Al-Qalam 
By Mazen Hakim
What good is a call for jihad when the gates of Gaza are sealed by Arab tyrants?
This week, a group of prominent Muslim scholars issued a fatwa calling for jihad in response to Israel’s ongoing annihilation of Gaza. Their statement, steeped in classical jurisprudence and moral outrage, arrives as bombs fall on children, hospitals, and entire neighborhoods with clinical brutality.
The outrage is justified. The legal reasoning that Islamic scholars might find coherent. And yet, the whole thing feels hollow.
Why?
Because these scholars, for all their moral fervor, have issued a fatwa that dares not name the true architects of betrayal—the corrupt Arab despots that have collaborated with, enabled, and shielded Israel and its Western backers for decades. The kings, princes, and generals who rule in Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, Cairo, Amman, Manama, and Rabat are not merely indifferent to Palestinian suffering. They are its accomplices.
Let’s talk plainly
When Egypt’s military junta seals the Rafah border while Gaza bleeds, what right does it have to call itself an ally of the Palestinian people?
When Mohammed bin Salman courts Israeli tech investors and echoes Washington’s priorities, what value is there in his regime’s vague pro-Palestine posturing?
When the UAE normalizes with Israel and then cosponsors anti-resistance resolutions at the UN, what “solidarity” does that represent?
When Jordan’s security services coordinate daily with Israel, and Morocco trains its military alongside the IDF, what illusion remains?
These regimes are not defenders of the ummah. They are its jailers. And no amount of scholarly verbiage can disguise that.
The true front line of liberation does not begin at Gaza’s edge—it begins in the palaces, prisons, and parliaments of the Arab world. It begins with naming these regimes for what they are: the local enforcers of a regional order built on subjugation, surveillance, and the steady sacrifice of Palestine on the altar of imperial strategy.
A fatwa that calls for jihad against Israel but remains silent on the tyranny of Sisi, MBS, MBZ, Abdullah and the rest is not just insufficient—it is complicit. It gives moral cover to regimes that have done everything in their power to ensure that Gaza remains isolated, the resistance strangled, and the Arab street demobilized.
The Qur’anic command to “stand firmly for justice” (Q. 4:135) is not a license for selective outrage. It is a call to moral and political clarity. And that clarity demands that any meaningful solidarity with Palestine must begin with the overthrow of the despotic regimes that have enabled its oppression.
Until that is said—not whispered, not implied, but said plainly and loudly in the pulpits of every Mosque —these fatwas will remain what they are: exercises in righteous performance, untethered from revolutionary reality.
The liberation of Palestine is not just a struggle against Zionism. It is a struggle against every palace guard who calls himself a “leader” while guarding Israel’s flank.
And until the scholars have the courage to issue that fatwa, the road to Jerusalem remains blocked—not by tanks or drones, but by the cowardice of those who fear to name the real enemy.
