The “Palestinian” Jihad against Israel

by Andrew E. Harrod

“From beginning to end, the conflict with Israel is all about Islam,” writes world-renowned jihad watcher Robert Spencer in his latest superlative book, The Palestinian Delusion: The Catastrophic History of the Middle East Peace Process. He documents in detail how jihadists and their allies worldwide have skillfully weaponized the modern invention of a unique Palestinian nation against the Zionist struggle for a Jewish state.  

Spencer dissects a decades-old “propaganda success that Josef Goebbels and the editors of Pravda would have envied,” which created the global myth that Palestinians are an “indigenous population.” So declare institutions like the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), while Palestinian leaders fantasize about a “link between the ancient Canaanites or Jebusites and the modern-day Palestinians.”  In reality, Roman occupiers in 134 first derived the name Palestine for the ancestral Jewish homeland after the “Israelites’ ancient enemies, the Philistines,” in order to eradicate the identity of defeated Jewish rebels.

In subsequent centuries most Jews entered a diaspora exile, leaving their homeland to decay under largely disinterested imperialists like the various Muslim powers that ruled the region following seventh-century Arab conquest. Mark Twain thus wrote in his 1869 travelogue The Innocents Abroad that “Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes.” Historian William B. Ziff wrote in 1938 that at the 20^th century’s beginning

there were 40,000 Jews in Palestine and about 140,000 others of all complexions. The inhabitants had no other feeling for this pauperized, diseased-ridden country than a fervent desire to get away from it.

This wasteland transformed as Jews, beginning in the late 19^th century, heeded Zionism’s call to reestablish a Jewish state and invested in significant development of the region, which ironically increased its Arab population.  Particularly the League of Nations Palestine Mandate entrusted to Britain in 1922 with the goal of creating a “Jewish national home” on territory lost by the collapsing Ottoman Empire in World War I witnessed significant Arab immigration. British politician Winston Churchill wrote in 1939 that, “far from being persecuted, the Arabs have crowded into the country.”

Egyptian, Syrian, North African, and even Ethiopian names indicate this and prior waves of immigration into what the British and Zionist institutions (e.g. the Palestine Post newspaper, now Israel’s Jerusalem Post) then called Palestine. “Most indigenous people of Palestine, like Los Angelenos, seem to have come from somewhere else,” Spencer writes. During this “Mandate period, the Arabs of Palestine generally considered themselves to be Syrians, and Palestine to be Southern Syria” and rejected any foreign Palestine designation.

After Israel successfully defeated Arab aggressors following its 1948 independence war, the Soviet Union promoted a Palestinian identity during the 1960s through groups like the 1964-founded Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). The PLO would “counter the image of the tiny Jewish state standing virtually alone against the massive Muslim Arab nations surrounding it,” Spencer writes.The PLO peddled the fiction of “Palestinians as a tiny indigenous people whose land had been stolen by rapacious, well-heeled, and oppressive foreigners.” Accordingly, today “it is commonplace to see traditional Arab dress, food, and customs described as ‘Palestinian,’” even though “they are just as Syrian, and Lebanese, and Jordanian as they are Palestinian.”

In the contrasting reality, Spencer copiously cites Islamic canons that make Israel’s destruction a “religious imperative, even an act of worship.” “Islam’s doctrines of jihad, its deeply rooted anti-Semitism, and its supremacist political ideology” make it “impossible for the Palestinians to accept any peace agreement that allowed for the indefinite existence of the Jewish state of Israel.”  An “informed and committed believer will look at the Jews, and in particular at Zionism and the State of Israel” and see an “eschatological struggle against the great spiritual enemies of the Muslims.”

When not deluding innumerable “willfully ignorant and historically uninformed” policymakers globally, “Palestinian spokesmen have again and again made it clear” their obedience to Islamic doctrines, Spencer demonstrates.  “Rule of Muslims by infidels” like Jews, for example, “is unacceptable under any circumstances” and “any land that has been ruled by the Muslims at any time belongs to the Muslims forever and can never be ruled by anyone else.”  Particularly notable, the “Palestinian claim to Jerusalem is based not on political or even historical claims, but on an Islamic fable” of a seventh-century miraculous night journey by Islam’s prophet Muhammad.  Already during new-born Israel’s 1948 fight for survival, Arab Muslim leaders “framed the conflict in exclusively Islamic terms” while jihadists journeyed from as far away as Pakistan to destroy Israel.

Jihad ideology has “made certain that a Palestinian state would be only a new jihad base,” as when Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip in 2005, Spencer assesses.  During the phony peace process that followed the 1993 Oslo Accords, “Palestinian Arabs would say everything they were expected to say and then act as if they had meant none of it.”  PLO leaders like Egyptian-born Yasser Arafat repeatedly incited jihad despite contrary peace proclamations, exemplifying Muhammad’s canonical dictum that “War is deceit.”  Meanwhile “Palestinian leaders have refined lying during war into a fine art” in a “wildly successful” propaganda offensive influencing the United Nations and world opinion.

As Palestinian society is unlikely to abandon its Islamic indoctrination of youth into jihad, the “reality is that there is no solution” in the foreseeable future for Israel’s conflicts according to Spencer’s “distasteful conclusion.”  “Americans in particular like problems with solutions” and embrace the “prevailing assumption that if we just sit down and talk with one another, we will ultimately be able to find common ground.”  Therefore numerous American presidents wanted “to win a Nobel by being the man who finally brought peace to the Middle East,” along with an “army of the professional diplomats and foreign service ‘experts’ who have expended massive amounts of time.”  All of these policymakers should simply spare themselves the effort and humbly read Spencer’s sobering book.