Explaining the Virulence
World War II ended in 1945, but Second Lt. Hiroo Onoda of the Imperial Japanese Army rejected many attempts in the following years to inform him of Japan’s surrender. Instead, he continued to fight a guerilla campaign for Emperor Hirohito from hiding places in the jungles on the Philippine island of Lubang until 1974. During that 29-year period, he senselessly murdered about one Filipino and injured three others per year, plus he damaged and stole property. Only when his former commander traveled to Lubang and ordered Onoda to give up did the aging soldier accept that his emperor had acknowledged defeat and therefore he too must lay down arms, which he finally did.
The Palestinians of the West Bank, Gaza, and eastern Jerusalem are Onoda writ large, emulating the grizzled, vicious soldier. They too battle on for a failed cause, destroying property, murdering senselessly, and ignoring repeated calls to end hostilities. Just as Onoda attacked on behalf of a supposed divine emperor, they inhabit a fantasy world that promises an awe-inspiring new order through acts of wholesale destruction, one in which Jesus was a Palestinian, Jerusalem was always exclusively Islamic, and Israel is on the verge of collapse.[1]
Expressing this ambition, every year or two, Palestinian leaders initiate a spasm of unprovoked violence against Israelis, usually invoking a conspiracy theory (the favorite: “Al-Aqsa [Mosque] is in danger”). The violence, initiated in the spirit of Hiroo Onoda, might involve stone-throwing in the West Bank, knife stabbings in Jerusalem, car-rammings in Tel Aviv, or massacring hordes out of Gaza. With time, the paroxysm peters out, only to start up again at a later time.
Whence comes this inexhaustible passion for destruction? What sustains it? And what weakens it? Answers require going back nearly one-and-a-half centuries.
1. Explaining the Virulence
Palestinian political culture is unique in its undying genocidal radicalism. In all the world and in all of history, nothing resembles the fanaticism of the over-hundred-year campaign by Palestinians against Jews near and far. Egyptian-American scholar Hussein Aboubakr Mansour correctly sees “the absolute and final negation of Zionism, by any means necessary” as “the most central problem of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.” I call this rejectionism: the unconditional refusal to accept any aspect of Jewish presence in the Palestine. Rejectionism repudiates every aspect of Zionism: it denies Jewish ties to the Land of Israel, fights Jewish ownership of that land, rejects Jewish political power, refuses to trade with Zionists, murders them where possible, and allies with any foreign power, including Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and Khomeinist Iran, to destroy them.
That a Palestinian leader helped convince Hitler not to expel Jews but murder them in the Final Solution offers one indication of its uniqueness; the attempt to strangle Israel at birth offers another; its century-long endurance a third.
What has rejectionism achieved for the welfare of Palestinians? Not much, with most of them living under PA or Hamas dictatorships. The happy few live in eastern Jerusalem under Israel’s democracy. Despite this bleak record, rejectionism remains strong. And that puzzle demands explanation.
History
Early hostility to Zionism. Local opposition to modern Zionism emerged immediately but had limited form, with disputes in the 1870s limited to issues like grazing and water rights. It took about thirty years for both sides to begin to realize that those disputes had a larger nature. Zionists denied this reality while Palestinians were slow to see Zionism as something distinct from broader European incursions.
The very first modern Jewish settlement in Palestine began in 1870, when the Paris-based Alliance Israélite Universelle purchased land for Mikveh Yisrael, a Jewish agricultural school, on the authority of no less than a decree (firman) of the Ottoman sultan. But the peasants of a neighboring village, having long farmed the land, viewed it as their own property. They accosted the Ottoman governor of Damascus, demanding that he annul the sale. In this early clash lay the seeds of what followed.
Many more battles over rights to farming, grazing, trespassing, water, and building repeated in the following years, setting off rounds of violence that turned fiercer over time. The first large-scale Palestinian attack on Zionists took place at Petah Tikva in 1886, leading to “widespread destruction, vandalism, and looting, including the loss of all its animals and the uprooting of newly planted trees,” as described by Alan Dowty of Notre Dame University. The first Zionist was shot and killed in 1890 and the first Palestinian fell in 1896. But these remained strictly local problems.
Opposition to Zionism began to coalesce over time. The first declaration of pan-Arabism (or Arab nationalism), Negib Azoury’s pathbreaking 1905 book, informed readers that “Our movement comes just at the moment when Israel [i.e., Jewry] is so close to succeeding in its plans for universal domination.” Anti-Zionism was expressed through the dual phenomenon of intense romanticism about the land (“This is Palestine; transformed into a sacred shrine,/So kiss its soil, wet with dew) and dehumanizing slogans about Zionists (“Palestine is our land and the Jews are our dogs”). Restricting immigration and retaining control of land topped the issues, followed by countering the official use of Hebrew and limiting Zionist power on municipal councils.
Then the larger picture became clear. As Slovak scholar Emanuel Beška writes, “the months at the end of 1910 and the first half of 1911 represent the turning point in the attitudes of the educated Arab public toward Jewish land purchases in Palestine, Jewish immigration, and the Zionist movement.” That turning point had a decidedly negative quality: “a number of Arab journalists, notables, and officers became involved in anti-Zionist activities and campaigns; and the quantity of articles critical of Zionism published in the Arabic press markedly increased.”
Such views jelled in World War I and its aftermath. As a gesture to win Jewish support in World War I, the British government in 1917 issued the Balfour Declaration designating Palestine as the “national home for the Jewish people.” In March 1920, the first major, fatal communal violence took place when Arabs attacked a Jewish village, leading to thirteen deaths. In April 1920, London received the League of Nations’ Mandate for Palestine with the goal of establishing the “national home for the Jewish people” promised in the Balfour declaration. By the end of 1920, Muslim Arabic-speaking peoples living in the mandate hesitantly and for the first time began to see themselves as Palestinians rather than Syrians, Arabic-speakers, or Muslims.
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Amin al-Husseini. In May 1921, the British authorities appointed a young and unqualified Amin al-Husseini (ca. 1895-1974) as mufti (Islamic legal authority) of Jerusalem, and inadvertently crowned him as the first modern Palestinian leader. As German scholar Klaus Gensicke explains, Husseini’s “hatred of Jews knew no mercy and he always intervened with particular zeal whenever he feared that some of the Jews could escape annihilation.” The effects of that appointment reverberate to this day.
Husseini’s rejectionist ideas had three probable sources. First, he lived in the context of a Bedouin tradition of annihilation. The long-serving British consul James Finn, who lived in Jerusalem in 1845-72, captured Bedouin rapaciousness, especially vis-à-vis settled peoples:
None but those who have seen it can appreciate the devastation wrought in a few hours by these wild hordes. Like locusts they spread over the land, and their camels, only too glad to revel upon the luxury of green food, strip every leaf off the vines, and devour, while they trample down, all corn or vegetable crops, leaving bare brown desolation where years of toil had made smiling fields and vineyards. Nor is this all, for the cattle and flocks are swept off to the desert by the marauders who leave behind, for the unfortunate peasant, nothing that they can carry away.
