The Islamic State’s Response to the First War Between Israel and HAMAS in Gaza
Hamid al-Zawi (Abu Umar al-Baghdadi), the emir of the Islamic State movement between 2006 and 2010, when it was known as the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI), released his fifteenth speech of twenty-three on 9 January 2009, entitled, “The Believers Are Nothing Else Than Brothers”.1 The focus of the speech, which was about ten-minutes long, was the then-ongoing Israeli Operation CAST LEAD (27 December 2008 – 18 January 2009), the first major flare-up in Gaza since HAMAS’ takeover of the strip in 2006.2
It is relatively rare for the Islamic State (IS) to focus on Israel at all, but when it does, its usual approach—as explained earlier this year, when IS attacks in Israel led to the production of some propaganda materials—is to primarily focus on the iniquity of the Palestinian leadership, the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) and HAMAS, and condemn those who raise the anti-Israel cause above all others. In IS’s perception, the recovery of Spain, lost to Muslim rule in the fifteenth century, is as important as Jerusalem. This was more or less the approach when Al-Zawi himself gave a speech about a year before this one, focused on the Palestinian issue, and it was IS’s approach when it commented on the May 2021 Gaza conflict.
Al-Zawi’s January 2009 speech was not dissimilar from this general pattern: his focus is not really on Israel per se, but more using the Jewish State as a means to attack IS(I)’s Muslim enemies—regional governments, the Palestinian groups, etc.—and to call for Muslims to unite, under the jihadists’ banner, of course. The practical things Al-Zawi advocates—that people storm the borders of Gaza from the neighbouring states, that they not to be satisfied with peaceful protests or raising money for the Palestinians, and for soldiers in Arab militaries (especially Egypt’s) to help get weapons into the strip—are aimed at Muslims, and accompanied by explicit criticisms of the regimes for colluding with Israel and the masses for not joining the jihad. Al-Zawi’s concluding promise, that IS(I) is preparing to escalate its attacks against the Americans in Iraq, is framed as the group doing its part in the war against “the Jews and their helpers”, but it very pointedly does not say that the organisation will be diverted from its own revolutionary program within Iraq to begin operations in former Mandate Palestine. A transcript of the speech is produced below.
Praise be to God, Lord of the Worlds, who says in a decisive part of what was sent down3: “Fighting has been made obligatory upon you ˹believers˺, though you dislike it. Perhaps you dislike something which is good for you and like something which is bad for you. God knows, and you do not” [Qur’an 2:16]. Prayers and peace be upon Al-Bashir al-Nadhir [Bashir the Warner], who said: “The head of the affair is Islam [submission], its central pillar is prayer, and its peak is jihad on the path of God.” He added: “Whoever dies having neither taken part in an expedition [of jihad] nor having the thought in his heart of participating, dies upon a branch of hypocrisy.”
As for what follows:
The brothers of apes and pigs,4 slaves of al-taghut, who pour lava and fire on our people in Gaza. They have killed women and the elderly; they have demolished houses over the heads of their owners; and they have increased in their oppressiveness, rapacity, and disdain. They blew up mosques, the houses of God. They did all this in front of all Muslims and in full view of the media. What did you do, O umma [Islamic community]? Did you not read God’s saying: “What has happened to you that you do not fight in the cause of God, and for the oppressed men, women, and children who say, ‘Our Lord, deliver us out from this town whose people are oppressors! By Your grace, give us a protector, a helper, from Your own” [Qur’an 4:75].5 And His sayings, glory be to Him, “The believers are nothing else than brothers” [Qur’an 49:10], and, “The believers, men and women, are protectors of one another” [Qur’an 9:71].6
Supporting the oppressed Muslims in Gaza is an individual duty on every Muslim,7 a prerogative and a duty ordained by the Lord of earth and heaven. Their betrayal and negligence in their support and the [lack of effort in] lifting the injustice and oppression from them is a major evil and a great sin,8 amounting to participation in a crime whose disgrace will remain on the necks of every Muslim during his life and after his death.
