Dr. Michael Krampner is a Jerusalem-based writer with a Ph.D. in Jewish history, and a retired American trial lawyer whose writings and book reviews primarily focus on Jewish history, historical warfare, judicial reform, and geopolitical critique.
Just two weeks ago the foreign secretary of Britain, Ed Milliband, announced sanctions against Israeli ‘settlements’ in Judea and Samaria because the location of those Jewish towns and villages prevent a ‘two state solution.’ Underlying his doltish decree was the even more foolish belief that the dispute between the Arabs who call themselves ‘Palestinians’ and Israel is about territory and that if those Arabs have a state of their own then there will be peace, Arabs and Israelis will live in harmony and all will be right with the world.
Perhaps Mr. Milliband actually believes the drivel he is spouting or perhaps he is pandering to the significant number of Islamic voters on which his Labour Party depends. In either case, he shows that he knows nothing about Israel, the Arabs, Islam and the Middle East.
Assuming that Mr. Milliband’s problem is his profound ignorance rather than malice, he would benefit tremendously from reading Dr. Yehuda Yemini’s new book It Was Never About Territory: Israel, Islam and What Really Stands in the Way of Peace in the Middle East, Ebook Pro Publishing, 2026 (available on Amazon).
Yemini, an expert in political psychology with a Ph.D. from Bar Ilan University and years of experience working with Arabs, has written an excellent history of Islamic doctrine and Arab attitudes towards Jews and how that doctrine and those attitudes have shaped the modern Middle East. Relying heavily on Arabic language documents, Yemini shows that Islamic belief and Arab attitudes of Islamo-supremacism, expansionism and superiority caused Moslems to create an apartheid and segregated social system at the creation of Islam in the seventh century. They classified Christians and Jews as dhimmis who could practice their religions as second class residents (never full citizens) so long as they abased themselves and agreed to be humiliated by the Moslem majority amongst whom they lived.
Early Islamic documents talk about the Jews in two ways: first as the Children of Israel who G-d chose and then, at a later period in Mohammed’s life as ‘The Jews’ who violated G-d’s laws and who were replaced as chosen people by Moslems. Through the first fourteen centuries of Islam the Jews were too small, weak and scattered to pose any threat to Islam or to Moslems’ self-image and most Islamic conflicts with the West were with Christians and Christianity.
Dealing with the modern period in Israel, since the 1880s, Yemini demonstrates that the Arabs have been waging war against the Jews since at least 1920 and that war has taken different shapes at different times. The Islamic war against the Jews was always motivated by Islamic doctrine that holds that Jews are repulsive and degraded and there cannot be a Jewish majority state anywhere, but especially not on land that once, for a while, was governed by Moslems.
The breakup of the Ottoman Turkish Empire after WWI led to the rise of Arab nationalism, but that nationalism did not ask for a separate state for ‘Palestine.’ It asked for attachment of what is now Israel to the newly created Kingdom of Syria. When that plan failed, the new leader of the Arabs in what is now Israel, Haj Amin al-Husseini, the murderous and genocidal Mufti of Jerusalem, began a campaign to expel or murder all the Jews in Israel, a campaign that continues today under the auspices of Hamas, Hezbollah and their allies and patrons, such as Iran, Qatar - and UNRWA.
Yemini notes that it did not have to be so. In the early days of the Mandate there was a faction of Arabs who opposed al-Husseini and who were in favor of living in peace with the Jews.
The Arab campaign began with sporadic Arab ‘resistance’ to the presence of Jews in Israel, usually fomented by the Mufti and his allies, in the form of murder, rape and robbery sprees of Arabs against Jews. These occurred in 1919 in the Galilee; in 1920, the so-called Navi Musa murder and rape riots of Arabs against Jews in Jerusalem, and; notably again in 1921 when Arabs went on a five day murder, rape and robbery spree against Jews in Jerusalem, Jaffa, Peta Tikvah, Hadera, Safed and elsewhere incited by the Mufti and his allies.
In August of 1929 the Mufti called for attacks on the Jewish community of Hebron and Jerusalem. In Hebron sixty-seven Jews were killed, ‘women were raped and hacked to pieces.’ In the Arab riots in Safed that year eighteen Jews were murdered and eighty injured. During the Arab revolt against the British and the Jews from 1936 to 1939 al-Husseini continued his ruthless program of attacking Jews and of eliminating enemies. He is reported to have ordered the murder of as many as eight thousand of his Arab political opponents. Hundreds of Jews were also murdered.
