What a “Free” Palestine Would Mean

The claim that Islam is a religion of peace is a nicety invented by Western politicians so as either not to offend their Muslim populations or simply lie to themselves that everything might yet turn out fine. In fact, since its beginning Islam has been pretty violent.

Douglas Murray, Islamophilia

Do Westerners who attend pro-Palestinian demonstrations really understand the ideology their support is empowering? I suspect many do not, that their support arises from a genuine humanitarian concern for the people of Gaza. What they don’t understand is that their compassion is being directed and manipulated by Islamic and other totalitarian forces whose primary objectives are not to improve the lives of Palestinians, but to bring about the destruction of Israel and its people, by any means necessary, including genocide. Do they know that Hamas, the current government of Gaza, in its 1988 original Charter (and the 2017 revised edition) advocates for these things (as reported by Bruce Hoffman in the Atlantic on October 10, 2023):

The covenant opens with a message that precisely encapsulates Hamas’s master plan. Quoting Hassan al-Banna, the Egyptian founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, of which Hamas is a constituent member (Article 2), the document proclaims, “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it” …

After some general explanatory language about Hamas’s religious foundation and noble intentions, the covenant comes to the Islamic Resistance Movement’s raison d’être: the slaughter of Jews. “The Day of Judgement will not come about,” it proclaims, “until Muslims fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Muslims, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.”

The killing-the-Jews bit is a quote from Sahih al-Bukhari Book 56, Hadith 138, attributed to Mohammad, that is simply reiterating Allah’s instructions to Muslims.

Here are a few of many examples: “Strike terror [into the hearts of] the enemies of Allah and your enemies.” (Surah 8:60) “Fight [kill] them [non-Muslims], and Allah will punish, [torment] them by your hands, and cover them with shame.” (Surah 9:14) “I will instil terror into the hearts of the unbelievers, smite ye above their necks and smite all their finger-tips off them. It is not ye who slew them; it was Allah.” (Surah 8:13–17)

You could say then that Hamas are carrying out Allah’s plan here below.

These kinds of mystic marching orders from Allah gave Hamas fighters scriptural and moral justification and authority on October 7, 2023, to behead children, rape women, and chop up, shoot and burn parents and grandparents while chanting Allahu Akbar! before proudly ringing Mum and Dad to tell them what a great job they were doing, taking a few hundred hostages with them as trophies, including several women, who they stripped naked, repeatedly raped, tied to the back of cars and dragged through the streets of Gaza where they were cursed, spat on and stoned by crowds until they were dead.

But conspiracy theories have become more popular than ever today, one in particular claiming that the October 7 massacre victims were all actors and that it was a staged event conducted by the IDF against its own citizens, and that those men in paragliders armed with grenades and machine guns were actually IDF soldiers, in other words (as reported by the Washington Post) the claim was that:

the ambush was staged by the Israeli military to justify an invasion of Gaza. Others say that some 240 hostages Hamas took into Gaza were actually kidnapped by Israel. Some contend the United States is behind the plot.

These conspiracy theories must have come as quite a surprise to Ghazi Hamad of the Hamas political bureau, who said on October 24 on LBC TV (Lebanon) that Hamas is prepared to repeat the October 7 Al-Aqsa Flood massacre again and again until Israel and the Jews are annihilated.

There is no doubt that injustices have been and are being committed by both sides in the Gaza conflict and that there are individuals and groups on both sides who should be held accountable. This article is not an attempt to justify either side, but to address an obvious imbalance, by providing information where it is being withheld, hidden or convoluted, so pro-Palestinian supporters can fully understand what and who they are supporting and why, and to provide them with a basic understanding of the nature of the totalitarian ideology their actions are unwittingly empowering when they shout, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!”

Apologists for Islam tell us after every atrocity and terrorist attack that the attackers do not represent the real Islam, that Islam is a religion of peace, that the word Islam itself means peace. But this is not true and needs to be understood in context.

The word Islam means surrender and submission to Allah, through his emissaries, meaning “authorities”, who, since Mohammad—as written in the Koran—are commanded, by violent conquest, proselytising and colonisation, to spread Islam throughout the world until all are in a state of submission to Allah.

Variations of this sentiment—which is expressed many times in the Koran—have inspired the aggressive colonising history of Islam, from Europe to South-East Asia in over fifty countries, where many of the previous religions and cultures have been annihilated and many are still being discriminated against, marginalised or destroyed. Consider the plight of Coptic Christians in Egypt, Lebanon and Iraq, and the Zoroastrian and Kurdish populations in Turkey and other now-Muslim countries. One of many terrible examples is Iraq’s attack against the Kurds with chemical weapons during the Halabja war in Kurdistan on March 16, 1988, when they were used by Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein—an Islamist—killing over five thousand people, described by Human Rights Watch as an “act of genocide”.

