The Israeli right portrays Islam as murderous. It serves a political purpose

Jonathan Jacobson writes in Haaretz on 26 September 2026:

“Most Israelis today believe Islam is an aggressive, violent, bloodthirsty religion that hates Jews and seeks to take over the world,” says Ron Shaham. “Now, I’m not here to defend Islam’s battered reputation. But the problem isn’t just that these claims are inaccurate. They also serve the political right by presenting the conflict between us and Muslims as inevitable and extinguishing every glimmer of hope for reconciliation.”

Shaham is a professor emeritus and former head of the Department of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at the Hebrew University. He was born in Kiryat Bialik in 1956 to a father who had immigrated from Germany and a mother of Syrian descent. Childhood visits to his maternal grandparents’ home first exposed him to spoken Arabic. That, he says, may have sparked his love of the language, drawing him to Middle Eastern studies and an academic career spanning more than four decades.

We meet to discuss his latest book, Beyond Jihad: What You Aren’t Told About Islam published in Hebrew this past July. In this short, relatively accessible book, Shaham challenges the misconceptions about Islam that have dominated Israeli discourse in recent decades and reexamines the religion’s role in the conflict in which we remain mired.

What made you write this book now?

“Of course I share the anxiety and anger people here have felt since October 7. But I’m troubled by the superficial, slanted picture of Islam presented by right-wing scholars, journalists and rabbis. There’s a kind of self-perpetuating system at work: The rabbis supply the religious ideology, and the scholars and journalists supply the ‘knowledge,’ with very big quotation marks, that supports and justifies it.”

As Shaham describes it, both groups promote their views in the news media, on podcasts and across social media, exploiting the Israeli public’s growing interest in Islam since the October 7 massacre. He calls it “a deliberate campaign with a clear agenda.”

“I want to be clear that I’m not trying to smear the entire religious Zionist community or its scholars, some of whom are excellent researchers,” Shaham says. “Still, the figures I discuss in the book aren’t on the fringes. They have considerable influence.”  They include Dr. Mordechai Kedar, a religious Zionist scholar at Bar-Ilan University and one of the few specialists in Islam on the list; Dr. Michael Ben-Ari, a former Knesset member and disciple of far-right Rabbi Meir Kahane; veteran journalist and Arab affairs commentator Zvi Yehezkeli; and Rabbi Oury Cherki, a disciple of Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook.

Ben-Ari, for example, describes his book Vision and Dagger: Islam and Its War on the Infidels (published in Hebrew in 2024) as “a document that takes readers on a harrowing journey into Islam, its values and its methods: its venomous antisemitism, its delight in death and bloodshed, its deceitful dealings with a Western world blinded by its own willful ignorance, and its constant, systematic drive to impose Islam on the entire world through the sword and rivers of blood.”

Another book in this genre is Muhammad, the Quran and the Jews: A Window onto the Truth (published in Hebrew in 2020) by Nir Zoref, a retired intelligence officer with a master’s degree in Arabic. In the introduction, Zoref writes that “the Quran provides tools for recognizing and understanding characteristics of Arab society, such as an embrace of lies and manipulation, an absence of criticism and critical thinking, an unwillingness to compromise, a tendency to blame others, emulation of the Prophet Muhammad’s deeds, the imposition of religious and political ideology through force and violence, hostility toward minorities and other religions, evasive policies and double standards.”

Shaham, by contrast, argues that “the idea that you can understand Islam and Muslims solely through the Quran and the Hadith is ridiculous. It’s like trying to understand Jewish religious law through the Bible alone, while ignoring the Talmud.” Books such as Ben-Ari’s and Zoref’s, he says, also tend to cherry-pick passages from Islamic sources while ignoring the commentaries that explain them, even though Muslims themselves rely on those interpretations.

