Richard Landes is a historian of millennialism living in Jerusalem; his most recent book, Can “The Whole World” be Wrong?: Lethal Journalism, Antisemitism, and Global Jihad.

Introduction: Rethinking Imperialism in the Middle East

The prevailing paradigm concerning the conflict over the land from the Jordan to the Mediterranean runs roughly as follows. Israel is the last manifestation of Western imperialism and colonialism, the most pernicious and pervasive imperialism the world has ever known, something Western democracies renounced after World War II. They came in the 20^th century, displaced the natives and stole their land. Palestinian violence against Israelis is fully justified in response to this terrible offense.

Michael Merriman-Lotze articulates it clearly in comparing the violence that comes from the Israeli and the Arab side:

in short it is my opinion that Israeli violence is the violence that must be exercised to maintain a neo-colonial military occupation and apartheid-like inequality. Palestinian violence is the inevitable response to that occupation and apartheid-like inequality. Violence therefore will only end when the occupation and Israeli apartheid end.

Although I think this narrative, and the justification it gives to some otherwise unimaginable behavior, is mistaken, both empirically and morally, I think it has every right to be articulated in the public sphere and taken seriously. I don’t, however, think it’s appropriate for this point of view to demand from its audience that they not familiarise themselves with alternative analyses. Here is my serious response.

Consider the imperial-colonial paradigm and the insight it offers us in understanding how imperial and colonial impulses have contributed to this enduring conflict. There is no question that the thirst for dominion and supremacy play a key role in many wars, usually resolved by a battle in which one side destroys the other’s military and establishes its dominion. The pattern of hardened warriors coming from the margins of a society, committed to a supra-moral solidarity (my side right or wrong), defeating an empire gone soft with success, becoming in a few generations soft in turn, and victim to another hungry tribe, inspired the social historian Ibn Khaldoun, to take it as a law of political behavior.

But empires are not merely militarily superior, they have a cultural force that is best observed in the colonial aspect of their activities, their day-to-day superiority over their conquered peoples. When Western progressives oppose ‘colonial imperialism’ they oppose cultures whose sense of superiority over others is so great that they have the right to subject them and exploit them under threat of destroying them. And as any progressive can tell you, these are things we categorically reject.

But were progressive anti-imperialists to acknowledge that their (‘Western’) culture is – so far – the only imperial culture to renounce the right of dominion, and to consider that observation’s implications, they would realise a fundamental conceptual error: in renouncing dominion, the West (at the height of its military hegemony), rejected an international norm that had governed international culture the world over for millennia. Thus, exotic ‘others’ like the populations and cultures of the Orient, have always, and still play by la raison du plus fort est toujours la meilleure. Rule or be ruled. Do onto others before they do onto you.

Arab-Muslim imperial-colonialism

However, thinking that the West is the only imperial force worth discussing (and condemning), progressive historians have a marked tendency to ignore the millennium and a half-long history of Islamic and Arab imperialism. And yet, that is precisely the path of thought and analysis that leads to a progressive resolution to the profound conflict.

Of all the ancient empires that rose and fell, the most enduring was the last, the monotheistic empire of Islam. In Muhammad’s day, Arabs were warrior tribes, primarily based in the Saudi peninsula. And yet, within a century of his teachings, Islam had spread and covered the area from Iran to Spain. For both extent and durability, it was the most stunning imperial conquest in the history of the world.

One of the most important indicators of the penetration of a conquest concerns its impact on language. Take England. When Angles and Saxons invaded in the 6^th and 7^th centuries, they chased out the Celtic inhabitants and replaced their tongue with a Germanic one (Anglo-Saxon). When Scandinavians invaded in the 9^th-11^th centuries, they had limited impact on the English tongue. When post-millennial Europeanised Normans invaded in 1066, the language war between their aristocratic French and native commoner English went on for centuries, eventually producing a marriage of tongues that made English one of the richest languages known.

