“It’s not a religious war.”
That refrain echoed through a televised dialogue on Gaza hosted by Lianhe Zaobao and Berita Harian, where Singaporean academics and professionals gathered to discuss the ongoing conflict.
Several non-Muslim speakers took pains to frame the war as a political and humanitarian crisis, warning against reducing it to a matter of faith.
“This is about breaking down of international order,” said Felix Tan, a lecturer in international relations.
“It’s a political situation,” agreed Chris Tan, a former military officer, who went further, expressing relief that Muslims in Singapore that he knew, didn’t see the war as an attack on their faith. “If our Singapore Muslims see it that way, then it’s a huge problem,” he added.
But not all participants were so sure.
Every Muslim speaker in the room pushed back. While they acknowledged the political and legal dimensions, they also confessed that for many Muslims, the war was personal, emotional, and yes, religious.
“We also cannot pretend that it’s not true, that Muslims are the ones who feel a lot for this,” said Dr Walid Jumblatt Abdullah, a political scientist at NTU, “This is an issue that Muslims have always been concerned about,” he continued, pointing to years of grassroots mobilisation in the Muslim world long before October 7, 2023.
Mardia, a Muslim student on the panel, admitted that she was more comfortable discussing the war with fellow Muslims, “because we have the same stances on it.” Those stances, she implied, came not only from shared politics, but shared religious worldview.
And Imran, a director of an interfaith dialogue centre, highlighted how hard it was to separate religion from politics even within the Muslim community itself.
“Some Muslims do not distinguish between Judaism as a religion and the political situation in Gaza or Israel,” he said, “and when you try to tell them these are different categories, then you get attacked for being pro-Zionist.”
In that moment, the panel laid bare a quiet but growing dissonance. While governments and international bodies continue to speak in the language of law and geopolitics, millions across the Muslim world, and many Jews on the other side, also experience this war as a sacred cause.
A war about identity, destiny, and the will of God.
The Material Roots of a Century-Old Conflict
However profound its theological undertones, to see the Israeli–Palestinian war clearly, we have to start with its earthly dimensions. This conflict did not begin as a holy war… well, not in the modern era at least.
In truth, the secular and the sacred have been intertwined from the start. Attempts to draw a clear line between them risk oversimplifying a conflict in which faith and politics have often blurred into one another.
Two Nations, One Land
By the end of the nineteenth century, two national movements were taking shape on the same strip of earth.
Zionism gathered a scattered people into a political project after centuries of persecution and pogroms. Arab nationalism rose with the eclipse of empire and the arrival of European mandates, insisting on the dignity and sovereignty of those already rooted there.
Neither began as a campaign of faith. Both were bids for self‑determination that saw the same landscape as home.
From Mandates to Partition and Flight
Imperial Britain’s withdrawal did not bring clarity.
British policy made different promises to different parties and so, trust failed. The United Nations proposed partition in 1947, and war followed in 1948. Palestinians fled or were expelled in their hundreds of thousands; some left at the urging of their leaders, believing they would return after victory.
Israel fought for statehood against several invading armies and survived. Over time, refugee camps became cities. Statelessness became an inheritance, and borders went from being colonial lines on paper and became the boundaries of everyday lives.
Occupation, Law, and Security
After the war of 1967 Israel held the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem.
In formal legal terms, a territory placed under the authority of a power that is not its recognised sovereign is treated as occupied until its status is settled. Jordan ruled the West Bank from 1948 to 1967, and after losing it to Israel in the Six-Day War, formally renounced its claim in 1988 amid the First Intifada, transferring representation to the Palestine Liberation Organisation.
In short, Jordan lost the land in 1967, lost influence in 1974 when the Arab League recognised the PLO as the Palestinians’ representative, and finally let go in 1988.
For its part, Israel, having won the territory in the 1967 war, retained control of the territory and later annexed East Jerusalem, arguing that it cannot “occupy” land taken in a defensive war and abandoned by its prior claimant.
Yet most states and institutions, adhering to the pre-1967 borders as their legal baseline, continue to describe Israel’s presence as occupation. In this view, “occupation” is not a moral judgment, but rather, a technical term rooted in international legal convention rather than in the actual chain of sovereignty.
Israel rejects the label, calling the areas disputed and pointing to the absence of prior Palestinian sovereignty and to agreements that reserved final status for negotiation. Formally, then, “occupation” names a legal condition.