In the revised Binding Charter of the Current Government of the Palestinian Authority Islamic Resistance Movement—Hamas, the goals of the terrorist organisation are clearly stated, many of which appear to be paraphrasing Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Article 22, for example, refers approvingly to the fake Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a book that tells of the Jews’ diabolical plan to rule the world. The Charter then concludes by stating the real goals of Hamas, none of which include a permanent two-state solution:

The Islamic Resistance Movement is composed of soldiers under which Article 36 states, inter alia, that the Islamic Resistance Movement “will only serve as a support for all groupings and organizations operating against the Zionist enemy and its lackeys … The Islamic Resistance Movement adopts Islam as its way of life. Islam is its creed and religion. Whoever takes Islam as his way of life, be it an organization, a grouping, a country or any other body, the Islamic Resistance Movement considers itself as their soldiers and nothing more.”

It is clear from their own Charter that Hamas are not primarily interested in the plight of Gaza’s Arabs, but in destroying Israel, killing Jews everywhere, and advancing the Islamic Caliphate for the domination of the Middle East, Europe and elsewhere under sharia law.

There is also the historical connection between Hamas, the spread of Islam and the Nazis. Adolf Hitler admired Islam for its hatred of Jews.

In his memoir, Inside the Third Reich (1995), Albert Speer reported that “Hitler believed Nazis and Muslims were united in their cause because we were jointly fighting the Jews.” This led Hitler to discuss “Palestine” and the conditions there, stating that he himself would not rest until the “last Jew had left Germany”. This was ironic, given that most Jews who had managed to leave Germany before being murdered went to Israel, where Islamic leaders vowed not to stop fighting them until the “colonisers” were driven out of Israel, or what they at the time began referring to as “The Nation of Palestine”.

But the plot thickens: during the Second World War the Nazis collaborated with several fanatically anti-Jewish and anti-democratic Islamic regimes, who were also involved in acts of genocide in Europe against Jews and Christians. During the war, members of the Muslim Brotherhood—the origin of Hamas—spied for the Nazis and fought as Nazi troops in two Muslim Waffen-SS Handschar divisions. Handschar is German for scimitar, the curved sabre used by Islamic troops of the Ottoman empire. The highest-ranking Muslim at the time was involved in the Romanian Holocaust/Porajmos. Hajj Amin al-Husseini, according to the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust (1990), made a substantial contribution to the Axis war effort by organising “in record time” recruitment to Muslim SS units in Croatia that would be involved in some of the worst atrocities of the Second World War.

Referring to the Jews as an invading army of occupiers and colonisers is somewhat akin to the pot calling the kettle black, particularly when we consider that on November 29, 1947, the United Nations adopted Resolution 181 (also known as the Partition Resolution), a two-state solution the Arabs rejected. During this time, the Jews of the Middle East were being driven out of many Islamic countries, because they were Jews and because of the Islamic/Nazi alliance. So where could the Jews go? Europe was clearly not an option and travelling to America was an expensive exercise few families could afford, and so they headed for Israel, where they were promised refuge and resettlement. The resettlement of Jews in Israel is a far more complex historical phenomenon than low-resolution thinkers on both sides would have us believe.

After years of fighting and unrest (and excesses and injustices on both sides), in 2005, Israel decided to vacate Gaza and its surrounding territories, in many cases forcibly moving Jewish settlers out of their homes to do so. They hoped this move would encourage peace. The Israeli authorities not only relocated 8000 settlers and their families, but also exhumed their dead.

But soon after the settlers were removed and Israel relinquished control, terrorist attacks on Israeli citizens and rocket attacks from Gaza on Israeli cities and towns were resumed and increased. After a series of these attacks, for the safety of its own citizens, IDF units were sent to Gaza to check people moving in and out in an attempt to deter terrorist attacks. Nevertheless, from 2005 to October 2023, Israel continued to exercise restraint.

These protective manoeuvres could hardly be construed as the acts of an aggressive colonising power whose primary objective, according to Hamas, is the genocide of civilians in Gaza. In fact, until October 7, almost half a million people from Gaza and the West Bank, one fifth of the population, were employed in Israeli towns and cities.

Israel is often labelled as an apartheid state. But this misconception stems more from hatred than from truth.

In fact 21 per cent of Israeli citizens are Arabs, and many other ethnic and religious groups enjoy freedom of religion and Israeli citizenship. The Knesset (the legislature of Israel) is built on land owned by the Catholic Church, and a substantial number of its legislators are Arabs.

Although Israeli law in relation to all this is not perfect, it is in alignment with Western democratic values, which the hostile Arab states surrounding it are not. Most enforce strict ethnic-segregation laws, ban the practice of alternative religions, and have histories of torture, murder, expulsion and genocide against those who refuse to comply with the strict enforcement of sharia law on almost every aspect of public and private life.