In the case of the two extreme points of Muslim conquest, Arabic did not dominate. Shi’i Iran kept its language and much of its culture; and in Spain the conquest was turned around beginning in the 11^th century, leaving a limited mark on the language of the natives. But from Iraq to Morocco something much more colonial and invasive occurred. Arabs came in as victorious Muslims, and dominated so thoroughly every aspect of this vast swath of cultures and languages that their language (and many mores) dominated everywhere, largely suppressing and replacing almost all the local ones (cf. Berbers).

I note this because it’s important to understand the remarkable continuity between this conquest and the Arab world today. Indeed, the similarity between the attitudes of Arabs in modern times, and in the early Middle Ages are remarkable on key points:

1. Tribal loyalties: the clan structure has shown great durability in Arab culture: us-them loyalties (my side right or wrong), self-help justice, vendettas.
2. Importance of Warrior Honor: one is not a man without killing another man, inflicting humiliation a source of honor, shame is social death, blackened honor is bleached in blood.
3. Alpha Male dominance: gender roles are governed by the male need to assert honor by controlling the sexuality of his women. According to some readings, Muhammad opposed honor-killings, and yet they prevail in most Arab and Muslim cultures (Pakistan, Afghanistan) today.
4. Strong horse politics: power and the ability to instill fear and inspire loyalty with violence are coin of the realm. Power relations constantly disrupted by power-challenges and vendettas.
5. Triumphalist Religiosity: a form of religious belief that insists on public displays of its superiority, it’s honor, over all other religions. Triumphalists feel the need for public signs of respect for their superiority over others. Right up to Westphalia (1648), Christian triumphalism had legitimated wars, including on civilians. The US constitution constitutes the first time in the history of Christianity, that the winners chose tolerance.
6. Monotheistic Imperialism: Triumphalist religiosity is a widespread phenomenon among the nations. Certainly, the Greeks had no doubt of their cultural superiority and expected everyone to acknowledge it in the places they conquered. But monotheism takes imperialism to new heights, with its political formula ‘One God, one ruler, one faith,’ and its doctrinal claims to a monopoly on salvation for all mankind.

The unimaginable success of the imperial expansion of the first century of Islam fed this triumphalist strain among followers of the Prophet. It led to the division of the world into dar al Islam and dar al Harb: where Muslims rule is the realm of submission, where they do not, is the realm of the sword where infidels who have yet to submit to Islam are harbi – destined to the sword.

The role of Arab-Muslim imperial-colonialism on the current conflict with the Jews

The reason why the Arab world, and the Muslim-Arab world in particular, find Israel categorically unacceptable goes back to the doctrine of Dar al Harb, Dar al Islam. The land between the river and sea became a key part of the exploding Arab-Muslim empire – Dar al Islam – in the 7^th century. Fast forward some 14 centuries, and the dissolution of the Caliphate in 1924 (the first ‘Nakba’) put an end to Dar al Islam formally. In the eyes of the West, Islam, the millennia-long foe, had been put in its place.

But this triumphalist vision of a world ultimately entirely submitted to Allah (through Islam) lived on, taking on a more modern form, more powerful and effective than the Ottoman basket case. Hassan al-Banna formed the Muslim Brotherhood (1927), a multi-generational plan to revive true Islam, fight the forces of secular modernity making inroads in the Arab world whose progress al-Banna saw as a regression to the ‘Jahaliyya,’ i.e. the ‘Ignorance’ of the pre-Islamic Arab world. He sought a long-term, multi-generational goal of a new salvific and eventually global Caliphate in which Muslims ruled according to Sharia: Where there was Dar al Harb, there shall be Dar al Islam.

For al-Banna, his triumphalist followers and sympathisers, the demotion of Islam in the eyes of the nations that had occurred through the military and cultural success of Western imperial-colonialists, threatened the very religion itself: ‘a declaration of war on all shapes of Islam.’ For them, Islam must dominate. Few forces today that seek global hegemony are so open about their imperial ambitions.

