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CONTEMPORARY ISLAM, AS FAR AS THE OVERWHELMING majority of Muslims and non-Muslims understand, is opposed to Zionism in every way, shape and form. Yet, when the Arab Nations fought against Israel in the early wars, they did so in the name of Arab Nationalism while within their own borders, they were struggling to curb Islamic-based movements. Gamal Abdel Nasser's fight with the Muslim Brotherhood is well known, as are the other confrontations between the Iraqi and Syrian administrations with their islamists. When Arafat founded al-Fatah, he did not speak of Islam, and when the Black September terrorists massacred eleven Israeli athletes at Munich in 1972, they chanted no Islamic slogans. When the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) conducted its terrorist activities against the "Zionist enemy," it did so under the leadership of a Christian, George Habash, who had espoused Marxist-Leninist principles. Now, roughly three decades later, the Christian minority voice of Palestinians seems to have been absolutely stifled by the calls of Muslim clerics for Jihad, and one rarely hears of Christian opposition to the state of Israel. Largely due to the propaganda movements of groups such as Hamas, Hizbollah, al-Qaeda, and Islamicjihad, the fight against Zionism is no longer couched in terms of Arab-nationalism: it is a now perceived as the duty of the believer in Islam.
Yet, I argue that a thorough investigation of Islam's two main sources, the Qur'an1 and the Hadith,2 present conflicting views on the issue. If the Qur'an is read on its own, without the refraction of the Hadith, it could, based on certain verses, be mistaken for a very right-wing Zionist document. The Hadith, on the other hand, collected more than a century after Muhammad's death,3 can never be mistaken for anything remotely Zionist: the land of Israel is Muslim territory to be wrested from the accursedjews in a brutal and bloody eschatological battle. In this paper I examine those contradictory perspectives and investigate the importance of this information in and outside of the Muslim world. Throughout this paper, unless otherwise indicated, the term "Zionism" is not used as in political or secular definitions, but in accordance with the Biblical concept of Eretz Israel as a homeland for the Jewish people. There is certainly no...