Muslims do not hold one view of Jewish sovereignty. Some Islamist groups and clerics reject Jewish rule over any part of historic Palestine on religious grounds. Other Muslim scholars, governments, and public declarations defend coexistence and the legitimacy of peace with Israel. Treating either position as the uncontested voice of Islam misstates the record.
How sacred land becomes a political prohibition
One historical strand of Islamic law divided the world into Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb, as summarized by Britannica. Some later Islamist movements used that framework to argue that territory once under Muslim rule should not pass permanently to non-Muslim sovereignty.
Jerusalem sharpens the debate. Britannica’s Jerusalem overview notes the city’s core place in Islam through al-Aqsa and the Prophet’s Night Journey. Hard-line readers turn that holiness into a claim. Muslim duty, they say, bars any lasting Jewish rule there.
This argument is influential in some Islamist traditions, but it is not the only Muslim interpretation.
Hamas is the clearest modern text
Hamas’s 1988 charter offers a direct statement of the rejectionist view. It describes Palestine as Islamic land, makes resistance a sacred duty, and includes clearly antisemitic passages.
The 2017 “Document of General Principles and Policies,” reproduced by the Journal of Palestine Studies, changed some of that language. It distinguished Jews from “the Zionist project” and accepted a Palestinian state on the 1967 lines as a national formula. It nevertheless rejected Israel’s right to exist and retained a claim to all of Palestine. The language moderated more than the political objective.
The Qur’an does not yield one political answer
The hard-line position cannot simply be labeled “what Islam says.” In Qur’an 5:20-21, Moses tells the Children of Israel to enter the holy land God has given them. Other verses and later interpretations address covenant, exile, and inheritance differently. This does not turn the Qur’an into a Zionist text. It shows that scripture does not produce a single modern political program.
That is why Muslim disputes over Israel and Jerusalem are not only political. They are about how to read the texts. Muslims read the same sacred history in different ways.
Muslim arguments for coexistence
The best rebuttal to hard-line rejection has come from Muslims. The Marrakesh Declaration, backed by Muslim scholars and covered by the U.S. Institute of Peace, called for the protection of religious minorities. It pushed back on weaponized readings of the faith. The Muslim Reform Movement’s declaration rejected violent Islamist supremacy even more plainly.
State-backed Muslim bodies have also picked pragmatic paths. The Abraham Accords did not settle theology. But the Institute for National Security Studies notes that Muslim clerics in the Gulf supported normalization in part on a claim. Peace with Israel, they said, is allowed in faith and legitimate in politics.
The record therefore contains a genuine Islamist objection to Jewish sovereignty and genuine Muslim arguments against that objection.
The conclusion the evidence supports
Parts of modern Islamist thought turn the sanctity of Palestine and Jerusalem into a doctrine of permanent opposition to Jewish sovereignty. Hamas provides the clearest political text. Muslim disagreement, scriptural complexity, and religious arguments for coexistence are equally part of the record.
The relevant problem is not Islam as a whole, but a specific set of interpretations that converts sacred geography into permanent political denial. Treating that strand as the view of all Muslims is inaccurate. Ignoring its influence is also inaccurate.