We often come across a rather common misconception regarding the question of Palestine, and that is that it is a holy war between Muslims and Jews. This, of course, is incorrect. The root causes of the question of Palestine can be traced quite clearly [You can read more about this here], and assigning a purely religious motivation or significance to them produces a distorted view of reality.
To briefly recap, the beginning of the question of Palestine is rooted in the Zionist movement, and its goal of colonizing Palestine to establish a Zionist state there. The first Zionist conference took place at the very end of the 19th century (1897). It is important to note that Zionism saw Judaism as an ethnicity, and not merely a religion, hence it argued that the Jewish people, like all other peoples were entitled to an ethnic nation-state, which was popular in European thought at the time. It is crucial to understand this distinction because a sizable majority of thought streams in early Zionism were secular.
The founding fathers of Zionism, including David Ben-Gurion, certainly didn’t view their aspirations for Palestine as religious; they were nearly all atheists or religiously indifferent, and Zionism itself from its onset “enjoyed little support from key Jewish figures”. As historian Nur Masalha has explained in detail, Zionism emerged from the conditions of late-nineteenth-century Eastern and Central Europe as a radical break from 2,000 years of rabbinical Judaism and Jewish tradition. The ‘Land of Israel’ was revered by generations of Jews as a place of holy pilgrimage, not as a future secular state, and while generations of Jews expressed their yearning for “Zion” through prayers and customs, only very recently has this yearning become understood as in any way literal. Instead, early political Zionists most frequently framed their goals in Palestine in the colonial terms popular at the time, such as the idea that Zionists as Westerners were better equipped to cultivate the land than the natives.
No wonder then that 80% of early Zionist settlers did not even settle in Jerusalem, including Ben-Gurion himself, who could not be bothered to visit Jerusalem until three years after arriving. This is due to the fact that Zionist settlers at the time deemed Jerusalem too multi-religious and pluralistic for the founding of the ethnonationalist society of their dreams. Not only was it “full of aliens” (native Arabs) but it was also inhabited by the “old Jewish Yishuv”, whose members were part of the anti-Zionist ultra-orthodox community. As a result, Zionists preferred to build the new exclusively Jewish settlement of Tel Aviv on the Mediterranean coast. The notion that political Zionism and the founding of the Israeli state were predicated on the realization of millennia of religious longing is mostly an ex post facto justification. Rather, Zionism, like the European nationalisms before it, is an example of nation-building through the invention of tradition: cherry-picking collective memory and manipulating the religious past for political purposes.
This does not mean that there weren’t any religious Zionist streams at all, but it was the post-Herzlian secular Zionism that managed to pool the resources of European Zionism and centralize the efforts to colonize Palestine. This Zionism was also the one that succeeded in establishing colonies in Palestine, and carrying out the Nakba where over 800,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed from over 500 villages, the majority of which were then destroyed.
Revisionist Zionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky candidly wrote regarding Palestinians that:
“Every native population in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonised.”
It would be hard to imagine that such resistance was warranted only if the colonizers differed religiously from the colonized.
Even though the Ottomans did not settle en masse in Palestine, and shared their religion with the vast majority of Palestinians, we still saw uprisings and independence movements which took up arms to fight them. Some were so successful, they managed to win Palestinian regional autonomy for a considerable period of time. This was because, like any empire conquering land, the stability of their rule relied on keeping the people in check, and particularly in the final years Ottoman policy towards Palestine was disastrous in many ways. So naturally, Palestinians resisted them. Not out of any religious motivation, but simply to escape domination.
So why is it then that when it comes to Zionist settler colonialism, many simply chalk it up to some holy war, rather than a colonized people resisting their oppressors?
This misconception is often based on an Orientalist understanding of the Middle East which boils everything down to religious sectarianism. This is quite common today, as if middle easterners are just incapable of living with others. How many times have you seen a misguided pundit boil down complex histories, struggles, political actors with diverse ideologies, contexts, motivations and goals into a simplistic Manichean battle between Sunnis and Shias?
Consequently, when viewed in this manner all grievances and conflicts in the area become petty, with no logic or context behind them other than fulfilling some divine commandment. All actors become irrational; it flattens all struggles and equalizes all parties. Suddenly, there are no oppressors or oppressed, no colonists or colonized. Resistance becomes identical to domination, and everything is dismissed as illogical religious superstition typical of the backwards peoples inhabiting the region.
These shallow analyses of the question of Palestine serve multiple functions; First, it is an attractive and easy way to comment without actually saying anything of worth. It is convenient, because it spares you the need to do any research or take a stance while projecting a false image of understanding or nuance.
However, more nefariously, this talking point can serve as a justification for brutal violence. For example, a large portion of American Evangelicals view the “restoration” of Israel as necessary to bring around the end times, and the return of Jesus Christ. In such a case, the oppression of Palestinians becomes a matter of holy significance. This plays a prominent role in many “faithwashing” initiatives [You can read more about this here].
Humans are quite adept at masking their intentions behind an altruistic and noble facade. Not long ago, the United States attempted to legitimize its invasion of Iraq by claiming it was actually bringing freedom and democracy to the Iraqis. Similarly, religion has been cynically instrumentalized to legitimize and mask political goals when it comes to Palestine. Indeed, many do view the Palestinian question as tied to religion, but the origins are firmly rooted in an anti-colonial struggle.
There would have still been Palestinian resistance to Zionism regardless of the religion of the colonists or the colonized. There would have still been Palestinian resistance to Zionism even if Palestine had no religious significance to anyone on the planet. This has been proven time and time again by liberation movements all over the globe.
Furthermore, and perhaps more importantly, we cannot allow Israel to succeed in its conflation of Zionism with Judaism. We cannot allow Israel to speak in the name of and represent world Jewry. When the question of Palestine is erroneously viewed as a holy war, then these Israeli claims are inadvertently reinforced and legitimized. This simplistic view also erases Jewish allies of Palestine, and overlooks Muslim allies of Israel. Not to mention that it completely misunderstands the dynamics of both societies.
For instance, what of Christian Palestinians? What of secular Palestinians? They also fought against and suffered from Zionist settler colonialism. It would be absurd to suggest that these groups were motivated by wanting to participate in a “Muslim holy war”, as many claim.
Whenever this “holy war ” talking point is used, it is a sure sign that the person practicing it is either -at best- misinformed, or is purposefully cultivating a clash of civilizations narrative to justify one aim or the other. In either case, it is not a claim that can withstand any scrutiny, especially when it is simplistically employed to analyze a heterogeneous society’s struggle against settler colonialism in an area full of liberation movements.
So no, the question of Palestine is not some holy war between eternally warring peoples, it is a recent struggle resulting from settler colonialism infused with reactionary ethno-nationalism, both relatively new concepts originating in the last couple of centuries. The analysis of the question of Palestine through any other lens will produce a flawed and misleading understanding of the facts on the ground, and will result in shallow and ahistorical interpretations of the region as the one discussed above.
- Decolonize Palestine, Faithwashing. [Link}
- Hjelm, Ingrid, et al., eds. A New Critical Approach to the History of Palestine: Palestine History and Heritage Project 1. Routledge, 2019.
- Masalha, Nur. Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History. Zed Books Ltd., 2018.
- Khalidi, Rashid. The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017. Metropolitan Books, 2020.
- Joudah, Ahmad Hasan. Revolt in Palestine in the Eighteenth Century: The Era of Shaykh Zahir al-‘Umar. Gorgias Press, 2013.