Israel-Palestine: The Sacred and the Secular
1. BASIC FACTS & HISTORICAL CONTEXT
The Israel-Palestine conflict is a modern manifestation of an ancient struggle, layered with competing nationalisms, colonial legacies, and profound religious significance. Its contemporary roots lie in the late 19th and early 20th centuries with the parallel rise of Zionist nationalism, seeking a sovereign homeland for the Jewish people in their historic land of Eretz Yisrael, and Arab nationalism, which coalesced in opposition to the declining Ottoman Empire and subsequent British Mandatory rule.
The pivotal event of the 20th century was the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, known to Israelis as the War of Independence and to Palestinians as the Nakba (Catastrophe). The United Nations Partition Plan of 1947, which proposed separate Jewish and Arab states, was accepted by Jewish leaders but rejected by Arab representatives. The ensuing war resulted in the establishment of the State of Israel and the displacement of approximately 700,000 Palestinians, creating a refugee crisis that remains central to the conflict even today.
The 1967 Six-Day War was another watershed, leaving Israel in control of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights. This occupation created the modern framework of the conflict: Israeli settlements, military administration, and Palestinian resistance, including two major Intifadas (1987-1993, 2000-2005). The Oslo Accords of the 1990s established the Palestinian Authority (PA) and a framework for peace but ultimately failed to deliver a final status agreement on borders, refugees, security, and the status of Jerusalem—a city sacred to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
The Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 was followed by the seizure of power by Hamas, an Islamist group designated as a terrorist organization by many countries, leading to a stringent Israeli-Egyptian blockade. The cycle of conflict has been marked by repeated wars in Gaza, Palestinian rocket attacks, and Israeli military operations. The Hamas-led attack on October 7, 2023, which resulted in the deaths of approximately 1,200 Israelis and the capture of over 250 hostages, and the subsequent Israeli military campaign in Gaza, which has resulted in a high number of Palestinian casualties (estimated to be more than 50,000 including huge numbers of children), and a humanitarian catastrophe, represent a devastating and bloody new chapter, further entrenching the existential nature of the struggle for both peoples.
2. PERSPECTIVES
The conflict is sustained by deeply held, internally coherent, yet mutually exclusive narratives that are both secular and sacred.
The Israeli Narrative:
For many Jews, Israel represents the culmination of a two-millennia-old hope for a return to Zion and self-determination in their ancestral homeland. This is not merely a political claim but a deeply felt historical and religious imperative, powerfully reinforced by the trauma of the Holocaust, which demonstrated the existential necessity of a sovereign state for Jewish survival. From their perspective, the wars of 1948 and 1967 were defensive struggles for existence. The ongoing security measures—the occupation, the blockade of Gaza, the West Bank barrier—are framed as unfortunate but necessary responses to persistent terrorism and a rejectionist ethos among segments of Palestinian leadership. The October 7th attacks are seen as the ultimate validation of these security fears, a brutal attempt to realize genocidal ambitions. For many Israelis, any concession is weighed against a profound and legitimate fear for their physical safety.
The Palestinian Narrative:
For Palestinians, the conflict is a story of displacement, disenfranchisement, and national erasure. The Nakba is not a historical event but an ongoing process of losing land, homes, and rights under a military occupation now in its seventh decade. The expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank is seen as a deliberate strategy to render a viable Palestinian state impossible to achieve. The blockade of Gaza is viewed as a form of collective civilian punishment. For Palestinians, their resistance, though fragmented between the PA’s diplomacy and Hamas’s militancy, is a legitimate struggle against a colonial occupation for the basic rights of freedom, dignity, and self-determination. The events since October 7th are seen by many as a horrific, if predictable, symptom of the desperation born from a suffocating occupation, even as they condemn the targeting of civilians.
The International & Mediating Perspective:
The international community, including the UN, largely operates within a framework of international law that views the pre-1967 lines as the basis for borders, considers the settlements illegal, and affirms the Palestinians' right to self-determination. However, this perspective is often caught between the two irreconcilable narratives. Mediation efforts repeatedly fail because they often attempt to negotiate technical and territorial compromises (land swaps, security arrangements) on a conflict that is, for its primary actors, fundamentally existential and identity-based. The post-October 7th landscape has seen this international divide deepen, with stark disagreements over issues of proportionality, ceasefire terms, and the political future of Gaza and the Palestinian national movement.
