Israel and Palestine Are Now in a Religious War

Why the Middle East conflict has been getting increasingly brutal—and increasingly hard to solve.

By Caroline de Gruyter, a columnist at Foreign Policy and a Europe correspondent for the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad.

Something strange is going on with Israel, writes Elie Barnavi, a former Israeli ambassador to France and a prominent historian and writer, in his autobiography Confessions d’un bon à rien: In less than a century his country “has gone through the entire sequence of European wars, but in reverse order.”

Barnavi’s book (which has not been translated into English) was published in 2022. He could not have known at the time that a furious war between Israel and Hamas would erupt in late 2023. Even so, his analysis of Israel getting involved in Europeans wars “but in reverse order” is perfectly applicable to the war now raging in Gaza. To be sure, his vision is pitch dark: Israel’s wars are getting worse, in Barnavi’s view. Therefore, the potential for further escalation of the Gaza war in the wider region is considerable.

What exactly does it mean to have European wars in reverse order? In Europe, religious wars raged on for most of the 16th and 17th centuries, fought between Catholics and protestants and their regional, princely or city-state backers. The situation only changed after the Peace of Westphalia, in 1648, a double peace treaty that put an end to both the Thirty Years’ War in the Holy Roman Empire and the Eighty Years’ War between Spain and the Dutch Republic. From then on, states became the predominant actors in international politics. They certainly fought terrible wars, but also managed to contain and prevent them through peace conferences—the Concert of Vienna (1814-15) for example—where European powers guaranteed non-interference in each other’s spheres of influence. Finally, interstate wars in Europe stopped altogether after the Second World War, at least among member states of what has become the European Union.

Israel, Barnavi argues, took the opposite trajectory. Israel’s wars began as battles between states: the Jewish state against neighboring Arab states, involving one national army fighting another. This interstate warfare ended with the Yom Kippur War in 1973. After that, Israel no longer fought large-scale wars against other states and instead mainly fought Palestinian guerrillas. Even in that new phase, however, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict remained a conflict between two nations, two national movements, over the same piece of land. Because of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza strip, this struggle—which is raging still today—took on a colonial dimension.

Beyond that, crucially, the war has changed in character. On both sides, politics and society are now deeply divided. Both in Israel and Palestine, the main internal division is between those who are secular and those who are religiously motivated. On both sides, the religious camp seems to be getting the upper hand.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Politico wrote recently, is “losing control” of his government because his far-right, religious coalition partners are uncompromising and pushing their way. For instance, the Israeli Minister of Finance, Bezalel Smotrich, and Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir—who both live in Israeli settlements in the West Bank—have publicly called for “migration” of Palestinians from Gaza and building new Israeli settlements there, and have referred to Palestinians as “human animals” and “Nazis.” Despite U.S. pressure, they have also refused to transfer tax revenues that Israel routinely collects for the Palestinian Authority to the government in Ramallah, Palestine’s de facto administrative capital. Netanyahu obviously no longer controls his own ministers. His religious coalition partners know he will not fire them. If he does, the government would fall and the prime minister, who faces charges on three cases of fraud, bribery and breach of trust, would lose the immunity that currently keeps him out of reach of the judiciary.

On the Palestinian side, things are no better. For many Palestinians, 88-year old Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has lost all credibility. Under his 19-year tenure, the Palestinian cause and the fight against the Israeli occupation have largely disappeared from the international agenda. Hamas puts them back on that agenda. A December 2023 poll showed that Hamas’s popularity was actually growing—even among secular Palestinians who normally do not support Hamas and condemn the Oct. 7, 2023, massacres. This result should be seen as a sign of utter political despair; they have lost hope that less extremist leaders can achieve a just peace with Israel.

In this way, what used to be a national conflict is increasingly turning into a religious conflict. Barnavi, who has studied Europe’s religious wars extensively as a scholar, writes: “The growing power of fundamentalists on both sides drags us back to the pre-modern, pre-Westphalian era—to the religious wars in Europe of the second half of the 16th century and the first half of the 17th century.”

This is bad news. Europe’s wars of religion were terrible. Everybody was fighting everybody, and there was no restraint in warfare. The French 16th-century philosopher Michel de Montaigne lived through them and wrote about them in his Essays. These wars led him to develop his theory of political governance and change through “petits pas” (little steps) instead of revolutionary, sweeping movements, so as to contain extremism and bloodshed. If religious lunatics have their way, he noted, compromises are no longer possible.

Barnavi, without mentioning Montaigne, seems to come to the same conclusion. Two countries can negotiate a deal, he argues in his memoirs, with both settling for less than they originally demanded, using rational considerations. But two camps that deeply believe God has given them the land are incapable of doing this, because it requires them to renege on the fundament on which their faith and identity are based.

The question whether Israel and the Palestinians can get their stranded peace process back on track thus depends less and less on negotiations between both sides—which was the case 30 years ago, resulting in the Oslo peace accords—and more and more on the struggle within the two camps between secular and religious parties. The more intense these internal power struggles become, the less likely the peace process can be put into motion again. This means, of course, that it also becomes more likely that the conflict will be settled militarily.

European religious wars were eventually stopped because of the emergence of the modern, relatively secular state capable of compromise; its claims of the raison d’état eventually prevailed. The religious war in the Middle East, by contrast, is currently intensifying because the state (or the national movement, on the Palestinian side, which also used to be secular in character) is becoming weaker.

If both sides are unable to broker a compromise, someone else needs to make sure things don’t spiral out of control, with Israel’s neighbors and other regional powers, including Iran (which is a theocracy itself), getting more directly involved. One can only hope that intensive diplomatic efforts, mainly by the United States and some Gulf states, behind the screens will eventually bear fruit. But thanks to books such as Barnavi’s, one thing is becoming increasingly clear: Compromise is now harder than ever.