the group's suicide bombers detonated themselves in an open-air market in West Jerusalem. The attack took 16 lives, and injured 178. I happened to be only a few blocks from the market at the time of the attack, and arrived shortly after the paramedics and firefighters. Over the next hours, a scene unfolded that I would see again and again: screaming relatives; members of the Orthodox burial society scraping flesh off walls; the ground covered in blood and viscera. I remember another Hamas attack, on a bus in downtown Jerusalem, in which body parts of children were blown into the street by the force of the blast. At yet another bombing, I was with rescue workers as they recovered a human arm stuck high up in a tree.

After each of these attacks, Hamas leaders issued blood-curdling statements claiming credit, and promising more death. "The Jews will lose because they crave life but a true Muslim loves death," a former Hamas leader, Abdel-Aziz Rantisi, told me in an interview in 2002. In the same interview he made the following imperishable statement: "People always talk about what the Germans did to the Jews, but the true question is, 'What did the Jews do to the Germans?'"

What Would Hamas Do If It Could Do Whatever It Wanted?