he recent protracted conflict between Israel and Hamas has left a death toll of over two thousand with ratio of 30:1 for Palestinian to Israeli lives lost. The fact that many Palestinian casualties were civilians while it was mostly Israeli combatants who died, together with widespread footage of the devastating impact of Israeli bombs on civilian structures in the Gaza strip, has led many people to blame Israel or to view its actions as very disproportionate. Furthermore, many believe that the very creation of Israel itself with the requisite expulsion of Palestinians from land they may have occupied for centuries was the supreme injustice that lies at the heart of the never-ending conflict, the undying hatred of Muslims around the world toward Israel, and the acts of terrorism perpetrated by various groups over the decades, such as the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), Hizbullah and Hamas.

This article will make the case that the conflict is not really about land at all, at least not about “land” as a place to live in a manner similar to the one enjoyed by some 711,000 Palestinians before the creation of the modern state of Israel in 1948. About twenty times as many people, an estimated 14.5 million, were displaced less than one year earlier after India became independent and was immediately partitioned into India and Pakistan (East and West). Pakistan and India were each flooded with over 7.2 million displaced people, mainly Muslims who left India for Pakistan, and vice versa for Hindus and Sikhs. Massive violence and slaughter occurred on both sides of the border, and neither government was equipped to deal with the upheaval1. Yet the partition of India has never provoked any mass outpouring of sympathy for the displaced, as has the creation of Israel. There is no theoretical reason that the partition of Palestine, despite human rights violations on both sides, could not have resulted in two internationally recognized independent states, with the negotiations mediated by the United Nations.

My intent is not to argue that Israel has done no wrong. It is to show that the intractable problems arise not from what Israel does but from the fact that its very existence violates Islam from a theological perspective. The basis of Islamic theological hatred of Jews is expounded by Elias Al-Maqdisi and Sam Solomon in Al-Yahud: Eternal Islamic Enmity and the Jews2. These authors argue that is not the struggles over land leading to conflict, but conflict leading to struggles over land.

An underlying reason is of course theological. Judaism originated in the “Holy Land” centuries before Christianity where Jews once occupied far more land than present-day Israel. Jerusalem was the capital under Kings David and Solomon. A small number of Jews continued to live in the Holy Land even after the Diaspora. In terms of religious claims, the Jews can say they got to the Holy Land first. The modern Zionist movement began in the late 19th century and large-scale immigration of Jews to Palestine began in the 1880s. Many migrants were motivated by persecution and discrimination in their country of origin. The Peel Commission of 1936-37 was formed to consider the concept of a partition of Palestine in response to the Arab revolt against British rule and mass Jewish immigration; it failed. One of the Jewish leaders, Chaim Waizman, testified before this Commission: “There are in Europe 6,000,000 people ... for whom the world is divided into places where they cannot live and places where they cannot enter.” We know what happened to most of those six million. After the Holocaust, the creation of Israel became virtually inevitable. Some 20 years after the Peel Commission plan failed, David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, wrote “Had partition been carried out, the history of our people would have been different and six million Jews in Europe would not have been killed – most of them would be in Israel.”3 This is exactly what the Grand Mufti of Palestine and ally of Hitler, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, did not want – he believed that the extermination of the Jews was the best way to solve the Palestinian problem. Many countries were indifferent to the fate of Jewish refugees. In Canada, which took in only 5,000 Jewish refugees, immigration official Frederick Blair is alleged to have said, “None is too many,” reflecting the attitude of Prime Minister William Lyon MacKenzie King. The desire for a Jewish homeland that would always accept Jewish refugees is entirely understandable. Today, anti-semitism is flaring up again in Europe, in large part as a result of rapidly increasing Muslim populations, and immigration of Jews to Israel, especially from France, is rapidly rising each year.

Many humanists, myself included, do not like the idea of religion-based states. But whoever accepts Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan (created nine months before Israel), all officially starting with “Islamic Republic of,” as legitimate countries has little reason to single out Israel on that basis. In terms of treating citizens who don’t adhere to the state religion equitably, Israel is far ahead of any Islamic state.

All of the Jewish and Christian prophets, including Jesus, are recognized in Islam and are considered to be forerunners of Mohammad. Adherents of Islam’s monotheistic predecessors are recognized as “People of the Book” and the “custodians” of Islamic revelations from Abraham and the Patriarchs until Mohammad came along. So far, so good. Where does the hate come in?

