Palestine

Palestine is home to one of the three most sacred sites on Earth to Muslims, Masjid al-Aqsa (The Aqsa Mosque). It is the epicenter and metaphorical “beating heart” of the holy city of Jerusalem, and of the blessed region of the Levant (Bilād al-Shām) more generally.

Masjid al-Aqsa served as the first qibla (direction of Muslim prayer) before God instructed the Muslims to pray towards the Kaʿba in Mecca.

It is the hallowed ground upon which Muslims believe the Prophet Muhammad led all of God’s thousands upon thousands of prophets and messengers in prayer–from Adam to Abraham to Moses to Jesus and beyond–during his miraculous Night Journey (Israʾ) from Mecca to Jerusalem and Ascension (Miʿraj) to the heavens.

Beyond Masjid al-Aqsa and Jerusalem, other locations across Palestine wield great sacred significance to Muslims for having been lands upon which the stories of countless prophets and messengers of God unfolded.

To learn more about why the land of Gaza specifically is important in Islam, please refer to the article, Why is Gaza Important? Honoring a Land of Ribat.

Masjid al-Aqsa (Al Aqsa Mosque) refers to the entire tract of elevated land located in the Old City of Jerusalem and presently enclosed within the compound’s walls. Also known as al-Haram al-Sharif (The Noble Sanctuary), it is of tremendous spiritual significance to Muslims and among Islam’s three holiest sites alongside the Sacred Mosques of Mecca (Masjid al-Haram) and Medina (Masjid al-Nabawi).

The site is commonly referred to by non-Muslims as the Temple Mount.

It is worth noting that, contrary to popular misconception, the entirety of the mosque complex–not just the famed golden Dome of the Rock (Qubbat as-Sakhra)–is considered holy.

Presently, the site features a walled compound enclosing numerous mosques, gardens, libraries, fountains, and other structures.

Due to its religious significance to both Muslims and non-Muslims alike, Masjid al-Aqsa has frequently served as a major flashpoint of tension, conflict, and Israeli aggression in recent decades.

To learn more about the significance of Masjid al-Aqsa and Jerusalem, please refer to the article, Why Do Muslims Love Jerusalem?

And if you’d like to learn more about the history and features of Masjid al-Aqsa itself, please refer to The Noble Sanctuary website.

No, not all Palestinians are Muslim.

While the overwhelming majority of Palestinians are Muslim, there exists a significant minority of Palestinian Christians, as well as a very tiny percentage of Palestinians who belong to other religious groups including Samaritans and Druze.

Palestinians of all faiths experience apartheid, aggression and occupation.

In 2022, famed Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh–a Christian whose family hails from the city of Bethlehem–was shot and killed by an Israeli soldier. Her Jerusalem funeral would later become the site of violence by Israeli police who attacked crowds of mourners and pallbearers causing Abu Akleh’s casket to nearly fall to the ground.

Despite underreporting in Western media, Palestinian Christians and their churches have also been attacked during Israel’s latest war on Gaza. For instance, in December 2023, Israeli snipers shot and killed two Palestinian Christian women on their way to the bathroom as they walked within the grounds of the Holy Family Church where they had been seeking refuge.

Religion, undoubtedly, plays a significant role in this conflict. The Palestinian struggle, however, is also rooted in a story of colonialism and dispossession, rife with violations of human rights and international law including war crimes and systematic discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity and religion.

For centuries, Palestine has been home to a religiously and ethnically diverse community of Muslims, Christians, Jews and more who have lived in relative peace and without major conflict.

An iconic example that dispels this myth of perpetual and irreconcilable religious conflict is the centuries-long Muslim custodianship of the keys to one of Christendom’s most revered sites, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

Unfortunately, the misrepresentation of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is not always an honest mistake. It is often portrayed as being an “impossibly complicated” or centuries-long religious conflict in order to deliberately obscure certain inconvenient truths or to shield Israel from accountability. This myth works to minimize or obfuscate clear Zionist injustices and rights violations, as well as to dehumanize the Palestinian people as a collective of irrational religious zealots–thereby justifying Israeli apartheid, occupation, and anti-Palestinian violence.

