“Allah is the best of deceivers” (Qur’an 3:54). Even Abu Bakr, the first of the so-called Rightly-Guided Caliphs, is reported to have said, “By Allah! I would not rest assured and feel safe from the deception of Allah, even if I had one foot in Paradise” (Sam Shamoun, “Allah: The greatest deceiver of them all”).
If a Muslim cannot trust his own God, then nothing is certain. Yet Muslims must worship such a God, and hope for the best. Islam, the religion of truth, thus negates itself, leaving befuddled votaries and a dysfunctional ummah. This endures because to Muslims, truth and loyalty are the same thing. Objective truth is not reliable, and consequently much less significant. Islam, the perfect and final religion, came to replace all preceding religions, starting with Judaism. To the Muslim, therefore, the Jew stands as the original cause of all his troubles. Jew-hatred is an inescapable consequence of the existence of Islam. That a land should once again be ruled by Jews raises the genocide hadith to red alert:
The last hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them until the Jews would hide themselves behind a stone or a tree and a stone or a tree would say: Muslim, or the servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him; but the tree Gharqad would not say, for it is the tree of the Jews, (Sahih Muslim 6985).
The Roots of Jew-Hatred in Islam
This antithesis of Islam and Judaism finds its purest distillation in the existence of a Jewish state, and worse, located right in the heart of “Muslim lands,” its founding the cause of a population of homeless Muslims. These “Palestinians” became the custodians of all the ummah’s Jew-hatred, and tasked with wiping out the Jews on behalf of all Muslims. The “Palestinian nation” of the Muslims became the evil counterpoint to the Levy tribe of the Jews. Their slaughter of Jews on October 7 brought Muslims onto the streets around the world in rapturous gratitude for this “moment of triumph”.
The ummah’s shock and trauma at the abolition of the moribund Ottoman Caliphate in 1924 by the ostentatious modernism of the Republic of Turkey, founded a year earlier, led directly to the 1928 founding of the Muslim Brotherhood. Its founders perceived that Sunni Islam needed a caliphate for our times and modelled itself on the rising Nazis, complete with Gestapo and Green Shirts, and presented itself as prosecuting jihad for a new world, thus creating Islamic modernism under the leadership of the Supreme Guide, Hassan Al-Banna. Unlike a caliphate, the Muslim Brotherhood holds no territory, yet like a caliphate, it enjoys supranational jurisdiction.
For Al-Banna, the 1920s, 30s and 40s held an existential threat, not only to the Muslim Brotherhood, but to the Muslim ummah: the “Jewish modernism” that Zionist immigration was bringing into the heart of “Muslim lands”. In a 1949 interview with American journalist John Roy Carlson, Al-Banna explained:
We are not eager to have a parliament of the representatives of the people, or a cabinet of ministers, unless such representatives and ministers are Qur’anic Moslems. If we do not find them, then we must ourselves serve as the parliament. Allah and the religious councils will limit our authority so that no one has to fear dictatorship. We aim to smash modernism in government and society. In Palestine our first duty as Moslems is to crush Zionism, which is Jewish modernism. It is our patriotic duty. The Qur’an commands it.
Al-Banna did not say “religious duty”, but “patriotic duty”. The Brotherhood was ensuring that the nascent Arab nation evidently emerging from the rubble of the Ottoman Empire, cemented its identity in Islam and became a formidable force for jihad, in the first instance, against the Jews of Mandatory Palestine. The Shi’a cleric Ruhollah Khomeini was a young man when the caliphate fell. Fifty years later, as Ayatollah Ruhollah (“spirit of God”) Khomeini, he would do the same for Shi’a Islam by establishing the Islamic Republic of Iran under himself as Supreme Leader. Both Al-Banna and Khomeini suckled the milk of Nazism and both burnt to avenge the humiliation of the Muslims at the abolition of their caliphate.
From the Caliphate to the Muslim Brotherhood
This Brotherhood determination to expunge “Jewish modernism” from Mandatory Palestine, in 1964-5 offered the Soviet KGB the kernel for its “Palestinians”. By injecting this kernel into the Arab flotsam and jetsam from the Israeli War of Independence and the establishment of the State of Israel, they devised the perfect union of Islam’s jihad, Nazism’s organised genocide and the Comintern’s “national liberation”. Robert Spencer, in The Palestinian Delusion, shows that the “Palestinian nation” that so many today lose their senses over, is nothing but a squalid KGB Cold War side-project. They repurposed an Egyptian non-entity born in Cairo as Yasser Arafat, the quintessential “Palestinian”. Even the “Palestinian” flag is repurposed from the collapsed 1958 Arab Federation of Iraq and Jordan.
