Professor Moshe Sharon, one of the most senior Middle East scholars in Israel, ties in the Oct. 7 massacre with “the most basic issues in Islam that the public in Israel is unaware of.” A conversation with a man who served as the advisor of Menachem Begin and Rafael Eitan, a globally renowned expert on Islam.

Professor Moshe Sharon (86), one of the most senior Middle East scholars in Israel, is convinced that the majority of Israelis have no real idea as to the profound depth of the hatred of Jews and Israel that is ingrained in Islam. These are the roots that gave birth to the vicious, barbaric massacre carried out by Hamas on October 7. “For years now, we have been busy telling ourselves stories that we have wanted to believe,” says Sharon. “Some of this stems from ignorance and a lack of familiarity with the most basic issues in Islam, and we really insist on not looking the reality of the situation squarely in the eye.”

Prof. Sharon, a retired IDF colonel, is a globally renowned researcher of Shia Islam and the history of Islam in the Land of Israel and the middle ages. He was a special consultant on Arab affairs to the late Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, and also served as an advisor to former Minister of Defense, Moshe Arens and to Binyamin Ben Eliezer, during his stint as the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, and he worked with two Chiefs of the General Staff – Rafael Eitan (Raful) and Moshe Levi. He is currently proposing to the policymakers in Israel that they should erase two words from their lexicon – “Peace” and “Now” – if they seek to guarantee the security of the citizens of Israel and to create a tolerable state of affairs for them. The Moshe Sharon with whom I met has a unique, double perspective – both as a lifelong member of the academic world and a studious researcher, as the man who headed the Department of Islamic Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a student of the great Bernard Lewis, and as an individual whose academic works span a diverse spectrum of periods and streams in the history of Islam, but also as a man of action, who has been present at a number of decisive decision-making junctures throughout the 1970’s and 1980’s.

The interview we held with him, among others, gave rise to a surprising and perhaps less orthodox insight into the Iranian issue, as well as an unusual, and some might even say disturbing, look at the small minority of Israeli Arabs who choose to serve in the IDF. But before we delve into all that, the obvious starting point for the long conversation with him is the open wound left by the events of October 7.

Q: At this current time, there are many people asking themselves if the images of October 7 do indeed reflect the true face of Islam, and what is the basic attitude of Islam towards Judaism, Zionism and the State of Israel?

Sharon: “Let’s begin with the fact that from the outset, Islam has abhorred the Jews. The Jews’ decision to reject the teachings of Muhammad was sufficient to categorize them as the ‘enemies of Islam’, and this animosity of Islam towards the Jews is a continuing sentiment stretching across time from that period until the ‘end of days’. That is the basis of it all. Our ‘end of days’ is ‘The wolf shall dwell with the lamb and the leopard lie down with the kid.’ Islam’s end of days is a process whose appearance will be triggered by a future occurrence. According to the hadith, the body of sayings or traditions attributed to the Prophet Muhammad, the end of days will not arrive until the Muslims kill all the Jews, apart from those who choose to hide behind trees and stones. As such, the

hadith continues by recommending that perhaps the Muslims should make the effort of looking behind the trees and the stones, as there might be Jews hiding there, so that they don’t miss out on finding any of them.

“As the Jews are ‘the People of the Book’, then until the end of days, in other words until the bitter end that awaits them, the Jews may live under the rule of Islam provided that they pay the jizya, the poll tax imposed on non-Muslims in the Islamic world, and also provided that they are humiliated.”

Q: What do you mean by humiliated?

“They need to appear in public in clothes that set them apart from the others and degrade them. The heart of the matter is that the Muslims are not permitted to live in equality with the Jews. This perspective is based on the adage that “Islam is superior and prevails over all other religions.’ This superiority takes the form, for example, of the fact that a Jew may not marry a Muslim woman, but a Muslim man may marry a Jewess, as he is superior and she is inferior. Thus, the Jews also pay the jizya and are also slapped on the nape of the neck when they pay it.

Q: You are clearly talking to be about ancient history. It surely does not exist today.

“The world view behind this conduct is still in full force and effect to this very day, whether it is portrayed openly or not.”