Mohammad considered himself to be the seal of the prophets (all of whom Islam claims were Muslim), the last and by far most important in the whole Abrahamic line, who brought the exact word of Allah in the form of the Koran which the Angel Gabriel conveyed to him piecemeal (and, one might add, coming up with just-in-time verses that were incredibly convenient for Mohammad). There would be no prophets after Mohammad (“seal”) and nothing in the Koran could ever be changed. The coming of such an important person would surely have been revealed in the scriptures of the Jews and Christians. It was especially important for Mohammad that the Jews, as the original monotheists, should recognize him. The Christians were essentially polytheists anyway with their belief in the Holy Trinity, committing the sin of “shirk” or assigning companions to Allah. When Mohammad moved from Mecca (where he had been an essentially unsuccessful prophet, even with his own tribe, for 13 years) to Medina (then a mainly Jewish city called Yathrib) in 622, he tried hard to attract the Jews to his new religion. For 17 months, he had the Muslims pray in the direction of Jerusalem (instead of toward the Kaaba) and introduced a fast modelled on the Jewish fast. And he included the names of the Jewish Patriarchs in the Koran (but under their new Muslim identity, of course).

But the recalcitrant Jews rejected Mohammad’s claim that his prophethood was the fulfilment of their own prophecies and they had the scriptures to prove it, which did not jive with the Koran. In fact, they mocked him. So the obvious conclusion, for Mohammad anyway, was that the Jews had falsified their own scriptures, thereby incurring Allah’s wrath. (This is why the Koranic phrase “those who have incurred Your [Allah’s] wrath” is understood by all Muslim authorities to refer to the Jews. The Christians are “those who have gone astray.”) The People of the Book, then, botched their job as custodians because they concealed the revelations of the coming of the Prophet Mohammad. They had things coming to them. It didn’t take Mohammad too long to show his displeasure with the Jews, and among the many things he got accomplished during his years as a warrior-prophet were the expulsion from Medina of two of its Jewish tribes, the Banu Kaynuka and Banu Nadir, the complete annihilation of the third, the Banu Qurayza (800 men beheaded, women and children enslaved) and the complete subjugation of the Jewish tribes of Khaybar (whose land he stole, forcing them to become tenants and pay a large tribute in money and crops, essentially the first to be dhimmis4). Others who didn’t convert to Islam faced Allah’s wrath as dished out by Mohammad as well, but his particular animus was for the Jews. After Mohammad’s death, his followers cleansed the Arabian peninsula of all non-Muslims, who either converted to Islam or were killed or expelled. To this day, Saudi Arabia tolerates no citizens who are not Muslim, executes apostates, and forbids non-Muslim foreign workers from gathering for private worship. I am waiting for a UN resolution condemning Saudi Arabia for its oppression.

According to the Koran, Jews are all kinds of bad things. They are covenant breakers, they practise sorcery, they corrupted the Scriptures, they conceal truth with falsehood, they tried to extinguish Allah’s light, they are liars, they are vulgar and fools, haters of one another and full of enmity to their own (showing their immoral characters), they are people who have incurred the wrath of Allah, they are cursed and transformed into apes and swine, and the worst of Allah’s creation. That’s just a warm-up. According to Al-Maqdisi and Solomon, there are 500 direct and explicit negative references to Jews that can be taken from only eight of the suras or chapters (1 -5 and 7-9) and there are some 4000 verses (aya) which refer to Jews (and Christians) in some way. Thus, an enormous amount of the text in the Koran is devoted directly or indirectly to Mohammad’s obsession with the Jews, reflecting his rage that these original monotheists rejected his call to Islam. Many of the hadiths and much of the Sira (biography of Mohammad) are also concerned with the kuffar and Jews as the most hated thereof.

The first sura of the Koran, the Exordium, is very short. It praises Allah, then ends with a plea that He should guide believers to the straight path, and not the path of “those who have incurred your wrath nor of those who have gone astray.” Devout Muslims recite this sura every day in each of their five daily prayers. According to Al-Maqdisi and Solomon (a former teacher of sharia law and a convert to Christianity) reciting this amounts to a curse embedded in the key ritual prayer. The condemnations as referenced in the Koran, they say, are coming directly from Allah and therefore carry both temporal and eternal penalties.