In the minds of supremacists like al Banna, therefore, the creation of Israel was a further catastrophe in this long war on Islam, the loss of territory in the heart of what was and should be dar al Islam, and a denial of Muslim imperial claims. The core of the Arab-Muslim irredentist demand that Israel be destroyed, is a direct expression of this imperialist Islam from its first century. Free infidels are anathema to Islam’s triumphalist sovereignty. ‘We cannot concede a grain of sand to Jews.’ For Abul A’la al-Maududi, the most systematic thinker of modern Islam explained, Jews must exist in the state of submission. ‘The purpose for which the Muslims are required to fight is … to put an end to their sovereignty and supremacy.’^[1] To have the dissolution of the Caliphate followed two decades later by a Jewish state in the heart of what should be Dar al Islam was a continuation of the same war ‘against all shapes of Islam.’ For triumphalist Muslims like al-Banna, Islam necessitated dominion. Its demotion on the world stage was an existential threat. Hence, losing the battle with the Jews threatened to be an unmitigated disaster, utter humiliation on a global scale in response to which, in complete confidence in their impending victory, the Arab League promised historic massacres. To lose would fatally wound triumphalist Islam’s need for visible dominion. To Muslims such as these, Israel was a blasphemy against the Prophet (PBUH). An intolerable degradation. Another nakba. Indeed, The Muslim Brotherhood, initially a weak movement, only came into its own in the fight against Zionism.^[2]

The Nakba

This hard zero-sum mentality – if you win (anything) I lose; in order for me to win you must lose (everything) – has characterised one of the dominant currents in Arab attitudes towards Jews in the modern period. It’s not that more egalitarian, mutually respectful relations didn’t exist. The large influx of both Jews and Arabs in the first half of the 20^th century, with far greater growth where Jews and Arabs lived together (Haifa) than where Arabs lived alone (and dominant), attests to the possibility of civil, voluntary relations between the two populations.^[3] The current situation in Israeli hospitals is a rare case of a large Muslim minority integrated into the workings of professional democratic institutions. Israel has better relations with its Arab-Muslim citizens than any European country currently, despite having twice as large a population as any other democracy.

The Zionists put great importance on that reciprocity, and unlike European imperialism (which they saw themselves as explicitly rejecting), they purchased and worked the land, and played by the prevailing rules rather than conquering and then settling the land of displaced populations. They understood that their ability to live in the (former) Dar al Islam (i.e. among Muslim-majority nations), depended on that civil, demotic model of non-coercive, contractual relations prevailing. Their declaration of independence makes it clear that they operated in the liberal-progressive tradition of egalitarianism and self-determination rather than authoritarian imperialism.

The Great Arab Revolt of 1936-39, in which the Muslim Brotherhood played an important role, asserted the hard zero-sum triumphalist position. People who participated in the assault on both the British imperialists and the Zionists, did so to restore Arab honor. The Peel Commission made a point of asking Arab rioters how come, if things had so dramatically improved since the arrival of the Zionists, were they attacking Jews? Responded one rioter: ‘You say we are better off: you say my house has been enriched by the strangers who have entered it. But it is my house, and I did not invite the strangers in, or ask them to enrich it. Better a mat of my own than a shared house.’ In other words, ‘I prefer poverty as a member of the dominant group, to sharing in wealth’. One might call it a lose-lose: I can only ‘win’ (live in poverty) if you lose.

What we have here is a good example of what, mutatis mutandis, became of the spirit of Muslim imperial-colonialism over the many centuries in the land between the river and the sea. By the later Ottoman period, this was a classic case of so many prime-divider societies where the ruling elites dominate the vast majority of commoners living in poverty, and the backwater of a failing system: Muslim peasants – fellahin – and other commoners were in dire shape, impoverished by natural conditions, Bedouin raids, exploitative absentee landlords, and heavy state taxation, living at the edge of subsistence.

Their condition was far from the glorious triumphalism of their ancestors, but that apparently did not mean they renounced the proud sense of superiority appropriate to the conquest, but now threadbare … A mat of my own. When the Muslim Brotherhood and the Arab Nationalists denounced Western imperial-colonial aggression, they did so accurately: both sides were engaged in la raison du plus fort. But what they opposed to that aggression was their own, robust, millennia-long, imperial-colonialism, the so-called ‘resistance’ was imperial competition for dominion.

