Moshe Maoz’s book is a warning of impending Armageddon sparked by a combination of obduracy and fanaticism over the Holy City and a cri de coeur for action to prevent it.
The outcome is not a given. In Maoz’s view, it could go either way. His central thesis is that, throughout the ages, Muslim-Jewish relations have been characterized by an inherent duality: hatred, persecution and violence on one hand, mutual respect and readiness for cooperation on the other.
Widespread blanket generalizations on both sides, Jews claiming a monolithic Muslim antisemitism and Muslims asserting an all-encompassing Jewish hatred for Islam, are wrongheaded and dangerous.
For Maoz, a Hebrew University professor emeritus in Middle Eastern studies, the relationship between the two monotheistic religions is more complex: They are not mutually exclusive or implacably locked in an existential struggle; on the contrary, there has always been a duality in the perception of the other. And crucially, in his view, the extended periods of cooperation in the past show that a model of mutually beneficial accommodation is possible today.
Much of the book is devoted to a sweeping survey of Muslim-Jewish relations from the emergence of Islam in the 7th century to the present. The duality begins with the prophet Mohammed himself, who initially admired the Jews and tried to win them over to the new religion. Only when he failed did he direct prayer facing Mecca rather than Jerusalem and embark on a holy war against the Jewish tribes in the Arabian Peninsula.
The Koran, too, while largely derogatory towards Jews, “the descendants of monkeys and pigs,” sees in Abraham a common patriarch and declares that all people, including Jews, “who believe in God and the Last Day, and act righteously - will have their reward with their Lord.”
Moreover, as Maoz points out, Muslims generally preferred Jews to Christians on both theological and pragmatic grounds. Islam and Judaism are strictly monotheistic whereas Christianity preaches a Holy Trinity; Jews, loyal, submissive subjects and relatively few in number, did not pose anything like the security threat to Muslim rule crusading Christians did.
Treatment of the Jews in Muslim-ruled lands reflected the fundamental duality of perception. There were “golden ages” in North Africa, Spain and the Ottoman Empire, alongside parallel periods of severe persecution including forced conversion to Islam. For example, the sustained cruelty of the Almohad Caliphate provoked Maimonides’ 12th century “Epistle to Yemen” in which he declared: “Never has a nation risen against the Jewish people that is a more hateful enemy than the nation of Ishmael.”
At the core of Maoz’s argument, however, is his claim that Islam never developed the ingrained antisemitism Christianity did. On this he quotes Bernard Lewis, the preeminent scholar of Islam, who found “little sign of any deep-rooted emotional hostility directed against Jews, such as the antisemitism of the Christian world.”
Indeed, Lewis maintains that today’s Muslim antisemitism is primarily a reaction to Zionism and the rise of Israel. It is, he says, “a function of the Arab-Israeli conflict cynically exploited for propaganda reasons by Arab rulers and intellectual elites. It is something that came from above…as a political and polemical weapon to be discarded if and when it is no longer required.”
But as Lewis suggests and Maoz acknowledges strains on the already complex relationship intensified with the emergence of Zionism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Zionism, Maoz writes, elicited strong and violent opposition especially in the Holy Land with the focus often on Jerusalem and the Temple Mount.
In the early days under the British Mandate (1920-1948), extremists over Jerusalem emerged on both sides. Amin al-Husseini, the pro-Nazi Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, took an uncompromisingly hostile position. In the worst outbreak of anti-Jewish violence, longstanding tensions over access to the Western Wall exacerbated by Husseini sparked nationwide Arab rioting in the summer of 1929. 133 Jews were massacred mainly in Hebron, Jerusalem and Safed.
On the Jewish side, religious and secular hardliners inflamed Muslim opinion with visions a Third Temple built on the ruins of the Haram al-Sharif mosques.
The establishment of Israel in 1948 loosed a flood of Muslim resentment. Where Jews in Muslim lands had been at best a tolerated minority, in Israel the tables were turned. Arabs were outraged by the exodus in war of Palestinian refugees and the perceived second class treatment of those who remained. Israel was seen as a spearhead of western imperialism, a foreign body in Arab land, a stain on Arab honor. But for the first nineteen years of Israel’s existence, the Old City and Temple Mount, then in Jordanian hands, were not a focal point of conflict.