Politically, however, it has become a story about colonisers and the colonised, a narrative that legitimises violent “resistance” for one side and seems to prejudge the case for the other.
Israel’s security policy sits inside that argument and gives it teeth.
The Holocaust, the wars of 1948, 1967, and 1973, repeated terror campaigns and explicit threats from hostile neighbours produced a security doctrine that prizes pre‑emption, buffers, checkpoints, street segmentation, and barriers.
However one judges those instruments, they are strategic before they are theological and they flow from a memory of vulnerability that remains close to the surface of Israeli life.
Politics, People, and Legitimacy
Inside the Palestinian polity, power has never been simple.
The Fatah–Hamas split, corruption in the Palestinian Authority, and competing centres of rule in Gaza and the West Bank have repeatedly drawn energy away from institution‑building. Bouts of violence have often been shaped by factional rivalry as much as by creed.
All this plays out against a gruelling daily reality that is not a theory: closures and blockades, scarce work, interrupted schooling, homes levelled and rebuilt. Life exists in a state of limbo.
And so does diplomacy, which keeps circling the same set of questions: borders, settlements, refugees, the right of return, the status of Jerusalem.
Oslo, Camp David, and the Roadmap for Peace treated these as matters of law and statecraft, and they remain so even when religion is set to one side.
Alongside the legal files run the stories people tell to the world and to themselves. House keys kept from pre-nakba 1948. Title deeds and photographs. Founding myths and archives.
Both sides claim legitimacy from history and law and carry those claims into every negotiation.
These are the “material” layers: nationalism, colonial legacy, sovereignty, power, and human suffering. They are essential to understanding how the conflict began and why it endures.
Yet they do not tell the whole story. Because alongside these worldly forces runs another current which is deeper, older, and more resistant to compromise. One that draws from scripture, sacred geography, and visions of divine destiny.
And that current has, over time, transformed a territorial dispute into something far harder to resolve: a war about God.
A War of Gods as Much as of Land
Trace the logic of the actors themselves and a deeper reality emerges: this is not just a nationalist quarrel. It is a war saturated with theology; one that has become, in substance and in spirit, a sacred struggle on both sides.
1. Sacred Land and Divine Mandate
The foundation stone of Islamist resistance is theological, not political. Hamas’s 1988 Charter declares all of historic Palestine an Islamic waqf, a perpetual trust consecrated to Allah “until the Day of Judgement.”
The language is absolute: what God has claimed cannot be ceded to unbelievers.
The text goes further in Article 7 of the charter and quotes a narration attributed to Muhammad from Sahih Muslim, Book 41, Hadith 6985, which says:
“The Day of Judgement will not come until the Muslims fight the Jews, and the Muslims will kill them, until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees, and the rocks and trees will say: ‘O Muslim, O servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.’”
The belief is that the Last Day will not come until Muslims kill the Jews, with even trees and stones calling out their hiding places. When scripture is deployed like this, the war ceases to be just about lines and borders.
The movement’s identity reinforces this. Hamas defines itself as al-Muqāwamah al-Islāmiyyah (The Islamic Resistance) and explicitly traces its lineage to the Muslim Brotherhood.
Even its later 2017 document, presented as a political “softening,” continued to describe Palestine as “Arab Islamic land.” To them, the land remained sacred, and the mission, divine.
2. The Culture of Martyrdom
This sacred framing does not stay in charters and sermons. It permeates society. From the pulpit to the classroom, martyrdom (shahada) is taught as the surest path to paradise.
Palestinian media glorify suicide bombers. Children are indoctrinated. Mothers celebrate sons who die in jihad. Clerics like Yusuf al-Qaradawi have issued fatwas explicitly legitimising “martyrdom operations,” even by women, against Israeli civilians.
It is theology operationalised as strategy. The calculus shifts from temporal to eternal reward, a dynamic that no ceasefire or economic aid package can neutralise.
The fusion of faith and policy can also be seen in the Palestinian Authority’s so‑called “Martyrs Fund,” officially the Palestinian National Fund but known colloquially as the “pay‑for‑slay” scheme.
Through this programme, monthly stipends are paid to the families of Palestinians killed or imprisoned for attacks on Israelis. The payments are tiered by the length of prison sentence or the circumstances of death, and they are often celebrated in state media as a continuation of the martyr’s “sacrifice.”
