The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Is Not About Religion
Extremists call it a 'holy war,' but this conflict has always been about the very secular issues of territory, injustice and identity.
Khaled Diab
Aug 17, 2015 3:34 PM
Is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict a religious one? Recent terrorist attacks and the clash over the Holy Sanctuary/Temple Mount would suggest so. But this is no holy war – far from it.
The Palestine-Israel Journal, an academic publication dedicated to studying the conflict, recently organized a roundtable discussion on the very issue of whether this conflict is religious or national. The panel – which included Israeli, Palestinian and foreign participants from academia, the media, the clergy and the activist community, including myself – was sharply divided on the question.
My own reading of the situation is that what we have in Israel-Palestine is essentially a secular-nationalist conflict over land, injustice and, to a lesser degree, identity. This is demonstrated in the PLO charter. While the document repeatedly mentions the words “Arab,” “Palestinian” and “nationalism,” it does not once refer to religion. The nearest it comes is to mention a “material, spiritual and historical” connection with Palestine.
The second most important political force in the Palestinian struggle after Fatah was, for decades, the Marxist-Leninist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, founded by George Habash, who was born into a Christian family. Many of its members were atheists, the remnants of which tell their “comrades” in Hamas that “paradise is in this life, not the next,” and say “Palestine is paradise.”
http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.671543
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