On October 26, 2026, the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs (JCFA) held a special event to mark the launch of Dr. Harold Rhode’s new book, “Islamic Warfare and the October 7th Massacre.” Dr Rhode, a fellow at JCFA, is a former senior official in the Pentagon, and has lived and studied in Iran, Turkey, and many parts of the Arab world.
Attending the event at JCFA were Israel’s former Ambassador to the U.S. Ron Dermer and Col. Richard Kemp, as well as several foreign ambassadors and embassy representatives.
The 108-page book is an updated version of a previous publication – this time with analysis covering the October 7th Hamas massacre. Rhode schools his readers on fundamental Islamic concepts related to invasion and conquest that drove Muslims from the earliest days of Islam to today.
An endorsement by Col. Kemp reads as follows: “In this book he identifies the severe challenges the West faces today from Islamic jihad; and, if unchecked, the catastrophe that will engulf our future generations. If we fail to act now, along the lines Dr. Rhode so compellingly proposes, we will have betrayed our children, grandchildren, and their descendants.”
In his introduction of Dr. Rhode and his book, JCFA’s president, Dr. Dan Diker said, “I don’t think there has been a serious study or policy book that has come out since October 7th about the ideological and religious engine that fueled the decades before October 7th.”
Dr. Diker noted how Dr. Rhode highlighted the similarity of statements by Haj Amin al-Husseini to those of Hamas which called its massacre the “Al-Aqsa Flood.”
“The Al-Aqsa mosque on the Temple mount has been a key point of reference in everything that’s happened,” Diker said.
In his remarks, Dr. Rhode explained that Hamas must be destroyed and that the only way to get Muslims to rethink their sources and their culture is “through a thought revolution,” but added that “it requires a though revolution on our part as well.”
According to Rhode, “It is important that we understand how the Arabs/Muslims understand us, because they make decisions based on their assumptions – not ours.”
He offered an example.
“Muslims believe that any land conquered by Muslims must remain under Muslim rule forever. All of [the biblical land of Israel] was conquered by the Muslims in 637-38 CE. So, all of it is Muslim – that means pre-1967 Israel, Judea and Samaria, and the Gaza Strip.”
Rhode emphasized that due to the Muslim ideology that a land conquered is forever Muslim, “no Muslim can make permanent peace with a Jewish State on what they ‘know’ is Muslim territory – which means that there cannot be a two-state solution.”
In his book, Rhode writes, “Westerners continue to ignore the fact that the values and objectives of Islam differ from those of the West. Muslims understand the Western concept of compromise as a form of defeat.”
Rhode adds, “Western governments and officials who relentlessly seek permanent peaceful solutions with Muslim-majority countries, and Muslim organizations in the non-Muslim world, do so at their peril.”
In his closing comments at the event, Rhode said the West “must have the ability to force the Muslims to rethink their civilization,” adding that “the tools exist there, but they have no incentive to do this” unless they experience a “catastrophic defeat.”