After Muhammad’s death, the Muslim community was left without an authority who could interpret God’s words for it. Large portions of the Quran are ambiguous, written in an ornate Arabic that people struggled to understand even in Muhammad’s time. Islamic law, or Sharia, developed after his death to help interpret those words. Today, some 1,400 years later, the world’s 1.8 billion Muslims are divided into rival branches, each containing numerous competing voices. They debate the meaning of the very religious texts that Israeli Jewish right-wing thinkers present as unequivocal.

How does all this serve political ends?

“One of the claims right-wing thinkers make is that the conflict between Israel and the Arab world in general, and between Israel and the Palestinians in particular, is a religious conflict that can’t be resolved. [They claim that] the Arabs hate us because their religion tells them to, not because of anything we do. This gives them a simple explanation for the conflict, makes Israelis give up on a diplomatic solution and justifies continuing the military struggle.”

By contrast, most Israeli scholars of the Middle East, the majority of whom are secular, see the conflict as a national and territorial struggle that began with Zionism. In recent decades, the two camps have traded harsh accusations. Those on the right argue that religious scholars understand the region better than their secular counterparts, whom they accuse of naivety and a willful blindness born of political correctness. Secular scholars, they say, lack the tools to understand the Muslim world and the Middle East. Scholars on the left, meanwhile, accuse their right-wing colleagues of Islamophobia and racism, and of putting their research at the service of political interests.

So, in your view, is this a national and territorial conflict or a religious one?

“There is truth to the claim that Islam’s hostility toward Judaism dates back to Muhammad’s day and that this is an age-old religious conflict. That isn’t an invention; there’s evidence for it. You can see it in the Quran and Hadith literature, and later in medieval Muslim polemics against Judaism. For centuries, that hostility was contained, as long as Jews lived under Muslim rule as protected subjects, effectively second-class citizens.”

According to the Quran, idolaters face a choice between conversion to Islam and death. Jews and Christians, however, are “People of the Book,” entitled to retain their religion and forms of worship and to receive the protection of Muslim rulers, provided they pay a poll tax and accept certain restrictions. These include requirements to wear clothing that distinguishes them from Muslims and to make way for Muslims, as well as bans on public worship, carrying weapons, riding horses, and building new houses of worship or renovating existing ones without permission.

But did these restrictions reflect the reality of Jewish life under Islam? In most periods and places, the stringent rules were set aside, and Jews lived “in relative security, practiced their religion undisturbed and maintained commercial and neighborly relations with Muslims.” Some even managed “to attain senior public positions.” To the extent that more than 1,200 years of Jewish life under Muslim rule across different parts of the world can be summed up, few scholars regard persecution as its defining feature. Many respected scholars maintain that Jews fared better under Muslim rule than under Christian rule in Europe.

“An interesting point about Shiite jihad is that, in doctrinal terms, it must first be directed against the Sunnis, and only then against infidels. That point is downplayed these days, partly because Iran wants to lead the Muslim world.”

So what changed?

“With the emergence of Zionism and the conflict over Eretz Yisrael, the religious dimensions of the conflict also came to the fore. You can see this, for example, in calls to defend Al-Aqsa Mosque against the Zionists. But the question is how much religion and theology influence politics. I can’t say whether or when it will happen, but if an opportunity for peace arises, Islam won’t stand in the way. I guarantee that clerics close to the government will find the religious justifications it needs.”

Shaham stresses that this is more than wishful thinking. “I like to give the example of The Egypt–Israel peace treaty. If the conflict between us and the Arabs stems from a religious duty to wage jihad to liberate Eretz Yisrael and return it to Muslim rule as part of Dar al-Islam [lands under Muslim rule and Islamic law], how do you explain Egypt signing a peace agreement with us with the backing of prominent Muslim clerics?”

Previously, the religious rulings, or fatwas, issued by Egypt’s religious establishment had presented a united front against peace agreements with Israel. That changed in the period leading up to the 1979 agreement, with fatwas from two senior religious authorities: Gad al-Haq, who would later serve as Grand Imam of al-Azhar, Egypt’s leading Sunni religious institution; and Abd al-Aziz ibn Baz, who would later become Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia and also served as chairman of the Muslim World League’s Islamic Fiqh Council.

