75 Winter 2025 that raged in Mandatory Palestine since April 1936, and which Küntzel considers “the founding text of Islamic antisemitism.” For while the Mufti had espoused Islamic antisemitism well before 1937, alongside other prominent Arab leaders such as Abdul Aziz ibn Saud, founding monarch of Saudi Arabia, and Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan Banna, the pamphlet was “the first full presentation of the construct of a direct connection between Muhammad’s clashes with the Jews in Medina and the contemporary conflict in Palestine and of a link between the seventh and twentieth centuries.” That is to say: the Palestine conflict was not an ordinary territorial dispute but an extension of Islam’s millenarian war against the accursed Jews, which would only come to an end with their total extermination. And by way of substantiating this thesis, the pamphlet rescued the hitherto forgotten Judgment Day hadith from oblivion, transforming it into one of the foremost religious justifications of the long-lasting genocidal war against Israel and world Jewry. Small wonder that Arab League Secretary-General Abdul Rahman Azzam responded to the imminent UN Partition Resolution by threatening Mandatory Palestine’s Jewish community with “a war of extermination and momentous massacre that will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacre or the Crusader wars” — three years after the Holocaust. While this threat failed to materialize as the nascent State of Israel defeated the all-Arab attempt to destroy it at birth, 75 years later — on October 7, 2023 — thousands of Hamas terrorists burst out of the Gaza Strip, which the Islamist terror organization had ruled since 2007, and embarked on a genocidal spree of slaughter, torture, rapes, mutilations, pillage, and abductions that would not have shamed Genghis Khan’s Mongolian hordes. And it is no mere coincidence that the Judgement Day hadith features prominently in Hamas’s covenant, alongside numerous Nazi-like antisemitic tropes about Jewish culpability for all the world’s ills and the need to rid the world of this cosmic evil. n Efraim Karsh is Professor Emeritus of Middle East and Mediterranean Studies at King’s College London and former director of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies.
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