Many verses of the Koran tell Muslims not to befriend Jews or Christians (e.g., 5:51: O you who have believed, do not take the Jews and the Christians as allies. They are [in fact] allies of one another. And whoever is an ally to them among you – then indeed, he is one of them. Indeed, Allah guides not the wrongdoing people).

Muslim invaders arrived in the Levant not long after Mohammad’s death in 632 and captured Jerusalem in 637. Since Islam claims the whole world for Allah, Muslims taking land away from its original inhabitants is seen as reclaiming it for Allah and natives who aren’t converted or killed become dhimmis. Once land has been claimed for Allah, it becomes dar-al-Islam (house of Islam) and must remain so forever. For this reason, Muslims believe that they are still entitled to al-Andalus (Spain).

But not all land is equally special. The entire area of the Holy Land, including what is now Palestine and Israel, and especially Jerusalem, is considered a waqf or religious endowment from Allah and therefore the perpetual property of the Muslim umma and to be regarded as sacred. Under no circumstances should such sacred land ever be ruled by infidels (the Hamas charter is clear on this).

Judaism and Christianity arose in the Holy Land, but what makes it special to Islam, whose prophet never set foot outside Arabia? Mohammad wanted to establish Islam’s claim to the Holy Land, as he was last of the Abrahamic line of prophets. So he went to Jerusalem – magically.

Mohammad had a dream or a vision (some believe he took a real corporeal trip) in which he, guided by the Angel Gabriel, rode a winged horse-like animal called Burak to Jerusalem. There Gabriel and Mohammad met Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and the other “Muslim” prophets, with Mohammad leading them in prayer, thereby establishing his supremacy over them all. Later, he flew with Gabriel to each of the seven heavens, meeting different prophets at each level and finally meeting Allah. Counselled by Moses, who keeps sending him back to Allah, Mohammad bargains Allah down from the 50 daily prayers the deity at first demanded to five. (Note that Mohammad, not Moses, is the only direct intercessor with Allah.) This Night Journey (al-Isra’ wa al-Miraaj) is not described in the Koran, where it is only mentioned in sura 17:1, but is detailed in the Sira and some hadiths. Mohammad hoped that his claim of a close encounter with all the important prophets and of chumming around with Moses would convince the Jews that he was their Expected One, but again they ridiculed him.

To stamp the supremacy of Islam on the birthplace of Judaism, the Holy Land, and Jerusalem as its capital in particular, Mohammad based several Islamic doctrines on his Night Journey (his total supremacy over all the prophets, five daily ritual prayers, his exclusive right to intercession with Allah). Belief in the Night Journey became an integral part of Islam and sharia rulings on waqf reflect this. Modern day Islamic theologians justify the Islamic right to hegemony in Palestine on the “disbelief of the Jews” and the fact that the land does not belong to those who lived there first but to those who would establish the laws of Allah there. Even those Jews who bought and paid for land in the 1930s and 1940s before Israel was created have no title to it from the Islamic perspective of waqf.

To have Jews governing any part of Palestine and especially its capital Jerusalem with its Islamic holy sites (like the Dome of the Rock, built on the Temple Mount sacred to Jews) is an affront to Islam and to Allah. In the words of Bat Ye’or

Hatred of the Jews is prescribed Islamic doctrine. The Islamic source documents prescribing enmity toward the Jews (and Christians) continue to be affirmed by all Islamic authorities and by all Islamic regimes, Sunni and Shiite. In 1968, the “Fourth Conference on the Academy of Islamic Research” attended by elite theologians of many Muslim countries was held at Al-Azhar University in Cairo following the defeat of the Arab forces that had attacked Israel a year earlier in the Six-Day War. The proceedings were summarized in a paper by D.F. Green, who listed six recurring themes: Jews are the enemy of Allah and of humanity, Jews manifest in themselves a historical continuity of evil qualities, Jews are riff-raff and do not constitute a true people or nation, the State of Israel is the culmination of the historical and cultural depravity of the Jews, Islam is superior to all other religions and is guaranteed to ultimately triumph, and finally (and highly relevant here) that it was an outrage that Jews, who traditionally had an inferior status under Arab Islam, would have defeated the Arabs, have their own state and cause the contraction of the abode of Islam (dar-al-Islam).