O Muslims, the rulers of the lands of Islam are traitors, infidels, and immoral liars, so are you criminals? Where are the slogans of nationalism, Arabism, and patriotism when war has been declared on the oppressed in Gaza from the land of Kinana, from miserable Egypt under the rule of its taghut, la-Mubarak,9 the enemy of God, the enemy of Muslims, and the ally of the criminal Jews?
O Muslims, if there is no standing against these traitorous rulers today, then when? They have betrayed your deen [i.e., Islam],10 stolen your money, and are participating in the massacre of your brothers and your sons. Rebel against them, break their thrones, remove them from authority, destroy their might and their impious regime. The weapon is the weapon and [the means of] fighting is fighting to get out of this predicament of humiliation and this life of shame.11 What was taken by force can only be recovered by force. What was taken by military coups and fraudulent idolatrous elections can only be recovered from the barrels of a guns.12 Be truthful to God and to yourselves!
Do you think that the rulers of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and the [Arabian] Peninsula will one day rise to defend the deen, your land, and honour? Since the answer is known to every child, who has felt the bitterness of humiliation and pain in his mother’s milk, then how long will the silence last? O Muslims, make helping your brothers today in Gaza the spark to liberate the country from the transgressors [tughiyan], the people of whom the Messenger of God, peace and blessings be upon him, said: “The Last Hour will not come until the Romans descend on al-Amaq or Dabiq, and an army comes on that day from Medina, consisting of the best people. When the ranks are arranged, the Romans will say: ‘Do not stand between us and those [Muslims] who enslaved people from amongst us. Let us fight with them.’ And the Muslims will say: ‘No, by God, we will never stand aside so that you may attack our brethren’. Then they [the Muslims] will fight [with the Romans]: a third of them, whom God will never forgive, will run away; a third of them will be killed, the best of martyrs in God’s eyes; and a third [who will win the victory] will never be tested”.13
This is the example of the Muslim who does not forsake his brother, nor leave him to an enemy, nor leave him in his time of need. If God does not accept the penance of those who fled after actually fighting in this battle, then how to judge the sin of those who did not fight at all? What do you think [the scale of] his transgression is? The Prophet, peace and blessings of God be upon him, said, as recorded in Al-Sahihayn: “Support your brother, whether he is the oppressor or the oppressed”, and, “A Muslim is a brother of another Muslim, so he should not oppress him, nor [betray him by] hand[ing] him over to an oppressor”.14 We are an umma, one with another, like a solid structure,15 as the Messenger of God, may God bless him and grant him peace, described us [according to Al-Sahihayn]: “A believer to another believer is like a building whose different parts reinforce [or strengthen] each other.”
This is how we see the solution, God willing:
First: Intelligent men should lead the angry, demonstrating crowds in the streets and cities of the countries neighbouring Palestine, storm the borders, and join our people in Palestine. They should [thereafter] participate in jihad with their brothers in every possible way, the least of which is seizing the weapons of the border guards and the military bases spread along the borders to protect the Zionist enemy [al-‘adu al-Sahyun].
Second: Every Muslim who is forced to serve in the armies of these tawagheet, and every officer who saw treachery with his own eyes, and repented of it to God, must smuggle as many weapons as possible outside their units, or guide those who can seize weapons to the weapons depots and stores, and then get these weapons to our people in Palestine, for I was pained to see [Israeli] helicopters in the skies when it does not need a great weapon to take them down. These weapon are also to be used to kill every taghut, major or minor as he may be, who tries to stop demonstrations of solidarity with our people in Gaza. And let everyone know that our battle with the Jews and their agents is not a battle of words and chants; it is a battle in which blood will flow in rivers and in which body parts will fly in all directions like stones, for God will never alleviate this state of humiliations until we sell our souls cheaply to Him and rule by His law in His land.