And what nomads did not finish off, the villagers did themselves. Israeli scholar Arieh Avneri recounts instances “when the defeated themselves destroyed their property, uprooted their vineyards and their olive groves, burned and destroyed anything they could not take with them, and went into exile. They left behind scorched earth.”
The second source concerned a half-century of the peasantry’s growing strife with Zionist farmers, noted above. Third, Husseini served as a politically aware officer in the Ottoman army during World War I, geographically not far from what the U.S. House of Representatives later called the Turks’ “campaign of genocide against Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Syriacs, Arameans, Maronites, and other Christians.”
Bedouin, peasants, and Turks: through them and perhaps other sources, Husseini developed a monstrous hostility toward Jews. Soon after World War I ended, he told a Jewish colleague of Syrian descent, Isaac Abraham Abbady, “This was and will remain Arab land. We do not mind you [Jewish] natives of the country, but those alien invaders, the Zionists, will be massacred to the last man. We want no progress, no prosperity [deriving from Jewish immigration]. Nothing but the sword will decide the future of this country.” That phrase, “massacred to the last man,” serves well as Husseini’s slogan. He frequently reiterated this point in the following decades, asserting that Palestinians would “continue to fight until the Zionists are eliminated and the whole of Palestine is a purely Arab state.”
In this uncompromising campaign, he used any and all tactics. He organized and encouraged unprovoked violence against the British and the Jews, including a three-year long intifada (uprising), known as the Arab Revolt, in 1936-39. He promoted the antisemitic blood libel and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion forgery, made Jerusalem into a flashpoint, and was probably the first Muslim leader to call for jihad (a religious war of Muslims against unbelievers in accordance with Islamic law) against Zionists. Husseini lived in Germany during the war years, 1941-45, and proved so useful that he earned an audience with Hitler. Nor was that a courtesy visit; as Israel’s Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu pointed out, based on the study by Barry Rubin and Wolfgang G. Schwanitz, Nazis, Islamists, and the Making of the Modern Middle East,[2] Husseini had a central role in formulating the Final Solution that led to the murder of six million Jews. Thus did he and the Nazis mutually radicalize each other.
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Husseini’s legacy. Husseini mentored the young Yasir Arafat (1929-2004), perhaps his relative, who for 45 years from 1959 faithfully carried out the mufti’s genocidal program as head of many institutions, including Fatah, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and the Palestinian Authority. Arafat flaunted rejectionism throughout his career, even after ostensibly accepting Israel in the Oslo Accords: “We plan to eliminate the State of Israel and establish a purely Palestinian state. We will make life unbearable for Jews by psychological warfare and population explosion,” he announced in 1996. “We Palestinians will take over everything, including all of Jerusalem.” The PLO spin-off, the PA, announced: “We’ll liberate our land from [Israel]. It won’t remain at all. Not a single settler, Israeli, or Jew will remain in our land.”
Husseini spent the post-war years in Egypt, where he influenced the Muslim Brotherhood. Its founder, Hassan al-Banna, declared that “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.” Hamas, the brotherhood’s 1987 spin-off in Gaza, also continues with his hallmark genocidal rejectionism. One leader, Mahmoudal-Zahar, defined the organization’s goal as “liberat[ing] any inch of Palestinian land and to establish a state on it. Our ultimate plan is Palestine in its entirety.” XX NEED A MURDEROUS QUOTE
The PLO and Hamas, both Husseini derivatives, competed to win Palestinian allegiance, with the former an ideological chameleon and the latter determinedly Islamist (seeking to apply Islamic law under a caliph). Their differences widened in 1993, when Arafat formally recognized Israel in the Oslo Accords; the 1988 Hamas Charter had stated that “so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences” contradict its principles. That disagreement over tactics henceforth bifurcated rejectionism. The PA argues for negotiating with Israel, lowering the Zionists’ guard, winning concessions, then pounding Israel through violence and international delegitimization. Hamas sticks to consistent, old-style violent rejectionism.
All five of the major Palestinian leaders so far – Amin al-Husseini, Ahmad al-Shukeiri (the first PLO leader), Yasir Arafat, Mahmoud Abbas, and Ahmed Yassin (the founder of Hamas) – made destroying the Zionist presence their only goal. Whatever their differences in outlook, personnel, and tactics, nearly all major Palestinian organizations – Fatah, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Palestine Liberation Organization, the Palestinian Authority, Hamas, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad – are lineal descendants of Amin al-Husseini. “Massacred to the last man” remains their slogan.
Husseini’s efforts played a large part in the Arab states’ decision to go to war with Israel. Of particular importance was the General Islamic Congress he hosted in Jerusalem in 1931, which launched the Palestinian issue as a pan-Islamic concern and helped imbue the Arab states with their own form of rejectionism. Abdul Rahman Azzam (1893-1976) provides one example of this transmission. He participated in the congress, was elected to its executive committee, and in 1945 became the first secretary-general of the Arab League. In that capacity, he was the one to reject any compromise with the Zionists in 1947, asserting instead that the Arab states were hungry for war with the budding Jewish state: “The Arab world regards you as invaders and is ready to fight you. The conflict of interests among nations is, for the most part, not amenable to any settlement except armed clash.” Azzam became notorious for calling on the eve of Israel’s independence for “a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades.”
Nor was Azzam alone. In response to the UN vote creating Israel, Amin al-Husseini’s relative Jamal promised that “blood will flow like rivers” as Palestinians and their allies abort the nascent Jewish state. Ismail Safwat, the coordinator of Arab state forces attacking Israel in 1948-49, defined the war aim: “to eliminate the Jews of Palestine and to completely cleanse the country of them.”
True to their word, Palestinians and their Arab state allies ethnically cleansed every Jew from the mandatory territories they controlled – including villages, Jerusalem’s outskirts, and the ancient Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City. (About a million more Jews were subsequently expelled from or forced to flee their homes in Arabic-speaking countries from Morocco to Iraq.)
How important was Husseini? His influence over Palestinians and Islamists means his legacy still dominates the Palestinian-Israeli arena a half-century after his death. Zvi Elpeleg, a biographer of Husseini, finds that “his influence on the refusal to accept the existence of a Jewish state was greater than that of any other leader.” Middle East Quarterly editor Efraim Karsh concludes: “Just as the Holocaust might have well not happened without Hitler, just as tens of millions of Russians and Chinese might not have perished without Stalin and Mao, so Palestinian Arabs might not have followed a course of anti-Jewish hatred and incessant conflict without Husseini.”
Rejectionism Today
Even as the small and vulnerable Yishuv (the pre-state Jewish community in Palestine) grew into the affluent and powerful country of Israel, Palestinian attitudes stayed remarkably stationary, ever refusing to accept Jews, Judaism, Zionists, and Israelis, fantasizing about destroying the state and terminating the Jewish presence. Rejectionism survived the Balfour Declaration, the establishment of the State of Israel, the retreat of Arab states, the Soviet collapse, and much else. Wars and treaties came and went, personnel changed, ideologies, objectives, tactics, and strategies evolved, all leaving little impact on the core goal. This remarkable constancy does not get the attention it deserves.
