Ron Shaham says "Most Israelis today believe Islam is an aggressive, violent, bloodthirsty religion that hates Jews and seeks to take over the world," and he argues that this story does more than misread a faith. It helps the political right turn a human conflict into something permanent, natural, and impossible to escape. That’s the trick. Make domination sound like destiny, and people stop imagining anything else.
Fear as Political Technology
Shaham says he is "not here to defend Islam's battered reputation," but he does say the problem goes beyond accuracy. The claims, he argues, "serve the political right by presenting the conflict between us and Muslims as inevitable and extinguishing every glimmer of hope for reconciliation." That’s the machinery at work: not just prejudice, but a narrative that hardens fear into policy and makes endless confrontation look like common sense.
The Haaretz piece says that for Israeli thinkers portraying Islam as inherently violent, peace is a fantasy. In that framing, the conflict isn’t a political arrangement that can be changed. It becomes a fixed condition, sealed off from history, negotiation, or ordinary people’s lives. Once that idea takes hold, the public gets trained to accept permanent hostility as if it were weather.
Cherry-Picked Texts, Managed Reality
Prof. Ron Shaham argues that these portrayals rely on selective reading. He says they cherry-pick religious texts and ignore moderate voices. That matters because it’s not just an argument about theology. It’s a way of sorting people into enemies and threats while erasing the voices that don’t fit the script. The result is a cleaner story for power, and a much uglier one for everyone else.
The article’s framing makes the political use of this rhetoric plain: if Islam is cast as inherently violent, then reconciliation can be dismissed before it even starts. No need to talk about coexistence, no need to listen to people who reject the caricature, no need to admit that the conflict is being narrated by those who benefit from keeping it alive. The story does the work for them.
A photo caption in the piece shows "Muslim women at a demonstration in Paris" and quotes the line, "Many Muslims actually want to integrate into Western culture." That caption sits there like a small correction to the larger panic. Real people, real politics, real lives. Not the cartoon version sold by the loudest voices.
The piece doesn’t describe institutions, police, or armies. It does show something else that matters: how political language can be used to lock people into fear and make an entire population easier to manage. When a conflict gets described as inevitable, the people living inside it are the ones who pay for the convenience of that lie.