Saudi-UAE notions of Islam are at the core of Israeli thinking on post-war Gaza
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Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s government is mulling a proposal for the post-war administration of Gaza that would put the battle to define moderate Islam in the 21st century on the front burner of Middle Eastern politics and allow the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia to export their autocratic notion of ‘moderate’ Islam.
Potentially, the 32-page proposal, if successfully implemented, would give the two Gulf states a leg up in their propagation of a socially less restrictive, religiously more tolerant Islam that rejects democracy and political pluralism, advocated by Indonesia’s Nahdlatul Ulama, the world’s largest, most moderate Muslim civil society movement, in favour of a contested Islamic principle of absolute obedience to the ruler.
Entitled “From a Murderous Regime to a Moderate Society,” the proposal calls for a cultural and political revamp of Gaza and the creation of a “moderate Muslim entity” in the mould of the UAE and Saudi Arabia.