Palestinian identity has become inextricably tied to rejectionism. As a well-known rhyming Palestinian slogan puts it: “Our struggle with the Jews/Is a struggle of existence, not of borders.” When an American in mid-2019 asked Mohammad Shtayyeh, the PA “prime minister,” for his proposal to remedy relations with Israel, Shtayyeh went silent. In other words, Israel cannot ever satisfy the PA. Consistent with this, Hassan al-Kashef, director-general of the Palestinian information ministry, has argued for the only contact with Israelis being to demoralize them through violence.
Rejectionism manifests itself in many ways via its drive to eliminate Israel and kill Israelis. Novel tactics, such as creating a permanent refugee population and a supersessionist ideology, keep it vibrant.
Destruction of Israel: Palestinians seek not just to eliminate the State of Israel but to destroy it, a legacy of Bedouin, peasant, and Turkish annihilationism. They are not shy about saying so. The never-amended 1968 charter of the Palestine Liberation Organization states that “the liberation of Palestine will destroy the Zionist and imperialist presence.” Yasir Arafat said in 1972, “Peace for us means the destruction of Israel and nothing else,” and repeated this sentiment in 1980: “Peace for us means the destruction of Israel.” Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader in Gaza, announced in 2021 that “God has decreed that we must attack Tel Aviv,” and promised that Hamas with its allies can “destroy” the city. In May 2023, the PA endorsed PIJ’s Khalil al-Bahtini speaking of an intent “to blow up all of the Zionist entity’s cities.”
The plans can get specific. Saleh al-Arouri, the deputy leader of Hamas, also delved into details, explaining how, in the next war with Israel, it will close the air and sea spaces, shut down electricity, water, and communication services, thereby closing down the economy.
Nor are these empty threats. In 1948, on taking the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem, Jordanian forces engaged in what Israel later termed “the wanton destruction of all but one of the thirty-five Jewish houses of worship that … had graced the Old City for centuries.” In the early-1950s, Palestinian leader Musa al-Alami built a large experimental farm that employed thousands of Palestine refugees near Jericho boasting 10,000 banana trees, 12,000 other trees, 16,000 vines, 400 dunams of cotton, 400 dunams of vegetables, fields of grain, and 80,000 fowl. The farm also included a clinic, a school, and a swimming pool. But because this farm contradicted the rejectionist demand refugees not be settled outside Israel, many Palestinians saw its efforts at economic self-sufficiency as a plot to accommodate Israel’s existence. The anger exploded in 1955, when thousands of Palestine refugees attacked the farm, burnt it to the ground, brutalized its residents, and tried to murder Alami. A half-century later, in 2005, a group of American Jewish donors purchased the intact high-tech greenhouses Israelis had left behind following their retreat from Gaza, and donated this infrastructure to Gazans; in the old spirit, the Gazans looted and destroyed it. Vae victis.
Palestinians widely express support for destroying the Jewish state. Surveying 400 Palestinian opinion polls over 12 years, Israeli historian Daniel Polisar found that “Since 2005, regardless of the methodology and the precise wording of the questions, the maximalist option has won every time, usually by large margins,” where the maximalist option means “a Palestinian or Islamic state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea,” i.e., a Palestine replacing Israel. Indeed, a steady 80 percent of Palestinians have believed over the past century that they can destroy the Jewish state. David Pollock of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy further finds that Palestinian attitudes toward Israel have become more ambitious over time. Whereas in 2015, 56 percent of West Bank residents and 44 percent if Gazans endorsed the two-state solution, i.e., accepted Israel at least temporarily, those numbers declined in 2020 to 9 percent and 21 percent, respectively, a massive reduction.
Killing Israelis: The assault on individual Israelis also has wide popular support, with the “street” probably yet more enthusiastic than its leadership. Instructional videos on social media teach Palestinians on how best to murder Israelis, whether by knife or gun. The killing of Israelis meets with rapture. To cite one example, after a bomb went off at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 2002, killing 9 and wounding 87, thousands of Gazans celebrated by marching in the streets, shouting slogans and brandishing firearms to express their delight.
This phenomenon reaches its apex when parents express joy – to all appearance sincere – on learning of their children’s demise while attacking Israelis. Ibrahim Al-Nabulsi, 18, engaged in drive-by shootings of Israeli soldiers and civilians, and helped found the violent anti-Israel West Bank gang called the Lion’s Den; when the IDF came for him in 2022, he fought a gun battle and ended up dead. Thousands then attended his funeral and an informal shrine emerged at his place of death, complete with the moldy remnants of his last meal. His father Alaa, 53, a “colonel” in the PA security services, was tasked with catching criminals precisely such as his son; despite this role, Alaa approved of his son’s actions. “As a father, it was hard for me to tell him not to get involved in this. What else could I tell him? That it’s OK to live a life of humiliation?” More ebulliently, he added, “Ibrahim was hunting them, not the other way around. Whenever he heard about an Israeli army raid, he was the first to go out and confront them. This was his fate. We praise God.” Ibrahim’s mother spoke enthusiastically of her son’s death while making the V-for-victory sign: “Ibrahim triumphed. My son, who is dearer to me than my own soul, has returned to his lord.” She added elegiacally about his message to Palestinian children:
Ibrahim wanted to send a message to a specific group – to the children, who will be brought up on jihad, Allah willing. When these children see the mujahid [fighter of jihad] as a humble, loving, and truthful person who does not eat anything that is haram [forbidden], they are going to love jihad, thanks to Allah, and jihad will become their way of life. Even if they do not learn it at school, they are going to learn it from their role model – people who are wanted [by Israel]. Thanks to Allah, Ibrahim got his message across.
In another case, the mother of Hassan al-Qatanani, who murdered an Israeli mother and her two daughters, boasted of his actions:
He loved martyrdom. He would say to me, day and night, “Mom, I want to be martyred.” He would kiss my hand and say, “Pray to Allah that I will be martyred.” I would say: “May Allah give you what you want, inshallah.” Praise be to Allah for granting him what he wanted. … Anyone with courage in his heart cannot accept what the Jews did to us. We should fight them with our children, with our money, with our families, with our fingernails. We should devour the Jews with our teeth.
As a Gaza Islamic scholar and the father of dead child put it, “Our children … are dear to us, but Palestine and Islam are dearer and more important.” Such perversity staggers.
Murderers of Israelis have a sacred status in Abbas’ PA. Referring to them as martyrs, he declared that “Even if we have only a penny left, we will give it to the martyrs, the prisoners, and their families. We view the prisoners and the martyrs as planets and stars in the skies of the Palestinian struggle, and they have priority in everything.”