This framework clarifies the Muslim stakes in Israel’s creation. Nothing could be more catastrophic than the Jews, historically the weakest and most cowardly of the dhimmi, establishing an autonomous state in the heart of (what should be) Dar al Islam. (Scholars of shame-honor cultures note that as long as a humiliating fact [e.g. a wife’s infidelity] isn’t made public, it is bearable.) A Jewish state in Palestine was just such a public announcement of Muslim impotence.

And yet, that is precisely what happened. And the response to the catastrophe was to imprison the refugees from Palestine in ‘refugee camps’ (where most still live) and swear eternal enmity to the ‘Zionist entity.’ Here one finds the key triumphalist response among Arabs to Israel’s inexplicable and blasphemous success, a response that has dominated Arab leaders with few exceptions, to present: make your own people suffer as a way to promote the war you won’t admit you lost. Hamas explains:

The day the enemies conquer some part of the Muslim land, jihad becomes a personal duty of every Muslim. In the face of the Jewish occupation of Palestine, it is necessary to raise the banner of jihad. This requires the propagation of Islamic consciousness among the masses, locally [in Palestine], in the Arab world and in the Islamic world. It is necessary to instill the spirit of jihad in the nation, engage the enemies and join the ranks of the jihad fighters.

Islamic and Arab Irredentism, Western Naivete

If all that makes no sense to Westerners (who then feel required to Westplain it as resistance to Jewish imperialism and a desire for freedom and dignity), it makes perfect sense to Arab Muslims. Former Jordanian MP Muhammad Tu’mah Al-Qudah proclaimed on October 30, 2019:

The prophet Muhammad warned us against these people. The Quran (5:82) says: ‘You shall find the people strongest in enmity towards the believers to be the Jews…’ Every Muslim should read this verse. Every Muslim should memorise it and carve it onto his mind and his heart… (Our) enmity toward the Jews will never end. It will continue until the Dajjal arrives and the Jews are annihilated in the Great Battle, which will take place in the Levant, in our own land, against the Jews. The enmity between us and the Jews will never cease because it is ideological… The regimes of the world can sign agreements and peace accords with the Jews, but the people curse the Jews whenever they recite the (opening) Al-Fatiha chapter (i.e., the 7^th verse, 1:7) in the Quran.

Here lies the irredentism that makes the conflict so enduring.

***

Only when observers realise that both the Christian/post-Christian and the Muslim drives to colonial empire play by the same zero-sum rules that necessitate war, can they begin to appreciate how much the Jews, that confounding people, have promoted precisely the kind of progressive culture that renounces dominion. (Is there any occupying power in the world whose own people oppose it? And in Israel that opposition is despite the dangers involved in ending it.) They have launched the most successful experiment in freedom and toleration in the Middle East since their previous efforts in the first millennium BCE. When Sadat claimed that Egypt was the only Arab nation, and all the others were tribes with flags, he underlined the degree to which Israel represents a much more developed stage of democratic nationhood than any of her neighbours, including Egypt. And yet, Westerners who promote the Two-State Solution readily believe that if there were a Palestinian state it would be democratic, mindful of the rights of their minorities, and live at peace with its neighbour.

The notion that Israel is an imperial-colonial entity, the last and worst embodiment of Western imperialism, and that Palestinians are fighting it for freedom and dignity, is perhaps the single most egregious mistake currently made by the ‘social warriors’ who support Hamas. Hamas, and the entire spectrum of Palestinian parties, all openly fight to take away Jewish freedom and dignity, which the Jews defend with exceptional restraint. The anti-imperial, anti-Zionism of fools repeats the Jihadi imperial, irredentist chant, ‘Min el–maiyeh lel mayieh, Falasteen Arabiya’ (From water to water, Palestine will be Arab) imagining they are partaking in a global struggle for freedom and dignity, and certainly not – heaven forbid! – strengthening the most ruthless, religious imperialism on the planet, which has them on their target list.

