A Review by By Arie Graafland
Danny Burmawi: Islam is a political theology of the sword with which it is difficult to live together.
Danny Burmawi’s book on Israel and Islam argues that Islam itself is the actual cause of the many wars waged against Israel. The driver was never land, never the Palestinians, it was religion. Islam cannot be detached from the Arab-Israeli conflict in any meaningful way, Burmawi writes. The wars are anchored deep in Islamic theology, history and doctrine. What Islam is waging against Israel is, in plain terms, a religious war.
For Muslims worldwide, the “Palestinian cause” is barely a concern. The Arab states take the view that Islam is under attack by the West, which is trying to weaken the ummah, the global community of Muslims. Israel, treated as a Western outpost, sits on the front line. Across the Islamic world it is demonized as the ultimate evil, the great enemy of Allah.
The Islamic world will not accept the Palestinians
Burmawi grew up in Jordan as a committed Muslim until he converted to Christianity in 2007. In Jordan he lived a stone’s throw from the Palestinian refugee camps, which nobody bothered with. Lebanon shows the same pattern: nearly 489,000 registered Palestinians who may not own property, may not work, and have no health insurance. Syria is no different. Egypt and Iraq go to considerable lengths to keep Palestinians from integrating into the population. Nobody, in fact, is interested in the Palestinian cause. Nowhere are Palestinians accepted as equal citizens, except in Israel, where Muslims live alongside Jews with the same rights.
The current situation is a sharp break from the end of the 19th century. The first Jewish pioneers were building the first settlements then: Petah Tikva in 1878, Rishon LeZion in 1882, Zikhron Ya’akov in 1882. Tel Aviv emerged in 1909. Jewish presence in “Palestine” was not a problem for Islamic countries at the time; they were tolerated, and their presence was even welcomed because the Jews made the desert fertile and drained the marshes. Disease retreated. The port of Haifa was modernized.
Jews were tolerated as long as they lived under the banner of Islam. “Palestine” was an open geographic region with multiple tribes, no state, no parliament, no flag. Palestine as a state is a retrofit, invented after the war of 1948. In that war, Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Iraq and Lebanon were not trying to liberate “Palestine”, they were trying to annihilate the newly founded Jewish state.
The West and the Palestinian cause
Two days after that infamous 7 October 2023, when Hamas invaded Israel and committed a massacre, the “Palestinian cause” was being celebrated in the West. Ivy League campuses overflowed with flag-waving students chanting “intifada” and demanding Israel’s erasure. Dutch university towns produced the same picture, occupations and flags for the “Palestinians” everywhere.
The Syrian civil war cost half a million lives. Yemen is grinding through civil war. Libya is collapsing into tribal conflict. Sudan is at war with itself. In Nigeria, Christians are being slaughtered. None of this is a problem for the West; nobody talks about it. But Israel’s existence is.
The Hamas lobby
None of this comes out of nowhere. The social-science faculties have been running decolonization studies for years; the human-rights NGOs and the media push the same narrative. The AIVD (Dutch intelligence service) reports that the Hamas network in the Netherlands has been active for years, running propaganda and organizing pro-Palestine, anti-Israel protests. Carel Brendel pointed this out years ago, and now the AIVD has confirmed it.
The Palestinian Community Netherlands (PGNL) is part of the political Hamas lobby. In their eyes Hamas isn’t guilty, Israel is. Cairo’s al-Azhar university, which has the reputation of being “moderate,” sees it the same way. After 7 October, the Grand Imam Ahmed al-Tayeb uttered the memorable line that Hamas had given the soul back to the Islamic ummah.
The Alliance between the left and Islam
The West has by now lived through a disastrous Marxist revolution. Critical theory extended Marx’s critique of political economy into culture, politics and science. Postmodernism has had a powerfully leveling effect on Western culture. Woke, gender studies and decolonization studies dominate the universities. The radical left and Islam have built a tight alliance, and the Palestinian cause has become a devastating weapon for hollowing out the intellectual foundations of the West.
There was a problem, Burmawi writes. After 9/11, Islam carried out roughly 64,000 terrorist attacks in over seventy countries, many of them aimed at fellow Muslims. That made an open alliance awkward for the left. So “Islamism” was invented. The word is not neutral: it functions as a dividing line, separating the “ordinary Muslim”, your neighbour, from the political and militant groups that carry out attacks. This gave the social sciences, and especially the politicians, a way to enter into an alliance with Islam. By now it is EU policy, and in the UK, Keir Starmer cannot stop praising the country’s Muslims.
Burmawi’s critique is radical. He describes his book as a forensic investigation into the ideological architecture of what he calls “a political theology that presents itself as a religion.” The aim isn’t to explain articles of faith but to examine what Islam produces psychologically and geopolitically. It will surprise no one that he self-published. No English-language publisher would take it on. He sits in the same line-up as Ruud Koopmans, also unable to find an English-language publisher for his recent books, the leftist scholar Simon Elmer, whose publisher pulled his book on the Great Replacement from the list, and Jan van de Beek, who is being boycotted in the Netherlands over his empirical study of the costs of immigration.
Can the West live alongside Muslims?
Burmawi calls Islam a political theology of the sword that masquerades as a religion. That is why peaceful coexistence between Christians and Muslims in Lebanon has proven impossible. Hezbollah has effectively taken over the country with the aim of turning it into a Shiite Islamic state.
If it can’t be done in Lebanon, can we manage it in Europe? Is the West alert enough, well enough informed about the religious and political practice of Islam? Not really, says Burmawi. By abandoning Christian faith and emptying its churches, the West has produced a vacuum, and that vacuum is now being filled by what tends to be fanatical activism. If Nietzsche was right, if morality goes when Christianity goes, then what’s left is an empty throne. And history teaches that empty thrones always get occupied.
For Burmawi, the moral framework of the West is anchored in Christian faith. Christianity made the Enlightenment possible too. He is not blind to the terror of the medieval Catholic Church, but he notes that the church worked its way out of that phase. Western religion has a self-cleansing capacity, as Pim Fortuyn put it. Islam lacks precisely that. Which is why Christianity and Islam cannot be reconciled.
This is more current than you might think. A year ago, Richard Dawkins, a committed atheist, said he felt himself to be a “cultural Christian.” He could no longer deny that the religion he had spent much of his life fighting had left an indelible cultural imprint on the West. And Ayaan Hirsi Ali, tireless campaigner for Western values, converted to Christianity a few years back.
Closing
What now? Have we been blinded by the activist groups behind the “Palestinian cause”, and are we about to drop Israel? Islam cannot change. Facts don’t register. That’s why the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict makes no impression in the Islamic world. Israel has offered to cede land many times. In vain.
Having read his book, I lean strongly toward Burmawi’s view: what we are dealing with is a political theology of the sword. The consequences are far-reaching. One of the most important is that the values of the Enlightenment must be restored to their place, and the state must defend them with far more assertiveness. What we need, Burmawi writes, is a new centre. A centre where reason rules and where the ideological captivity of the past few decades is set aside.
Danny Burmawi, Islam, Israel and the West. A Former Muslim’s Analysis , Gerasa Books, 2025, 225 pp.
May 16, 2026
Translated from Dutch
Order Islam, Israel and the West here
Everyone should be reading your book. It showed me so many things about Islam I previously didn't know.