‘The Palestinian Delusion’: ‘The most important book on the Jihad against Israel in existence’

Here is an extraordinary review of my book The Palestinian Delusion from Dr Anjuli Pandavar, who is “a British writer and social critic. She was born into a Muslim family in apartheid South Africa, where she left Islam in 1979. Anjuli is preparing to convert to Judaism. She is one of the staunchest defenders and fiercest critics of Israel. She owns and writes on Murtadd to Human, where she may be contacted.” Get The Palestinian Delusion here.

“‘The Palestinian Delusion’: Catastrophe in the Middle East,” by Anjuli Pandavar, Israel National News, September 27, 2024:

In light of developments in Israel since 7 October 2023, and as the one year anniversary of that day that lives in infamy approaches, this is the time to read:

The Palestinian Delusion: The Catastrophic History of the Middle East Peace Process, by Robert Spencer, 2019, Bombardier Books, New York.

“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” This slogan serves as the opening line to Robert Spencer’s book, a line that could just as well have been, “This is the book about which there is no delusion.”

As the book unfolds, it becomes clear that, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”, is not just a delusion, but a delusion that contains within itself, Russian-doll fashion, multiple delusions. This appalling slogan is the culminating metaphor for all that has been “The Israeli-Palestinian peace process”, and a well-chosen scene setter. But more importantly, it has its counterpart in the Israeli co-existence delusion.

Robert Spencer’s work is unanswerable because his credentials are impeccable, credentials that come down to two non-negotiable principles: original sources; and intellectual honesty. Those who will dismiss his books can do so only by not reading them. The writer’s life, for Spencer, is one of bravery — there have been attempts on his life, and tenacity — financial services companies have denied him service, bastions of inquiry have de-platformed him, one country has, infamously, debarred him.

Spencer writes like a man who must keep writing, and his readers snap up his books as soon as they hit the shelves, or pre-order them.

Whereas The History of Jihad offers a blow-by-blow account of the fourteen-centuries-long barbaric assault on civilisation that its perpetrators proclaim as jihad, The Palestinian Delusion dissects just one, the most urgent, of jihad’s innumerable contemporary world-wide outbreaks: the jihad to destroy Israel.

The “delusion” in the title refers to multiple delusions: that of a Palestinian nation; that the “Arab-Israeli conflict” is a simple struggle over land; that the so-called “peace process” is a series of negotiations; that Judea and Samaria — what the Jordanians dubbed “The West Bank” during their occupation — and Gaza (and the Golan Heights) are “occupied territories”; and that the Muslim Arabs are the wronged party. Along the way, many lesser and shorter-lived delusions are referred to, both directly and indirectly.

Integral to the Palestinian delusion is the co-existence delusion, that came so strongly to the fore in 2021. “The Arabs” of Israeli fancy consist, so the notion goes, of those Arabs living in the territories that Israel had conquered in defensive wars waged against her many hostile Arab neighbours — territories the global propaganda machine describes as “occupied territories”— and “Israeli Arabs” who co-exist harmoniously with Jews within the territory of Israel. Spencer’s book is focused on the circus that came to be known as the “Middle East Peace Process,” to which the co-existence delusion is peripheral and so not treated.

The manifestations of these many delusions are expertly woven into the historical sequence of developments in and around the 28,000 square kilometres of mostly resource-starved scrubland on the Eastern Mediterranean shore, from which the Romans had banished almost all the indigenous people, the Jews, less than two thousand years ago. In the chapter ‘How Israel came to be,’ Spencer describes how for the exiled Jews, having had enough of oppression, persecution and pogroms in their scattered existence, the time had come to return to their desolate scrubland. “L’Shana Haba’ah B’Yerushalayim”, “Next year in Jerusalem” chants the hope of centuries. They were finally going home.

The only problem was that while they were away, that desolate scrubland had been overrun by Muslims on jihad, and somewhere in the small print of that barbaric doctrine, it says that once Muslims rule a land, it can never ever be ruled by anyone else again, never mind that they seized it in the first place, as in this case, they did to the land of Israel in 634 AD, when the Byzantine Empire still held it.

Robert Spencer’s expertise on the Qur’an, strong enough to deter Muslims and Islamic apologists from challenging him, is on full display in Chapter Two: ‘The Roots of the Hatred of Israel,’ under the subheading, ‘Qur’anic Anti-semitism.’ The main fountainhead of jihad is the Qur’an, of which Spencer dissects no fewer than sixty-nine verses for their role in the extreme Muslim hatred for Jews, whether those Muslims are jihad terrorists or “moderate” Muslims. Of the hadith, the sayings and doings of Muhammad, whose examples Muslims must emulate, the notorious genocide hadith runs:

The last hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them until the Jews would hide themselves behind a stone or a tree and a stone or a tree would say: Muslim, or the servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him; but the tree Gharqad would not say, for it is the tree of the Jews.

No Muslim will repudiate this hadith — think about that when you next dream of how wonderful it would be if Jews and Muslims could co-exist in peace.

Spencer explains, “Muslims are taught in their holiest books not just to despise and mistrust Jews, but that Muslims are doing a good and virtuous deed if they kill them, a deed that will bring about the consummation of all things and the dawning of eternal justice for mankind.”

Israel is not the first place where Muslim rule has been pushed back. Before the re-establishment of Israel, civilisation was restored in various places throughout the 1400 years of jihad conquest: Tartary, Armenia, the Balkans, the Iberian Peninsula, the Mediterranean islands, southern Italy, southern France, India, East Timor and, of course, Israel. Each of these reconquests is a deep affront to Muslims, for centuries the most galling having been the Iberian Peninsula, in particular, Al-Andalus (Spain), about which myths of Muslim multicultural magnanimity abound.

The re-establishment of Israel eclipsed all other jihad losses. It shook Muslim supremacism to its core, coming as it did just when Islamic revivalism was getting underway in the aftermath of the demise of the Ottoman caliphate. Not only is Jerusalem the setting of a great Islamic fantasy (a mosque that never was, from which Muhammad rode a beast that never existed, on a journey that never took place, but Muslim rule was replaced with rule by Jews, and the Palestinian Delusion lays out, meticulously, how Islam makes it impossible for Muslims to countenance Jewish rule over Muslims and over lands once ruled by Muslims. “Drive them out from where they drove you out”, says the Qur’an (2:191).

The Israeli co-existence ideologues and “peace process” proponents would do well to consider how it is that Jews are “occupiers” who must cede the land to the “Palestinians”, while the Ottomans before them, who had brutally oppressed the region’s Arabs for centuries, were never occupiers, and under whom the “Palestinians” never even knew they existed. Is it because the Ottomans were Turks, or because the Ottomans were Muslims?

The Palestinian Delusion will still, despite its scholarly integrity, meet with incredulity from most. The desire so desperately to believe something not to be true, when confronted with irrefutable evidence to the contrary, can prove an intensely distressing experience. So deeply and successfully have the twin ideological onslaughts of political correctness and multiculturalism wormed their way into the Western psyche, that otherwise rational people become quite irrational when it comes to Islam and Muslims….