Israel’s Hidden Role in the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation |
The history of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), a faith-based international body founded in 1969 in Rabat, Morocco, is intimately intertwined with the history of Israel and its political actions in the West Bank and Gaza. This connection is already visible in the organization’s founding document. Its Charter, signed in the same year and effective from 1972, explicitly mentions only two of its 57 Member States (MS) and three of its MS’ cities (cf. Arts. 14, 18, 21, 39), and it implicitly alludes to only one non-MS: Israel. It can be read in its preamble that the OIC MS determined ‘to support the struggle of the Palestinian people, who are presently under foreign occupation’ and ‘to establish their sovereign State with Al-Quds Al-Sharif as its capital’.
In this contribution, I argue that Israel acts as a quasi-non-MS within the OIC and, more specifically, as a case of what I define as negative memberness. Though formally excluded, it is able to shape the internal dynamics of the organization while serving as a constitutive other, or enemy, in Schmitt’s terminology (2007). The application of the friend/enemy distinction to International Relations is not uncontested: Teschke (2011) has argued that Schmitt’s conceptual vocabulary was forged within a specific ideological context, namely the legitimation of Nazi Germany’s spatial politics, which makes its de-contextualized application problematic. For this reason, the concept is employed here as a descriptive device aimed at mapping how opposition structures identity within an international organization, rather than as a general explanatory framework.
IR scholars as social scientists were relatively late in recognizing the role played by religion, initially embracing the Orientalist tendency to label it as a primordial impulse destined to disappear as societies modernize (Modongal, 2023). Events such as the 1967 Six-Day War, the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, and the end of the Cold War led some scholars (Huntington, 1993; Juergensmeyer, 1993) to acknowledge that religion indeed plays a crucial role in IR. Such acknowledgment grew stronger after the 9/11 attacks and the rise and fall of ISIS, further consolidating the place of religion within the discipline. Authors have since re-interpreted old concepts in light of this perspective: for instance, the concept of ‘religious soft power’ (Ozturk, 2023) was developed from Nye’s idea of ‘soft power’ (1990). It is meaningful that, as of today, the second largest international organization after the UN is the OIC, a body founded on religious ground, whose very existence challenges earlier assumptions about the marginality of religion in global politics.
Although the OIC was founded in 1969, the idea of an Islamic supranational entity traces back to the concept of ʾummah, an Arabic term that means ‘community’ (cf. Quran 3:104). The idea of a political entity whose borders were defined not only by territorial conquest or treaties but primarily by the shared faith of its inhabitants took institutional form in the Caliphate immediately following the death of Muhammad in 632. The Caliphate, as a political institution, lasted until 1922 with the abolition of the Ottoman Sultanate by the Kemalist Turkish National Assembly. Since then, Islamist ideologues, pundits, thinkers, politicians, and theologians have advocated for the reconstitution of the Caliphate, often referring to the ideal model of the first four Caliphs, the Rašidūn, or ‘Rightly Guided’ (Rida, 2024). More generally, the renewed emphasis on unity on a religious basis in Islam has been labelled Pan-Islamism, a political movement initially proposed by Abdülhamid II to face the territorial losses suffered during his reign from 1876 to 1909, in opposition to the Tanzimat reforms (Chouinard, 2010). Influential thinkers such as Jamāl al-Dīn al-Afghānī (1839–1897), Muḥammad ʿAbduh (1849–1905), and Rashīd Rida (1865–1935) argued that the unity of the Islamic world could be both a source of decline, if neglected or misinterpreted, and a potential basis for its rebirth if properly understood.
Know your Enemy, Know your Friends
The straw that broke the camel’s back was the 1969 arson attack on the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem by Denis Michael Rohan, an Australian Christian fundamentalist. The subsequent summit in Morocco, which gathered representatives from 24 Muslim countries and preceded the First Islamic Conference of Foreign Ministers in Jeddah the following year, effectively transformed the Pan-Islamic impetus into a recognized international organization. While religion was the common denominator, the Islamization of the struggle against Israel was simultaneously catalyzed, even though it would later crystallize in a more radical form with the Muslim Brotherhood’s activity in the Gaza Strip (Litvak, 1998).
Egyptian President al-Nāṣir’s Pan-Arabism was being counteracted by Saudi Arabia’s King Fayṣal through Pan-Islamism (Sheikh, 2003). After the death of the founder of the modern Saudi state ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz in 1953 and the consequent loss of a powerful legitimizing factor, the tendency of his son Saʾūd (1953–1964) to align closely with Egypt and Syria became increasingly problematic. Events such as the 1956 Suez Crisis and the 1958 formation of the United Arab Republic led to al-Nāṣir’s surging popularity as the leader of a secular, socialist, and republican Pan-Arabism (Baba, 1992). The values he represented posed a direct threat to the region’s autocratic regimes. After succeeding his brother, King Fayṣal, a political and diplomatic maven, seized the opportunity to champion Pan-Islamism. Following years of efforts that included the foundation of the Muslim World League in 1962, he leveraged the aftermath of the 1967 war to take decisive action in 1969.
Even though reading the OIC as a purely anti-Israeli institution would be far from reality, the political, in Schmittian terms, was deeply rooted in the designation of Israel as the enemy. The struggle against Israel provided a common framework through which cooperation on a religious basis could be promoted and the organization’s identity........