3. PHILOSOPHICAL QUESTION & ANALYSIS
Central Question: Can a land that is deemed sacred by two faiths ever be justly governed, or must
justice inevitably require the desacralization of territory for the sake of political compromise?
This question moves beyond practical politics to challenge the very nature of sacredness, sovereignty,
and justice when two peoples' foundational myths and identities are inextricably tied to the same sliver
of land.
A. Philosophical Lenses:
The Limits of Liberalism (Rawls, Walzer):
Liberal political philosophy, exemplified by John Rawls, prioritizes individual rights, justice as fairness, and overlapping consensus. Yet, it struggles profoundly with conflicts where group identity—especially ethno-national or religious identity—is non-negotiable. The land is not a commodity to be divided by a veil of ignorance; it is the constitutive element of a people's identity. Michael Walzer, in his work on justice and particularism, might argue that the deep historical and cultural ties of both Jews and Arab Palestinians to the land create competing and equally valid "thick" moralities that cannot be easily reconciled by "thin" universal principles. The liberal peacemaking model, based on territorial division and resource sharing, feels spiritually inadequate because it asks both sides to treat the sacred as profane—a real estate transaction.
Hegel's Dialectic and the Struggle for Recognition:
The conflict can be interpreted through a Hegelian lens as a bloody, protracted "struggle for recognition" (Kampf um Anerkennung). Each side seeks not just land, but acknowledgment from the other of its own legitimacy, narrative, and right to exist. The violence is a tragic dialectic where each action seeks to assert the Self and negate the Other, only prompting a counteraction that further entrenches the mutual denial. True synthesis—a state of mutual recognition—remains elusive because each perceives the other's existence as a fundamental threat to its own. The events of October 7th and their aftermath represent the ultimate negation, a violent refusal of recognition that has set the dialectic back decades.
Post-Colonial Critique (Said, Fanon):
Thinkers like Edward Said analyzed the conflict as a clash of narratives where Zionist settler-colonialism employed Orientalist discourses to frame Palestine as "a land without a people for a people without a land," thereby erasing the indigenous Palestinian presence. Frantz Fanon’s analysis of violence as a cathartic and necessary force for the colonized to reclaim their humanity provides a framework, though not a justification, for understanding the logic of armed resistance, including its most brutal manifestations. From this perspective, peace cannot be brokered through technical agreements but requires a full decolonization that addresses the power imbalance and the psychology of oppression.
B. Theological and Existential Perspectives:
Judaism:
Jewish attachment to the land (Ha'aretz) is a cornerstone of religious tradition, mandated by covenant and woven into liturgy and law. For religious Zionists, the modern State of Israel is the beginning of the messianic redemption, making territorial concession not just a political compromise but a theological sin. This sacralizes the political conflict, making compromise on Jerusalem or settlements existentially and religiously impossible for a significant portion of the Israeli body politic.
Islam:
For Muslims, Palestine (Falastin) is waqf—a sacred trust for the entire Muslim community (Ummah). Jerusalem (Al-Quds) is the third holiest site for Muslims, lower in hierarchy only to Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia, the location of the Prophet Muhammad's Night Journey to the heavens. The loss of political control over it is not just a national defeat but a religious devastation. Palestinian identity is thus doubly constituted: by national aspiration and by religious duty to liberate Islamic land. This similarly elevates the conflict beyond the political to the spiritual realm for many Muslims.
The tragedy of Israel-Palestine is that both peoples are, in a profound sense, "right" in their deepest claims: the Jewish people have an undeniable, ancient, and trauma-forged connection to the land, and the Palestinian people are an indigenous nation with an equally undeniable right to self-determination and justice in their homeland.
The philosophical impasse lies in the fact that these two righteous claims are, in their current form, mutually exclusive. Any just solution, therefore, may not lie in choosing one narrative over the other, but in the desperately difficult task of building a new, shared political and human space that can acknowledge the sacredness of both attachments without allowing either to veto the existence of the other. The alternative, as history has grimly illustrated, is a perpetual zero-sum struggle where each victory for one side is a catastrophic loss for the other.