During WWII, the Mufti, the father of today’s Arab war against Israel and the Jews, spent four years in Germany working for the Nazis making propaganda for the Arab world. He encouraged the murder of Jews in Europe and urged the Germans to conquer British Palestine so that they could then murder all the Jews there. In a typical radio broadcast to the Arab world from Germany, al-Husseini proclaimed ‘Oh sons of Arabia. Stand up as one and fight for your sacred rights. Kill as many Jews as you can find. It pleases Allah and history and our religion. It saves our dignity. Allah is with you.’
What makes Yemini’s book particularly valuable is that he is always aware of the theological and ideological basis for the Islamic war against the Jews and Israel. He quotes liberally from the Islamic sources and shows that Islamic theology is an important part of Arab politics. Even the so-called secular Arabs live in a culture, an environment, permeated with a sneering disdain for Jews and disgust at the idea that Jews should have self-determination in their own land, especially when that land was once ruled by Moslems -- although it was never ruled by the Arabs of Israel but always by some foreign Islamic power like the Ottoman Turks.
It is a ‘misconception that there were two parallel struggles against the State of Israel, secular-nationalist and religious.’ Says Yemini. The West has been unwilling to look at what the charters of Hamas, Hezbollah and other Jihadi groups say. Those documents say that theirs is a religious struggle against the Jews to rid the land of Jews. ‘Not respecting what Muslim leaders say or write, dismissing them out of hand or providing a moderate interpretation has always been the West’s Achilles heel…’ Yemini warns.
Yemini takes the reader through the modern history of the Arab wars against Israel, those conducted by Arab nations in 1948, 1956, 1967 and 1973 and in between, and then when those wars did not succeed, the terror campaigns including the murder of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics, the hijacking and bombing of planes and the bombing of civilian spaces in Israel such as restaurants and schools, and the murder of families and school children in Israel in the ’intifadas.’ This is all, of course, long before October 7, 2023.
Yemini also attributes the failures of attempts at peace between the Arabs and Israel to Islamic ideology. The Arabs have never been able to make a deal to allow Israel to live in peace in its own borders because their ideology and theology prohibit it. Yemini quotes important Islamic sources that say that the person who makes peace with Israel is a traitor to Islam. That, of course, was why a group of Egyptian President Sadat’s army officers murdered him: they thought him a traitor to Islam for making peace.
It was also why, when the vicious Yasser Arafat was negotiating at Camp David in the Clinton years, he told the West he wanted a Palestinian state but at the very same time he told the Arab world in Arabic that the point of the so-called ‘two-state solution’ was to carve up Israel piece by piece, section by section, to recover all of it for the Arabs and Islam. Arafat never did complete a final peace deal with Israel, even when he was offered 98% of what he asked for, because then he would have had to give up the Jihad against Israel.
That clearly is also the long-term position taken by Arafat’s corrupt, dishonest and blood-soaked, Soviet-trained successor Mahmoud Abbas, currently in the twentieth year of his four year term as dictator-president of the Palestinian Authority. The Palestinian Authority, by the way, is recognized by many countries, including Milliband’s Britain, as the government of ‘Palestine.’
Yemini adds his insights about political psychology to this well-documented history of Islamic ideology and theology regarding Jews and his thorough history of the Arab wars against the Jews. He points out for instance that the Arabs who call themselves ‘palestinians’ are continually encouraged and incited in their culture and in their society and by Islamists in other places, even places that have no Jews but share Islamic ideology. He discusses the Islamic propaganda and rhetoric that asserts that the little Jewish people are somehow a threat to Islam and to Islam’s holy places (the same propaganda the Mufti disseminated in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s) as if Israel’s seven and a half million Jews could really do injury to the world’s one billion eight hundred million Moslems.
Yemini discusses Arab rhetoric and also analyzes Arab behavior in psychological terms that explain why they must continue the Forever War against Israel by any means, whether they are murdering Jewish children or constantly lying about their motives and about Israel and Jews. This part of the book is also enlightening especially for the psychologically minded. It fits together well with Yemini’s explanation of Islamic and Arab doctrine.
In a sense, Ed Milliband is not unusual for a Western politician. His ignorance, or pretense of ignorance to disguise his malice, is common in Western politicians. Such people like to appear as if they are doing something important when all they are doing is repeating the same foolish mistakes that have been made many times before. (See France under Macron).They pretend that they believe that somehow swapping little pieces of land will cause the end of the conflict perpetuated by Arabs who are ideologically dedicated to wiping Israel off the map and killing Jews.
People like Milliband don’t understand that peace between Arabs and Israel requires that the Arab leadership and ultimately Arab culture adopt a different ideological and theological stance toward Israel and the Jews. Currently the Arabs are still on the genocidal path laid out for them by al-Husseini, the Mufti. This is the project that Milliband and other European politicians support even if they are too stupid to realize it.
