There is no single Islamic answer to the question of Jewish sovereignty. That needs to be said at the start, because too much public writing collapses a very large religious tradition into either a blanket indictment or a blanket absolution. Some Islamist movements and clerical traditions reject Jewish sovereignty over any part of historic Palestine on religious grounds. Other Muslim scholars, declarations, and states reject that absolutism and treat coexistence with Jewish political power as religiously permissible.
The objection is usually built from sacred geography and political theology
One historical strand of Islamic jurisprudence divided the world into categories such as Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb, a distinction summarized in Britannica’s overview. Later Islamist politics often drew on this vocabulary to argue that territory once governed by Muslims should not be surrendered to non-Muslim sovereignty.
Jerusalem intensifies that argument because of its religious status in Islam. Britannica’s Jerusalem overview notes the city’s centrality to Islamic devotion through the traditions associated with al-Aqsa and the Prophet’s Night Journey. In maximalist political readings, that sanctity gets turned into a claim that Muslim religious duty forbids recognition of lasting Jewish sovereignty there.
That is a real argument. It is also not the only one Muslims have made.
Hamas is the clearest modern primary text
If the goal is to see this objection stated plainly, the best primary source is Hamas. Its 1988 charter framed Palestine as Islamic land and fused nationalist struggle with a religious duty of resistance. That document is openly ideological, and parts of it are unmistakably antisemitic.
Hamas later tried to recalibrate its presentation. The 2017 “Document of General Principles and Policies,” reproduced by the Journal of Palestine Studies, softened some of the earlier language, distinguished Jews from “the Zionist project,” and said Hamas would accept a Palestinian state on the 1967 lines as a formula of national consensus. But the same document still rejected Israel’s legitimacy and kept the larger claim to all of Palestine intact. So the tone changed more than the endpoint did.
The Qur’an does not reduce neatly to the Islamist position
It is a mistake to present the Islamist reading as though it were simply “what Islam says.” The Qur’anic text is not that simple. In Qur’an 5:20-21, Moses tells the Children of Israel to enter the holy land that God has assigned to them. Other verses and later commentarial traditions complicate how Muslims have understood covenant, punishment, exile, and succession. The point is not to conscript the Qur’an into Zionism. It is to show that the scriptural record is more layered than slogans about permanent Islamic exclusivity suggest.
That is one reason Muslim disputes over Israel and Jerusalem are not merely political. They are interpretive. Different Muslims read the same sacred history differently.
Muslim counter-traditions are part of the record too
The strongest rebuttal to absolutist religious rejection has come from Muslims themselves. The Marrakesh Declaration, backed by Muslim scholars and analyzed by the U.S. Institute of Peace, argued for the protection of religious minorities and against weaponized readings of Islamic tradition. The Muslim Reform Movement’s declaration rejected violent Islamist supremacy even more explicitly.
State-backed Muslim religious institutions have also taken more pragmatic paths. The Abraham Accords did not settle theology, but the Institute for National Security Studies notes that Muslim clerical support for normalization in the Gulf rested in part on the claim that peace with Israel is religiously permissible and politically legitimate.
So the honest picture is not “Islam forbids Jewish sovereignty.” It is that some Islamist and clerical movements say so, and other Muslim voices argue they are wrong.
What the record shows, and what OZJF concludes
The record shows a real religious objection inside parts of modern Islamist thought. It is visible in Hamas, in some Brotherhood-derived rhetoric, and in political readings of Jerusalem’s sanctity that leave no room for Jewish sovereignty. But the record also shows internal Muslim disagreement, scriptural complexity, and modern Muslim arguments for coexistence, minority protection, and state-to-state peace.
OZJF’s conclusion is intentionally narrow. The problem is not “Islam” as such. The problem is a specific set of Islamist and clerical readings that turn sacred geography into a doctrine of permanent negation. Treating that current as if it speaks for all Muslims is bad scholarship and bad politics. Pretending it does not exist is no better.