Refugees: Rejectionism has spawned a population of “Palestine refugees” unwilling to accept loss in war and go on to reconstruct their lives. Instead, and against their own interests, they blindly insist on getting back to their own or their ancestors’ properties. Starting a new, normal life outside Israel equals betraying the cause. Only the permanent refugee status is valid, with its culture of dependency and rage. This pattern was set as soon as Israel came into existence. Reflecting on the Alami experimental farm destruction cited above, Israeli authors Adi Schwartz and Einat Wilf conclude:
Faced with a choice between humiliation from a life of poverty and adversity in the refugee camps and the perceived humiliation of accepting Israel as a fait accompli, the refugees chose to remain in the camps. … The refugees were fully conscious in the choice they made: no to the state of Israel, even at the cost of staying in the camps forever.
That rejectionist spirit inspired Palestinians to transform the United Nations agency dedicated to refugee welfare, the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), into a large and permanent bureaucracy that purposefully keeps them mired in the refugee status. In contrast to all other refugee populations, which diminish in number as people settle or die, UNRWA expands the number of refugees over time.[3] Thus, an infant born in Syria in 2024, if the great-grandchild of Palestinians who fled Israel in 1948-49, carries refugee status. UNRWA itself proudly acknowledges this bizarre phenomenon: “When the Agency started working in 1950, it was responding to the needs of about 750,000 Palestine refugees. Today, some 5.9 million Palestine refugees are eligible for UNRWA services.”
By normal counting, the number of refugees, who were born latest in 1949, decreases by the day. My actuarial estimate puts their number in 2024 at about 10,000 – or 0.2 percent of those holding this status. When the last genuine refugee from Mandatory Palestine dies, presumably in the 2050s, the pseudo-refugees will continue to proliferate and the “Palestine refugee” status will, at current rates, swell indefinitely. Steven J. Rosen of the Middle East Forum noted sardonically that, “given UNRWA’s standards, eventually all humans will be Palestine refugees.”
Alone among the masses of dislocated peoples in the years surrounding World War II, Palestinians are frozen in the status of refugee – in some cases, unto the fifth generation. The other estimated 100 million refugees from that era, including my parents, settled in their new homes many decades ago, making it unimaginable that I, much less my children, should consider ourselves refugees. Only “Palestine refugees” stew in “refugee camps” in a self-perpetrated and willful descent into poverty, indignity, futility, stagnancy, grievance, and nihilism, suffering from the ravages of lives truncated and distorted by an impossible and ugly “right of return” intended to destroy the Jewish state. This anomaly of ever-proliferating phony refugees has a plain purpose: to sustain rejectionism through the fantasy of a mass “return” while sharpening an ever-larger dagger at Israel’s throat.
Paradoxically, Palestinians’ attitudes became more extreme as they weakened relative to their enemy. It started as a dispute over land and water rights. It turned into a nationalist rivalry. It became a rejectionist ideology. It acquired a genocidal dimension. Finally, it acquired a supersessionist ideology, that of Islamic Zionism.
Islamic Zionism
The creation of a counter-narrative to Zionism sustains rejectionism and explains its current extremism.
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The uniqueness of Jewish Zionism. Many millions of modern Westerners emigrated to settle in the Americas, in Africa, in Australia, and parts beyond. But no emigration resembled that of Jews to Zion. Those others involved setting out to new, mostly unfamiliar places. Only Jews had maintained a remnant in their ancient, indigenous homeland despite millennia of imperial conquests and colonial settlements. Only Jews continuously immigrated to their homeland, even acquiring temporary autonomy (in Tiberias in the mid-sixteenth century) within it. Only Jews saw their destination as a land endowed with sacred attributes. Only Jews longed for the land of emigration in daily prayers, annual religious occasions (“Next year in Jerusalem”), and life-cycle events. Only Jews revived their ancient spoken language used in that land and made it the new lingua franca. Only Jews reestablished national sovereignty over their ancestral home.
These unique attributes prompted Muslims living in Palestine, starting around 1900, to respond by following suit, by developing their own version of a love for Zion – a phenomenon I call Islamic Zionism.[4] This new-found Muslim passion for Jerusalem and Palestine, German analyst Khalid Durán notes, amounts to an “attempt to Islamize Zionism ... in the sense that the importance of Jerusalem to Jews and their attachment to it is now usurped by Palestinian Muslims.” As Islamic Zionism ascended among Palestinians, this ultimate act of cultural and national appropriation acquired a surreal intensity that spewed a toxic loathing for the original Zionism, denying its history and seeking its destruction, as expressed through genocidal rejectionism.
When one party longs for an object, others naturally also come to value it more. Thus did Jewish nationalism inspire Palestinian nationalism. Were it not for another people who saw Palestine as their “national home,” its residents would have continued to view this area as a province of something larger, whether Greater Syria, the Arab nation, or the Muslim community. If not for Jewish aspirations, Muslim attitudes toward Palestine would no doubt have resembled their indifference toward the territory of Transjordan, a coolness only slowly eroded by many years of governmental effort by Amman. Palestinian nationalism promised the most direct way to deal with the challenge presented by Zionist immigrants – a challenge not felt on the East Bank.
When Zionists articulated a vision of Palestine’s future as the Jewish national home, Islamic Zionists turned Palestine into something even more prized. As Jews returned to the land of milk and honey, Palestinians devised an intense longing for the land of orange groves and olive trees. As Jews established the State of Israel, Palestinians demanded a State of Palestine.
Zionists and their supporters see the establishment of Israel as a quasi-messianic event of world-historical importance; British leader Winston Churchill articulated this sentiment in 1948: “the coming into being of the Jewish state in Palestine is an event in world history to be viewed in the perspective not of a generation, or a century, but in the perspective of 1,000, 2,000, or even 3,000 years.” In opposition, naturally, Palestinians see Israel’s destruction as no less quasi-messianic, turning that conflagration into the resurgence of Palestinian pride, Arab identity, Muslim power, and the defeat of Western (i.e., Christian) imperialism.
Just as Israel is no mere plot of land for Jews, Palestine acquired a comparable meaning for Palestinians. For Mahmoud Darwish, called the Palestinian “national poet,” the territory’s loss to Israel represents the fall from grace, the bitterness of exile, and for the loss of power. George Habash, leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, stated that “The Palestinian revolution is a stage in the world revolution.” Likewise, Yasir Arafat claimed the PLO “part of the world revolution which aims at establishing social justice and liberating mankind.” Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei called Israel’s destruction “the most important cause of the [Iranian] revolution” while its President Ebrahim Raisi described it as “the most important issue of the World of Islam today.” Important writers in Arabic go yet further, connecting either the seizure of Jerusalem from Jewish control or the destruction of Israel to the End Times.
Muslims widely understand both Palestine and Jerusalem to be mentioned in the Koran, though it mentions neither by name, making them Islamically significant and further encouraging Islamic Zionism. Verse 5:21 quotes Moses calling on the Israelites, “O my people, enter the Holy Land (al-ard al-muqaddasa) which God has assigned to you.” Haim Gerber of the Hebrew University observes that “a sense of uniqueness and difference from other regions, even from Syria, was no doubt imparted to the inhabitants of Palestine by the basic fact that, following Judaism and Christianity, Islam too considered Palestine a holy land.”
