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Why the Islamic World Won't Recognize a Jewish State

[BESA Center/Bar-Ilan University] Mordechai Kedar - The Islamic world is ideologically incapable of according legitimacy to the State of Israel for deep-seated religious, nationalistic and historical reasons. According to Islam, the Jewish religion was invalidated by the birth of Christianity, which in turn was invalidated by the arrival of Islam. Islam's basic approach is not that it came to the world to exist alongside other religions as equal among equals, but to replace them. Jews are perceived in the Islamic world as members of a religion without an ethnic or national basis. Thus, in Iraq, there are Arab Iraqi Muslims, Arab Iraqi Christians and Arab Iraqi Jews, all members of the Arab nation. From an Islamic perspective, a French Jew is a member of the French nation. How can one recognize Israel as the "State of the Jewish People" - an ethnic group that does not really exist? Palestine was conquered during the period of Khalif Omar bin al-Khattab in the third decade of the seventh century. This placed Palestine within the group of countries which were under Islamic rule, like Spain, Sicily and part of the Balkans, and which must be returned to the bosom of Islam. Khalif Omar declared Palestine, from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River, as Waqf (holy endowment) land, consecrated for all Muslim generations forever. So how can the Jews demand that Muslims recognize the Jewish conquest of the land of Palestine which is holy to Muslims alone? The writer, a research associate at the BESA Center, is a 25-year veteran of IDF Military Intelligence.
2009-07-31 06:00:00
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