Islamists claim that the Israelis have, since 1948, been committing “ongoing genocide against the Arabs in Gaza”. If this were true, it would be reflected in the demographic history of that region. The latest statistics reveal that the population of Gaza increased between 1960 and 2020 from 1.1 million to 5.1 million, which could hardly be construed as the result of a policy of applied genocide.

This does not mean there have not been atrocities committed on both sides where the loss of civilian life was extreme and uncalled for. For example, the Thawrat al-Burāq riots were part of a series of demonstrations and riots in late August 1929 which culminated in the massacre of many Jews including an entire Jewish town by Arabs. We should also take into account the cumulative number of domestic terrorist attacks inside Israeli towns and cities since 1948, with a death toll that runs into many thousands. The Jewish Virtual National Library contains comprehensive lists of the victims in Israel and worldwide, which includes attacks on embassies and diplomats, major attacks on Jewish targets, terror incidents inside Israel, and the Munich Olympics massacre. The Nakba massacres were perpetrated against Arabs by Israelis which involved the slaughter of thousands. This occurred after November 29, 1947, when the United Nations adopted Resolution 181, and agreed to a two-state solution. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, in 1947 the UN General Assembly:

called for the partition of Palestine into Arab and Jewish states, with the city of Jerusalem as corpus separatum (Latin: “separate entity”) to be governed by a special international regime. The resolution—which was considered by the Jewish community in Palestine to be a legal basis for the establishment of Israel, and which was rejected by the Arab community—was succeeded almost immediately by violence.

This agreement did not mean Arabs would be expelled from Israel nor ethnically cleansed, but relocated. It is similar in many ways to the Jewish settlers who were forcibly removed from their homes by the Israeli army after Israel had left Gaza and its territories in 2005, which was yet another attempt at a two-state solution that failed.

The constant bombardment of Israel with hundreds of thousands of rockets is intended to kill as many Israeli citizens as possible. If Israel’s Iron Dome defence curtain had not been employed, the Israeli death toll would have possibly been in the millions by now, and the conflict at a horrific level.

The current invasion of Gaza by the IDF is in part an act of revenge for October 7, 2023, and in their efforts to destroy Hamas, the IDF may be disproportionately targeting civilians and causing great suffering and hardship to Palestinian people.

The casualty figures given by parties on both sides of this conflict are all in serious dispute and vary according to “the authorities” that make such claims. A statistical analysis of the Gaza-based Ministry of Health (a wing of Hamas) casualty count, titled “Statistically Impossible: A Critical Analysis of Hamas’s Women and Children Casualty Figures”, in the March 2024 edition of Fathom Journal, reported that:

statistics pertaining to the present war all come from organisations operating under the Hamas government. This has led to significant debate about the reliability of both the total death count and its constituent makeup in terms of combatants and civilian men, women, and children. This paper demonstrates that the casualty figures concerning women and children are statistically impossible. Our results cast serious doubt on all other aspects of the Gazan death counts.

The Gazan Ministry of Health (MoH) has repeatedly claimed that 70 per cent of Gazan deaths are women and children. We first found the claim in the MoH’s 11 December 2023 report. In 2024, the MoH has repeated this claim in all seven of its reports that we have been able to obtain so far this year. The 70 per cent figure has also been widely cited in the media, with a recent BBC fact-check even using it to criticise IDF statistics on eliminated Hamas combatants. But how trustworthy is the 70 per cent statistic? It should be kept in mind that the Gazan MoH operates under the auspices of the Hamas government, giving it a vested interest in delegitimising Israel and demonising the IDF.

The spread of Islam has always been and is still being accomplished through military conquest, mass migration and colonisation.

Islamic “colonisers” conquered Israel and Syria around 700 AD and started Muslim rule which spread over 1300 years. Archaeological records show that Israel was occupied by Jews centuries before the Islamic conquests and colonisation. The Arab claim that Israel is their national homeland is untrue, as attested by the Dome of the Rock—an Islamic shrine located on top of the Temple Mount in the Old City of Jerusalem. The Temple was destroyed by Islamic colonisers, who then built the Dome of the Rock upon its ruins. The Dome was initially completed in 691-92 at the order of Umayyad Caliph Abd al-Malik.

Muslims hated Jews long before the State of Israel was established, because Jew hatred is one of the fundamental tenets of the Koran, reinforced by the teachings of Islamic scholars for centuries. Kalid al Hud, for example, observed that Mohammad drove the Jews out of Arabia. The Koran in fact, not only wants Jews out of the Middle East, but eradicated from the face of the earth.

