Letter to Dr. Einat Wilf

By Carl Goldberg, PhD

Editor's Note:  This is one of the commentaries selected from Robin's weekly newsletter Patriot Neighbors. Any cartoons appearing will have been added by me.  If you wish to get the full edition,   E-mail her at PatriotNeighbors@yahoo.com to get on her list, it's free.  RK

Again, my compliments on your outstanding presentation on Michael Shermer's show  (YouTube: How to Achieve Peace in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.) I sent the recording to all of my email groups with my high recommendation. In your presentation, you correctly got to the root of the conflict over Israel, namely, that the Arabs/Moslems adamantly refuse to countenance any Jewish sovereign state in any borders in the territory of the former British Palestine Mandate. 

You were cautiously optimistic that this Arab/Moslem position could change, and you pointed to the Gulf states as an example of how Moslems can reinterpret their religious texts to become "Muslim Zionists."

In my opinion, there are no grounds even for cautious optimism for the following reason. The Abraham Accord states do not represent a reinterpretation of Islam's sacred texts. The leaders of the Gulf states are dictators who recognize that the sacred doctrines of Islam contradict the state interests of a modern state, and they use their dictatorial power to pursue state interests against their own Islamic religious establishments and their own religious subjects. They have not reinterpreted the Koran or the Sunnah; they are just ignoring them in the interests of state.

The unfortunate fact is that the Koran commands Moslems explicitly to make war on the Jews (and Christians, too.) in order to subjugate them to Islamic rule. This precludes all Jewish sovereignty. The Hamas Charter makes this very clear and even says that the very existence of Israel is an affront to Allah. 

Muhammad, as you well know, said in a notorious genocidal hadith that the Moslems will fight the Jews and kill them. That is also sacred Islamic text, and it too is reproduced in the Hamas Charter. This is why the Moslem Arabs have always refused a state when it was offered to them on condition that they live alongside a Jewish state. Allah prohibits it! There is no way to come up with an interpretation of these texts which means the opposite of what the text says.

Unfortunately, we are all stuck with those immutable Islamic sacred texts. If there is any hope for the Moslem Arabs to agree to coexist with a sovereign Jewish state, it is that masses of Moslems will become more secular, less religious and simply ignore these parts of their sacred texts. Ultimately the root of the Moslem (not only Arab! See the Islamic Republic of Iran!) war against Israel is Islam, itself, preached in all the mosques. 

Any Palestinian Arab leader who aspired to peace with Israel, would have to go against his own religious establishment and against his own religious population -- in addition, of course, to going against the multi-generational anti-Israel narrative of the "naqba."