Jerusalem served as the first qibla, or direction to which Muslims pray, before Mecca replaced it. Verse 17:1 of the Koran refers to the Further Mosque (al-masjid al-aqsa) without indicating its location. A caliph subsequently built a mosque in Jerusalem with this name and forevermore Muslims have widely connected these two unrelated facts to associate Jerusalem with their prophet’s life, creating a permanent Koranic connection with Jerusalem and making it Islamically significant.
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Denying Jewish history. The logic of Islamic Zionism requires that Palestinians deny Jerusalem’s sacred and historical importance to Jews and erase all Jewish connections to the Land of Israel, replacing them with a Palestinian heritage. Toward this end, the nationalist Palestinian establishment of scholars, clerics, and politicians has constructed a revisionist edifice made up in equal parts of fabrication, falsehood, fiction, and fraud.[5] It draws on two main sources: pre-Israelite history and the Zionist storehouse of longing for the Land of Israel. Its confused account includes inconsistent and even contradictory elements, all deployed in the supreme effort to deny a Jewish connection.
Some components of this brew include: The ancient Hebrews were Bedouin tribesmen. The Bible came from Arabia. Instead of Moses taking the Israelites to the Promised Land, Musa (a common name in Arabic) led Arabic-speaking Muslims to Palestine. Biblical figures are turned into Muslims. Any Jewish presence in Palestine ended in 70 c.e. Today’s Ashkenazi Jews descend from the Khazar Turks.
Amin al-Husseini called the Western Wall a “purely Muslim place” to which Jews have no “connection or right or claim.” Mahmoud Abbas says the Israelis have “been digging for 30 years to find any evidence or proof of the existence” of Jewish ties to the Temple Mount but “They haven’t found anything. [It] belongs exclusively to the Muslims.” The political implication is clear: Jews lack any rights to Jerusalem. As a street banner puts it: “Jerusalem is Arab.” Jews are unwelcome intruders.
Palestinians claim to predate the Jews by invoking an imaginary lineage to the Canaanites, thereby predating the Israelites; thus, Saeb Erekat of the PLO claimed to be “a son of Jericho, aged 10,000 years. … I am the proud son of Canaanites, and I existed 5,000 years ago.” Arafat invoked an imaginary Canaanite king, Salem, and spoke movingly about this Palestinian “forefather” after whom “the monumental city” of Jerusalem was supposedly named.
The Jebusites, a Canaanite people whom the Bible indicate controlled Jerusalem before King David’s conquest of the city for the Jews, play a special role in Islamic Zionism. Claiming Jebusite heritage allows Palestinians to argue that they preceded Jews in Palestine and therefore the area belongs to them alone. Arafat asserted that “Our forefathers, the Canaanites and Jebusites, built the cities and planted the land; they built the monumental city of Bir Salim [Jerusalem].” PLO leader Faisal Husseini insisted, “I am a Palestinian. I am a descendant of the Jebusites, the ones who came before King David.”
Palestinian leaders also stress continuity from ancient times. The PA mufti, Muhammad Hussein, claimed that Palestinians “have been firmly established upon this land [of Palestine] since the Canaanite era.” Mahmoud al-Habash, the PA’s supreme Shariah judge focused on Jerusalem:
Our forefathers and historical lineage, the Jebusite Canaanites, built Jebus, Jerusalem, the City of Peace – the Canaanites called it the City of Peace – 5,000 years ago. Our presence in Jerusalem has not ceased for 5,000 years. Nations and occupations have passed through, and colonialism, whether brief or long. It came and left, but the people of Jerusalem stayed. These transients will move on, while the people of Jerusalem will stay. They have no place in Jerusalem. Jerusalem is ours, not theirs.
Responding to a quote attributed to Netanyahu that Jews have historical rights to the Land of Israel dating back to 3000 bce, an Abbas representative, Abdullah al-Ifranji, retorted that “the people of Palestine have a history in the land of Canaan going back to 7000 bce.”
According to this account, Canaanites built Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem. If a Jewish Temple existed, it was elsewhere. Sometime in the early 1950s, the Temple Mount’s Islamic authorities deleted the references to Solomon’s Temple that had appeared in its earlier guide books. The PA mufti, Ikrama Sabri, told an Israeli reporter in 1998, “I heard that your Temple was in Nablus or perhaps Bethlehem.” Two years later, Arafat more assertively told Bill Clinton, “Solomon’s Temple was not in Jerusalem, but Nablus.” At other times, even Nablus is excluded; a PA spokesman stated that “There is no historical proof – despite all the excavations – that [the Jews] had any kind of presence in this land” of Palestine.
The emphasis on Canaan leads to curious results, such as the PA’s “Ministry of Culture” staging a historical drama in the West Bank town of Sabastia in 1996 concerning the polytheistic god Ba’al, lord of fertility and weather. It dressed up young Palestinians in costumes to enact a passion play in which Ba’al emerged supreme, defeating the Israelites. Israeli journalist Ehud Ya’ari witnessed and described the event.
Young people – in flowing robes tailored especially for the event, decorated with Canaanite motifs, on light wooden chariots built according to specifications from drawings found in the Megiddo excavations – made their way through Sabastia’s narrow alleyways to a stone stage in the center of the village. There, they recreated the legend of Ba’al, the supreme Canaanite god, and his struggle with his brother Mut, god of the underworld. In the end, Ba’al emerged victorious with the help of his sister Anat, the goddess of war. The narrator of the text put special emphasis on the warning against the “Habiru” tribes (the Hebrews), who were moving into the land.
To top it off, Bakr Abu Bakr, a member of Fatah’s Revolutionary Council, calls the historic “Children of Israel” an “Arab tribe that became extinct.” Present-day Israelis, in contrast, “have no connection to them,” but are European colonialists who justify stealing land from Palestinians by pretending to be descendants of the ancient Israelites. One children’s textbook explains that Israelis are “foreigners who came from all ends of the earth, foreigners who did not know Palestine and did not live in it – neither them nor their fathers and forefathers.” In an audacious act of cultural arrogation, another PA schoolbook asserts that the “Zionist occupation” appropriated Canaanite names and thereby “has stolen the Palestinian national heritage and history.” Tell es-Sultan consists of archeological ruins dating back to 2600 bce near Jericho and considered the world’s oldest town; when a United Nations organization listed it as a “World Heritage Site in Palestine,” Mahmoud Abbas approvingly commented that this action “testifies to the authenticity and history of the Palestinian people.”
Denial of Jewish history goes beyond words to the destruction of archeological evidence that ties Jews to the Land of Israel. For example, the PA in May 2023 initiated construction work at El-Unuk, an Early Iron Age site connected to the Israelite entry into Palestine, deleting its information about the Jewish presence.
