Saudi-UAE notions of Islam are at the core of Israeli thinking on post-war Gaza
By James M. Dorsey
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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.