Third: With regard to our brothers in Palestine in general and Gaza in particular, the necessities of time make it imperative for those who fight to exalt the word of God and want to honour his deen to unite under one banner, and to set aside the benefits of al-dunya [this temporal world], which are wrapped in false illusions. If you do not unite now, when will you, for God’s sake? So, fear God and fight the enemy of God, as God has commanded. The Almighty said: “Verily, God loves those who fight in His cause in battle ranks as if they were a [single] solid structure” [Qur’an 61:4].
Fourth: The Palestinians scattered around the world have a duty to support [the Palestinians in the Territories]. There is hardly a country [bilad] devoid of them [Palestinians], with their well-known military competence, and their high standards of scientific and technical knowledge. They should target Jewish and American interests everywhere, for they do not lack experience or courage in such things, thank God, and they are more eager than others to support their people
Fifth: Isn’t it time for the weapons stored in the warehouses of the Palestinian organisations [al-munazamat al-filistiniya] to be used against the transgressors, instead of [keeping the weapons back for] the endless military parades in the camps? What exactly are they waiting for? Is there an intensity greater than this intensity? Or is it [this hesitancy] meant to defend the crumbs of life that the tawagheet of the countries they reside in give them?
I warn the Muslims, especially the scholars and intellectuals among them,16 against diverting the anger of the people into aimless demonstrations, or the catharsis of having them to collect donations that will not reach their brothers [in Palestine], for the Jews and Christians want us to do that. They kill us and then tell their agents to receive the wounded and bury the dead. This is why they established the so-called Red Cross.
As for us here in Iraq, we promise our people in Gaza that we will not desert them on this front of the battlefield against the Jews and their helpers. We will escalate our operations against the American occupier, and we give good tidings to our brothers in Palestine and Iraq that victory is near, for the Almighty said: “Undoubtedly, alongside hardship there is ease” [Quran 94:5].
We see the end of the Jews and their agents as imminent, praise be to God, at the hands of the Knights of Tawheed [monotheism] and the bearers of the banner, “There is no god but God.”
Allahu akbar, allahu akbar allahu akbar
“God’s will always prevails in his affairs [i.e. the world], but most people know it not” [Qur’an 12:21].
Your brother, Abu Umar al-Baghdadi.
REFERENCES
The title of the speech, “innama al-mu’minun ikhwa” (إنما المؤمنون إخوة), drawn from the Qur’an (49:10), can be variously translated as: “The Believers Are Nothing Else Than Brothers”, “[All] Believers Are Brothers”, “The Believers Are But Brothers”, and “The Believers Are Only Brothers”.
There have been two more major rounds in Gaza since then, in November 2012 and the summer of 2014, and several other significant, if smaller, eruptions, most recently in May 2021 and August 2022.
The word translated as “decisive” is “muhkam”, which refers to passages of the Qur’an that are meant in effect literally; the antonym is “mutashabih”, meaning “allegorical”. The word translated as “sent down” is “tanzil”, i.e. the Qur’an.
The phrase “al-qarada wal-khanazeer” can be rendered as “apes and pigs” or “monkeys and pigs”.
By Tradition, the town referred to in this Qur’anic passage is Mecca, from which the early Muslim community fled in 622 to Medina—an event known as the hijra, essentially an Islamic rendering of the Exodus story, which appears to have been so central to the early Ishmaelites, with Muhammad playing the role of Moses. (The historical evidence is clear that “Muslims” in the sense we now understand did not exist at this time—the creed of the Arab community was an Abrahamic monotheism that only crystallised into Islam nearly a century later—and it is very unlikely that the town they fled from was Mecca in the southern Hijaz, what is now Saudi Arabia; it was much further north, in the Levant.)
The word translated as “protectors” is auliya, which can also be rendered: “supporters”, “helpers”, “guardians”, and “friends”.
