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Beginning of the End

Is the Israel-Palestine conflict a religious one, or is it a settler-colonial war, a struggle between a colonizer and the colonized?

By Mariam Khan | August 2024

Beginning of the End
“The tale of Palestine from the beginning until today is a simple story of colonialism and dispossession, yet the world treats it as a multifaceted and complex story — hard to understand and even harder to solve,” writes Noam Chomsky, an American linguist and activist, and Ilan Pappé, an Israeli historian in their book, On Palestine.

The free world watches closely the atrocities Gazans have been made to go through over the ten months of Israel’s ongoing military offensive in Gaza. Till the time this piece went to print, over 39,000 people had been killed, including more than 15,000 children, and over 89,622 were injured. But these numbers so far don’t seem to pull the moral strings of the movers and shakers of the liberal world.

Is the Israel-Palestine conflict a religious one, or is it a settler-colonial war, a struggle between a colonizer and the colonized? SouthAsia magazine deconstructs in this piece.

“The origins and ongoing Israel/Palestine conflict are not about religion but a national liberation struggle against the ethno-nationalist Zionist project. The conflict is understood to be a typical settler-colonial conflict between the indigenous inhabitants, the Palestinians, and the successive waves of European Jews who inundated historical Palestine,” says Dr. Peter Slezak, Honorary Associate Professor in Philosophy, School of Humanities & Languages, University of New South Wales (UNSW). “The framework of “settler colonialism” is the framework most widely used by scholars and analysts because it corresponds in essential respects to other familiar cases such as that of America, Australia and South Africa - in which an indigenous population is displaced by a foreign population.”

For Dr. Paul Poast, Deputy Dean of Doctoral Education, Social Science Division and Associate Professor, Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago, there are three ways to examine the Israel-Palestine conflict. “The first is to focus on the deep historical attachment of peoples with different religious and ethnic identities to those lands. That is the frame people use when pointing to the religious or British colonial legacies of the conflict.”

Discussing the British colonial policies of the early 20th century and the impact they had on the current conflict, Dr. Slezak from UNSW mentions, “The 1917 British government’s Balfour Declaration was actually drafted by Chaim Weizmann and American judge, Louis Brandeis and was addressed to the British Lord Rothschild, proposing a Jewish “homeland” in Palestine, but it was clearly understood to be intended to create a Jewish State at the expense of the traditional Arab inhabitants.”

Highlighting the implications of the 1947 United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine, where the majority of the land was given to the Jewish minority for a Jewish state, Dr. Slezak talks about the 1948 war, which broke out after the State of Israel was declared on May 14th and how it shaped subsequent conflicts. “Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians had already been ethnically cleansed amid major atrocities such as the notorious Deir Yassin massacre in April 1948. The war ended with Palestinians holding only 22% of Palestine, the West Bank and Gaza. After the war of 1967, Israel occupied the remainder and, in keeping with the governing Likud Party charter, intends not to permit any Palestinian state to exist between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. The ongoing brutal occupation of the West Bank and the blockade of Gaza are illegal in international law and all the 700,000 Israeli settlers are violating the Fourth Geneva Convention.”

Dr. Poast, from UChicago, shares that the second lens of viewing the Israel-Palestine conflict is to focus on the legacies of the UN partition plan and how that quickly fell apart. “With this frame, one could point to either the immediate unwillingness of Israel’s neighbors to accept the plan, but can also point to whether the setup of the division was ever practical (for either the Palestinians or the Israelis) in the first place.”


The last frame for Dr. Poast is to focus on the more immediate history, namely the incentives and behavior of groups like Hamas and the far-right of Israel, which according to him is the most useful frame. “It makes clear that the present conflict is less about deep historically driven animosities, and instead more about the political incentives of the leadership of both groups. For Hamas, their legitimacy to power is to argue that Israel does not view the Palestinians as equals. The far-right of Israel, of whom Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is politically dependent, is motivated by a desire to control all of Israel for reasons related to the deeper history (both religious and cultural). In other words, while history matters, it doesn’t matter for everyone. It just happens to matter to those who are presently in power and, hence, they have drug their respective populations into a tragic war.”

The free world watches closely the atrocities Gazans have been made to go through over the ten months of Israel’s ongoing military offensive in Gaza.

How significant are religious motivations and identities in the Israel-Palestine conflict? Dr. Slezak, Honorary Associate Professor in Philosophy at UNSW says, “There is a growing influence in Israel of the fundamentalist Jewish fanatics who are now even represented in the Knesset but the majority of Jews in Israel and the diaspora are not motivated by religious beliefs but by ethno-nationalist, racist supremacist views.”

So, is the conflict a religious one, or is it a misconception that it is? “Most Israeli Jews are secular, agnostic, non-religious but identify ethnically and culturally as Jews. On the Palestinian side, there are both Muslims and Christians, and their resistance is entirely a matter of struggle against ethnic cleansing, expropriation of land, demolition of houses, uprooting of olive orchards, thousands of arrests without charge or trial under “administrative detention” and hundreds of extrajudicial murders of unarmed civilians including children,” shares Dr. Slezak.

According to Dr. Slezak, “The entire Israel/Palestine conflict is entirely a matter of land, as explicit in the writings and pronouncements of Zionists from the earliest beginnings when Theodor Herzl wrote that the local Arabs must be displaced and transferred to make way for the Jewish immigrant settlers. The first Prime Minister of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, and others were also perfectly explicit about their conception of Eretz Israel (Greater Israel), which would include as much land and as few Palestinians as possible. The widespread mythology (advanced by the notoriously fraudulent hoax book From Time Immemorial by Joan Peters) claimed Israel was a “land without people, for a people without a land.” The appeal to religious justification, as when the UN representative holds up a Bible to show their “title deed” to the land, is a purely cynical, hypocritical piece of public theatre.”

Is there a possibility of inking the deal of the century and a probable end to the conflict?

“Since the current Gaza genocide, the difficulty of resolving the conflict has increased. The polarization between Jews and Palestinians, both in Israel and worldwide, has been much greater and harder to close. The conflict and the current “war” has persisted mainly because of immense, unconditional support by the US with billions of dollars in funding and also military, intelligence, and diplomatic assistance,” Dr. Slezak says, adding the conflict could end if the US and other governments would act to end Israel’s impunity as it ended in other cases such as South Africa and East Timor. “Israel has become a rogue state in the eyes of the world and may not be able to recover and continue in its current form as a racist, brutal occupier. Despite the immense cost to the Palestinians, this may be the beginning of the end of Israel and the Zionist project and we might see the emergence of a just, secular, democratic state in which Palestinians and Israelis might continue to live in peace,” he mentions.

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