By: Mordechai Kedar
It is only natural that liberals who have decoupled themselves from religious thinking, spiritual emotions and a kinship with the divine find it difficult to conceive of people prepared to wage war, kill and be killed for spiritual reasons and religious values. Liberals will instead attempt to find reasons that are rooted in their own world of concepts for any fight against them, such as oppression, occupation or poverty, then try to resolve the conflicts by eliminating those reasons. It never occurs to them to look for their enemies’ motivations in a realm they are unfamiliar with and do not recognize as valid – in religion.
Israel’s most bitter enemies are the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Islamic resistance movement of Hamas, the Islamic Jihad organization and the party of Allah – Hezbollah. There is deep religious significance apparent in the very names of these organizations, a significance well demonstrated in their foundational as well as mundane texts, which are all immersed in religious dialectic, passages from the Koran and quotes from the Hadiths (Islamic oral teachings).
The attitude of all these organizations toward the Jewish state is informed first and foremost by their religious conceptualization of Jews and Judaism. This conception is made up of four primary layers.
The first basic layer is the religious Islamic idea that Judaism is a “Din Batil” – an invalid religion – since it was canceled by Christianity through replacement theory two thousand years ago, and Christianity was in its turn replaced in the 7th century by Islam, the only true religion on earth (Din al-haqq). Judaism is then doubly cancelled – first by Christianity and then again by Islam, and there is no reason to establish a state for a nonexistent religion.
The second layer is the territorial component. According to Islamic zealots, the land of Palestine was governed for nearly 1300 years (638-1917) by Muslim rule, and while all states on the planet can obtain entry into Dar-al Islam (the House of Islam, i.e. countries ruled by Islam) there is no way for them to leave. To Muslims, the British conquest in the First World War of what is now Israel was illegal and unacceptable. Therefore, Britain’s Balfour Declaration recognizing the rights of the Jewish people to establish a “national home” in the land of their forefathers, as well as the states’ agreement in the 1920 San Remo Conference to reestablish a national home for Jews in the land of Israel are considered illegal and contrary to Islamic doctrine.
The third layer is the national component. According to Islamic zealots, Jews do not constitute a nation but are rather gathered in communities within other nations: Jews in the US are Americans who practice the Mosaic religion alongside other Americans of other faiths; Jews in Iraq are Arab Iraqis who practice the Mosaic religion, alongside other Iraqis who follow Mohammed or Jesus, and so on. The Jewish communities vary in language (Arabic, English, French, Spanish etc.), cuisine, dress, external appearance and even prayer texts. All this leads them to the inevitable conclusion that there is no Jewish nation and there is no need to establish a state for a non-existent nation.
The fourth layer is the Islamic religious ruling that Jews and Christians must live under Islamic protection as “wards” (Ahl-al dhimma) who have less rights. They must pay the jizya (head tax) by hand in subjugation;[1] they are forbidden to ride on a horse, only donkeys; they must wear a badge – yellow for Jews and purple for Christians – so passersby will not touch them since they are impure (najes); they are forbidden to communicate with residents of other states in order to prevent them disclosing the weak points of the Islamic states’ defenses; when walking the streets they must use the sewage drain rather than the clean dry pavement; and other like duties are imposed to humiliate the Jews and Christians who disbelieve the “true faith” and adhere to “canceled religions” – false faiths.
The conclusion of all four of these layers is that Jews (as well as Christians) have no right to a country, an army, a police system, a government, a state, sovereignty or independence; the existence of the state of Israel is entirely contrary to the Islamic conception of those who so view Jews and Judaism.
To their mind, the state of Israel is first and foremost a theological challenge, since the renewal of Judaic life poses an existential danger to Islam as a religion whose purpose is to replace the earlier religions, abolish them and build itself up from their construction materials: people, places, events, philosophy and stories. Therefore, the very existence of the state of Israel obligates Muslims who are faithful to their religion and to Allah to wage jihad against Jewish statehood, to save Islam from the danger of a reanimated Judaism in the form of a state where free Jews govern themselves.
To Islamic zealots, the fact that the Jewish state rules over its Muslim citizens contravenes Islamic law, and even worse is the fact that the Jewish state dares to fight against Muslims and even kill them, since Jews who would do so as wards of Islam would lose their status and justify a jihad against them.
The worst thing for jihadists is the Jewish prayer at the Temple Mount, since they know it is the historic location of the two Jewish Temples. Jews praying on the Temple Mount is a public display of Judaism returning to its place as a religion that is alive and relevant, thus posing a theological risk to the existence of Islam.
In Islamic conception, the restoration of the state of Israel is the result of an anti-Muslim Jewish-Christian conspiracy intended to revive Judaism through the establishment and entrenchment of a Jewish state, beginning with Balfour the evangelist’s Declaration in 1917, up to President Trump’s move of the American embassy to Jerusalem in 2018 under pressure from evangelist leader John Hagee, Chairman of Christians United for Israel (CUFI).
If so, where is a solution to be found? “Will the sword forever consume”?
Not necessarily. Islam dictates a way to make temporary peace with non-believers. Such temporary peace was made by Islam’s Prophet Mohammed in the year 628, when he came to an agreement with the non-believers of Mecca set to last for nine years, nine months and nine days. Mohammed signed the agreement in the village of Hudaibiyah, thus granting the agreement the name “The Treaty of Hudaibiyah”. In 630, two years after it was signed, Mohammed broke the agreement, conquered Mecca, burned its idols and took its women.
Islamic sages derived two lessons from this story: first, when the Islamic party is weak and the non-believer strong and dangerous, Muslims may sign agreements for temporary truces; second, if and when Allah grants Muslims the ability and opportunity to harm the non-believers, they may do so within the period of the temporary peace. Why? Because so did the Prophet Mohammed, who serves as an example to Muslims in all places and times.
Therefore, as long as Israel is unified, united, dangerous, disproportionate and invincible it will have temporary peace, and should Israel remain unified, united, dangerous, disproportionate and invincible, it will have that temporary peace forever.
Dr. Kedar is a well-known scholar of Arab and Islamic culture, researcher, and lecturer at Bar Ilan University’s The Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies.
