The Islamization of the Palestinian‐Israeli conflict: the case of Hamas

Abstract

'The Palestinian cause is not about land and soil, but it is about faith and belief. This statement by the Islamic Resistance Movement (Harakat almuqawama al-Islamiyya, or Hamas, its acronym) reflects an important development in the Arab-Israeli conflict, that of Islamizing it. Taking Clifford Geertz's definition of religion as a symbolic structure that generates meanings for people, a world view capable of providing answers to human problems, and an ethos telling people how they should act,2 the Islamization of the conflict, then, entails several consequences: a certain conceptualization of the conflict's causes and sources through religious-Islamic lenses; a perception of the desirable solution; and the provision of the motivation and justification for a specific mode of conduct in order to achieve that goal. The Arab-Israeli conflict has gone through several phases, each adding a different dimension to it. It began as a conflict between two national movements - Zionism and Palestinian nationalism - which claimed possession of one land, but since the 1936 Palestinian rebellion it came to encompass the various Arab states. From the 1950s it was perceived as a struggle between Israel and pan-Arab nationalism, which regarded Israel as a bridgehead of western imperialism, designed to splinter Arab territorial integrity and prevent Arab unity. In addition, it became an arena of the Cold War between the West and the Soviet Union. The decline of panArabism and the growing power and legitimacy of the territorial states in the Middle East have transformed the conflict from a zero-sum game between rival national movements into a conflict between states, subjected to the rules of raison d'etat, and, therefore, capable of being managed or resolved. The Islamization of the conflict, on the other hand, portrays it as a battle between two rival religions, Islam and Judaism, or between two opposing absolutes. The religious idiom has always played an important role in the evolution of Palestinian nationalism and in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. In the past, however, it was mostly the nationalist Palestinian elites - the notables during the British Mandate and the Fatah movement since the early 1960s - that employed Islamic symbols and themes in order to mobilize popular support for the national cause, whose aims were largely political