The Middle East conflict was never just about land. This is the oldest war

Monday marks one year since Hamas launched a bloody massacre which deliberately and specifically targeted Israeli civilians: men, women, children and babies all. Twelve hundred people died in the attacks and 251 were taken hostage. According to the Hamas-controlled Gaza Ministry of Health, more than 40,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel in the name of wiping out Hamas, with many civilian casualties including unequivocally innocent children.

The October 7 attacks and the response from Israel mark a re-escalation in a dispute that is understood by many as primarily territorial. A year on, as the fighting spreads across the Middle East, joined by militant groups from many nations, it should finally be obvious that this conflict was never just about land. This is the oldest war: a war between religions.

A Palestinian woman sits in the rubble of her home in the wake of an Israeli air and ground offensive in Jebaliya, northern Gaza Strip. Credit: AP Photo/Enas Rami

Forgive me if this is not news to you; it didn’t hit home for me until I was travelling in the Middle East years ago on my German passport. Discovering my nationality, a sheikh greeted me with a Nazi salute and a confiding “Heil Hitler” witnessed by a cheering bus. I learnt a quick and shocking lesson.

It is not a surprise that many in the increasingly irreligious West fail to grasp the religious dimension. Most of our skirmishes over the past 100 years have been over earthly political utopias rather than the immortal soul. The Boomer counter-culture bible was The Communist Manifesto, and the martyrs and saints of that religion were “freedom fighters” such as the Marxist guerrilla Che Guevara.

As the popularity of that post-holy text has waned, it has been replaced with a millennial scripture, imposing a lens of colonialism and racial oppression on all the troubles of the world today. In the West, the Palestinian cause has been reduced to fit our understanding ever since the state of Israel was created – firstly by the Boomers, as they came of age and struggled to process the evil of Nazism in the aftermath of World War II. With little insight into the mass murders which had already been committed inside the Soviet Union in the name of Marx, the zeitgeist among many in the Boomer activist class was to conceive communism as a perfect world.

The Palestinian Front for the Liberation of Palestine (founded in 1967, one of many similarly named but competing organisations claiming to be the rightful freedom fighters of the region) had the perspicacity to declare itself a Marxist-Leninist organisation. The PFLP’s alignment had the effect of neutralising any goodwill for the small-scale agrarian kibbutz communism of Israel. Instead, as historian Paul Berman recounts, the “new” left became focused on the mercantile success of Israelis and began to view the growing nation as the new capitalist class, making it the enemy.

Latterly, Millennials have become the dominant cultural force in the West (Gen X isn’t large enough to wield significant cultural power) and the communist ethos has gone out of fashion. It doesn’t really work with the consumerist mindset of influencer culture. Instead, a new binary has emerged: the coloniser and the colonised. (There isn’t much room for the nuance of human interaction in this binary.) This makes taking sides on Israel-Palestine easy, especially as Israel has become wealthy and strong, while Palestinians have remained impoverished.

But these post-religious belief systems are an entirely inadequate way to understand the conflict. Of course there is a territorial component, but that can’t explain why terrorist organisations such as the Yemeni-based Houthis and Lebanon-based Hezbollah have become involved. The Western paradigms provide no insight into why Iran’s governing ayatollahs provide arms, training and financial support to these organisations and other proxies across the Middle East.

Of course there is a land dispute between Israel and Palestinians, which is the result of Britain’s “gift” of already inhabited land to the Jewish people. But the greatest barrier to ending the conflict over land is the much bigger conflict between religions.

The argument is as old as the prophets, you might say. Jesus Christ came along and some of the adherents of Judaism recognised in him the son of God; Mohammed started his own branch, too. All of them acknowledge Abraham as their ancestor who first made a covenant with God, but they believe God wants different things. As is the way with monotheism, believing in one of these religions precludes believing in the others. Their arguments are largely incorporated in the Christian Bible and the Islamic Koran. They were theological and territorial at the same time.

They remain both today. We in the West tend to remember World Wars I and II, but the decline of the Ottoman Empire is far too remote for Euro-centric minds. Not so for loyalists of the Islamic empire, who felt their shrinking borders acutely.

A pan-Arabic nationalist movement attempted to bind the remnants of that empire together using shared religion as their glue. When Jewish people were suddenly among them on previously Muslim-controlled land, it was seen by pan-Arabists as a further erosion of the fallen empire. A Syrian Islamic revivalist preacher called Izz ad-Din al-Qassam took up the cause of the peasants who were to lose land to Israel. He inculcated a sense of national consciousness in the people of the area, tapping their sense of injustice at being displaced. There is no denying that those peasants lost something without compensation. But there is also no doubt that al-Qassam was motivated by more than just seeking a fair deal for the dispossessed.

The Hamas militia today are named the Al-Qassam Brigades in his honour. The pan-Arab movement has become the political Islamist movement. The Palestinians suffer the most, with Iran’s religious authoritarian regime invested in the propaganda value of their ongoing misery. Meanwhile, Zionist zealots pushing further into the West Bank play their part in keeping the focus on land.

To contemplate a lasting peace in the future, it is crucial to appreciate the broader context. Right now, if the Jewish state stops fighting, it fears being overwhelmed by hostile neighbours. So here is a thought for those protesters who plan to yell this weekend: stop instead to talk and think. Everyone should feel the tragedy of Gaza; but it will take you and the peaceful Muslims protesting alongside you to also feel the Jewish tragedy, so this ancient and ongoing horror can once and for all find an end.

Parnell Palme McGuinness is managing director at campaigns firm Agenda C. She has done work for the Liberal Party and the German Greens.