Given that this cocktail of claims relies on biblical history, it depends for authentication (ironically) on the Jewish Bible. When an assertive Brazilian journalist said to Arafat in 1991, “You are struggling for an entity – the Palestine state – that, from a historic and geographical viewpoint, has never existed,” Arafat gave a weirdly Zionist-like reply: “You must read the Bible because it contains abundant historic references that demonstrate the existence of a cultural and geopolitical Palestinian identity for many thousands of years.”
Dependence on the Bible implies that Islamic Zionism contradicts the mainstream Muslim understanding of history, which looks to the Koran for validation. Issam Amira, a prominent Palestinian Islamist associated with the Hizb ut-Tahrir movement, ridicules the “Canaanite roots” claim:
The people of Palestine have no historical right to Palestine. They have no right that dates back 2,000, 3,000, or 4,000 years. … our history is simple and it is not ancient. Our history dates back only 1,440 [lunar] years [to the Battle of Yarmouk in 636 ce when Muslims conquered Palestine]. 1,440 years ago we had no rights of any kind. Absolutely none.
Amira condemns Arafat, saying that he “cursed his own people” by making Canaanite claims. “The only thing you are allowed to say is: Oh Palestinians, you are Muslims.” This suggests the long-term limitations and vulnerability of Islamic Zionism.
Nonetheless, it prevails today. Palestinian Media Watch, an Israeli organization, sums up the procedure: the PA “takes authentic Jewish history, documented by thousands of years of continuous literature, and crosses out the word ‘Jewish’ and replaces it with the word ‘Arab’.” Just as Islam makes a supersessionist claim to replace Judaism, so Islamic Zionism makes a supersessionist claim to replace Jewish Zionism. Just as Muslims scorn Judaism as riddled with distortion (tahrif), Palestinians scorn Jewish Zionism as fraudulent.
This concoction then drives Palestinian emotions and politics.
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Eternal Jerusalem. Islamic Zionism quite exactly imitates its Jewish prototype:
Continuity: Donniel Hartman of the Shalom Hartman Institute called Jerusalem “one of the few remaining unifying concepts in our deeply divided Jewish world.” Arafat waxed poetic about Jerusalem as “the capital of our children and our children’s children. If not for this belief and conviction of the Palestinian nation, this people would have been erased from the face of the earth, as were so many other nations.”
Emotional significance: Jerusalem Mayor Ehud Olmert said in 1997 that Jerusalem represents “the purest expression of all that Jews prayed for, dreamed of, cried for, and died for in the 2,000 years since the destruction of the Second Temple.” Yasir Arafat in 2000 declared Jerusalem “is in the innermost of our feeling, the feeling of our people and the feeling of all Arabs, Muslims, and Christians.”
Eternal capital: Olmert, greeted Pope John Paul II on arrival in 2000 with “Welcome to the eternal capital of Jerusalem.” Likewise, Israel’s President Ezer Weizman welcomed him to “the eternal and indivisible capital of the State of Israel.” A day later, Arafat called the pontiff an “esteemed guest of Palestine and its eternal capital, Jerusalem.” Hamas also calls Jerusalem the “eternal capital of the State of Palestine.”
When Palestinians appropriate Jerusalem’s unique role in Jewish history, religion, politics, and emotions, they retroactively transform the city’s otherwise minor and instrumental place in Islam. In fact, Jerusalem rose and fell as a religious or political focal point of Muslim interest depending on utilitarian needs. When it fulfilled Muslim purposes, the city grew in Muslim esteem and emotions. When those purposes diminished, usually upon Muslims securely controlling it, Muslim interest in it promptly waned. This cyclical pattern repeated six times over fourteen centuries, during the time of Islam’s prophet Muhammad, the Umayyads, the early Crusades, the Ayyubids, the British, and the Israelis.
Focusing just on modern times, Ottoman neglect prompted scathing Western responses. For example, French novelist Gustav Flaubert in 1850 described Jerusalem as “Ruins everywhere, and everywhere the odor of graves. ... The Holy City of three religions is rotting away from boredom, desertion, and neglect.” American novelist Herman Melville described the Holy Land in 1876 as a “caked, depopulated hell.” Only after the British conquest in 1917 did Palestinians rediscover Jerusalem, which they used instrumentally to rouse Muslim sentiments against the British and the Zionists. Most notably, Amin al-Husseini convened the Jerusalem General Islamic Congress in 1931 to turn a Palestinian fight into an Islamic issue; as Basheer M. Nafi of the University of Reading explains, the congress’ purpose “was to place Palestine on the political agenda of many Islamic nations and forces.” Husseini succeeded: “it was an important achievement of the Congress to help transform Palestine into a pan-Arab and pan-Islamic problem.”
When Jordanian troops seized the Old City in 1948, however, interest plummeted. Jerusalem became an isolated provincial town, less important than Nablus. The economy so stagnated that many thousands of Arab Jerusalemites left. To take out a bank loan required a trip to Amman, the capital. The decline in Jerusalem’s religious standing was perhaps most insulting. Mosques lacked sufficient funds. Jordanian radio broadcast the Friday prayers not from Al-Aqsa Mosque but from an upstart mosque in Amman.
Jerusalem’s importance revived when the whole city came under Israeli control in 1967, again becoming a focal point of Arab and Muslim politics. The PLO’s original covenant of 1964, revealingly, made no mention of Jerusalem; the amended version of 1968, after the city fell under Israeli control, called Jerusalem “the seat of the Palestine Liberation Organization.” The city’s Islamic stature soared. King Faisal of Saudi Arabia had not bothered to visit Jerusalem when he could but now that he could not, he spoke movingly of his yearning to pray there. More surprisingly, he declared it religiously “just like” Mecca – a novel, if not a blasphemous idea.
Since then, many others – notably Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Jordan’s King Abdullah II, and Türkiye’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan – have cried for Jerusalem. A 2017 incident showed the continued international passion for Jerusalem among Muslims. Palestinians smuggled weapons into the Temple Mount and used them to kill two Israeli policemen and wound two others, prompting the Israelis to install metal detectors. The ensuing Palestinian outrage then echoed with loud, unthinking support from Muslim Brotherhood chief theorist Yusuf al-Qaradawi, Jordan’s monarch, the Arab League, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, and beyond.
Indeed, as rival Jerusalem Days suggest, Islamic Zionism can exceed Jewish Zionism. Israel’s version commemorates the city’s unification under its control in 1967. But, as Israel Harel writes in Haaretz, this tribute has declined from a national holiday to just “the holiday of the religious communities.” In contrast, the Muslim version of Jerusalem Day – instituted by Khomeini in 1979 – attracts crowds of as many as 300,000 people in distant Tehran, is celebrated across the United States, and serves as a global platform for rousing anti-Zionist harangues (though it too appears to be losing attendance).