Q: They are all like this? We do have peace accords with Egypt and Jordan and the Arab Emirates, and possibly with Saudi Arabia in the not too distant future. Where is the humiliation as far as they are concerned?

“That is another common mistake. We are talking about peace accords, but as far as they are concerned these are much ‘softer’ agreements, akin to a form of ceasefire, which derives from a specific interest or interests. The word peace, as a political concept in Islam, exists only within the collective nation of Muslims. There is no peace between the Muslims and the Jews and/or the Christians.”

Q: But both Sadat and Hussein used the word “peace”.

“Yes, that is true, both of them were exceptional. Sadat was murdered for that while King Hussein survived. I knew Sadat and I spoke with him; he is almost the only one who spoke of ‘peace’ in the way that we understand the meaning of the term, but most of the others really don’t mean this.”

Q: Does Islam differentiate between its attitude to Judaism and how it relates to Zionism and the State of Israel?

“Genuinely speaking – no, it does not. For the purpose of its public diplomacy efforts towards the West – yes.”

Q: You describe an extremely hostile approach of Islam towards the Jews, but in Israel there are hundreds of thousands of Jews who grew up in Morocco and their descendants, who to this very day look back nostalgically, yearning for their life there. And there are other Arab states in which the Jews enjoyed good relations with the Muslims for extremely long periods of time.

“In Morocco there was indeed a relatively idyllic state of affairs, as the Jews, who lived there from ancient times, accepted the yoke of the Muslim authority and its rules. But there too the Jews suffered some difficult times. Maimonides, for example, was a victim of the al-Muwaḥḥidūn movement (those who profess the unity of God). He was faced with three options, convert to Islam, be murdered or flee. Maimonides chose to flee to Egypt, he was thus saved and managed to preserve his religion and his faith.”

Q: Maimonides was not the only one. The renowned Jewish poet, Rabbi Abraham Ibn Ezra, who himself fled from Tunisia to Europe to escape the persecution there, compiled a famous lament in which he mourns the destruction of Andalusian and North African Jewry by the al-Muwaḥḥidūn, and despite that I ask, is all this really still relevant today? For example, that phrase that we hear from time to time: “Kill the Jews, including those hiding behind the trees and the stones” – is this still a guiding code of conduct for modern Muslims?

“It actually really does belong to the present. There are few preachers – among the Israeli Arabs too, in east Jerusalem and certainly in Judea & Samaria – who do not mention that hadith at least once a week in their sermons, whether they mention it outright or simply allude to it. Islam’s overall objective is to take over the world, and it is currently engaged in efforts towards that goal, with a considerable degree of success as far as it is concerned – in Europe, in Canada and also in the USA.”

The main issue as far as Islam is concerned, today too, is that the Jews belong to a group of nations referred to as “The House of War” (Dar al-Harb). These are nations that Islam is required to conquer. Thus, there is no such thing as entering into an agreement with the Jews, unless this involves an agreement such as the Treaty of al-Hudaybiya, which Muhammad made with his opponents, the members of the Quraysh tribe, in order to buy time and rebuild his military force, and then to violate the pact. In other words, this involves agreements that from the outset were purely intended to buy time and to be disregarded later on, just like the agreement that Hamas aspires to reach with us today, or agreements deriving from a specific interest, which is usually a passing interest.”

During the peace negotiations with Egypt, Prof. Sharon served as consultant on Arab affairs to Menachem Begin. He resigned his post after Begin refused to cancel the position of consultant on Arab affairs, which he, Sharon, had served as. Sharon thought that to a large extent this function was redundant, as it was more appropriate that the Arabs should work directly with the various government ministries rather than with him. In this position, he proposed establishing national service for Israeli Arabs and acted against the eviction of Bedouins from their unauthorized settlements in the Negev without their consent. When the Lebanon War broke out in 1982, Sharon was called up for a long period of reserve service, which then turned into him becoming an IDF career officer. He operated in Lebanon mainly in the field of establishing ties with the Shiites there and headed the then Arab Affairs Department in the IDF General Staff.