This institutionalises the theology of martyrdom within the machinery of governance, embedding sacred narratives of struggle into the political and economic life of the Palestinian cause.
3. Symbols, Names, and Sacred Flashpoints
Even the language of war is steeped in religion. Hamas named the 7 October 2023 assault “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood,” tying its actions directly to Islam’s third-holiest site.
That site, the Al-Aqsa Mosque atop the Temple Mount, is more than a flashpoint. It is the beating heart of the conflict’s sacred geography. The rallying cry “Al-Aqsa is in danger” has triggered repeated uprisings, because it reframes violence as the defence of holy ground.
The sanctity of Jerusalem has also globalised the struggle. Since 1979, Iran’s Quds Day has ritualised solidarity with Palestine as a religious duty, drawing millions into a cause they have no territorial stake in. Hezbollah’s 1985 “Open Letter” went further still, casting its fight against Israel as obedience to divine command.
It’s not just Palestinians who perceive the religious nature of this conflict. That perception is very much regional, and perhaps international. It helps explain why Hamas operatives reportedly trained in paragliding in Malaysia, a country with no strategic reason to quietly host such exercises beyond ideological solidarity.
4. A Mirror Image Across the Line
It would be a mistake to think that only Islamist movements speak this language. On the Israeli side, religious Zionism draws directly from covenantal theology. The use of the biblical names Judea and Samaria for the West Bank is deliberate: it signals that the land is not merely strategic but promised.
Movements like Gush Emunim arose from the conviction that Jewish settlement fulfils God’s command. This conviction makes territorial concession as theologically fraught for them as it is for Muslims.
The Temple Mount, again, sits at the centre of this worldview. For religious Jews, it is the site of Solomon’s and Herod’s temples and the staging ground for a prophesied Third Temple, which many believe will usher in messianic redemption.
5. Religious Globalisation and Irreconcilability
The result, is a conflict that long ago burst its geographic bounds. The Palestinian cause is preached in mosques from Jakarta to Johannesburg as part of the global ummah’s duty. Millions who have never seen the land march, donate, and sometimes die for it.
At the same time, messianic currents in Israel see the ingathering of exiles and the rebuilding of Jerusalem as signs of prophetic fulfilment.
Scholars have called this process “religicisation”: a nationalist conflict transformed over decades into a sacred war. That transformation hardens vetoes and deepens passions. Borders can be negotiated; divine decrees cannot.
The Uncomfortable Truth
The language of international law and statecraft still tries to reduce this war to territory, security, and self-determination. But when one listens to the sermons, reads the charters, studies the schoolbooks, and examines the slogans, a different picture emerges. This is a conflict in which land is sacred trust, violence is scriptural, and victory is cast in eschatological terms.
To admit this is not to dismiss diplomacy. It is to recognise the depth of what diplomacy is up against. This war is fought not just with tanks and rockets but with scripture and prophecy. And until the world faces that reality squarely, every “peace process” will remain a negotiation over geography in a war about God.
A Singaporean Reckoning
For Singapore, this conflict is not a distant abstraction. We live in a society where Muslims, Christians, Jews, and humanists share classrooms, workplaces, and neighbourhoods, and we all read from overlapping sacred texts. That shared inheritance should force us to approach the question differently. A zero‑sum or totalising posture, where one narrative must prevail absolutely, will not hold our social fabric together.
Dialogue that demands agreement is no dialogue at all. It produces a brittle peace that shatters at the first sign of difference. Our task is harder: to hold space for disagreement while refusing to let it harden into suspicion. We must search for common ground where it can genuinely be found: collaboration on humanitarian relief, protection of civilian life, preservation of historical sites, and leave the eschatology to God.
Singapore’s deeper calling may be to model a different kind of engagement: one that does not gloss over irreconcilable differences or suppress powerful emotions, whether Muslim, Christian, Jewish, or secular. We must create room for people to speak from their pain without fear of judgment and listen with the humility to know that facts, while vital, are never sufficient when history, suffering, scripture, and destiny are at stake.
And perhaps most importantly, we need to feel safe with one another again. We must recover a pre‑9/11, pre‑7/10 ethic of community, where cynicism and suspicion do not dominate every encounter and where trust can once more shape public life. If we are to build a society worth handing to our children and grandchildren, we have to remember that living at peace with each other is not a secondary good. It is the very condition for everything else we hope to achieve together.
