A defining moment in Israeli-Arab relations is upon us.
The real history between Israelis and Arabs isn’t about land or religion, but about pride, culture, and a civilization struggling to face its own reflection in the Jewish state.
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This is a guest essay by Nachum Kaplan of the newsletter, “Moral Clarity.”
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
A fascinating question regarding U.S. President Donald Trump’s Gaza peace plan is whether soldiers from Arab countries will join the international peacekeeping force tasked with securing Gaza. If they do, it will mark an important moment in wider Israeli-Arab relations.
This is because there is an aspect of Israel’s relationship with the Muslim world that is rarely discussed: The problem is not Islam as such, but Arabized Islam. This may seem like an odd observation, given that Islam is an Arabian religion. Yet it is also a proselytizing world faith that can be practiced and expressed in forms that are more Arab, or less Arab.
The stronger the Arab influence on Muslim states — their culture, politics, and imagination — the more ferociously anti-Israel they tend to become. Where Islam remains rooted in older, non-Arab civilizations (Persian, Turkic, Berber, Central Asian) it can coexist with realism, even wit|’h partnership. Where it is steeped in Arab myth, humiliation, and religious pride, it demands enmity.
This distinction is why non-Arab Muslim countries have generally been more pragmatic in their dealings with Israel. It is also why the battle in the Arab world between modernity and Islamism is so important — because it shapes Islam globally. Attitudes toward Israel in the Muslim world reveal that fault line clearly.
Let us address some hard facts head-on. Islam has a theological problem with Judaism. The Qur’an recognizes Jews as “People of the Book” but also condemns them for refusing to accept Muhammad’s prophecy. The hadith (commandment) drips with resentment toward Jewish obstinacy; medieval jurists reduced Jews to a tolerated but inferior caste.
Yet, for centuries, these prejudices were dormant, not existential. Jews lived across the Muslim world as minorities — often humiliated, sometimes protected, occasionally prosperous, but usually better off than they fared in the Christian world.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is primarily a religious one, not a territorial one, as confused Western chancelleries believe, but it is also an ethnic one. Israel’s rebirth in 1948 and its subsequent defeats of Arab armies in 1956, 1967, and 1973 were not just humiliations for Islam broadly, but for Arab pride specifically.
Israel’s recreation humiliated the Arab world at its emotional core, interrupting centuries of perceived ascendancy. A people whom Arabs had long regarded as weak and servile suddenly decolonized and resurrected their ancient nation in the heart of what Muslims called Dar al-Islam (an Islamic term for the Muslim regions of the world). Each subsequent military defeat deepened the sense of disgrace.
To be Arab was to be the chosen vehicle of Islam’s glory. Losing to Jews was not merely a military failure but a metaphysical collapse. Theological irritation hardened into obsession. Israel became the stage on which Arabs could reenact a drama of lost honor. “Anti-Zionism” became a sacrament, and the Jew was transformed from a protected inferior into the avatar of Western intrusion, modern corruption, and everything Arabs feared in themselves.
The Nakba1 of 1948 created today’s template of political failure seeking redemption through the ritual of hatred. Arab regimes that could not build functioning states built mythologies instead. They turned the Palestinian refugee into a permanent symbol of collective injury, proof that history itself had wronged the Arab world.
The Suez adventure of 1956, when Egyptian strongman Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, deepened the myth. Nasser lost the war but claimed moral victory among his people for defying the West. In 1967, Israel’s six-day rout of three Arab armies humiliated the entire Arab order. The response was the Khartoum liturgy of the “Three No’s” — no peace, no recognition, no negotiation — a theological quarantine against the reality of defeat.
By the Yom Kippur War of 1973, the pattern was complete. The Arabs had perfected a way of celebrating defeat as moral resurrection, proof that divine favor could be regained through blood. The fight against Israel had become not politics but penance.
This is what Arabization of Islam means in practice: the transformation of the faith into the way Arabs practice it, and of spiritual pride into civilizational narcissism. The Qur’an’s polemics against the Jews became, in Arab mouths, an identity.
Yet, like any civilization, culture, or society, there are divergent views. Every Arab state has lived this internal war. On one side stands the secular, military, or monarchical regime that wants stability and Western technology but fears its own people. On the other stands the Islamist movement that promises purity and revenge. Israel is one of the major battlefields where they compete for legitimacy.
Nasser used it to unite Arabs under his socialist banner. The Muslim Brotherhood used it to damn him as an infidel. Ba’athists used it to disguise tyranny; jihadists use it to sanctify murder. Each claims to defend “Palestine”; each really defends its own relevance.
