A Prophetic and Timely Book
Book Review of Rumy Hasan's Dangerous Liaisons
Dangerous Liaisons: The Clash Between Islamism and Zionism, first published in 2013, points out that the Israel-Palestine conflict has become a clash between two fanatical political/religious ideologies. The reissue of the book is extremely timely.
Dangerous Liaisons is unusual in several ways. First: the Israel/Palestine conflict tends to be studied in isolation and rarely in relation to the wider Middle East. Rumy Hasan presents the clash in terms of the region and Israel’s complex association with both Shia and Sunni Islamic states. And he takes the issue even wider, analysing it in terms of the conflict in the West between Zionists and Islamists.
Second: the conflict has tended to be analysed mainly in political/national terms. However, Hasan points out in 2013 the composition of the newly-elected Israeli government—of which veteran Israeli dissident Uri Avnery writes, “the settlers are in control of the State”—demonstrating that the pernicious mix between religion and politics had come to dominate Israel. Hasan also points out that in 2013 the corruption and collaboration of Fatah meant that Hamas was seen as the main leadership of the Palestinians. So, eleven years ago, in 2013, the Israel/Palestine clash had already become one of religious/political ideologies.
Those who have seen the clash in religious terms tend either, in the case of hard-line Zionists, to regard Israel as a bastion of Western Judaeo-Christian values against Islam—Samuel Huntingdon’s “clash of civilisations”—or, in the case of many Muslims, as part of a Judaeo-Christian crusade against all Muslims. Hasan shows that the clash is not between the Judaeo-Christian West and Islam but between these two modern religious/political ideologies, which have so much in common with each other, that they not only feed off each other, but they also need each other. This is a third unusual feature of this book: that, unlike many critics of Israel, Hasan combines a powerful critique of Zionism with an equally powerful critique of Islamism. As he writes: “those sympathetic to the cause of Palestinians find Islamism’s vigorous hostility towards Israel likewise appealing and so tend to remain silent about, or treat with kid gloves, its reactionary aspects.” He certainly cannot be accused of treating Islamism “with kid gloves.”
One Zionist argument (which contradicts the claim that Israel is a bastion against Islam) is that far too much attention is given by Palestinian solidarity activists to the Israel/Palestine issue: after all, these Zionists argue, much worse things are happening elsewhere in the world (an argument that has become known as “whataboutery”). Certainly, there are even more unjust conflicts in the world; however, Hasan brings out the immense significance of the conflict: small though the area of Israel/Palestine is, the ramifications of the clash mean that it is an epicentre of global conflict. Thus in his discussion of Israel’s relations with Iran (in the section about Shia Islamism), Hasan argues in 2013 that there was a possibility that Israel might attack Iran—the great showdown between Zionism and Islamism—with incalculable consequences for the region and the world: a prospect that came to pass in a limited way in 2024 and, in a much more dangerous form, in the “Twelve-Day War” of June 2025, during which Israel succeeded in bringing the US into the war, though (unlike the current genocide in Gaza) Trump eventually stepped in to calm the escalating situation by forcing Israel into a ceasefire.
In his discussion of al-Qaeda (in the section about Sunni Islamism), Hasan showed that the Palestine issue had become the main cause of resentment among Muslims towards the West and a potent recruiting-tool for jihadism. This section also includes a discussion about the Arab Spring and the possibility that the takeover of the Arab secular, progressive revolutions by Islamists could lead to a regional war between Zionism and Islamism (he also points out that Zionists, because of the inherent reactionary nature of Zionism, did not give any support to the progressive revolutionaries who began the Arab Spring). And Hasan shows how the conflict between Zionism and Islamism in the West drags Jewish and Muslim communities into association with these two ideologies, so that they end up demonising each other. Zionists and Islamists make use of spurious charges of antisemitism and Islamophobia for political ends—as Hasan puts it: “a clash of ideologies and identities has enveloped a competition of beggar-my-neighbour sensitivities and victimhood.” And the conflict also conscripts people who might appear to have nothing to do with it, for instance, the far-right English nationalist EDL’s support for Zionism.
Though the book portrays the full bleak reality of the increasing power of these two dangerous ideologies, the last chapter attempts “to find a way out of this troubling morass.” Here the clash becomes one between Zionism and Islamism on the one hand and on the other hand the progressive, secular, left-wing forces within the Muslim and Jewish communities and around the world who are struggling against the power of these reactionary ideologies in support of universal values of justice and human rights. Hasan argues for a global anti-apartheid campaign that will weaken the power of Zionism and hence that of Islamism too. And he writes that Palestinians should “get their act together” and join forces with progressive Israeli Jews to work towards a “secular, democratic state for those living in the land of historic Palestine which does not confer privileges on any group.”
I would have liked to have read a bit more about the dynamics of this one state solution. It is true that a detailed discussion of it is not part of the remit of this book—but a small problem I have with Dangerous Liaisons (small, that is, in the context of this book; in a book about the one state solution I would find it a much bigger problem) is that Zionism is seen only in terms of settler colonialism. Certainly, there is a lot of truth in this depiction, but surely Israeli Jews have become a national group with national rights that would need to be recognised in a one-state solution.
There are a few minor critiques that I would also add here. First, is Hasan’s definition of Zionism in the first chapter, “Key Precepts of Zionism and Islamism.” The assertion that “evidence suggests” that European Jews have their origin in the Khazar kingdom is very much open to dispute and in any case, the Jewish claim of descent from the ancient Jewish community of the Holy Land has always been one of cultural and spiritual descent, not a question of genes (which does not of course justify establishing a majority Jewish State by driving out 700,000 Palestinians). Also, Hasan almost completely omits to mention the complexity of the early Zionist movement, which included thinkers such as Martin Buber or Hannah Arendt (from whose writings he quotes at one point) who supported a bi-national and cultural Zionism that sought to share the land in cooperation with the Palestinian Arabs and was opposed to the creation of a Jewish State. Nonetheless, it remains true that political, state Zionism has from the beginning had an expansionist drive that sought to gain as much land as possible with as few Palestinians left in the land as possible—and we see the ultimate fulfilment of this drive in the present situation.
Another criticism I have is that it seems to me that Hasan pays insufficient attention to Hamas’s pragmatic flexibility, in despite of its Islamist “ideological rigidity.” In the words of Norman Finkelstein in his book Gaza: An Inquest into its Martyrdom (2018):
A 2009 study by a US government agency concluded that Hamas ‘had been carefully and consciously adjusting its political program for years’ and had ‘sent repeated signals that it is ready to begin a process of coexisting with Israel’ (footnote: Paul Scham and Osama Abu-Irshaid, Hamas: Ideological Rigidity and Political Flexibility, United States Institute of Peace Special Report, Washington DC 2009, pp. 2-4). (p. 31)
But, in accordance with the thesis put forward in Dangerous Liaisons, Zionism needed Islamism; and so Israel rejected all these signals (which increased after 2013) and encouraged the Hamas hardliners. Ten years later the clash came to a head, with the explosion of 7 October 2023 (when Hamas returned to violent Islamism, after the group had tried in vain both the diplomatic route—by signalling that it was ready to accept Israel on the 1967 borders—and non-violent resistance, with the March of Return in 2018) and the retaliatory genocidal onslaught against Gaza conducted by the far-right settler-dominated Israeli government. Hasan in fact emphasises the support Israel has always given to Hamas and its precursors (pp. 49-53).
These criticisms should not detract from the excellence of this book. It is a fascinating, disturbing and prophetic exploration of the complexities and dangers of two equally pernicious ideologies—an exploration that makes extremely painful reading but which also, even in these catastrophic times, offers a vision of hope.
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