Since Hamas’s brutal and unprovoked assault on southern Israel on October 7, 2023, we’ve heard many protesters chant, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” calling for an end to Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza. Many protesters fail to realize they are calling for Israel’s destruction and the elimination of all Jewish people from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.
These protesters believe their support of Palestinian Arabs constitutes an act of justice, standing with the so-called oppressed. They may not understand their battle cry is rooted in a genocidal Muslim belief dating back to World War II.
When large numbers of Jewish people returned to Israel in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Ottoman Turks controlled the land known as Palestine, though it was first Eretz Yisrael—the ancestral Jewish homeland. Upon their homecoming, Jewish immigrants purchased uncultivated, malaria-infested wasteland from the absentee Ottoman landowners at highly inflated prices. As Jewish ownership of the land increased, civil disputes arose. When the British defeated the Ottomans in World War I and gained control of the land, quarrels intensified.
Arab leaders, who initially accepted the Jewish people’s return, began to feel threatened by their growing population. Jewish immigrants had transformed the worthless swampland they purchased into productive farmland; and as their economy grew, the Arab leaders resented their success.
The Arabs, who had migrated to the Jewish homeland and occupied it for centuries, had no vision to improve it or develop a healthy economy. Leading up to World War II, their opposition turned violent. Many attacked Jewish immigrants, who struggled to fight back, lacking weapons and training.
Driven by their growing need for oil, the British, who controlled the land, favored the Arabs. The Arabs in the Middle East held the oil reserves Britain desperately needed to fuel its economy and war efforts. In the 1930s, pressured by Arab leaders, Britain restricted and eventually closed its doors to Jewish immigrants fleeing growing persecution from Nazi Germany.
Haj Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem, befriended Adolf Hitler and proudly supported Nazism. He and Hitler shared a hatred of the Jewish people. The grand mufti “turned the Arab-Jewish dispute from a resolvable conflict over land to an irresolvable conflict over religion.” This development gave birth to Palestinianism, the ideology and movement based on the erroneous belief that Eretz Yisrael belongs to the Arabs.
The grand mufti declared it a violation of Muslim law to accept Jewish sovereignty over even an inch of the land of Palestine, claiming it was forever to be held in trust for Allah. He opposed the creation of a sovereign Jewish state anywhere in it.
During the war, the grand mufti lived in Berlin as Hitler’s guest and contributed to his Holocaust efforts. Following the war, he was designated a war criminal and fled to Egypt to avoid prosecution.
Hamas’s October 7 massacre and the rallying cry “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” are rooted in the fateful decision of an Arab religious leader to exclude Jewish people from the land they had lived in for 2,000 years prior to Islam’s existence and to justify violence to exterminate them. It’s a call for their annihilation.
We must never forget that unbelieving humanity hates Israel because it hates God. Such opposition to Israel will not be resolved until Messiah returns to Earth to crush the Evil One and judge mankind for its mistreatment of His Chosen People.
