Robert Spencer | Front Page Mag | 10-7-2025
President Donald Trump announced on Saturday afternoon that peace in Gaza was at hand:
After negotiations, Israel has agreed to the initial withdrawal line, which we have shown to, and shared with, Hamas. When Hamas confirms, the Ceasefire will be IMMEDIATELY effective, the Hostages and Prisoner Exchange will begin, and we will create the conditions for the next phase of withdrawal, which will bring us close to the end of this 3,000 YEAR CATASTROPHE. Thank you for your attention to this matter and, STAY TUNED!
This followed his declaration on late Friday afternoon that “based on the Statement just issued by Hamas, I believe they are ready for a lasting PEACE.” Yet Trump’s call to “STAY TUNED” was apposite, as what will happen next is even more unpredictable than usual. Hamas may indeed release the hostages and abide by the conditions of the peace agreement, at least initially. One outcome, however, is certain beyond any doubt whatsoever: Hamas will eventually break the agreement and resume its jihad against Israel. Whatever they may be telling Trump now about being ready for a lasting peace, and however much he may or may not actually believe them, there is no chance whatsoever that Hamas will lay down its arms and start telling its people that they’re just going to have to live in peace with Israel.
This is clear from Hamas’ founding charter, which quotes Muslim Brotherhood founder Hasan al-Banna saying: “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.” On the surface, it’s an odd statement: a religion, Islam, will supposedly destroy a nation-state, Israel. Yet that is exactly what the jihadis of Hamas intend to do, and why they are fighting. The war against Israel would rage on even if Israel were no larger than a postage stamp. It will never be solved by negotiated settlements, for its guiding principle is the Qur’anic command: “Drive them out from where they drove you out” (2:191).
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For a pious, believing Muslim, this command is no less divinely inspired, and no more subject to negotiation or alteration, than the Ten Commandments are for believing Jews and Christians. The command to drive the Jews out from where they drove the Muslims out does not depend upon the events of 1948, or the claims that Israeli forces at that time compelled at least some of the Palestinian Arabs to leave their homes.
The land of Israel was once part of the Ottoman Empire, the last Islamic caliphate, and before that by the Abbasid caliphate. As such, by the lights of Islamic theology, it belongs to Islam forever, and Muslims have a responsibility before Allah to drive out those infidels who rule this land now. That responsibility cannot be negotiated away, no matter how skillful the negotiator may be, or how favorable the terms of the proposed agreement.
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Although the fact that the war against Israel is a jihad is universally ignored among mainstream foreign policy analysts and policymakers in North America and Europe, Islamic leaders frequently mention the fact, and have done so for many years. As far back as March 1936, Sa’id al-Haj Thabit, the speaker of Iraq’s Parliament, visited Palestine and repeatedly called upon the local Muslims to wage jihad against the Jews.
Two years later, the Muslim Brotherhood proclaimed that such a jihad was an “inescapable obligation on every Muslim.” In 1943, Ibn Saud, the king of Saudi Arabia, explained to U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt that there was “religious hostility…between the Moslems and the Jews from the beginning of Islam…which arose from the treacherous conduct of the Jews toward Islam and the Moslems and their prophet.” Accordingly, the king was happy to discuss proposals for peace in Palestine with “anyone of religion except (repeat except) a Jew.”
Amid the Arab rage after the UN partition vote late in 1947, the ulema (Islamic religious scholars) of Cairo’s venerable al-Azhar, the foremost institution in Sunni Islam, declared that “the liberation of Palestine” was “a religious duty for all Moslems without exception, great and small. The Islamic and Arab Governments should without delay take effective and radical measures, military or otherwise.” They declared that any Muslim who dealt with Jews (even in such trivial matters as “buying their produce”) “is a sinner and criminal…who will be regarded as an apostate to Islam.” This would carry serious consequences: “He will be separated from his spouse. It is prohibited to be in contact with him.”
In April 1948, Sheikh Muhammad Mahawif, the mufti of Egypt, issued a fatwa stating that jihad against the Jews in Palestine was an obligation incumbent upon all Muslims, because the Jews were working “to take over…all the lands of Islam.”
This language about the “liberation” of Palestine from the Jews’ being an “obligation incumbent upon all Muslims,” an “inescapable obligation on every Muslim,” was rooted in Islam’s theology of jihad. A manual of Islamic law certified by al-Azhar as conforming to “the practice and faith of the orthodox Sunni Community” stipulates that “when non-Muslims invade a Muslim country or near to one,” then “jihad is personally obligatory upon the inhabitants of that country,” and indeed, obligatory upon everyone “able to perform it, male or female, old or young,” when “the enemy has surrounded the Muslims.”
The Jews may not have surrounded the Muslims in the military sense, but they could be found everywhere in Palestine, and Muslim leaders considered them to be hostile invaders. Hence every Muslim was obligated to wage jihad against them.
That obligation will remain in the minds of many Muslims as long as Israel exists, and as long as Islam exists. Thus the one outcome that we can be sure about amid all the prevailing uncertainty is that the jihad will go on. Hamas, or its successor, will sooner or later resume its efforts to destroy Israel. Allah demands nothing less.
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