“Inhuman and barbaric incidents such as the October 7 massacre,” relates Sharon, “have occurred in the past, but on a much more limited scale, involving families or individuals who have experienced the savagery of Muslim terrorism.” From a historical perspective, he is convinced that the “the October 7 massacre in those communities along the Gaza border, which included the desecration of the dead and the living, incidents of rape and beheading, draws from the ancient taboo of Islamic religious law that does not allow Muslims to be ruled by Jews, even here in Israel. Indeed,” says Prof. Sharon, “Israeli Arabs who live here with us compromise, but at their deepest, base levels, just like the deepest, base levels of those declared enemies who surround us, the Jew is singled out as being inferior and humiliated. You are surely aware that the yellow star or Jewish badge was not an invention of the Germans during the Holocaust but the Arabs, the First Caliph al-Mutawakkil, who lived in the ninth century, was the one who ‘in his grace’ enabled the Jews who found it difficult to wear the honey-colored wraps to make do with yellow patches.”

Q: Is this attitude also connected with the manner in which Hamas regards the hostages?

“In ancient wars waged by Islam, Jewish women were turned into slaves. Some of them were sold and some were taken as a prize by the Islamic enslavers. Muhammad was the one who set the examples, in the war in which he destroyed the Jews in Khaybar and Medina (an entire tribe of 900 people) – the men were slaughtered and the women taken captive. Muhammad took two women for himself, Rayhana and Safiyya. Both of them became his concubines. Later on, they converted to Islam as they really did not have any choice.”

Q: What you are essentially saying is that today there are those who are realizing, or striving to realize, in practice, what was the common practice in those days; that there are people for whom the barbarism and savagery that characterized the conduct of Muhammad and his men are a role model for their current behavior. I assume that this pattern of behavior is well known to many people in the profession, so how and why is it that such grave errors were made in relation to Hamas?

“The main error is in the fact that we projected our desires and view of things onto the Muslim world. We deluded ourselves into thinking that what we want is what they want. We sincerely desire peace, but that term, as both you and I understand it, does not exist at all in their lexicon. I have claimed for years already that there is no such thing as peace in the Arab warehouses. There is no such product or thing. The implication of this is that if you are going to pay for ‘peace’, you are in fact going to pay for something that simply does not exist. It is a fiction.”

Q: If not peace then what else? Propose an alternative.

“The only thing I can suggest is that we must be sufficiently strong so that Islam will have an alibi to enter into an agreement with us. Islam needs that alibi in order to establish a pact with the Jews, the members of the ‘House of War’.”

Q: And we are not strong?

“Not sufficiently, no.”

Q: When will we know that we have beaten Hamas? When will Hamas know that it has lost?

“When we kill many more of them, when they flee and wave white flags. That will be a sign for you and for them that we have won.”

Q: Is the State of Israel conducting the negotiations for the release of the hostages in the right manner?

“No. As a rule, our leaders do not know how to conduct negotiations with Arabs.”

“Sadat”, Sharon recalls, “once said to me: “Ya Ibni, tell your prime minister (Begin, N.S.) that we are in a bazaar. The goods are a little too expensive.’ The first rule: never be the one to open your mouth first – let the other side start the talking. Begin was always the one to start talking, that was his mistake and that is why he paid for it with the entire Sinai. The second rule: Don’t be distracted by hugs, kisses and handshakes – it’s all worthless. We too value respect and honor, not just them. The third rule: Don’t hesitate to get up from the table and walk out. The fourth rule: Check that the goods that you are interested in actually exist in the other side’s warehouses. In the case of ‘peace’, as I have just explained – this is a commodity that does not exist, that cannot exist. It is an imaginary commodity. Islam simply does not allow it.”

Q: But the hostages are something tangible. They do exist and if we fail to do something now they will die.

“We need to delete two words from our lexicon: The word “Now” and the word “Peace”. Whoever uses these words and aspires towards them is basically writing a surefire recipe for heavy losses in the negotiations and will be forced to pay a heavy price.