But, in the words of acclaimed Black American author and activist, Ta-Nehisi Coates, the conflict is, in many ways, shockingly “uncomplicated”:

…the most shocking thing about my time over there was how uncomplicated it actually is. Now, I’m not saying the details of it are not complicated. History is always complicated. Present events are always complicated. But the way this is reported in the Western media is as though one needs a PhD in Middle Eastern studies to understand the basic morality of holding a people in a situation in which they don’t have basic rights, including the right that we treasure most…the right to vote, and then declaring that state a democracy. It’s actually not that hard to understand. It’s actually quite familiar to those of us with a familiarity to African American history.

The word “Nakba” (Arabic for “catastrophe” or “calamity”) is used to describe the massacres, atrocities, and ethnic cleansing through which the state of Israel was established. Between 1947-1948, Zionist militias carried out wide-scale atrocities against thousands of Palestinians (including civilian women, children, and the elderly), destroyed thousands of homes and around 530 Palestinian villages (effectively wiping them off of the map), and forcing over 700,000 Palestinians into exile–amounting to what was then around 85% of the total population of ethnically cleansed territories.

Many also describe Israel’s actions as an ongoing Nakba (Arabic: nakba mustamirra) given that Zionist state and vigilante/settler violence, active theft and occupation of Palestinian lands and resources, and discriminatory apartheid rule persist through the present-day.

Yes, it would be accurate to describe Israel’s war on Gaza as a genocide. Many would also characterize Israel’s actions and the wider Zionist project preceding its current assault on Gaza as genocidal.

The United Nations’ Genocide Convention defines genocide as:

…any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: Killing members of the group; Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

In March 2024, the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) concluded that "there are reasonable grounds to believe” that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.

This conclusion was reached after analyzing not only the nature and impact of Israeli violence against the people of Gaza, but by taking into account statements of numerous Israeli political and military leaders and soldiers indicating genocidal intent.

In addition to a growing body of genocide scholars, rights groups, and international bodies such as the (UNHRC) describing Israeli actions as genocidal, a growing number of prominent voices from across the political and media spectrum, including in the United States, have described Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide.

To hear more about Israel’s genocide in Gaza and other crimes against the Palestinian people, please refer to this conversation between Dr. Omar Suleiman and Kim Iversen.

Zionism is a settler colonial ideology and movement–tracing back to the 19th century–that calls for the establishment and maintenance of a Jewish (i.e., Jewish majority) nation-state in the land of Palestine. Maintaining this Jewish majority has necessarily required and continues to require violent demographic engineering by methods including the dispossession, disenfranchisement, and ethnic cleansing (killing and forced exile) of millions of Palestinians.

Not all Jews are Zionists, nor are all Zionists Jews. In fact, globally, there are actually more non-Jewish Zionists than there are Jewish Zionists.

Some of the most important and powerful opponents of Zionism and advocates for the Palestinian cause are Jewish individuals and organizations.

No. Opposing or being critical of Zionism and the state of Israel are not to be equated with anti-Jewish hatred or bigotry.

To equate the two is a common tactic used to chill the discourse around and deter (or delegitimize and even criminalize) any and all criticism of Zionism and Israel as well as advocacy for Palestinian rights and self-determination.

The Palestinian cause is not one predicated upon dehumanizing or fomenting racist hatred against the Jewish people or any group of people for that matter. Rather, it is about the exact opposite: advocating for the restoration of the rights and dignity of the Palestinian people.

Moreover, equating anti-Zionism or criticism of Israel with antisemitism conflates the religion of Judaism with the political ideology of Zionism–erasing the countless Jewish individuals and groups committed to a just future for the Palestinian people and who, to varying degrees, oppose or strongly criticize Zionism and the state of Israel.