Palestinian claims to Jerusalem led some, especially in the Western media, to pretend that Tel Aviv, not Jerusalem, serves as Israel’s capital.[6] The style guide of the Guardian, a British newspaper, for years stated that “Jerusalem is not the capital of Israel; Tel Aviv is.” Under threat of legal action, the newspaper later corrected this with “it is wrong to state that Tel Aviv – the country’s financial and diplomatic centre – is the capital” while still not acknowledging Jerusalem to be the capital, insisting that “Israel’s designation of Jerusalem as its capital is not recognised by the international community.” The BBC called Tel Aviv the “Israeli capital,” as did Canadian television network CTV. Agence France-Presse, the New York Times, and Washington Post used “Tel Aviv” as a synonym for Israel’s capital. The confusion also reaches into political circles; when questioned about the identity of Israel’s capital, Obama’s spokesman Jay Carney comically tied himself into knots as he avoided the self-evident reply.
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Holy Palestine. Islamic Zionism has transformed Palestine even more dramatically than Jerusalem.
Jews have Eretz Yisrael (“the Land of Israel”) and Christians have Terra Sancta (“Holy Land”). Although the Koran also refers to this territory as the Holy Land (al-ard al-muqaddasa), Palestine historically had no special status in Islamic tradition and Muslims did not cherish it. Palestine existed neither as a political nor cultural unit during the centuries of Muslim rule over the area. It was not a fixed cartographic entity but geographically vague, a concept without formal boundaries like Scandinavia or New England. It usually included territory on both sides of the Jordan River. The only time Palestine existed as a polity was either under the rule of Jews (Judea, Israel) or Christians (Crusader kingdoms, the British empire). As Bernard Lewis writes, for Muslims the name Filastin “had never meant more than an administrative sub-district and it had been forgotten [after the Crusades] even in that limited sense.”
Muhammad Y. Muslih of Long Island University notes that “Under the Ottoman regime (1517-1918), there was no political unit known as Palestine.” Long-time British resident Elizabeth Anne Finn explained in 1873 that the peasants of Palestine “speak Arabic, and call themselves Arabs, but they feel no patriotic attachment to Palestine as a whole. … This want of national coherency is the strongest feature in character of the population of Palestine.”
Despite having little political and no religious import among Muslims, the name Palestine continued in use, gaining currency over time. The territory “had slowly taken shape in the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the consciousness of both its inhabitants and its central government,” according to German historian Alexander Schölch.
From these inauspicious beginnings, the romance of Palestine grew into what it is today, an extremely powerful nationalist force rivaling the Jewish original. Thus did Amin al-Husseini refer to Palestine as the “Arab holy land” and Arafat call it “the promised land.” With the foundation of the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1964, it acquired political expression, going on to become a household word. The PLO proclaimed the “State of Palestine” in 1988. Palestine acquired official status in 1994 with the creation of the Palestinian Authority.
The PA pressured governments, international organizations, corporations, reference works, and others to recognize it as a state. This campaign has had considerable success, as institutions around the world, public and private, indulge the pretense that a “State of Palestine” actually exists. The Palestinian Authority maintains diplomatic missions in 95 countries compared to just 78 for Israel. Athletes have represented the fictitious “State of Palestine” at the Olympics since 1996.
Islamic Zionism also demands replacing the name Israel with Palestine. Israel may be an actual state, but it sometimes disappears from view. The U.S. merchandising giant Target has sold globes showing Palestine but no Israel. Verizon, the largest U.S. mobile telephone provider, has texted customers arriving at Ben-Gurion Airport in Lod, Israel, with a “Welcome to PALESTINE” message. The Dutch airline Transavia listed Palestine as a destination, though it does not fly there; and it did not list Israel, though it does go there. A Ryanair flight attendant informed passengers en route to Tel Aviv of their destination as “Palestine.” Qatar, host of the World Cup, offered online tickets for sale to residents of "Palestine" but not to those of Israel. Palestine: A Guide by Mariam Shahin pretends Israel does not exist; the small town of Jaffa fills up a chapter of twenty pages while the vastly larger city of Tel Aviv is barely mentioned. Even on Israeli television, an Arabic news show called the Galilee “Occupied Northern Palestine.”
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Emulating Zionism. Celebrating Jerusalem and Palestine is just the start of Islamic Zionism, for Palestinians have modeled ideas, institutions, and practices – nearly everything – on the Jewish model.
Given that the delineation of a territory called “Palestine” in 1920 was a Zionist achievement, the very existence of a Palestinian Arab identity resulted from Zionism. So too with the growth of that feeling. As UCLA professor James Gelvin notes, “Palestinian nationalism emerged during the interwar period in response to Zionist immigration and settlement.”
The peculiar nature of the PLO be understood only with reference to its Zionist inspiration. The World Zionist Organization (founded in 1897) served as the model for the Palestine Liberation Organization (founded in 1964). The globe-trotting unofficial ambassador Chaim Weizmann provided the prototype for Yasir Arafat. Israel’s 1948 Proclamation of Independence inspired the PLO’s 1988 Declaration of Independence in subject matter, organization, and even in specific phrasing.
The Yishuv created a unique quasi-governmental apparatus that included the nuts and bolts of administration (educational institutions, labor unions, political parties, militia, intelligence service, etc.) before attaining sovereignty. Palestinians made a first attempt at copying this structure in Jordan (1968-70) and a second in Lebanon (1970-82), before finally succeeding with the Palestinian Authority (from 1994) and Hamas (from 2007).[7]
Emulating the Jewish diaspora, Palestinians sometimes call themselves the “Jews of the Middle East.” They correctly point to being more educated and mobile than the majority populations among whom they live, just as they suffer prejudice, dispossession, and repeated expulsions. They even, outrageously, claim to suffer a holocaust at Israeli hands, just as Jews suffered a Holocaust at Nazi hands.
Israel’s 1950 “Law of Return” automatically grants Israeli citizenship to any Jew making aliyah (emigrating to the Land of Israel); Palestinians claim a “right of return” entitling every Palestine refugee and his descendants to move to Israel. The pattern of imitation extends even to particulars. Zionists tried to land the Exodus 1947, a worn-out freighter with 4,500 Holocaust survivors on the beaches of British-controlled Palestine. To publicize the Palestinian plight, the PLO in 1988 tried to stage a repeat with an old Greek car ferry, renamed Al-’Awda,or “The Return.” Neither succeeded in landing passengers.
These and many more parallels point to the Palestinians’ profound ties to their mortal enemy, their inability to separate themselves from it, and their ferocious hatred of it. Palestinians have become the Zionists’ double, or what the Germans call a Doppelgänger – an evil twin and nemesis. As Ruth Wisse of Harvard University points out, “The national consciousness of Palestinian Arabs is so politically focused on what belongs to the Jews that they cannot concentrate on what is theirs to enjoy.”
Rejectionism’s Mixed Record
Rejectionism involves two sorts of tactics to weaken Israel: local violence and international delegitimization. The former has failed as spectacularly as the latter has succeeded.
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Violence. Palestinian stoning, knife stabbing, lynching, arson, car-ramming, weaponized kites and condoms, shooting, bombing, rockets, missile barrages, intifadas, and massacres have a deliberate brutality and heartlessness, purposefully imposing personal and familial anguish on enemies. But the viciousness also has a strategic purpose. Violence has the larger goal of discouraging Israelis, causing an exodus, frightening away visitors, reducing capital inflows, heightening security expenses, and inducing government repression. Already in 1968, Arafat spoke of “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.” He and others repeated that hope many times since.