When Nasser’s successor, President Anwar Sadat, flew to Jerusalem in 1977, he punctured the spell. He did what no Arab leader was supposed to do: He treated the Jews as equals. His journey to the Knesset (Israel’s Parliament) was not an act of affection but of political hygiene. Egypt was dying from the infection of ideology. Sadat sought a cure in modernity: open markets, peace with the West, and an end to futile wars. For that act of realism, he was branded a heretic and assassinated by Islamists.
That murder, more than any Israeli bullet, defined the Arab condition: Kill the man who tries to live. The Arab world’s true struggle is not against Zionism, but against the idea of the future.
Arab intellectuals often insist that anti-Zionism is a political idea, not a religious one. Yet politics in the Arab world is religion by other means. The call to “free Palestine” is the modern version of the caliphate’s lost grandeur. Israel’s success — its democracy, innovation, and resilience — exposes everything the Arab world failed to become after independence. That exposure is intolerable, so Israel must be treated as a cosmic fraud, its achievements as theft, and its existence as a provocation.
Wherever Islam has been Arabized, this reflex dominates. The Palestinian cause becomes sacred; compromise becomes apostasy. Where Islam remains non-Arab, the reflex weakens. Theology alone cannot explain that divergence. Culture does.
The best way to measure the difference is to leave the Arab world. Iran before 1979 was Muslim, but not Arab. Under the Shah, Tehran and Jerusalem were allies — two non-Arab, Western-facing powers defying the Soviet-backed Arab bloc. Persian nationalism, with its pre-Islamic pride, diluted religious dogma. Hatred of Israel was not central to the Iranian imagination until Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini imported it from the Arab street. He grafted Shi’a messianism onto Sunni political rage, creating the first fully Arabized Persian state.
Turkey tells the same story in reverse. Under the secular Kemalists, Turkey saw Israel as a partner: two post-imperial nations anchored in modernity. Under current Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkish Islam became re-Arabized with revived Ottoman rhetoric, Arabic slogans, and Palestinian theater. The anti-Israel hysteria followed automatically. The shift was cultural before it was theological.
Azerbaijan, by contrast, is a close Israeli ally. Its Islam is Turkic and pragmatic. It buys Israeli drones, not sermons. Its war with Christian Armenia matters to it; Gaza does not. The same is true for the Muslim republics of Central Asia. Uzbek and Kazakh elites, raised in Soviet secularism and Turkic nationalism, see Israel as a model for survival, not a rival for salvation.
North Africa’s Berbers, another non-Arab people Islamized but not Arabized, rarely march for “Palestine.” Their grievances are with Arab rulers, not Jews. In Morocco, where Arab and Berber identities mingle, the monarchy long maintained secret ties with Israel and made them public when it was safe to do so.
The correlation is too consistent to ignore. The more Islam is filtered through Arab culture, the more it inherits the Arab obsession with Israel. The more it draws from older, non-Arab civilizations, the more it retains perspective. Their Islam is faith without fetish. It does not need an enemy to exist.
Southeast Asia’s Muslim-majority states of Indonesia and Malaysia illustrate that the more Arabized their Islam becomes, the more anti-Israel they become. In 2016, Sultan Ibrahim Ibni Almarhum Sultan Iskandar of Johor (a Malaysian state) told Malays they should be proud of their Malay culture and not mimic Arab practices and customs.
His words fell on deaf ears because Malaysia has become more Wahhabist, an extreme brand of Islam that Saudi Arabia spent decades exporting through global mosques until it made the mistake of bringing its terror home to Riyadh itself, prompting a crackdown.
Wahhabi thought has also become more prominent in Indonesia. It is a country I have spent much time in, and the increased prominence of hijabs and burkas is unmistakable, as Wahhabism — Arabization — has changed the country’s once-syncretic form of Islam.
The idea of a single Muslim world united against Israel is itself an Arab export. It was invented in Cairo, perfected in Damascus, and financed in Riyadh. The Organization of Islamic Cooperation, founded in 1969 after an arsonist set fire to Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa Mosque, was not a spontaneous outpouring of religious solidarity, but a Saudi attempt to reclaim Arab leadership from Nasser. This battle is continuing now between Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman Al Saul.
Non-Arab members joined out of habit or calculation. But even at its height, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation’s unity was theatrical. Pakistani and Indonesian leaders condemned Israel at conferences, then quietly sought its irrigation technology. Central Asian presidents denounced “Zionist crimes” while sending envoys to Tel Aviv. The rhetoric belonged to Arabia; the pragmatism did not.
Israel is hated in the Arab world because it is the mirror that gives Arabs a glimpse of the life they might have had. In one generation, Israel turned desert into farmland, refugees into citizens, and chaos into democracy. It proved that Middle Eastern geography is not destiny. For Arab rulers, that success is unbearable; for Islamists, it is blasphemy.
