According to the Hamas charter, Palestine is an Islamic endowment “for all generations of Muslims until the Day of Resurrection” which no one may renounce. The Arab-Israeli conflict is seen as not just a political dispute but an implacably religious one. But there are Muslim scholars who will tell you that this claim has no basis in the Koran: not only that, but the foundation text of Islam, in fact, recognises the special link between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel.
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Dr Al-Husseini is a British imam who teaches a course on the Koran as part of interfaith studies at the Leo Baeck College, the Progressive rabbinic college in Finchley, north London. [Leauki: My rabbi was trained there.]
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He examines this passage through the eyes of one classic commentator of the Koran, Muhammad ibn Jarir al-Tabari (838-923), who says the remark is “a narrative from God… concerning the saying of Moses… to his community from among the children of Israel and his order to them according to the order of God to him, ordering them to enter the holy land.” Al-Tabari, Dr Al-Husseni says, is “our Rashi”, the founder of tafsir, “the science of exegesis” — the Arabic word is similar to pesher, Hebrew for interpretation.
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“During the life of the Prophet, there was an enormous territorial ambition to get Makka back from the Makkans,” he says. “There was no territorial ambition to claim Jerusalem, Palestine. “What happens during his lifetime is what God wants to happen for the Muslim community. His prophecy and his objective was the reclamation of the Islamic holy site which is Makka. If God had decreed that His Prophet should have Jerusalem, then it would have been something that he would have been preoccupied with during his lifetime and he conquered the whole of the Arabian peninsula. “It was never the case during the early period of Islam…that there was any kind of sacerdotal attachment to Jerusalem as a territorial claim.
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Since the militants cannot contradict the Koranic precedent for Jewish attachment to the Land of Israel, they adopt another tactic, Dr Al-Husseini says: they argue that Jews are a wicked people who “must be punished” — hence the spread of antisemitism within the Muslim world. “But no fundamentalist, no matter how hard they try,” he says, “can overrule the existing tradition to say there is, in fact, an Islamic counterclaim to Eretz Yisrael.”
http://www.thejc.com/articles/what-koran-says-about-land-israel
This traditional view is also represented and explained here:
http://www2.canada.com/ottawacitizen/news/story.html?id=604855a0-7b9c-4519-a841-f4736d59eaa1&p=1
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=d2e_1236321796 (Video)