A Muslim Brotherhood official, Labib Bey, boasting of “at least twenty thousand” foreign Muslims rushing to wage jihad against the Jews in Palestine, told Carlson, “Our boys believe that by fighting the Jew, they will make a place for themselves in Paradise. We will not leave Palestine until the last Zionist Jew is silenced.” Carlson quotes the Brotherhood’s newspaper, Ikhwan el Muslimin, describing the scene at Port Said station:
Last Sunday was one of Allah’s days in Port Said, for at one o’clock in the morning there arrived the Cairo train filled with people going to fight in the Holy War of Palestine. These faithful believers jumped on to the platform in Port Said, each carrying his own belongings, and marched in line to the Moslem Brothers’ House as compact as the stones of a building. They were enthusiastically and energetically prepared to go on their way to the field of action and to fight for Allah. It was lovely to hear them singing: “Struggle is our way, and to die for Allah our highest ideal.”
These events transpired sixteen years before the “Palestinians” were conceived in Moscow and gestated in situ to take over “the Holy War of Palestine” and to “fight the Jew… until the last Zionist Jew is silenced.” The Palestinians, therefore, once they had come into existence, came to personify the Muslim hope for Islam’s redemption.
To destroy the Palestinians is to destroy Islam.
Muhammad Bin Salman knows this; Ayatollah Ali Khamenei knows this. Saudi antipathy towards the Muslim Brotherhood and Qatar, and UAE subversion of the Muslim Brotherhood across several countries, parallel with unprecedented developments in the ummah, add up to Islam barrelling towards self-destruction. For Israel, the Abraham Accords renders the Palestinians irrelevant, but for the Abraham Accords Arab states, the Palestinians are central to their aim of dismantling Islam. A clear sign that their subversion of Islam has moved up a gear will be Saudi Arabia no longer paying lip-service to supporting the Palestinians, and openly turning hostile towards them.
If Palestinians have any aspirations at all, they are entirely negative, entirely destructive. Muslims who are not Palestinians still have some room for manoeuvre, since the Qur’an recognises that not every Muslim is temperamentally suited to killing:
Warfare is ordained for you, though it is hateful unto you; but it may happen that ye hate a thing which is good for you, and it may happen that ye love a thing which is bad for you. Allah knoweth, ye know not (Qur’an 2:216)
Not so the Palestinians; they had that gene turned off. That a Palestinian medical doctor, Mustafa Barghouti, cannot bring himself to express reservations about, let alone condemn, the cold-blooded Palestinian slaughter of well over a thousand Jews, men, women and children, the elderly, the disabled alike, should be a salutary warning to all who dream of peace with the Palestinians.