The word translated as “oppressed” is “mustadafin” (or “mustadafeen”), which is best-known in the West—where it is known—as the word used by the leaders of the Iranian Revolution to describe the people they claimed to be supporting and representing, both before their Revolution succeeded and since. (The counter-point word, “oppressors”, is “mustakbirin” or “mustakbireen”.) “Mustadafeen” can be variously translated as the “dispossessed” or more loosely as the “weak”: that this has Marxist, rather than strictly theological, connotations is, as the comrades would once have said, no accident. The Iranian Revolution was threaded through with Communists alongside the Islamists, and in the final phase—the violent coup that toppled the Imperial Government on 11 February 1979, three weeks after the Shah had departed—the Communists played an important role. The Soviet Union, directly and through its local Communist infrastructure in Iran, also played an important role in the early years in creating the intelligence-security infrastructure of the Islamic Republic. As the Shah once noted, the enemies ranged against his government were an “unholy alliance between the Black and the Red”.
The phrase translated as “major evil and great sin” is “ithm azeem and dhanab kabeer”. There are a number of other ways this could have been rendered: “evil” could have been “transgression”, for example.
This is a play on words: “la-Mubarak” means “not blessed” or “unblessed”, and the name of Egypt’s then-ruler was Hosni Mubarak.
“Deen” is often translated as “religion”, but this is very misleading. As Bernard Lewis put it, the connotations of the word “religion” are Christian, referring to a “system of belief and worship, a compartment of life”. Specifically in English, this is even more true since the framework assumptions are Protestant, where the relationship with God is an even more personalised matter of private belief, separated not only from the state, but other people. For Muslims, Islam is “the whole of life”, Lewis goes on: it is a public faith consisting of demands for custom and practice by individuals, regulating everything from diet to financial transactions, and imposing collective assumptions about governance. As such, to use the word “religion” for a doctrine that incorporates matters Christian (or post-Christian) Westerners would also think of as “political” and “legal” makes little sense. “Creed” might make more sense, but there is already a word for that (aqeeda). Sometimes “deen” is translated as “faith”, and this is a bit better—it indicates to readers what is being referred to, and it can be inferred that the Muslim faith incorporates all these elements that Christianity views as outside “religion”—but it is still deeply imperfect as a means of conveying the totality of what is involved.
The word used for “weapon” is “silah” and for “fighting” is “qital”: the point of the phrase is to say that Muslims should, when they speak of finding “weapons” with which to “fight” the despotisms in Islamdom, interpret these words literally; that the only method of change is violence.
The word translated as “idolatrous” is “shirk”, which is also sometimes translated as “polytheistic”: it refers to an effort to set up equivalents to God—whether in worship, or, as in this case, in a realm like law, where God should rule alone under the shari’a and instead people have tried to substitute man-made laws.
The quote is from the Sahih Muslim, a collection of hadith (sayings and stories about the actions of the Prophet Muhammad), compiled in the ninth century, in the period when Islam as the creed we now know was beginning to solidify and when the surviving biographies of the Prophet Muhammad were being written—nearly 200 years after his death. Sahih Muslim, written by a Persian scholar, Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj, who lived between approximately 815 and 875, is regarded as one of the two most authentic hadith collections; the other is Sahih al-Bukhari, written by Muhammad al-Bukhari, also a Persian, who lived from around 810 to around 870. Even Muslim chroniclers concede that there is an enormous amount of fraud and simple error in the hadith, but these efforts by Imam Muslim and Al-Bukhari only restated the problem in a different way. As historian Tom Holland has documented (p. 37), where the hadith are concerned, it was the very attempt to show the exhaustive isnads (supports), the chain of transmission back to the Prophet’s time, that gave the game away: “it turned out that there was no surer mark of fraud or distortion than a really exacting attention to detail.”
Al-Sahihayn refers to Al-Mustadrak ala al-Sahihayn, a hadith collection written in 1002 or 1003, by Al-Hakim al-Nishapuri, a Persian, also known as Ibn al-Bayyi or the “Imam of the Muhaddithin”, i.e. hadith scholars. For the issues with the hadith, see footnote 13, and note that all the problems there intensify given that Al-Hakim is writing 150 and more years later.
“Solid structure” is a translation of “al-bunyan al-marsus”: sometimes it is given as a “compact structure” or even a “compact wall”.
The exact phrase used is “the people of knowledge and judgment” (ahl al-ilm wal-ray).