Reminding us yet again of the most ignored element of the “peace process.” My latest in FrontPage:
The indispensable Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) has reported that Kuwaiti imam Sheikh Naji Al-Kharas said in a sermon last Friday that was featured on his YouTube channel that every peace agreement that has ever been negotiated between Muslim Arabs and Israel is “null and void.” Al-Kharas’ reasons for saying this are important and illuminate frequently ignored aspects of the “Palestinian” jihad against Israel, as well as of the Israeli-Arab “peace process,” but mainstream foreign policy and counterterror analysts are certain to persist in their willful ignorance anyway.
Al-Kharas said: “The Arabs have tried to negotiate and sign peace agreements with the Jews. Obviously, all these agreements are null and void. They are all null and void – the Camp David Accord, the Oslo Accord, the [Jordanian-Israeli agreement] of Wadi Arabah, and the ensuing agreements. Why are they null and void? Because they abolish the jihad. You are not allowed to sign a permanent [peace] agreement with the enemy. If you sign an agreement, it must be temporary, and that’s it. Nobody said one can sign a permanent agreement. This won’t be found in the Quran or the Sunnah. Can one abolish the jihad? The jihad must not be abolished.”
I’ve been pointing this out for years, but these warnings have been dismissed as “Islamophobia.” I suppose the imam Sheikh Naji al-Karas is an “Islamophobe.” And so is the official Palestinian Authority daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, which recently declared that the Palestinian National Council “again expressed its objection to every plan, project, deal, or attempt to harm the Palestinian people’s inalienable rights.” It called upon the Palestine Liberation Organization to “take all the necessary steps to encourage and escalate the resistance and the struggle against the occupation in all its forms and manners.” Jihad is “struggle” in Arabic.
Al-Hayat Al-Jadida is by no means alone in explaining the conflict in Islamic terms. An Islamic Republic press organ, the Tehran Times, reported in January 2020, when news of Trump’s peace plan was first circulating, that “Iranian Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani on Wed., in a letter sent to the Parliament speakers of the Islamic states, urged Islamic countries to counter US-proposed so-called ‘Deal of Century.’”’
The Islamic State (ISIS) was not to be outdone. According to the Jerusalem Post around the same time, the new ISIS caliph, Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Quraishi, “called on all Muslims worldwide to thwart US President Donald Trump’s peace plan, and added that ‘The Muslims who live in Palestine… will be at the forefront of the fight against the Jews [and] foiling the ‘Deal of the Century.’”
In “secular” Turkey, meanwhile, according to Yeni Şafak, “Turkish demonstrators poured onto streets across the country on Tuesday to protest U.S. President Donald Trump’s long-awaited Middle East peace plan….Many protesters at the rally held placards bearing slogans reading, ‘Jerusalem belongs to Islam.’”
Note all the terminology being used, across the board. “Islamic states” should counter the plan. “Muslims worldwide” should work to thwart it. “Jerusalem belongs to Islam.” Palestinians should escalate their “jihad.”
Yet this is the one aspect of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict that mainstream Western analysts routinely dismiss or ignore: Islam. This is a disastrous exercise in willful ignorance, as the Palestinian jihadis and their supporters constantly frame their war against Israel in Islamic terms, as The Palestinian Delusion: The Catastrophic History of the Middle East Peace Process shows.
It’s easy to understand, albeit inexcusable, why the Islamic aspect of the conflict is routinely ignored. The Qur’an commands Muslims to “drive them out from where they drove you out” (2:191), and even though it is a historical fiction that Israel actually drove Muslim Arabs out, this claim is a staple of pro-Palestinian propaganda, and hence it is a divine imperative, no more negotiable than the Ten Commandments are for Jews and Christians, that Muslims must destroy Israel and “drive out” the Israelis.
That means that no negotiated settlement will ever establish Israel securely and end the jihad against it, and that’s why analysts ignore Islam when considering the conflict: people don’t like bad news, or problems that cannot be solved. Nonetheless, this is the reality of the situation, and no good can ever come from ignoring reality.
In light of the role of Islam in the conflict, a Palestinian state would simply be a new base for more jihad attacks against Israel, as the withdrawal from Gaza demonstrated. Its establishment would not bring peace. The idea that Palestinians or their allies and supporters will ever sincerely accept Israel’s right to exist is a pipe dream.
The refusal of analysts of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to face the role of Islamic theology in the conflict is astonishingly naïve and ethnocentric. The Palestinians and their supporters will never accept the Trump peace plan because of Islamic imperatives that mandate that Islam must dominate and not be dominated, and that any land that once was ruled by Islamic law must be ruled by Islamic law forever.
Unless and until these facts are taken into account, every peace plan is foredoomed. Just ask Sheikh Naji Al-Kharas.
Mike says
And the facts keep proving them selves over and over again
Islam does not want peace
Peaceful religion is an oxymora for them
This will not end until it’s an all out war and everyone is dead
but one lonely Muslim wondering the world screaming were is everyone
or ally Akbar chasing there own shadows
in that very moment
Islam will have won an empty world
then there is the other is you can’t fix stupid
mgoldberg says
The irony is that Kuwait thru out some 400,000 ‘palestinian’ arabs during the gulf war, as they supported Saddam Hussein. I don’t think most were allowed to return, if memory serves. Yet… that hardly gets a mention as it’s always the muslim scourging the jews and everyone else, with nary an eye towards the bigotry within Islam and arabs for each other
gravenimage says
Muslim Cleric Denounces Peace Agreements with Jews
………………..
Of course he does–this is mainstream Islam.
Tony Naim says
Sayyed Al-Kamni, an Egyptian reformist ,stated that Al-Azhar university, the most prominent religious institution of jurisprudence in Sunni Islam, is the prime source of terrorism in the world, because this is where the kind of ideology the cleric in this video professes is preserved, taught and propagated.
Jihad cannot be defeated in the battlefield alone if it is not ultimately and finally eradicated from the religious establishment of Islam, from the minds of Islamic clerics and the curricula of Islamic religious institutions.
That is an intellectual diplomatic battle that should promote human rights, international law above political Islam in Islamic countries.
OLD GUY says
This century old battle with islam is not going away anytime soon. Islam’s plans to take control of the world and rule it through sharia law. They will settle for nothing less. That being said the non islamic people of this world are going to have to make a choice become a follower of islam or fight for our lives. This fight is going to be different from battles and wars of the past, this is the battle that totally annihilate’s one side or the other. The reason for this is that islam is lead by their Allah and a dead Mohammad not by a political or military leader.
James Lincoln says
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