That changed in 1967. The Six Day War had two diametrically opposite results: It unleashed radically militant forces on both sides especially with regard to Jerusalem and Temple Mount now under Jewish control; but at the same time, Arab recognition of Israel’s military prowess gave rise to pragmatic forces, ready for accommodation and mutually beneficial cooperation.
Some religious Jews saw the capture of the Old City as evidence of Messianic times and rebuilding the Temple as a divine fiat to expedite the Messiah’s coming. In the mid-1980s, Yehuda Etzion and other members of the “Jewish Underground” were caught with detailed plans to blow up the Haram al-Sharif mosques and rebuild the Temple on the debris.
Long since released from jail, Etzion still openly preaches rebuilding the Temple, brandishing detailed architectural designs. There are around 20 similar Jewish Temple Mount organizations active today. This has been a factor in a concomitant radicalization of Muslims over al-Haram al-Sharif, with calls for the defense of al-Aqsa in unconditional holy war.
Maoz argues that the extreme movements on both sides nurture each other and, if not curbed, precipitate action by one side or the other could ignite the fires of Armageddon.
The volatility of the situation has been underlined several times in the recent past. 1n 1996 riots erupted over Israeli excavation of tunnels under the Western Wall; in 2000 the second intifada broke out after a deliberately provocative visit to Temple Mount by then opposition leader Ariel Sharon; 2015 saw the “intifada of the knives” in Jerusalem; and there were riots with religious overtones in August 2019 (Tisha B’Av) and in April-May 2021 (Ramadan), which sparked a major outbreak of hostilities between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, as well as countrywide clashes between rampaging Muslims and Jews in Israel-proper.
Maoz also points to gratuitous political aggravation. For example, in 2018, US president Donald Trump’s moving of the American embassy to Jerusalem in May and Israel’s passage of the Nation-State Law in July. Both steps were seen to imply Israeli sovereignty over all of Jerusalem ahead of negotiations and sparked widespread protests in the Arab-Muslim world.
But there are also powerful pragmatic forces at work which could prevent a further conflagration. Over the past several decades, largely unnoticed interfaith dialogue (in which Maoz himself has been deeply involved) and, more importantly, significant peace moves have laid a platform for potential Israeli-Palestinian accommodation, which, in Maoz’s view, could, more than anything else, help defuse the Jerusalem situation and the underlying Jewish-Muslim tensions.
“Non-resolution of this will worsen the attitudes of many Muslims against Jews and Israel and will strengthen the fanatic Muslim movements. In contrast, a resolution of the Palestinian problem and the issue of East Jerusalem by consensus will decrease or negate the motives and excuses of the extremist Muslims – including Hamas – to fight Israel and the Jews, and will help improve Muslim-Jewish relationships and strengthen Israel’s position in the Arab and Muslim world,” he asserts.
In Maoz’s view, much depends on Israel. For him, the best way forward would be for a new government to accept the Saudi peace plan as a basis for negotiation with the Arab-Muslim world, primarily with the Palestinians. The Saudi plan, adopted by the Arab League in 2002 and by all 57 Muslim states in 2005 offers Israel normalization and peace with the entire Arab-Muslim world in return for resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict based on the following principles: termination of the occupation, establishment of a Palestine State alongside Israel with East Jerusalem as its capital, and a solution of the refugee issue agreed on by Israel.
This, or some other similar initiative, could secure Israel’s future in the region. The alternative, sitting tight and doing nothing, could lead to Armageddon.
A final caveat: Maoz’s book makes a strong case for the reconcilability of the Jewish and Muslim religions. It does not tackle the clash of potentially implacable Israeli and Palestinian nationalisms at the heart of the conflict in the same way. The zealous claims on both sides over the same land and the depth of Palestinian feeling over the refugee issue receive scant mention.
This begs the question: Given the souring of Israeli-Palestinian relations over the past decade and the inherent difficulties at the core of the conflict is the Saudi-type deal Maoz proposes still feasible? It may be. But even if not to the last jot and tittle, given the potential rewards and the enormity of the dangers, especially considering the volatility of the Jerusalem/Temple Mount tinderbox, it is incumbent on Israel to find a way to seize the initiative – with regard to both the West Bank and Gaza.
The writer is a former politics, diplomacy and opinion editor at The Jerusalem Report.
Jews, Muslims and Jerusalem:
Disputes and Dialogues
Moshe Maoz
Sussex Academic Press
270 pages; $34.95