Islam, between the Zionism of the Koran and Palestinazism

يَا قَوْمِ ادْخُلُوا الْأَرْضَ الْمُقَدَّسَةَ الَّتِي كَتَبَ اللَّهُ لَكُمْ وَلَا تَرْتَدُّوا عَلَى أَدْبَارِكُمْ فَتَنْقَلِبُوا خَاسِرِينَ

“O my people, enter the sanctified land prescribed for you by Allah and do not retreat, for you will find yourselves on the losing side”.

In all these verses, the “Blessed Land” or “Hallowed Land” is none other than the “Promised Land” for the Sons of Israel, granted by Yahweh in the Torah of Moses (and by Allah in the Koran!) in all its borders, from East to West! Allah even enjoins the Sons of Israel not to “retreat” and to reclaim their homeland without fear of the enemy, otherwise they will “lose out” in battle!
Verses such as these, which bear witness to the ultra-Zionism of the writer of the Koran, would make a supporter of “Greater Israel” rejoice today. Moreover, he would not have expressed himself any differently from the writer of these Koranic verses, whereas the virulent anti-Israel of Muslims is more akin to a betrayal not only of the Koran, but also of Muhammad, the Angel Gabriel and Allah himself, than to any kind of Muslim loyalty or piety!
Not only Muslims, but also and above all pan-Arabist-palestinist-Islamists. Especially since the term “Palestine” does not appear anywhere in the Koran and is never mentioned! In fact, the Koran remains faithful to the original name of “Land of the Sons of Israel” (in Arabic “Ard Bani Israïl”). This is despite the fact that almost 500 years before the ‘revelation’ of the Koran, the Roman emperor Hadrian had renamed Judea and the whole of the ‘Land of Israel’ to ‘Palestine’ (originally a Hebrew word whose etymology is ‘invaders’), thus ‘punishing’ the Sons of Israel for having rebelled against Rome.

It is therefore inconceivable that the Koran ignored the term “Palestine”, imposed by Rome and which claimed to supplant the name “Israel”. And if the Koran never uses the word “Palestine”, it is because it disapproves of it!

And so all Muslims, whether Sunni or Shia or followers of other currents, sects and movements of Islam, who today use the term “Palestine” instead of the name “Israel” are unfaithful to the Koran and betray it!
So how can Muslims “live” with this betrayal?
A solution has apparently been found thanks to an exegesis entitled: “The good news beyond the hidden things“**.

But before explaining it, let’s take a brief historical digression:
Unable to “digest”, in the context of The Umma, the historical anomaly represented by Zionism, i.e. the resurgence of a claim to national sovereignty among an Israelite population already subject to the rules of “dhimmitude”, Islam was in a quandary.

Especially as this “anomaly”, which was about to lead to the recovery of a Hebrew land that had been Muslim for 1,300 years, “risked” calling into question the very foundations of Islam.

Already in the 1930s, the SMC (“Supreme Muslim Committee of Palestine”) was virulently opposed to the return of the Israelites to their ancestral homeland. Its head, the Mufti Hadj Amin El Husseini, had not only declared his support for Hitler and raised Arab-Muslim troops to join the Waffen-SS, but had also whispered in Hitler’s ear the idea of the “Final Solution of the Jews”.

But how could this support for Nazism and the ‘Final Solution’ go hand in hand with the Koran?
That’s when the exegesis in question took over: according to Islam, Allah is the master of history, so it was to him that the “Zionist initiative” was attributed. Allah decided to bring all the Sons of Israel scattered around the world back to their ancestral homeland. But not to create a sovereign State. If Allah has allowed this return, it is in reality to simplify the task of the Muslims: to convert the Sons of Israel to Islam!
And if these Israelite dhimmis refuse to convert to Islam, then they are disobeying Allah’s “plan”. And in that case, they become kafiroun (“heretics” or “miscreants”), and must be exterminated.

In both cases, the gathering of the Sons of Israel on their ancestral land, in the heart of the “Arab-Muslim world”, as the pan-Arab-Islamists put it, is supposed to facilitate the execution of “Allah’s plan”.
According to this Muslim exegesis, Zionism was – despite appearances – part of “Allah’s stratagem”, supposed to accelerate the “Apocalypse” and the “End of Time”, at least in the Islamic version.



However, there was one hitch in Allah’s ‘stratagem’: The most radical supporters of Zionism (in truth, the Hebrew Liberation Movement) had freed themselves from the grip of Judaism. They were atheists and secular extremists who cared nothing for Yahweh’s plans and even less for those of Allah.
They were fighting to oust the British occupiers and their Muslim pan-Arab allies, and aspired to re-establish Hebrew sovereignty over their historic homeland. In the eyes of the Muslims, they therefore represented the very archetype of the ‘Kafir’, whose fate was quite clearly laid down in the Koran: extermination!
And it was then that the exegesis of “The Good News Beyond the Hidden Things” took on a new lease of life: the option of the “great conversion” was abandoned and that of what might be called the “Great Tomb ” (mass extermination) was “plebiscited”.
Inspired by this tempting prospect, pan-Arab Islamist theologians and leaders and their Palestinian spearhead – whether Hamas or the supposedly secular Fatah – see in hindsight in the Nazi “final solution” a “flavour” of what would be “the hand of Allah” in the execution of the “Great Tomb”.
This is why, in Hamas’s Gaza and in Ramallah, the ‘capital’ of the so-called ‘Palestinian Authority’ (as well as in the whole of the ‘Arab-Muslim world’), Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’ is the greatest ‘bestseller’ of all time (after the Koran, Muhammad obliges).
In it, Hitler himself is virtually promoted to the rank of ‘servant of Allah’. In fact, the Teutonic ‘Führer’ was given an Arabic nickname: ‘El khayder’.



And this is also why Muslim Palestinianism – which must be distinguished from the pseudo-Palestinism of Arabic-speaking Christians – has in fact never been (and still is!) anything other than an ersatz of Nazism.

** This exegesis was first formulated at the Fourth Islamic Studies Conference in Cairo. See D.F. Green. Arab Theologians on Jews and Israel. P 48-53. Editions de l’Avenir. Geneva, 1976

By the professor Belhassen.