“I have said this to a number of policymakers and decision makers with whom I have worked, and I will say it again, now – we both can and need to flip the equation. We should be striving to reach a situation in which they come to us to ask for peace. In our warehouses, as opposed to their warehouses, peace is a commodity that clearly exists. When they come asking us for peace, we will demand something in return for it. They should be the ones who pay us in return for peace or in return for a hudna (truce). ‘Land for peace’ – yes, but the other way round: They will pay us with land for the peace or the ceasefire that we grant them.”

Q: That has never occurred. Why should it happen now? What is that you know that all the Arab affairs advisors in the government, the Mossad, the Shin Bet and the police don’t know?

“The advisors are entirely familiar with the situation and its roots, and behind closed doors, when faced with the policymakers, they do say these things, but nobody listens to them, as our decision making process is conducted in the ‘Israeli’ language. This is a language that is foreign to the reality in which we are living.”

Sharon speaks in the same tone when addressing the idea of a “revitalized Palestinian Authority”, a term coined by the US in relation to the future of the Gaza Strip: “They are taking American. The Palestinian Authority is so dirty that we wouldn’t be able to clean the dirt from it using bleach. That is an unreal and baseless view of reality.”

Q: But the Palestinians are playing ball with the Americans in that game. Just look, the Palestinian government has recently resigned, and there are new appointments.

“Yes, as Islam to a large extent is based on a culture of falsehood. The falsity in the pan-Arab relations, and also the relationship between the Arabs and the rest of the world, is a key element, a legitimate element. I always like to quote a great sentence from the Arabic scholar and writer Ibn Qutaybah: “We the Arabs – we arrive early and we are late, we add and we detract, but we do not intend to lie.” “That is the entire Torah, on one foot.”

The discourse now is focused on a demilitarized Palestinian state.

“Demilitarized means castrated, and the Arabs will never agree to being castrated, and if they say that they agree – they will be lying. You cannot just establish a Palestinian state and then go to sleep. Such a state will enter into defense pacts, and will play the ‘refugee’ card, it will continue to Arabize Jewish history and gradually you will see just how a hostile entity develops before your very eyes.”

“To Arabize”, explains Sharon, who in the past was the scientific director of the Ben-Zvi Institute and is the current Chairman of the Government Naming Committee, “is to turn any remaining fragment of Jewish history in Israel into something Muslim.  To Islamize it. Once, a known Muslim scholar delivered a lecture at the Van Leer Institute and spoke endlessly about the ‘Palestinian Canaanites’, and the ancient presence of the Palestinians in the Land of Israel. When he finished, Professor Yehoshua Porath, of blessed memory, who can hardly be defined as right-wing, in fact he supported the left-wing Meretz party, got up from his place in the audience, and asked the lecturer: Please tell me what language did the Palestinian Canaanites speak? And, of course, the Muslim scholar was left speechless, and Prof. Porath, a professor of Middle East history who had engaged in profound research of the growth of the Palestinian movement, answered for him: They spoke Hebrew.”

Q: In your opinion, is there a difference between Hamas, Fatah-PLO and the Palestinian Authority?

“Only in the nuances not in their doctrine of the destruction of the Jews and the State of Israel. They share the same objective and it is only the method of achieving it that differs. If they could, then the PLO supporters too would slaughter us just like Hamas. They simply are not able to do so, as the IDF is doing an excellent job of containing them in Judea & Samaria, and it really needs to continue doing so.”

“The Oslo Accords,” as Prof. Sharon goes further back, “are the root cause of all evil. They were a disaster. A few clowns with good intentions traveled to Oslo and brought back a document that has absolutely nothing to do with peace. And that bastard, Arafat, as soon as he came here, filled his car with weapons and also hid a senior terrorist in it. As soon as we caught him doing that we should have kicked him out and made it quite clear that the whole deal is off. Instead, to this very day, we have been busy trying to ‘understand them’. Once again – this is a form of ‘psychology’ that is just not appropriate for the Middle East. Is there anybody on the other side who is busy trying to ‘understand us’? What does that mean to ‘understand them’? What is that all about?”

Q: Those who adhere to the Oslo Accords might admit that the experiment failed, but they will challenge you with the “demographic problem”.