It is worth emphasizing that al-Azhar University is the most prestigious centre of Sunni Islamic learning in the world. The august theologians of the Muslim world who gathered there in 1968 were in no way seeking new interpretations of their holy texts that would allow the peaceful coexistence with Jews and others. Rather, they all but endorsed a Jewish genocide. As summarized by Green, the assembled Muslim theologians, representing the highest Islamic authorities in the entire Muslim world, including most of the non-Arab Muslim countries, arrived at the following determination:

The ideas expounded in this volume (i.e., conference proceedings) could lead to the urge to liquidate Israel (politicide) and the Jews (genocide). If the evil of the Jews is immutable and permanent, transcending time and circumstances, and impervious to all hopes of reform, there is only one way to cleanse the world of them – by their complete annihilation. Did the participants of this conference intend this, and were they conscious of the dangers concealed in such reasoning? Yet its inner logic could easily lead to such a conclusion.6

Koran, Sura 2:216: Jihad (holy fighting in Allah’s cause) is ordained for you (Muslims) though you dislike it, and it may be that you dislike a thing which is good for you and that you like a thing which is bad for you. Allah knows but you do not know.

Islam views all of non-Muslim humankind as being in a state of enmity with Allah, who must be brought back into the fold by violent jihad if they reject the initial “peaceful” overtures of da’wa, the Islamic mission call. Al-Maqdisi and Solomon argue that a discussion of what people consider to be “the spectrums” of jihad is beside the point. How did Islam spread from Arabia to Egypt, Libya, Tunis, Morocco, Algeria, and elsewhere, they ask? Were the conquering armies composed of learned men, who proclaimed their message through peaceful dialogue, or of brutal assassins who forced their victims to embrace Islam or become virtual slaves?

A psychologist could have a field day analyzing how Islam turns non-Muslims, however peacefully they may be living, into the “aggressors” against Islam, with Jews as worst of the haters.7 Says Sura 5:82: You will surely find the most intense of the people in animosity toward the believers to be the Jews and those who associate others with Allah (pagans); and you will find the nearest of them in affection to the believers those who say, “We are Christians.” That is because among them are priests and monks and because they are not arrogant.

Liberating Palestine is really about deconstructing Israel, say al-Maqdisi and Solomon (and many others). While many people may sincerely think that peace is possible with a “Road Map” or Two-State solution, the Islamic theological perspective that a Jewish state on the waqf of Palestine is a non-starter remains unchanged. Some of Israel’s Islamic enemies are upfront about the religious rationale behind their desire to destroy Israel. Others will play to Western audiences, pretending to support the quest for a peaceful political solution, while sending another message to their Muslim public showing that they understand the Islamic imperative to destroy Israel; this second message is often given only in Arabic or phrased in such a way that the West remains oblivious to its true meaning.

The most prominent examples of those who openly declare their desire to destroy Israel are Hamas (the Muslim Brotherhood’s chapter in Palestine), the Lebanese Shiite organization Hizbullah (the Party of God), the Islamic Republic of Iran (which has made Israel’s destruction #1 on its agenda, despite having no direct stake in Palestine), and al-Qaeda and its many offshoots and permutations.

Among those who speak out of both sides of their mouth on the matter of peace with Israel are many Arab countries, Islamic religious leaders, and the Palestinian Authority. This contingent will “concentrate on the hot button issue of the land, capitalize on the world sympathy for the plight of the Palestinians, weave through the recognition of the ‘peaceful nature of Islam’ and other building blocks of the Islamic argument.”8 They have to find a way to reconcile the irreconcilable: the theologically unacceptable Nakbah or ultimate catastrophe – referring to Israel’s creation and subsequent victories over Arab armies – and the political reality of having to live with Israel’s existence. Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser popularized the term Naksah, meaning setback, as a way of combating the radicalization movement in his own country and engaging with non-Muslims in seeking political solutions. Since the real issue was theological, however, Muslim Arab leaders used the term Nakbah and Naksah interchangeably. The Six-Day War of 1967 dealt a mortal blow to the concept of Naksah and led Nasser to call the 1968 Conference of the leading Ulama (Islamic clergy). While the West looked upon the conference as irrelevant rhetoric, al-Maqdisi and Solomon argue that it actually gave legitimacy to the Nasser regime in the vast majority of Islamic countries, such that their leaders came to embrace total Jihad against Israel and not negotiations, or at worst keep the illusion of negotiations while planning toward the full Jihad. The word “Naksah” did not feature in the 1968 Islamic conference. President Anwar Sadat, who came to power in 1970 following Nasser’s death, combined the concepts of Nakbah and Naksah, proclaiming his personal Islamic identity with the Nakbah position while continuing to pursue the Naksah position of a political solution through negotiations following the war of 1973.9 Sadat was assassinated by Islamists in 1981 for having made a peace treaty with Israel.

PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat signed the Oslo Accord in 1993 for which he, along with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994. But Arafat often assured his followers that he regarded the Oslo Peace accord as similar to the Hudeibiya treaty that Mohammad made with the Quraish tribe. This would mean nothing to most non-Muslims, but most Muslims – including Palestinians – would understand that this treaty, resented by Mohammad’s Muslim followers, was supposed to last for 10 years but was broken after only 18 months by Mohammad on a convenient pretext.10

Sheikh Yousef Al-Qaradawi is the chairman of the International Union of Muslim Scholars. He has a religious broadcast (Sharia and Life) on Al Jazeera with an estimated worldwide audience of 60 million and serves as chief religious scholar for the website Islam Online, that he helped found.11 Speaking to Western audiences, he said:

While addressing his Muslim constituency in Arabic, and reflecting Allah’s mandated perspective, he said:

Refugees of the “Palestinian Diaspora” who settled in Western countries effectively developed the political case for the secular state of Palestine, becoming very influential in academia, the media and think tanks. Most advocates of Palestinian refugees do not address the fact that they are segregated and discriminated against in Arab countries where they are not granted full citizenship, as they are in the West. Displaced Palestinians and their descendants better serve the Arab/Muslim cause as permanent refugees than as integrated citizens. The argument for the “right of return” is of course an argument to overwhelm Israel with non-Jewish, often hostile inhabitants. The survivors and descendants (inside and outside of Palestine) of the 711,000 Palestinians displaced in 1948 now number about 5 million.13 It would not be long before the Jews were once again reduced to dhimmi status. Is there any reason to think that the treatment of Jews as a religious minority in “Palestine” (whatever its political borders would be) would be better than the discrimination, brutality and death inflicted on religious minorities as we are now witnessing around the Muslim world?

Why is the ratio of the Palestinian versus Israeli dead so skewed, at 30-to-1? Israel’s Iron Dome has successfully deflected most of the thousands of rockets launched by Hamas and it has built bomb shelters for its citizens, who are warned by sirens of impending attacks. Hamas builds tunnels to Israel so its militants can attack not only Israeli military targets but its citizens (some of the tunnels opened near kibbutzim). It keeps weapons caches and rocket launchers in densely populated areas and uses the Palestinian people as human shields. The death of Palestinians civilians by Israeli fire directed at Hamas targets embedded in homes, schools, and hospitals serves both to incite civilian hatred toward Israel and to garner sympathy and support from the rest of the world.15 We should bear in mind that the same people who show us heartrending images of children killed or injured by Israeli weapons would be quite prepared to strap a suicide vest on those same children and send them to their deaths to take down Israeli civilians. Former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir said: “We will only have peace with the Arabs when they love their children more than they hate us.” With Islamic leaders urging mothers to nurse their children with hatred of the Jews, that day is a long way off.

Why would Israel bomb Gaza when the images of rubble and of dead and distraught Palestinians are bringing it so much bad PR? Could it be that it is fighting for its very existence and the lives of its citizens – and in a broader existential sense, for the right of Jews to live? To condemn Israel for attacking Hamas military targets embedded in civilian infrastructure without acknowledging the religiously mandated sacred hatred that motivates Hamas to launch its rockets at Israel can hardly be considered objective.

Hamas may have miscalculated in this current offensive, with only Turkey and Qatar supporting it. But the opposition is not based on a rejection of the Islamic doctrine that drives Hamas, but on strategic considerations. If the political state of Israel ceased to exist, would Islam be at peace with the world? Is it the existence of Israel that causes planes to be flown into buildings, public transit and sports events in major cities to be bombed, schoolgirls to be kidnapped, Jews to be targeted for death in Europe, ever more Muslims in Western countries to openly declare and sometimes violently express their commitment to jihad and sharia law, and a caliphate to declare itself in one of the endless supply of Islamic failed states mired in sectarian and jihadi violence of indescribable savagery? Or is Israel merely the front line of the modern Islamic jihad to fight the enemies of Allah (all non-Muslims) and establish dar-al-Islam?

The Gordian knot that is the conflict in Palestine is not about land, it’s about Islamic sacred hatred of the Jews.