Gad al-Haq, for example, ruled that because Islam is a religion of security and peace, a ruler may agree to a cease-fire or reconciliation to serve Muslims’ interests and protect them from harm. Shaham says the peace agreement with Egypt “shows how flexible the sources are, and how people can choose verses, traditions and interpretations to suit the interests they want to advance, whether that means war or peace.”

Where else do we see that flexibility?

“What is jihad?” Shaham responds with a question of his own.  We may think the answer is obvious, but Shaham shows that it is anything but simple. As he explains, the familiar understanding of jihad, literally “effort and striving for the sake of God,” as holy war is just one meaning of a concept with a rich and complex history. In mystical circles, for example, an individual’s inner struggle against evil is the “greater jihad,” because it demands the greatest effort. Holy war is the “lesser jihad.”

“In the book, I show that there are moderate interpretations of jihad even in its military sense, including in the modern era,” he says.  He cites Muhammad Abduh, Egypt’s Grand Mufti at the turn of the 20th century. At the time, European Orientalists portrayed Islam, in contrast to Christianity, as a coercive and barbaric religion bent on conquering the world by force. Abduh argued that some early Islamic conquests were driven by rulers’ political interests and violated Islamic law. Peaceful coexistence, he argued, should be the norm between Muslim and non-Muslim states.

Another example is Abdallah bin Bayyah, a Muslim scholar of Mauritanian origin and chairman of the UAE Council for Fatwa, the country’s highest authority for issuing religious rulings. The council provided religious justification for the UAE’s normalization agreement with Israel under the Abraham Accords. Bin Bayyah also founded the UAE-based Forum for Promoting Peace in Muslim Societies.

“He argues that peace is a supreme value in Sharia because it serves two of its highest objectives: preserving life and preserving religion,” Shaham says. “In his view, any act that leads to violence or anarchy is religiously impermissible, even if it’s presented as jihad. He also says that in a world of international treaties and recognized borders, the historical circumstances that gave rise to offensive jihad no longer apply. In other words, he wants to strip jihad of its violent associations and place it within a modern discourse of peace, citizenship and cultural development.”

That sounds promising, but how much influence do figures like bin Bayyah have on ordinary Muslims?

“I’m not claiming that bin Bayyah’s approach is the dominant one in Islam today. But he has international influence, particularly in Saudi Arabia and the UAE. One indication is that his approach has become part of the compulsory curriculum at schools that train imams in those countries. In other words, the next generation of preachers will speak his language. Still, some people see his message as government propaganda rather than an authentic religious awakening.

“It’s important to understand that since the 19th century, Islam has faced a profound crisis over its technological and scientific inferiority to the West. That was one of the factors that paved the way for colonization and imperialism, which today take primarily economic and cultural forms.”

Shaham identifies several broad approaches to confronting this threat.

“There’s the secular path, which says that Islam can no longer meet these challenges and that Muslim societies therefore need to Westernize. Then there’s the modernist current, which argues that Islam already has all the answers. What’s needed is religious reform to restore the originality and innovation of its golden age. Disillusionment with Islamic modernism’s failure to break free of Western imperialism and achieve independence led to the rise of more radical Islamist ideas.”

This process accelerated after the Arab defeat in 1967, as the secular alternatives to Islam, Arab socialism and Arab nationalism, collapsed. Radical Islamic movements filled the ideological vacuum. They challenged the West’s cosmopolitan vision of the world as a “global village,” viewing it as an extension of a colonial project aimed at oppressing and exploiting Arabs. As they see it, their violent struggle against the Western colonial system, including Israel, which they regard as part of it, will continue as long as that occupation and exploitation persist.

These movements pose problems of their own and reflect a broader trend of religious radicalization across all the monotheistic religions in recent decades. But another problem, Shaham argues, is that Israeli right-wing thinkers treat them as representative of Islam as a whole.

