Why Israel Is So Important to Islamists

If the Jews of 1898 — who were fleeing persecution in Europe — could push Islam back (which they did), it signified an intolerable theological disaster of Islamic weakness.

This is a guest essay written by Samuel J. Hyde, a Fellow at the Jewish People Policy Institute. Find him on Instagram and X.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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Hamas is the product of a deep and ongoing debate within the Muslim world, a debate that has raged for the last 150 years and dwarfs the magnitude of any of the discussions we find in Western academia today.

This debate is not just political, but a profound theological reckoning. It revolves around a critical question: Why has Islam become weak?

This question became particularly pressing after the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the subsequent rise of Western powers in the Middle East (Britain and France).

For over a century, leading Islamic thinkers and theologians have examined their civilization’s history, grappling with the dramatic decline of a once-great empire. They contemplate how Islam — once the epicenter of scientific advancement and geopolitical power, home to the world’s largest astronomical observatory in the 16th century — could fall so far. They pondered how their empires, which had once expanded to the middle of France and halfway to Afghanistan within a century, had lost their dominance.

The answer to that question produces the Muslim world of today. Arab nationalism, in its essence, is a direct answer to the inquiry, “What happened to us as a civilization?”

At its core, Al-Qaeda represents another answer, proposing a path for the Muslim world to regain the power and agency that once defined its history four centuries ago.

Early Islam’s explosive rise was a historical marvel. Within a few decades, it conquered vast swathes of territory across continents. This success was not only surprising; it also confirmed the truth of Muhammad’s Revelation in the eyes of its leaders. This divine grace, which Islam shares with Judaism and Christianity, rests on the idea that there is a God, a God of Justice, who oversees history. Therefore, history has an arc, a purpose, and an end goal — a trajectory.

The crucial divergence here is that Islam took a leap that Judaism did not. Muslims believed that being powerful in history meant being in sync with the divine plan and aligned with the divine trajectory. In other words, if they were successful in conquering a continent in 10 or 40 years, it signified their truth and closeness to God, and God’s favor was with them.

Now, imagine you are a Muslim leader in Cairo in 1890, watching the British take the city from the Ottomans without any resistance. You are not only asking, “What happened to us?” but also, “How could Islam, in its divine form, grow weaker than Europe?” Ultimately, you are questioning, “How did we lose God’s favor, and how do we regain His grace?”

Here lie the beginnings of the ideas of Islamic renewal — what many today call Islamism. These are all responses to the question of how to restore the old piety of Islam that ensured geopolitical power through closeness to God. This is what Al-Qaeda represents, what the Muslim Brotherhood represents, and what Hamas represents — a chapter of the Muslim Brotherhood established in Gaza in 1987.

Hamas doesn’t fly Palestinian flags or promote a nationalist agenda; it rejects nationalism, seeing it as a European construct imposed on Muslims to divide and weaken them. This is crucial because it explains why Israel is so significant to terror organizations and regimes like the Islamic Republic of Iran, which has spent untold billions on Israel’s destruction.

Muhammad Rashid Rida was a prominent Islamic scholar, reformer, and thinker in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He played a significant role in the intellectual and political discourse of his time, advocating for Islamic renewal and the establishment of Salafi Islam in the modern age.

He also taught several important Palestinian leaders, such as Haj Amin al-Husseini and Izz ad-Din al-Qassam, for whom Hamas’ military brigades are named. Al-Qassam was a young cleric in the 1930s whose massacre of Jewish farmers sparked the Great Arab Revolt of 1936.

Rida wrote an astonishing letter in a journal in 1898 called Al-Manar (Arabic for “The Beacon”), one of the most influential journals in the Arab world at the time. In this letter, he addressed Palestinian Arabs and called them “complacent nothings.” It was not a polite letter; he was enraged with the Arabs of Palestine following the first Zionist Congress, whose minutes Rida followed very carefully.

Initially, Rida was pro-Zionist, thinking that Zionists and Muslims could team up to expel the Christian empires from the Middle East. However, he later turned against Zionism when he realized it aimed to establish a Jewish nation-state, to turn Jews into a sovereign people rather than aid the birth of another Muslim state “from the River to the Sea.”

Rida was concerned not with Palestinian nationalism — because such a movement did not yet exist — but with the theological implications of Jewish success. He wrote to the Arabs of Palestine, saying, “You are going to allow the weakest of all nations, the paupers of the earth, those expelled from every land in civilization, to push you back and become masters in your land.”

For Rida, the issue was not about rights or military occupation. As a Muslim theologian living under British rule, he found it inconvenient and theologically problematic (but tolerable) given the British Empire’s power.

However, if the Jews of 1898 — who were fleeing persecution in Eastern Europe, arriving in New York Harbor with nothing, and those who were living as second-class citizens throughout the Arab world — could push Islam back, it signified an intolerable disaster of Islamic weakness.

This explains why groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis view the destruction of Israel as so crucial. They believe that Islam’s current weakness is due to its impiety and distance from God. They argue that, by returning to God’s grace, Islam will regain its strength.

Destroying Israel, which they see as a symbol of Islamic weakness, would be the first step in this process. The epiphenomenon of Israel’s presence, in more recent times, as an immovable actor who could not be manipulated only added to the necessity of its destruction.

When Westerners used to gaze upon Hamas and say things like, “Well, you know, they’re extremists, but they might moderate over time,” there was an implicit assumption that the group’s motivations were nothing more than raw, unexamined emotions driven by political grievances. This view was predicated on the belief that, if one approached them with enough empathy, kindness, and economic benefits, they might somehow evolve into more moderate actors.

But the reality is that all of this radicalism — not just found in Hamas but sitting at the heart of the Palestinian cause — is not a product of external circumstances or temporary emotions; it is a manifestation of a carefully considered, long-standing ideological framework that, for the sake of its own standing, cannot accept sovereign Jews and, as such, the existence of the State of Israel.

That in its purest sense is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

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This guest piece was brought to you by Toni Airaksinen, Senior Editor of Liberty Affair in Boca Raton, Florida. Follow her on X @Toni_Airaksinen or Instagram.