Political trends

The conflict isn't all about religion It is true that Israelis are mostly Jewish and Palestinians are mostly Muslim, but religion is pretty low on the list of direct drivers of the conflict. This is not, despite what your grade school teacher may have suggested, a clash between Judaism and Islam over religious differences. It's a clash between nationalities — Israeli and Palestinian — over secular issues of land and nationhood. The European Jews who first encouraged and organized  mass Jewish migration  to what we now call Israel, in the late 1800s and early 1900s, were mostly secular Jews. Their movement, Zionism, treated Jews primarily as a nationality — like the French or Chinese — in addition to a religious group. While a number of Israelis are religiously observant, especially on the political right, the larger movement that created Israel was and remains primarily secular. Initial Palestinian armed movements were largely secular, as well. They were not, despi...