There was never in the recorded history of the Middle East any nation that covered the whole of Israel called the Palestinian nation. By which I mean a cluster of towns and cities united under a common flag, with its own judicial system, its own army, its own coinage and government and so on, in other words, those elements by which a nation is defined. The Arabs as an ethnic group originally migrated from Arabia and at the time pledged their allegiance to Syria. The historical reality of a contemporary Palestinian nationalism is a myth that existed nowhere until it was created early last century along with its propaganda, slogans and flag.

What should one expect when living under Islamic rule? Similar, and in many ways even more extreme, conditions as under any dictatorship, including a complete crackdown on freedom of expression. For a start, alcohol and most forms of art are banned in Islam because they excite the senses and are often associated with criticism of religion.

Punishment can be severe for those who transgress. Consumption of any intoxicants (khamr) is forbidden in the Koran. The prohibition of alcohol is verified from Surah Nisa (4:43) and Maida (5:90–91). The sharia punishment is flogging. Singing and dancing and music in general (for entertainment purposes) are also banned by sharia and considered haram, a term used in Islamic jurisprudence that refers to any act that is forbidden by Allah.

Any sculpture or painting that reflects the beauty of human or animal forms is haram. Mohammad said, “The painters of these pictures will be punished on the Day of Resurrection, and it will be said to them, ‘Make alive what you have created’.” (Book 97, Hadith 183) To the Western mind, art is not a form of worship or idolatry or a substitute for the worship of God, but expressions meant to inspire others, and as expressions of the proof of the divine in nature.

Homosexuality is not tolerated in Islam (Koran 7:80–84, 27:55, 26:168). Homosexuals in many Islamic countries today are severely punished and often brutally murdered. A 2013 study in the Fordham International Law Journal reported:

All five states that currently punish same-sex relations by the death penalty are Sharia-compliant: Iran, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Mauritania, and Sudan. The death penalty is also applied in the northern region of Nigeria, which has predominantly Muslim populations, and the southern parts of Somalia. The most brutal punishments, including lashes and public stoning, as well as arbitrary executions, also occur in Muslim-majority states (namely, Iran, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Qatar, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Malaysia). Some of the Islamic states that impose life imprisonment do so on the basis of the Sharia injunctions (for example, Maldives). Even the most “tolerant” states still punish the offence of “unnatural intercourse” (Bangladesh).

Intolerance and revenge permeate sharia law. The rights of women, for example, in relation to property and marriage, as detailed in the Koran (4:34), are inferior to the rights of men:

Men have authority over women because Allah has made the one superior to the other, and because men spend their wealth to maintain them. Good women are obedient. They guard their unseen parts because Allah has guarded them. As for those among you who fear disobedience, admonish them and send them to beds apart and beat them.

And what if a Muslim, after much contemplation and study, decides not to be a Muslim, or converts to another religion? In the West this is part of freedom of expression and choice and does not detract from a person’s ability to be a good citizen. But according to sharia law, any Muslim who decides to leave the religion must be killed. This is not an exaggeration: the punishment for apostasy is death. The famous Koranic commentary of Al Kazan quotes from Malik ibn Anas, Ahmad ibn Hanbal and other Koranic scholars, and cumulatively arrives at this interpretation: “All the deeds of the apostate become null and void in this world and the next. He must be killed. His wife must be separated from him and he has no claims on any inheritance.”

Today, the Israeli-Arab conflict threatens not only to engulf the whole of the Middle East, but the wider world.

The language of both sides is now charged with implications that nuclear retaliation is now on the cards, and aligns with scripture that prophesies some sort of cataclysmic end-time event, from which their side would emerge, with God’s help, unscathed. With both sides believing God is on their side, such rhetoric should be taken seriously. While Israel has never yet threatened to use nuclear weapons as part of a pre-emptive strike, there are Arab voices in authority who have.

Major General Jibril Rajoub is the current Secretary General of Fatah’s Central Committee and regarded as a potential candidate to succeed Mahmoud Abbas. His brother, Naif Rajoub, was a Hamas member of the Palestinian Legislative Council between 2006 and ­2018. Jibril Rajoub had this to say in 2013 on Radio Al Mayadeen, a pan-Arabist satellite television channel launched in Beirut in 2012, which speaks for almost all the Arab regimes in the Middle East: “Until now we don’t have nuclear weapons. Believe me, if we had nuclear weapons we would use them tomorrow morning.”

The Israeli-Arab conflict is deeper and more perilous than fanatics on either side would have us believe. Cooler heads need to prevail. I believe Israel has a right to exist, and whatever the future holds that right must never be compromised. The Arabs of Gaza and elsewhere, equally have a right to exist that should not be compromised. But with rights come responsibilities to themselves and to each other, which will be necessary before the implementation of a just and lasting peace is possible. The great question that now remains is: How? And it needs to be answered—soon.

Eugene Alexander Donnini is a freelance writer and poet whose essays and poetry have appeared frequently in Quadrant in recent years.