Religious Absolutism: Isaac and Ishmael

 

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.”

Jerusalem, Jerusalem

By David K. Shipler

If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.

Psalm 137:5

            The city of Jerusalem, whose sandstone facades glow ethereally in the slanting light of dawns and dusks, stands on a spine of hills along the lands of milk and of honey. To the east, the land plunging down into the Judean Desert has been traditionally hospitable to milk-producing goat herds. To the west, the fertile coastal plain along the Mediterranean has been sweet with orchards.

            That is the basic biblical geography. At this intersection of semi-nomadic peoples and settled farmers, Jerusalem has been enriched and burdened by ancient affinities and faiths. Its map today is enhanced and scarred by the overlays of history, religion, and nationalism, a treacherous landscape into which President Trump has now stumbled clumsily.

What forces he has unwittingly set loose we do not yet know; predictions in that part of the world are for prophets or fools. But his decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of the Jewish State alone, without also recognizing the Palestinians’ yearning for Jerusalem as the capital of their aspirational state, surely diminishes America’s maneuverability.

It’s hard to see what the United States gains from Trump’s move. For the limited profit of catering to his big donors and his narrow base, Trump has tossed away the American coin of neutrality—as tarnished as it was by years of tilting toward Israel’s interests. Not many Palestinians thought of Washington as truly unbiased, since no previous administration did more than use strong words against Israel’s confiscation of territories for Jewish settlement in the mostly Palestinian West Bank and the eastern districts of Jerusalem. No penalty was exacted: no withholding of aid, no reduction of military support. And now Trump has asked nothing from Israel in exchange for his endorsement.