As we continue to witness the ongoing conflict between Israel, Palestine, and Hamas, it’s probably worth going over some historical data to provide background to what is going on in that part of the world. This is just an introduction because it is impossible to cover centuries of conflicts in a blog post. However, it’s important to realize that, according to history, fighting is not going to resolve this problem, and at some point, adults need to sit down, talk, and find a viable path forward. Today’s post is a bit long but is probably better than reading 1,697 pages between the two books that I’m going to use as a reference to get the full story. The main references are selected readings from the books ‘A History of Christianity‘ by Diarmaid MacCulloch and ‘The Crusades‘ by Thomas Asbridge.

A few notes about the religion for each of the key players involved in the conflict. Important in order to understand the connections.  

• United States – mostly Christian (common knowledge)
• Israel – Judaism (common knowledge)
• Palestine West Bank – Sunni Islam¹ (controlled by the Fatah, secular political party according to Hamas²)
• Palestine Gaza – Sunni Islam (Controlled by Hamas)³
• Egypt – Sunni Islam⁴
• Iran – Shia Islam⁵
• Yemen – Sunni Islam (currently on a civil war, with Houthis controlling a big portion of Yemen)⁶
• Houthis – Shia Islam⁷

Israel (quoting from the book “A History of Christianity” by Diarmaid MacCulloch)

“Along the south-eastern end of the Mediterranean coast lies a land difficult to name. In a very remote past it was called Canaan, but its later turbulent history left it with two names, Israel and Palestine, both of which are in use today, and both of which carry a heavy weight of emotion and contested identity. For one people, the Jews, the land is the Promised Land, granted to them in solemn pronouncement made by God to a succession of their forefathers; Jews are so called from what was originally the southern part of it, Judah or in Greek Judaea, which contrived to keep its independence from great empires longer than its rival northern kingdom, which had arrogated to itself the name of Israel. 

Christians have their own name for Palestine or Israel: they call it the Holy Land, because Jesus Christ was born and died here. He was executed outside the city of Jerusalem, once briefly the capital of a united kingdom of Israel. Jerusalem has preserved its ancient and medieval walls intact, and even with the extensions to their area made in the Roman period, the old city usually surprises those who visit it for the first time by how small it is. Yet great human longing and passions are focused on that small compass. Medieval Christians made maps of the world with Jerusalem at the centre, and it is the setting for one of the most ancient and revered shrines of Islam, built on the site of the Temple which long before had been the centre of Jewish worship. 

So Jerusalem is resonant for all three linked monotheistic faiths, often with tragic consequences as they have fought each other to gain exclusive control over this small city. Jerusalem is the contested heart of Palestine or Israel, whose modest overall extent, no more than 150 by 100 miles when undivided, belies its importance in the history of the world.  

The Book of Judges at last provides stories which begin to sit more robustly and extensively amid conventional historical and archaeological evidence, and that evidence fits into the period 1200-1050 BCE. Israel is engaged in constant struggle with other peoples of the land, and in fact never finally dislodges them all, a rueful and realistic underlying theme with the book. The writer of Judges is much concerned with a threat to the Children of Israel from one of these peoples, the Philistine. Philistines in fact bequeathed their name to the land and therefore built into the word “Palestine” is a reminiscence of Israel’s enemies. But the Philistines also performed a service to Israel, because they securely date the Book of Judges by their presence in its narrative. Sources discovered by modern archaeologists reveal that the Philistines did not just fight Israel but also came into frequent conflict with the Egyptian Empire” (pages 47-52).  

The Muslim World (quoting from the book “The Crusades” by Thomas Abridge)

“From the end of the eleventh century onwards, the crusades pitted western European Franks against the Muslims of the eastern Mediterranean. This was not because these holy wars were launched, first hand foremost, to eradicate Islam, or even to convert Muslims to the Christian faith. Rather, it was a consequence of Islam’s dominion over the Holy Land and the sacred city of Jerusalem. 

According to Muslim tradition, Islam was born in c. 610 CE when Muhammad began to experience a series of “revelations” from Allah (God), relayed by the Archangel Gabriel. These “revelations”, regarded as the sacred and immutable words of God, were later set down in written form to become the Koran. 

The religion founded by Muhammad – Islam, meaning submission to the will of God – had common roots with Judaism and Christianity. During his life, the Prophet came into contact with adherents of these two faiths in Arabia and the eastern Roman Empire and his “revelations” were presented as the perfecting refinement of these earlier religions. For this reason, Muhammad acknowledged the likes of Moses, Abraham, and even Jesus as prophets, and a whole sura (or chapter) of the Koran was dedicated to the Virgin Mary. 

In the context of crusading history, a critical stage in this whole process was the capture of Jerusalem in 638 from the Greek Christians of Byzantium. This ancient city came to be revered as Islam’s third-holiest site, after Mecca and Medina. In part this was due to Islam’s Abrahamic heritage, but it was also dependent upon the belief that Muhammad had ascended to Heaven from Jerusalem during his “Night Journey”, and the associated tradition identifying the Holy City as the focus for the impending End of Days. 

It was once popular to suggest that the Islamic world might have swept across all Europe, had not the Muslims been twice thwarted in their attempts to capture Constantinople (in 673 and 718) and then defeated in 732 at Poitiers by Charlemagne’s Frankish grandfather Charles the Hammer. In fact, important as these reversals were, a fundamental and profoundly limiting weakness within Islam had already shown its face: intractable and embittered religious and political division. 

At their core, these issues related to disputes over the legitimacy of Muhammad’s caliphate successors and the interpretation of his “revelations”. Problems were apparent as early as 661, when the established line of “Rightly Guided Caliphs” ended with the dead of Ali (the Prophet’s cousin and son-in-law) and the rise of the rival Arab clan – the Umayyad dynasty. The Umayyads moved the capital of the Muslim world beyond the confines of Arabia for the first time, settling in the great Syrian metropolis of Damascus, and they held sway over Islam until the mid-eighth century. However, this same period witnessed the emergence of the Shi’a (literally the “party” or “faction”), a Muslim sect who argued that only descendants of Ali and his wife Fatima (Muhammad’s daughter) could lawfully hold the title of caliph. Shi’ite Muslims initially set out to contest the political authority of the mainstream Sunni form of Islam, but over time the schism between these two branches of the faith took on a doctrinal dimension, as Shi’ites developed distinct approaches to theology, religious ritual and law” (pages 17-20).

As you can see, this conflict between Israel and Palestine is not new; it has been ongoing for centuries. History highlights that conflict and fighting are not the correct ways to solve the problem, so it is probably time to try something else. The right approach, like I stated in the introduction, is to have adults in the room and engage in a civilized discussion to resolve this issue. However, as I mentioned in other posts, I don’t think the key players want to find a solution because each party is benefiting from this conflict in one way or another.                       

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1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Bank ↩︎
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamas ↩︎
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_Strip ↩︎
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Egypt ↩︎
5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran ↩︎
6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yemen ↩︎
7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houthi_movement ↩︎

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• History