By David K. Shipler
Also published by Moment Magazine
If you list the elements of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, you'll see that while most are subject to compromise, one is virtually non-negotiable: religion at its most dogmatic. It has grown more prominent over the decades as devout militants have gained power among both Israeli Jews and Palestinian Muslims.
Measuring its ultimate influence is
difficult, for the dispute is largely secular, and is seen that way by most
Israelis and Palestinians, polls show. In theory, the two sides’ overlapping territorial
claims, driven by the clash of two nationalisms, could be resolved by drawing
reasonable borders between Israel and a Palestinian state. West Bank Jewish
settlements could be dismantled and consolidated. Security concerns could be
addressed by humane, mutual protections. Jerusalem could be shared. Palestinians
could bargain away their “right of return” to former villages inside Israel. The
dueling historical narratives of grievance, so central to the conflict’s
psychology, might gradually fade as uneasy neighbors learn to coexist.
That is
all eventually possible, but less likely when each of the issues is salted with
the absolutism of divine mission, as certain Israeli and Palestinian leaders
are doing. They merge the sacred and the temporal, combine faith with tribal
identity, and infuse piety into their peoples’ past grievances and present
longings.
The current example is the war in Gaza. At dawn
on October 7, a voice on the Hamas military frequency announced
to the fighters: “Rocket barrages are being fired right now at the occupied
cities! May God empower and grace the holy warriors!” The man spoke in a pitch
of ecstasy, echoed by another’s exultant answer through the static: “The
resistance is now inside the occupied territories!”
“Allahu Akbar!” (God is most
great!) the young Palestinians shouted as they streamed from Gaza through
breaches blown in Israel’s border fence, their body cameras recording their
fervent chants as they whooped in celebration over Israeli corpses. Each
terrorist who died for his faith would earn the honor of being called shaheed
(martyr).
Thus began the worst day for Israel
in its 75-year existence, inflamed by religious slogans and symbols. Hamas wants
to replace the Jewish state with an Islamic state. It named its sadistic attack
“Al-Aqsa Flood,” after the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, the third holiest site
in Islam, now in Israel’s capital.
In turn, after the Hamas slaughters that day, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu embraced a biblical analogy by likening the Palestinians to Amalek, the ancient nomads whose complete extermination was ordered by God. This seemed to consider the massive assaults on Gaza that followed as divinely blessed. Other religious terms were tossed around. Israeli officials named the artificial intelligence that picked its targets in Gaza “the Gospel.” Netanyahu reportedly proposed naming this “the Genesis War.”
