Faith Under Siege: The Struggle For Islam’s Soul In The Jewish State – OpEd
How Israel’s Bureaucratic Management of Islam Shapes, Suffocates, and Reshapes Religious Identity Amid a New Era of Conflict
The Paradox of “Israeli Islam”: A Faith Bound by the State
At first glance, the phrase “Israeli Islam” seems a contradiction in terms, a paradox conjuring images of irreconcilable identities. Yet reality, always more obstinate than ideological neatness, asserts otherwise. Islam not only exists within Israel; it is meticulously structured, governed, and contained within the legal and political architecture of a self-declared Jewish state. As the war in Gaza rages and accusations of genocide reverberate globally, the question presses with renewed urgency: what is the future of Islam inside Israel? Is it mere survival under bureaucratic management, or is there still room for authentic religious selfhood?
Israeli Islam is not a paradox, but neither is it a harmony. It survives within frameworks inherited from the Ottoman Empire and the British Mandate, frameworks Israel has reshaped to fit the needs of a state determined to preserve its Jewish character. What emerges is not the organic vitality of a flourishing faith but a brittle accommodation—an Islam that exists by permission rather than by right, nurtured selectively, curtailed systematically.
Inheriting Structures, Imposing Control: Islam’s Institutional Captivity
When Israel emerged in 1948, it chose not to dismantle Islamic institutions outright. Instead, it inherited the Ottoman ‘waqf’ system, Islamic courts for personal status law, and a mufti-led clerical apparatus. These structures, however, were not left intact. They were subordinated to Israeli ministries, tightly budgeted, and rigorously supervised. Mosques remained open, but under the omnipresent gaze of permits, regulations, and intelligence services. Islamic judges presided over marriage and inheritance cases, but always within the straitjacket of Israeli sovereignty.
The outcome was a form of religious life that could survive, but only on terms stripped of political power and communal autonomy. Islam was reshaped into a civic accessory, sanitized of the political aspirations and resistance historically central to its theological tradition. It became, in effect, a religion of licensed obedience.
Lod’s Silent Mosques: Faith as a Memorial, Not a Movement
Nowhere is this more evident than in the city of Lod—known to Palestinians as Al-Lid—a place where contested memories thicken the air. Once a vibrant Arab city, Lod witnessed massacre and mass displacement during the Nakba. Today, its Arab minority lives amidst sanitized memorials that commemorate their own erasure. The Dahmash Mosque still stands, but its call to prayer is occasionally muffled by municipal ordinances; its survival signals not triumph, but careful containment.
Here, Israeli Islam is allowed to exist as a relic of past plurality, a museum-piece faith serving civic decorum rather than a living force of collective identity. The result is not reconciliation but a brittle coexistence, punctuated by the intermittent violence of riots and the slow grind of alienation. Beneath the surface of official toleration simmers an unspoken dread: that the embers of Islamic memory, if left untended, might once again flare into political defiance. Bureaucracy as a Weapon: Salaries, Permits, and Silent Sermons
The political economy that undergirds this containment reveals even starker realities. Islamic judges and clerics, often dependent on state salaries, find their authority conditioned by loyalty to the state apparatus. Religious schools must tread carefully to avoid accusations of radicalism; ‘waqf’ properties remain vulnerable to expropriation under administrative pretexts. Spiritual life itself becomes a transactional domain, where sermons are monitored, charities scrutinized, and community leaders co-opted or marginalized.
This fusion of religious management and security logic mirrors patterns observed across the post-colonial Arab world, where regimes learned to both patronize and neutralize Islamic institutions. In Israel, however, the stakes are heightened by the foundational tension between a Jewish national identity and a substantial Muslim minority. Israeli Islam is thus trapped in a matrix where survival requires submission, and where autonomy invites repression.
After 1967: Fragmented Islam, Fractured Loyalties
The situation grew more complex after the 1967 occupation of Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem. Within Israel’s borders, Islamic political expression took on new forms. The Islamic Movement, once a unified body, fractured into two branches—the southern, which chose political participation within the Israeli Knesset, and the northern, which refused recognition of Zionist sovereignty. The southern branch’s pragmatism led to parliamentary seats and limited influence; the northern branch’s refusal earned it bans, surveillance, and incarceration.
Yet even participation carries its costs. Political Islam within Israel often requires silences that border on complicity: muted criticism of state violence, careful navigation of loyalty tests, and the gradual erosion of public credibility among a Palestinian citizenry increasingly sceptical of accommodation. In contrast, resistance Islam—untethered from the state but hunted by it—remains symbolically potent yet materially vulnerable, marginalized in both Israeli political life and broader global Islamic currents.
Cut Off From the Ummah: Isolation Amid Digital Solidarity
Globally, solidarity with Israeli Muslims exists more as sentiment than strategy. Transnational Islamic movements like Hizb al-Tahrir offer rhetorical support but little tangible assistance. Geography, geopolitics, and Israel’s sophisticated security apparatus combine to keep Israeli Muslims isolated from the broader Islamic ummah. Digital connectivity may offer brief moments of virtual solidarity, but physical and political realities impose a much harsher solitude.
Faith Under Surveillance: The Banality of Religious Suppression
Philosophically, the very existence of Israeli Islam invites disturbing questions. Can a faith whose origins are inseparable from political revolution endure when pressed into bureaucratic obedience? What becomes of a religious community when its sacred spaces are surveilled, its leaders salaried by a state it did not choose, its rituals monitored for subversion?
Hannah Arendt cautioned that the gravest evils often slip through the cracks of bureaucracy, their horrors rendered ordinary by the cold, mechanical routines of administration. Israeli Islam suggests a related phenomenon: the banality of religious suppression. Faith does not die in flames; it withers under paperwork, audits, and permit renewals. Spiritual passion is not outlawed, merely redirected—into safe, depoliticized channels where it poses no threat.
Paths of Painful Compromise: Survival, Submission, or Underground Resistance
The options facing Israeli Muslims are therefore grimly constrained. Some may persist within the official frameworks, preserving religious rites in exchange for political silence. Others may seek to cultivate a more civic, less confrontational Islam focused on education, charity, and ethical community-building—an Islam of survival rather than sovereignty. Still others may move underground, reviving the clandestine networks that have sustained persecuted faiths throughout history, though at immense personal and collective risk.
Global reconnection through technology and diaspora ties may offer a partial lifeline, but it too brings dangers. Greater identification with global Islam could invite harsher crackdowns from a state already hypersensitive to questions of loyalty and security.
A Future in the Shadows: Islam’s Struggle for Dignity in a Hostile State
None of these paths promises dignity unalloyed. Each demands painful compromises, each carries the risk of fragmentation, marginalization, or repression. And none resolves the underlying philosophical dissonance: that a religion rooted in divine sovereignty is being forced into the moulds of state control.
In the broader context of the Gaza War and the humanitarian catastrophe unfolding before the world’s eyes, Israeli Islam’s struggle mirrors the larger Palestinian condition. It is a struggle for survival under a regime determined to remould identities to fit its national narrative. It is the tragedy of a faith tethered to administrative caprice, a community forever oscillating between containment and revolt.
Israeli Islam persists—but it does so wounded, wary, and weary. Its future, like that of the Palestinian people as a whole, depends less on policy shifts from above than on the resilience, creativity, and courage of those determined to practice faith and build community in the long shadow of a state determined to keep them small.
In the end, it is not Islam that is paradoxical within Israel—it is the brutal ingenuity with which a modern state can hollow out spiritual life, preserving its shell while bleeding it of its soul.