“More than demography, I am deeply perturbed that there is a very large number of Arabs who live in those areas under Palestinian Authority control, and who are constantly thinking of how to get rid of us, and the most important thing that needs to be done, alongside the security issue, is settlement. Settlement is Zionism and settlement also takes land from the Arabs, which in their religious view belongs to them. Just take a look at the fundamental work that the Palestinians are carrying out in the C areas, how they are gradually taking over the land there. They fully understand the importance of land. I want to work like the Arabs – more and more settlement, more and more seizure of land. That is how they work in relation to us, and we should do the same to them.”

Let’s talk a bit about the Israeli Arabs and the Bedouins, whom you have also researched and with whom you have also worked for many years. Three years ago, in May 2020, during IDF Operation Guardian of the Walls, Arabs living in the same neighborhoods and even the same buildings as Jews – in Lod, Acre, Ramla and Jaffa – broke into the houses of their Jewish neighbors and burned them down, looted and vandalized them, hit them and on some occasions injured and even murdered Jews. This violence erupted from among the Israeli Arabs.

“This resulted from the same place precisely from where Hamas came and from where the Fatah terrorists originate – Islam’s attitude to Judaism and Israel. Wherever the Jews are easy prey then such events happen and will continue to occur. In the mixed cities in Israel, the Jews are easy prey, due to the very fact that they live next door to their Arab neighbors, on many occasions the Arabs there are the majority.”

Q: So, maybe it is not a good idea for the Jews to live in areas with a dense Arab population? It might be a better idea to create separation?

“Indeed, living side by side in the same buildings and neighborhoods in the mixed cities has not proved itself, as it simply endangers the lives of the Jews living there. It doesn’t matter how long it takes – eventually, Jews will end up facing danger there, and as it has been proven in practice that the state is not capable of defending the Jews living there – then they would be better off not living together with the Arabs in the same buildings and the same neighborhoods.

Q: Is it possible to live in peace with Israeli Arabs?

“Yes, the majority of them are law-abiding citizens, and most of them simply seek to go out and work and bring food home to their families, but unfortunately, it is not this majority that sets the tone. It is the Arab MKs who set the tone, along with the Arab clergymen, many of whom are genuine radicals, as well as the Arab political figures, such as Raad Salah and Kamal Khatib, who led the Northern Faction of the Islamic Movement in Israel.

“At least some of the Israeli Arabs,” states Prof. Sharon, “define themselves today as Palestinian Arabs and not as Israeli Arabs. This is a process that began decades ago. Already back in 1977, I apprised Begin of the fact that the process of Palestinization had begun among the Israeli Arabs. Somewhere on the shelves of the archives lie two thick volumes in which I described our relationship with the Israeli Arabs. I don’t know if Begin actually read that material or not. It is still more than relevant today.”

Q: Arab society is currently characterized by an abundance of criminal activity, arms and murders.

“The solution is to beef up the police forces there more and more, both in terms of quantity, the presence on the ground and the appearance of that presence, and to operate the Shin Bet there, in the same way that they operate in Judea & Samaria. We cannot afford to wait around any longer. We will not be able to successfully contend with this otherwise.”

Q: You have worked closely with the Bedouin. On the one hand, they serve in the IDF and the defense establishment together with a handful of Israeli Arabs. Some of them have even fallen in battle for the State of Israel. On the other hand, they live in areas of weak governance, and on many occasions they become part of this, drifting into lawlessness, illegal weapons, protection rackets and crime, and taking over land.

“There are Bedouins and a small handful of Israeli Arabs, who although they might serve in the IDF, but based on my acquaintance with them and my understanding of them, they relate to their military service as work, a job, rather than fulfilling a function with meaning for them. They receive the wage of career soldiers from the day they join up. It’s not that they serve for three years and then enter the IDF career service track like other Israelis. The proportion of Arab society in Israel that serves in the IDF is minuscule. It is a bit like the ultra-Orthodox Jews or Haredim, where the number of those serving in the IDF is negligible.”

Q: They treat their service in the IDF as if it were simply a job? There are some who fell while fighting to protect the Gaza border communities during the current “Swords of Iron” War.

