The modern occupation of Palestine is often analyzed through legal instruments, human rights frameworks and power politics. Yet scholars such as Rashid Khalidi and international legal bodies, including the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC), highlight that the ideological foundation underpinning Israel’s expansion often transcends secular rationale. The idea of "Greater Israel," or “Eretz Yisrael,” stretching from the Nile to the Euphrates, is not simply a geopolitical ambition. It is a theological blueprint, drawn from Biblical scripture and messianic expectation, and increasingly invoked by Israel's leaders to justify actions that defy international norms.
For Muslims, the significance of this land transcends history and enters the realm of prophecy. According to widely accepted hadiths recorded in Sahih Muslim (Hadith 2937) and Sunan Ibn Majah (Hadith 4077), Al-Masih ad-Dajjal, the False Messiah, will emerge in the East and deceive humanity. His final confrontation will take place in Palestine, at the gate of Lod (modern-day Lydda), where he will be slain by the Prophet Jesus, who will descend in Damascus. In this framework, Palestine is not merely an occupied land; it is the epicentre of a cosmic struggle between deception and truth.
The concept of Eretz Yisrael has long underpinned Zionist expansionist ideology, particularly within Israel’s current ultranationalist coalition. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir have openly expressed messianic beliefs, as evidenced by Smotrich’s 2023 speech in Paris, where he denied the existence of a Palestinian people and stood before a map of "Greater Israel." Their vision is not driven by diplomacy, but by the so-called "divine entitlement" as interpreted through religious-nationalist ideology.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has increasingly framed military campaigns in sacred terms. By quoting scriptures like Ecclesiastes of the Hebrew Bible, “There is a time for war,” and likening Hamas to Amalek (the enemy of the nation of the Israelites in the Hebrew Bible), he positions Israel's actions within a holy narrative of survival and conquest. When policy becomes prophecy, negotiation becomes heresy.
This reframing of political violence as divine duty transforms settlements, airstrikes and blockades into acts of sacred fulfilment. It also immunises them from criticism. After all, how does one contest a war ordained by God?
Islamic eschatology holds that Dajjal will cause unparalleled deception and destruction before being defeated in Palestine. The battle between illusion and truth will unfold in this specific geography, not by coincidence, but by divine design.
In this context, Israel’s strategic targeting of holy sites, particularly the Al-Aqsa Mosque, and its erasure of Palestinian cultural memory can be viewed not only as settler-colonialism but as the groundwork for eschatological inversion. What is profane is presented as sacred. What is violent is cloaked as virtuous.
Dajjal, the deceiver, is said to manipulate perception: to make fire seem cool, and injustice appear just. What, then, are we witnessing today, if not a state apparatus employing language, religion and media to turn war crimes into self-defence and ethnic cleansing into security policy?
As of mid-2025, over 50,000 Palestinians have been killed, including thousands of children. Entire neighbourhoods have been razed. Hospitals and refugee camps have become military targets. The U.N. Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese has referred to the situation as “a textbook case of genocide” in her March 2024 report to the UNHRC. Yet Western governments echo the Israeli state’s framing: these are “regrettable necessities” in a war for survival.
This is not just political complicity; it is theological deception. The Dajjalic system does not announce itself with horns and darkness. It arrives through the normalization of moral collapse. It is the redefinition of violence as virtue and injustice as order. In Islamic tradition, Dajjal is described as having one blind eye, a metaphor for partial vision, selective truth and weaponized narrative.
The use of sacred texts to legitimize conquest is not new. From the Crusades to the doctrine of manifest destiny, religious narratives have historically been used to legitimize imperial conquest. Scholars such as Edward Said and Talal Asad have shown how theological frameworks can sanctify violence and erase Indigenous identities under the guise of divine justification. What makes the present moment unique is its fusion of prophecy with precision weaponry, of messianism with modern militarism.
The Israeli state does not merely invoke history; it scripts a future in which its theological narrative is unchallengeable. And those who resist it, Palestinians, human rights advocates, critical Jews, are cast not as opponents, but as existential threats, as agents of chaos in a divinely ordered world.
Framing the Palestinian struggle solely in legal or political terms fails to capture its spiritual magnitude. The war on Gaza is not just about territory, it is about narrative, theology and truth. If Dajjal is the great deceiver, then what we are witnessing is the infrastructure of that deception: the silencing of suffering, the erasure of memory, the sanctification of brutality.
Palestine stands at the center of this crisis not as a victim of history, but as a witness to prophecy. It demands not only political resistance but spiritual discernment. To stand with Palestine is not merely to oppose occupation. It is to resist a global drift toward moral blindness, to challenge the theology of power, and to affirm that truth, even in its most fragile form, is worth defending.
In an age where war is sold as peace and genocide cloaked as divine justice, the real battle is not only for land, but for clarity. And in this, Palestine is not marginal. It is the mirror in which humanity must confront itself.