Israel’s early catastrophic mistakes were many. Relevant here are: relinquishing the Temple Mount to the Arabs; recognising the Palestinians as a distinct people; and accepting the Palestine Liberation Organisation as the “sole, authentic representative of the Palestinian people”. Through such gratuitous actions, Israel became responsible for this “nation” not having a state. The root of the Oslo disaster and the decades long “peace process,” through which Israel’s destruction could be steadily engineered, lie in these mistakes. According to Professor Efraim Karsh:
As early as August 1968, Arafat defined the PLO’s strategic objective as “the transfer of all resistance bases” into the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, occupied by Israel during the June 1967 war, “so that the resistance may be gradually transformed into a popular armed revolution.” This, he reasoned, would allow the PLO to undermine Israel’s way of life by “preventing immigration and encouraging emigration … destroying tourism … weakening the Israeli economy and diverting the greater part of it to security requirements … [and] creating and maintaining an atmosphere of strain and anxiety that will force the Zionists to realize that it is impossible for them to live in Israel.” (Efraim Karsh, “Arafat’s Grand Strategy”, Middle East Quarterly, Spring 2004, pp3-11, p3)
Yasser Arafat’s 1968 stated intention to, “…force the Zionists to realize that it is impossible for them to live in Israel,” recalls the Muslim Brotherhood declaring two decades earlier, “We will not leave Palestine until the last Zionist Jew is silenced.” The Palestinians have never concealed their intention to kill as many Jews as it would take to drive the rest out of Israel. Prof. Karsh says of this strategy:
This [phased] strategy, dating from June 1974, has served as the PLO’s guiding principle ever since. It stipulates that the Palestinians should seize whatever territory Israel is prepared or compelled to cede to them and use it as a springboard for further territorial gains until achieving the “complete liberation of Palestine.” (p2)
Palestinian Strategy: Destruction, Not Statehood
The Palestinians would immediately use a state, any kind of state, to kill Jews and destroy Israel! Yet, Jews shudder at the very thought of expelling a single Palestinian Arab. If anything, they want to give them a state, “so we can live side-by-side with them in peace.” Is it not built into our genes to either destroy those who would kill us, or to put as much distance as possible between us and them? Three years into the genocidal war the Palestinians launched against Israel on October 7, more Israelis than ever are alert to this danger. Yet at the same time, there is increasing talk of giving the Palestinians cantons or emirates, and not even as a hopeful solution to their genocidal ambitions, but as an act of responsible Israeli stewardship.
Palestinian emirates is the brainchild of Dr Mordechai Kedar. To construct this idea, Dr Kedar had to imbue the Palestinians with an aspiration they lack, namely, to have their own state. Since they never wanted a state, the form of that state, whether a nation-state, an emirate or anything else, is irrelevant. Timor Aklin, a Jewish convert from Islam, explains:
“The Palestinians don’t have a goal. Their goal is to wipe out the Jews, but then, once the Jews are wiped out, what happens next? We wipe each other out. If we can’t wipe each other out, we’ll wait for the Jordanians, or the Egyptians, or the Lebanese or the Syrians, or whatever crazy guy is going to show up fifteen, twenty, thirty, fifty years from now. There is no real vision for a state. That’s not what they’re interested in.”
It remains to be explained how giving the Palestinians one kind of state amounts to rewarding terrorism, while giving them another kind of state would not. Whether militarised or demilitarised, a nation-state or emirates, none of these alters the fact that they are being rewarded for terrorism. The question of whether the state they receive is likely to succeed or fail, is: firstly, to presuppose the resolution of the question of reward for terrorism, both within Israel and between Israel and the Palestinians, in favour of providing them with a state; secondly, to accept that the Palestinians are and remain the responsibility of Israel; and thirdly, through Israel’s quest for the perfect model for Palestinian success after they have their own state, to perpetuate Israel’s self-imposed responsibility for the Palestinians.
Such advocates further presume that a Palestinian state’s “success” equates to the cessation of terrorism against Israel. Similar thinking confounded the early Labour Zionists, and their inheritors, who labour under the illusion that if we give them something good, they will stop wanting to kill us, thinking amply demonstrated to lead to catastrophe.
Israel’s Choices and the Iron Wall
The idea of cantonising the Palestinian population into clan-based emirates draws on the successful clan-based emirates on the Gulf. There is only one problem with this uncritical transplant: the Gulf Arabs are not and never were “Palestinians”. In other words, though both societies are similarly clan-based, unlike the Palestinian Arabs, Gulf Arabs do not have a depraved identity. Their national affirmation does not require them to annihilate another people. The Palestinian Arabs cannot attain national affirmation without exterminating the Jews. As nations, “Palestinians” and Jews are antithetical.