But the effort failed. Israelis are not dispirited and have not fled the country. Tourists and capital have flowed in. The repressive crackdown never occurred. Israelis score high on happiness indices. Instead, rounds of violence invariably end with Palestinians taking more casualties, their houses demolished, their buildings flattened, and their economy battered.
Worse, violence counterproductively hardens Israeli opinion, reduces Israeli good will, and diminishes – if not extinguishes – their readiness to make concessions. The extraordinarily generous offers during the Oslo Era (1993-2008), and especially those of Ehud Barak in 2000 and Ehud Olmert in 2008, are ancient history. Israelis will need many years of Palestinian good behavior, including truth, moderation, propriety, and non-violence, ever again to view them as positively as they did back then. The “Palestine” that once seemed imminent now looks like a mirage. Retribution now reigns.
Violence against Israel’s airplanes, pizzerias, kibbutzim, and bedrooms has also carried an international price. “Palestinian terrorism” has become a byword, with the Bing search engine recording over seven million entries in English alone. Taking this violence to the West – with Sirhan Sirhan assassinating Robert F. Kennedy, Mohammed Saleh participating in the New York City landmarks plot, and Nidal Malik Hasan mass-murdering Ft. Hood soldiers – further damaged the Palestinian reputation. Overall, then, savagery against Israel has completely failed.
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Delegitimization. But that failure pales beside the success of the Palestinian narrative. Whether in the media, education, religion, or politics, arguably, no insurrection ever has achieved as much as the Palestinians’. Depending on the audience, they present Zionism either as an imperialist movement of whites subjugating an indigenous people; or Jews oppressing, exploiting, and massacring a Christ-like population; or Nazis turning Gaza into an open-air concentration camp. Each of these has an audience. They indulge in brazenly antisemitic motifs, as when Mahmoud Abbas stated that “certain rabbis in Israel have said very clearly to their government that our water should be poisoned in order to have Palestinians killed.” Even in more reasonable circles, such as the EU, Israel’s response to attacks almost always lead to international criticism for perpetuating a “cycle of violence” and using “disproportionate force.”
Palestinians portray themselves, in contrast, as the wretched objects of a supposed Israeli rejectionism. Here journalist Ramzy Baroud proclaims that “the pro-Israel camp is fighting for the complete erasure of everything Palestinian,” neatly ignoring decades of Israeli efforts to find a Palestinian polity to live in peace next to. There he states that “For Palestinians, victory means freedom for the Palestinian people and equality for all. For Israel, victory can only be achieved through the erasure of Palestinians,” cleverly reversing reality. The PA’s official paper, Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, makes such views look mild:
As is its custom, [Israel] insists on committing a new crime while realizing its craving for murder. … Bloody hands pull the trigger on a hunch, as long as the target is Palestinian. … The occupation… spread out its snipers everywhere and began to shoot live gunfire – not randomly, but rather in order to wound and kill.
The passage concludes by calling Israel “an expert in the language of sadism.”
Such calumnies resonate in the wider world, especially among Muslims and on the political Left. As Oct. 7 showed, Palestinian violence spike support in faculty lounges, on the streets of Western cities, and at the U.N. General Assembly. As the world’s favorite revolutionary cause, Palestinians can uniquely call on the sympathies and resources of an immense support network that includes dictatorships and leftists, the United Nations, other international organizations, legions of Islamists, journalists, activists, educators, artists, priests, and assorted do-gooders. That the academy has broadly adopted this view, as have significant elements in the world of arts and the media, makes anti-Zionism self-perpetuating. As a welcome by-product, the campaign against Israel also spreads antisemitism.
Palestinians especially dominate international institutions. Not counting the “State of Palestine,” the Arab League has 21 member states and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation has 56, giving their membership enormous weight in international organizations to horse-trade and discredit Israel. Some examples: Founded in 1961, the “United Nations Special Committee on the Situation with regard to the Implementation of the Declaration on the Granting of Independence of Colonial Countries and Peoples” (for short, the “Special Committee on Decolonization”) has long been uniquely focused on criticizing Israel. In 1968, the U.N. General Assembly created the “Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Palestinian People and Other Arabs of the Occupied Territories” that adds more calumnies. In 1975, the U.N. General Assembly voted by a 2-to-1 ratio on resolution to declare Zionism, or Jewish nationalism, “a form of racism and racial discrimination” (but revoked this in 1991). With one exception, in 2013, every critical UNESCO country-specific resolution in recent years has focused on Israel. In 2022, the U.N. General Assembly condemned Israel 15 times and all other countries 13 times. In one of its ludicrous exercises, the UN’s World Health Organization singled Israel out for severe condemnation with the support of many democracies (Belgium, France, India, Ireland, Japan, Luxembourg, New Zealand, Spain, Switzerland), even as it elected North Korea to the WHO executive board.
Palestinian-origin persons living in the West have reached influential positions in many fields from which they spread rejectionism. Think of the academic Edward Said, his Columbia University colleague Rashid Khalidi, Berkeley’s Hatem Bazian, U.S. Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, New York City activist Linda Sarsour, Islamist functionary Nihad Awad (real name: Nehad Hammad), self-styled comedian Dean Obeidallah, Imam Omar Suleiman, the glamorous Bella and Gigi Hadid sisters, British Islamist Azzam Tamimi, and German politician Sawsan Chebli.
As for the Left, the section on “The Left Turns Anti-Zionist” (pp. 31-38) documents its shift in outlook.
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Rejectionism shackles Palestinians to a fraudulent history, political repression, and a death cult. But all evidence points to a majority accepting this situation and not willing to change, determined to destroy Israel almost regardless of cost to themselves. What explains this tenacity?
[1] Iranian dictator Ali Khamene’i has helpfully provided the precise date when Israel will vaporize: Sep. 9, 2040. His acolytes built a large doomsday clock to count down the days – which unfortunately, due to a power outage, stopped running on at least one occasion.
[2] New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014.
[3] This magic happened via four major steps that expanded the definition of a Palestine refugee. First, UNRWA allowed those who became citizens of a state (Jordan in particular) to remain refugees. Second, it extended the definition to “descendants of Palestine refugee males, including legally adopted children.” Third, it added refugees from the Six-Day War; today they constitute about a fifth of the total. Finally, it treats many residents of the West Bank and Gaza as refugees, even though the two-state-solution implies they are already home.
[4] Alternatively, it might be called Muslim Zionism or Palestinian Zionism. Unlike Christian Zionism, which supports the Jewish return to Zion, Islamic Zionism competes with and refutes it.
[5] For greater detail, see Yitzhak Reiter, Jerusalem and Its Role in Islamic Solidarity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), especially Chapter 4.
[6] Tel Aviv does host the headquarters of the Ministry of Defense.
[7] The main difference lies in the Yishuv not pretending to be a sovereign government and the PA strenuously trying to assert just this.