Let’s return to Merriman-Lotze. Here’s a rephrasing of his claim:

in short it is my opinion that Palestinian violence is the violence that must be exercised to establish a colonial military occupation that goes back more than a millennium, and apartheid inequality in which women and infidels are unequal before the law. Israeli violence is the inevitable response to that perduring Muslim imperialism. Violence therefore will only end when Muslims renounce their triumphalism and supremacism.

This would all be funny if it weren’t astonishingly stupid and self-destructive. Progressives accusing Israel of genocide are, like gays and feminists for Palestine, actual, real-life cases of life imitating parody… another, even more absurd chapter in Eric Hoffer’s study of millenarian True Believers.

Societies in which such absurdities are spoken can survive. But not societies in which such folly becomes policy.

Conclusion

This analysis might seem depressing. After all, the urge of Westerners to dismiss/ignore this evidence and insist so strongly on the secular, nationalist, human rights dimension of this conflict, reflects at best an unconscious need to believe there is a ‘solution’. At worst it is a dogmatic denial of reality. When Benny Morris completed his study 1948, the publisher rejected it because it depicted the Muslim war on Israel as a Jihad.^[4] Our political ‘scientists’ have limited experience understanding dealing with religious movements and motivations, so rather than address the lacuna in their knowledge, they prefer to go with the fiction of Palestinian ‘nationalism’ created by Soviet propaganda. That was the logic of the Two-State Solution: land for peace. However, when your opponent plays by zero-sum logic, concessions are invitations to further aggression, Land for War. And some key figures, including members of the Israeli intelligence community, continue to believe the fiction, no matter how threadbare.^[5]

What we need to explore as a culture is the mystery of how a believer can renounce triumphalism in the present (what he imagines at the eschaton only matter when she thinks the time has come), and adopt a demotic religiosity. That is a far less ‘manly’ form of religious identity, but it benefits everyone, not just the dominators. If the Western ‘progressives’ were serious about their values they would not encourage this Palestinian irredentism by pretending it is the ‘freedom fighting’ of the underdog, rather than the rage of the frustrated imperialist, especially when that imperialism targets the progressives as well.

It is not as if Islam has no demotic tradition. (One might argue it characterised the first Meccan period.) It is a form of humanitarian racism to believe that Muslims are incapable of the kind of reciprocal respect that democracies demand for the sake of separating church and state, a reciprocity that demotic religiosity makes possible. It is a form of folly not to confront the Muslim world and demand it get over its triumphalist honor-fixation and join the rest of humanity, to somehow believe that demanding this is a form of Western (progressive) imperialism.

The Jihadis have made it clear what this war is about: ‘We love death more than you love life, and that is why we will defeat you.’ Their conclusion only holds true if you who think yourselves bystanders, side with the death cult. We will win when you – infidel and believer – join us in loving life. Who would have thought that loving life was so difficult?

[1] Maududi’s gloss on Quran, 9:29 from his Towards Understanding the Qur’an, vol. 3, pp. 201-202; reproduced in Bostom, The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism: From Sacred Texts to Solemn History (AndrewBostom.org), 2020, p. 42. See also, Hillel Cohen, Army of Shadows: Palestinian Collaboration with Zionism, 1917–1948 (University of California, 2009).

[2] Ioana Emy Matesan, The Violence Pendulum: Tactical Change in Islamist Groups in Egypt and Indonesia (NY: Oxford UP, 2020), chap. 2.

[3] Walter Block and Alan Futerman, The Liberal Case for Israel (Springer, 2021), p. 66, Table 3.3 and p. 78f, Tables 3.5-6. See also the astonishing statistics on taxes paid. Although Jews owned less land, they paid well over three times the amount of taxes than the Arabs did in 1944/45: p. 334, Table 7.10.

[4] The editor at Metropolitan Books (Holt) refused to accept it in part because in her conclusion Morris wrote of how the Arabs were motivated by antisemitism and jihadism. Morris’ criticisms of the Arabs for corruption and disunity were deemed ‘racist.’ (Benny Morris email, 20 October, 2014)

[5] On Ami Ayalon’s inveterate liberal cognitive egocentrism, see Landes, Can “The Whole World” Be Wrong?, pp. 406-8.