As a result, “most Israelis see Islam as an aggressive, violent, bloodthirsty religion that harbors an antisemitic hatred of Jews and wants to impose itself on the entire world. I don’t deny that these elements exist in Islam, or even that they currently dominate it, for a range of cultural, economic and other reasons. But while a radical version of Islam dominates the discourse today, there are other versions that the public doesn’t know about and whose potential it doesn’t recognize.”

For Shaham, “Recognizing that potential and getting to know Islam’s different faces aren’t just questions of academic accuracy for scholars of the Middle East and Islam. They’re essential for Israeli society if it wants to recognize not only the threats around it, but also opportunities for hope and partnership.”

Over the past decade, particularly since the so-called Arab Spring, the struggle to shape Islamic public discourse has intensified as the moderate current led by bin Bayyah has begun to challenge radical Islam. Although it is still “too early to say how this struggle will end, the fact that it exists is further proof of Islam’s dynamism and vitality, and of why it can’t be reduced to an image of extremism, repression and warmongering.”

Returning to Israel for a moment, are there moderate voices like bin Bayyah’s in the countries of the “axis of resistance,” too?

“Those voices exist, but they’re silenced and barely heard in the current climate of hostility. That has more to do with politics than religious history. Israel is seen as an extension of Western colonialism in the Middle East, a particularly sensitive issue given the sense of exploitation and oppression that has developed among Arabs since the 19th century.”

What about their understanding of jihad and their attitude toward infidels?

“An interesting point about Shiite jihad is that, in doctrinal terms, it must first be directed against the Sunnis, who usurped the right to rule from Ali ibn Abi Talib, the first imam of Shia Islam, and only then against infidels. That point is downplayed these days, partly because Iran wants to lead the Muslim world and has therefore preferred, since the 1979 revolution, to emphasize jihad against Israel.”

This also allows Iran to bring Sunni forces such as Hamas in Gaza into the axis of resistance. These ties have also helped foster an emphasis within Hamas on dying to sanctify God’s name, a principle more prominent in Shia Islam that underlies the suicide bombings we know all too well.

“Peace, or sulh, can be made only after the infidels submit to Islam,” Shaham says. “But, as I explain in the book, the peace agreements with Arab countries were concluded under international law, not Islamic law. There’s also a verse in the Quran that permits making peace with infidels.”

Turning to relations between Islam and the West, he continues: “Are we on a collision course? I don’t want to make predictions. It also depends on the policies European countries adopt toward immigrants. Alongside Islamist voices that want to ‘Islamize’ Europe, there are moderate voices calling for integration. We need to remember that not all Muslim immigrants in Europe are Islamists. Many want to integrate into Western culture. I don’t know whether we can measure the relative strength of these different voices. Sometimes a highly motivated, determined extremist minority has far more influence than a passive, silent majority.”

Either way, Shaham argues, “a confrontation with Islam is already taking place in Europe, fueled by a sense that Islam and its culture are seeking to take over. How justified that perception is can be debated. It stems partly from the much higher birth rates among Muslim immigrants and their drive to promote Islam among the wider public. In any case, my impression is that European resistance to a Muslim takeover is framed less as a clash between religions than as a struggle over European cultural identity: between European values of democracy, liberalism and women’s emancipation and immigrants’ conservative cultural values.”

Speaking of liberal values and women’s emancipation, many critics of Islam point to its treatment of LGBTQ people. Are there interpretations of Islam that take a more tolerant approach?

“As with women’s rights, this raises a basic question: Why are these critics concerned about the issue? Are they motivated by concern for LGBTQ people and women in Islamic societies, or do they mainly want to show how backward Islam is and discredit it? Orthodox Judaism also takes a hard line on this issue, although pockets of tolerance have emerged in recent years, and Reform Judaism is generally more accepting.

“The orthodox approach in Islam is similar to that of Orthodox Judaism. More moderate attitudes toward LGBTQ people are developing more readily among Muslims in the West, under the influence of Western society. For example, an alternative reading of the sacred texts has emerged there that argues Sodom was destroyed because of violence, oppression and sexual exploitation, rather than simply because consensual same-sex relationships existed.”

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