Every Israeli breakthrough — the drip-irrigation field, the start-up hub, the gay-pride parade — is a rebuke to societies that still debate whether women may drive or children may read secular books. The hatred is therefore existential. Israel, even with its ultra-religious who look as though they never left the shtetl and live in a time warp, represents modernity’s victory. To Arab Islamists, that is intolerable.
This is why anti-Israel politics in the Arab world are a symptom, not a cause, of its decline. The same societies that demonize Zionism also ban books, jail poets, and police thought. The obsession with Israel is the fever of a civilization terrified of its own stagnation.
Meanwhile, beyond the Arab core, Islam is evolving in ways that make peace with Israel not only possible but natural. The Abraham Accords were negotiated not by Cairo or Damascus, but by the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco — states either marginally Arab or post-Arab in outlook. The Emiratis, descendants of traders rather than conquerors, saw that partnership with Israel promised technology, defense, and tourism. They chose prosperity over myth.
Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Wahhabism, now toys with the same choice. The Saudi Crown Prince speaks of a “new Middle East” where economics trumps dogma. His reasoning is not moral but mathematical: Oil wealth is finite; innovation is not. When Israeli-Saudi normalization comes, and it will, this will signal not only a geopolitical shift but a cultural one. It will be Saudi Arabia acknowledging that its old religion of grievance no longer pays.
For the Arab heartlands, the choice remains agonizing. To accept Israel is to admit that seven decades of rhetoric were lies and mistakes — that the problem was never Zionism but the Arabs themselves. To reject Israel is to cling to the only moral currency they have left.
That is why the Arab street still erupts when Gaza burns, but sleeps when Syrians are slaughtered or Yemenis starve. Israel is the safe outrage; hating it costs nothing. It unites Sunni and Shi’a, secularist and Islamist, rich and poor. It is the last common prayer of a civilization divided against itself.
Yet, beneath the noise, fatigue is visible. Egyptian youth no longer dream of war. Saudi elites study in Western universities. Persian Gulf entrepreneurs sign deals with Israelis. The future, however reluctantly, is disengaging from the past.
To say that the more Arab the Islam, the more anti-Israel the politics, is not bigotry; it’s diagnosis, identifying a cultural pathology, not a racial destiny. Arabization turned a universal faith into a tribal crusade. It made Islam’s encounter with modernity a zero-sum game. It made Israel the scapegoat for everything the Arab world could not achieve.
But the cure exists. Every non-Arab Muslim society that has separated its faith from Arab grievance — Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, even Iran before 1979 — demonstrates that Islam can coexist with realism, technology, and peace. The battle lines are not strictly between Islam and Judaism, nor East and West. They run through the Arab world itself: between those who choose modernity and those who cling to sanctified failure.
Israel’s role in that struggle is accidental but decisive. It is the mirror that refuses to lie. Its success proves that the Middle East need not remain chained to history, that a Semitic people can build a liberal, dynamic state in the desert and thrive. For Islamists, that is intolerable. For modernists, it is instructive.
The region’s future depends on which side learns the lesson. If Arab Islam continues to worship grievance, it will keep losing wars to Israel — and centuries to itself. If it sheds the myth of eternal victimhood, it will find in Israel not a curse, but a clue.
The Nakba, meaning “catastrophe,” refers to the 1948 Arab exodus, a period of mass displacement and emigration of Arabs during the establishment of the State of Israel.
This is such a good essay. No disaster can be blamed on one person or event, but there are a few candidates responsible for the catastrophe of antisemitic Arabization of Islam. Haj Amin Al Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem and pal of Hitler and early leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, broadcast Nazi propaganda throughout the Arab world during World War II. Yuri Andropov, the paranoid Jew hating head of the KGB, exported thousands of professionals to the Arab world with pamphlets of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Propaganda is effective .
The writings of the Muslim Brotherhood, by Qtub are in Arabic, but were translated by supreme leader Khameini into Persian. Khomeini tried to import the intense Jew hatred of the Muslim Brotherhood into Iran, but it didn’t take in quite the same way. Without the decades of propaganda, the ground was not as fertile. Only the leadership adheres. Wherever the Muslim Brotherhood goes, they bring chaos, violence, and hatred. They (specially founder Hassan al Banna) are source of Jihad, becoming popularized as a violent rather than spiritual struggle.
We need to rid the West of the Muslim Brotherhood if we do not want to go down the same path. That’s why it was devastating to see Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney celebrate Eid at the Muslim brotherhood linked Muslim Association of Canada.
Where Muslims failed in the ME, they have succeeded in penetrating and influencing Western society, education, politics and media.