The War is Not About Palestine

Even at this late date, many people in the West still think “a two-state solution,” with Israel and Palestine living side by side in peace, will end the conflict in the Middle East. Yet Muslim clerics have for years made it clear that this is not true.

A Qatari sheikh, Muhammad Al-Muraikhi, stated this plainly on Qatar TV years ago, on January 9, 2009. “We do not treat the Jews as our enemies just because they occupied Palestine,” he explained, “or because they occupied a precious part of our Arab and Islamic world. We will treat the Jews as our enemies even if they return Palestine to us, because they are infidels. They rejected Allah and His messengers.”

An Egyptian imam, Muhammad Hussein Ya’qoub, declared eight days later in a televised sermon that Muslim hatred of Jews had nothing to do with Israel and everything to do with the Qur’an:

If the Jews left Palestine to us, would we start loving them? Of course not. We will never love them. Absolutely not. The Jews are infidels—not because I say so, and not because they are killing Muslims, but because Allah said: “The Jews say that Uzair is the son of Allah, and the Christians say that Christ is the son of Allah. These are the words from their mouths. They imitate the sayings of the disbelievers before. May Allah fight them. How deluded they are.” [Qur’an 9:30] It is Allah who said that they are infidels.

Your belief regarding the Jews should be, first, that they are infidels, and second, that they are enemies. They are enemies not because they occupied Palestine. They would have been enemies even if they did not occupy a thing. Allah said: “You shall find the strongest men in enmity to the disbelievers to be the Jews and the polytheists.” [Qur’an 5:82] Third, you must believe that the Jews will never stop fighting and killing us. They [fight] not for the sake of land and security, as they claim, but for the sake of their religion: “And they will not cease fighting you until they turn you back [from] your religion, if they can.” [Qur’an 2:217] This is it. We must believe that our fighting with the Jews is eternal, and it will not end until the final battle—and this is the fourth point. You must believe that we will fight, defeat, and annihilate them, until not a single Jew remains on the face of the Earth.

Ya’qoub’s peroration was just as chilling:

As for you Jews—the curse of Allah upon you. The curse of Allah upon you, whose ancestors were apes and pigs. You Jews have sown hatred in our hearts, and we have bequeathed it to our children and grandchildren. You will not survive as long as a single one of us remains.

Also on Egyptian television on the same day, January 17, 2009, two other Muslim clerics, Sheik Said Al-Afani and Sheik Muhammad Abd Al-Salam, reiterated that the war against Israel was all about Islamic imperatives. The Jews, said Al-Afani, “are the accursed people, who incurred the wrath of Allah. They are the offspring of snakes and vipers, the slayers of our Prophet Muhammad, whose death was a consequence of his being poisoned by a Jewish woman.”

Contradicting the accepted wisdom in the West, he continued: “Our hatred of them is purely on religious grounds, and not because of the pure, sacred land, which was blessed by Allah, or because of Gaza…not only because of Al-Aqsa and so on. We hate them, first and foremost, because of their enmity towards Allah, and because they slayed our prophets.”

Then Muhammad Abd Al-Salam added: “Let me clarify that it is our duty to hate them, as part of our faith.” To this Al-Afani readily agreed. Al-Salam explained: “People have become confused about this. Some think that it is a territorial or a national issue, or that it has to do with the blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque, but the issue is much broader—it is a matter of faith. We are obligated to hate them because they are a murderous people, and the enemies of all that is good and of Islam.”

A Muslim cleric from Egypt, Sheikh Salam Abd Al-Qawi, emphasized on Egypt’s Al-Nas TV on January 8, 2009, that hatred of the Jews is a religious obligation mandated by Islam: “Hating the enemies of Allah is very important. We must teach our children, our youngsters, our brothers, and all the Muslims to hate the accursed Zionist Jews. Why not? They teach their children to hate us. Our hatred of the Jews is based upon our faith. The Koran tells us to hate them, not to love them…. We must teach our children to obey Allah, to obey the Prophet Muhammad, and to hate the Jews, the Zionists, and what the Zionists are planning. We must raise them on the Koranic verses that call to fight and wage jihad for the sake of Allah. We want to raise our children to love jihad for the sake of Allah. We must teach our children that death for the sake of Allah is our most lofty goal.”

All these years later, as the war rages more heatedly than ever, it still is.