“Mercenaries also die on the battlefield.”

Q: When people sacrifice their lives for the state – that isn’t counted as identifying with the state?

“No, there is absolutely no ideology involved in this. At least, that is what I can say from my acquaintance with them.”

Q: Iran is behind the proxy organizations, Hamas and Hezbollah. What can an experienced scholar and researcher of Shia Islam like you say about the open hatred of the Iranians towards us, their plans to destroy us? What does Iran want from us? What is the correct way to react to this?

“We need to look at the Iranian issue from two separate perspectives: The Shiite and the Jewish angles. The dominant Shiite perspective is the Iranians’ hatred of the Sunnis. This is smoldering hatred, which cannot be comprehended by somebody who is foreign to the Shiite faith. Shia Islam regards the Sunna as being responsible for killing Muhammad’s grandson, the ultimate prince of Islam, Ḥusayn ibn ʿAlī, the youngest son of Alī ibn Abī Ṭālib, the fourth Caliph in Islam, and of Fatma, the daughter of Muhammad. Ḥusayn ibn ʿAlī was murdered and did not live to be the Caliph of the entire Muslim nation. The fact that it was a number of soldiers of the Sunni Caliph who killed Husayn is of no interest to the Shiites. As far as they are concerned, the entire Sunna is responsible for this terrible sin.

“The Shiite’s greatest hope is that the last (12th) Imam, who disappeared, Muḥammad ibn al-Ḥasan al-Mahdī (the last descendant of Husayn) will one day reappear. For the moment, he is concerned to have disappeared. He is neither alive nor dead. He has no grave. He disappeared in northern Iraq, and the Shiites believe that he is the Messiah who will redeem the entire world at the end of days.”

Q: What has all this got to do with us?

“It is connected to us too, but first and foremost it is connected with the struggle between the Shiites and the Sunnis. The 12th Imam will appear in the midst of a bloodbath, from out of a huge explosion. The Shiites’ hope is that he will first of all destroy all the Sunnis. A great war must occur before he appears. Everything will explode and then he will appear and rule the world, where he will be able to run a ‘magnificent’ world of Shiites. That is their belief. The Sunnis are extremely familiar with this story, and this is the cause of the terrible fear of the Shiites and Iran, expressed by Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the Gulf States and the entire Sunni world, including Hamas.”

Q: Including Hamas? Hamas, that selfsame organization into which Iran pumps millions of dollars and provides it with arms?

Yes, including Hamas. The Iranians, in contrast to what we might imagine, want to see Hamas destroyed, even more than we do, as they are all Sunnis.”

Q: So, how does all this fit in with the extremely tight relations between Hamas and Iran?
“Iran arms Hamas to the extent that it will force Israel to destroy them to their very foundations. All this is a cold and deliberately calculated effort. Hamas receives funding and weapons from Iran to make Israel’s daily life intolerable and thus to force Israel to destroy Hamas, to do Iran’s work for it. That is what is happening at this very moment, and that is what the Iranians genuinely want to happen. I know that I am the only Middle East expert who analyzes the current situation in this manner, but that is my opinion, and I stand behind it.”

Q: So, if I understand you correctly, it isn’t us but rather the Sunnis who are of key interest to Iran, and so their nuclear weapons are aimed first and foremost at them, and only after them against us?

“Nuclear weapons in the Shiite-Iranian view are intended, above all else, to lead to a global war that will return the 12th Imam here. Both Israel and the impure Jews will be destroyed as part of that world war. In the Shia belief, the Jews are so impure, that if it is raining and a Jew goes out into the streets, the Muslims are then forbidden from going out as the rain dripping off the Jews will impurify the entire city.”

Q: In other words, Israel is only a marginal issue in the Iranian nuclear program?

“Yes”.

Q: And that is something that should console us?

“No, as we, after all, are part of their overall plan, but are not necessarily the top priority.”

Q: But they don’t stop talking about our destruction, they don’t mention destroying the Sunnis.

“Because they are afraid of the USA. They are less afraid of us.”

Posters of Arafat displayed at a protest in Ramallah (AP/Muhammed Muheisen