To get around this, Dr Kedar makes a convoluted and perhaps unconscious, but nonetheless unjustifiable distinction. He associates a non-existent, Palestinian state, the Palestinian Authority, with existing, failed Arab states, such as Libya and Yemen, yet does not associate an existing, Palestinian state, Gaza, with existing, successful Arab states, such as Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates, although he cannot entirely avoid doing so, as in Arutz 7 in 2014:
No one in the world can guarantee that a Palestinian state, if established in the West Bank, will not become a Hamas state, through elections, as happened in January 2006, or through a violent takeover as happened in Gaza in June 2007. …the only viable solution is the establishment of eight Palestinian Emirates: One already exists in Gaza. (My emphasis)
Dr Kedar unwittingly reveals that, irrespective of the form of state the Palestinian Arabs end up with, that state must necessarily fail as long as Israel continues to exist. Gaza, after all, was already analogous to the UAE, as Dr Kedar himself implies, a UAE-gone-wrong. While the UAE is indeed, Singapore-on-the-Gulf, the very suggestion of Singapore-on-the-med deeply offends the Gazans. Because they are Palestinian Arabs, emirates will be just another form of greenhouses and will go the same way. Dr Kedar does not explain why every single Palestinian emirate should not immediately become, or strive to become, another Qatar, the highly-successful clan-based emirate that created Hamas. That makes two existing emirates that want to see Israel destroyed and one of them is not even Palestinian; their commonality is the Muslim Brotherhood. Indeed, eight such emirates right inside Israel would suit the Brotherhood exceedingly well.
The Palestinian emirates plan ignores the centrality of Islam to Palestinian motivations—Hamas, after all, is the Islamic Resistance Movement—and specifically, the centrality of jihad to Islam. Hamas’s Muslim Brotherhood parent maintains, “Allah is our objective; the Prophet is our leader; the Qur’an is our law; Jihad is our way; dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope,” (My emphasis). Retired IDF General Amos Yadlin famously lamented:
We built a wall that extended 30-40 metres underground. We were very effective against rockets, both long- and short-range, thanks to an early warning system. We have the best anti-rocket system in the world, the Iron Dome. When Hamas understood rockets won’t work and tunnels they cannot use, they developed another strategy. This is where Israel failed. Hamas used tactics that superseded Israel.
Hamas did not only used, but found, tactics that superseded Israel. Observers have long noted the incredible stagnation and backwardness of Muslim thinking, ethics and societies. We contrast the stunning number of Noble Prizes awarded to Jewish scientists against Muslims failing to provide modern sewerage systems even in their glitziest cities and skyscrapers. Yet primitive Hamas managed to confound an Israeli General’s best technological defences.
Muslims are, indeed, creative, even ingenious, only that all their creativity and ingenuity go into deceit and jihad. Shari’a forbids any other kind of creativity. Muslims frown upon innovation, unless it advances Islam, e.g., by introducing sneakier ways to kill non-Muslims, or more subtle ways to hoodwink them.
Palestinian are perfectly capable of pursuing success, as General Yadlin attests. It is only that they have a different idea of success to everyone else. Palestinians are well aware of this difference; Israelis remain blind to it. Israelis are appalled that instead of spending the billions the Palestinians receive on developing Gaza, they build terror infrastructure instead. To Muslims, this is a perfectly logical thing to do. This life does not matter. What matters is the life hereafter, which is why to Palestinians, Jew-killing is the highest priority. It hastens the Last Hour.
If Israelis knew the Palestinians, they would know that nothing will stop them, not a wall that extends 30-40 metres underground, not a neat string of emirates, from coming after the Jews to kill them, nothing, except physically removing every single Palestinian from Israel, Gaza and Judea and Samaria plus, and this is most crucial, demolishing Al-Aqsa. The efficacy of this ideological counter-attack is proclaimed in their Al-Aqsa Flood. It will have the same effect on the Palestinians as desecrating the divinity of Emperor Hirohito had on the Kokka-Shinto faithful. It will shatter the ummah, after which, provided Israel maintains a fearsome military ready to do unspeakable things to Muslims, Jews will be safe.
In all likelihood, however, Israelis will try yet again to meet halfway people who exist only to kill them. Witness the relief and excitement with which some who received the news of Hebron sheikhs asking for an emirate so they can join the Abraham Accords. A common maxim goes: if it seems too good to be true, it probably is. But no one wants to be the one to sound a word of caution. This same timidity underlies the invariable prefixing of “President Trump’s plan” and “voluntary” to any mention of moving Palestinians out of Gaza. It seems Jews always go for half-measures and call it victory, from which, invariably, the undefeated Arabs “negotiate” defeat back to the Jews.
After the failure of General Yadlin’s 30-40 metre wall, Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s iron wall beckons more urgently than ever. Beyond the wall should be of no concern to Israel, save for threats to the health and security of the Jewish State. Israel did not create the “Palestinians”. They are not and never were Israel’s responsibility. Israel either is the occupier, or she is not. There is no halfway.
