To overlook role of religion in the conflict in Gaza would be a mistake

John Hagee is an 83-year-old Evangelical pastor of a Texan megachurch, with 932,000 followers on X. He founded Christians United for Israel (CUFI). In 2017 Binyamin Netanyahu addressed CUFI and told it that “Israel has no better friend in America than you”. Not American Jews, but Evangelical Christians.

Hagee preaches a version of dispensationalism, which believes that the end times are near. For him, the Bible is a commentary on current events. For example, the first of the four kings mentioned in the Book of Daniel and Revelation is Vladimir Putin. Egypt and Islamic forces represent the second, the third is China and the fourth is a combination of the US and the UK, whom the Antichrist will lead.

Jews are just collateral damage in the conflagration because, for the end times to come about, the Jewish people have to control all of Israel.

This could all be comfortably dismissed as absolutely nuts if Hagee had not been one of the pastors blessing the US embassy that Donald Trump relocated to Jerusalem, or if a who’s who of the Republican Party, including Nikki Haley, Mike Pence and Ted Cruz, were not lining up to speak at CUFI conferences.

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Hamas has its own brand of apocalyptic theology rooted in the Hadith, or sayings and traditions attributed to the Prophet Muhammad or his earliest followers. It teaches that Israel must be under Islamic control before the apocalypse.

For some orthodox Jews, the coming of the long-awaited Messiah is predicated on Jewish control of Israel. All of these narratives can be used to justify extreme violence against the out-group. After all, God wills it.

No solution will be found that ignores the depth of people’s religious identities

The West often feels that the existence of these conflicting apocalyptic theologies confirms Enlightenment thinking, that as progress is made, religion fades (or should fade) in significance.

Dr Carlo Aldovandi of the school of religions, peace studies and theology at Trinity, who has conducted significant research in Israel, disagrees. He believes that “mainstream social-political sciences, international relations theory and diplomacy have traditionally misunderstood or undervalued religion and its far-reaching influence on people’s lives, particularly in the Middle East.”

This has come at a high cost. Religion is an important strand in a complex tapestry of motivations that include land, power and resources. Engaging with people’s religious beliefs does not mean endorsing them, but it does mean listening.

People living on this island were used to rolling their eyes when asked about the religious war in Northern Ireland, as if it were about points of theological difference between Catholicism and the Reformed traditions, instead of inequality, systemic discrimination, ethnic identity and political disenfranchisement.

But to ignore the religious aspect in Northern Ireland would have overlooked a valuable resource that was part of the pathway to peace – the role of religious leaders trusted by the paramilitaries, which allowed ceasefires to be brokered and arms put beyond use.

As the world reels from the atrocities perpetrated on civilians, including babies and children, by Hamas on October 7th, and watches in horror at the brutal retribution inflicted on Gaza, peace seems more impossible than ever.

But what is the endgame for the Israeli government or for Hamas? Even if Gaza can be bombed back into the Stone Age, in the infamous 2019 words of former Israeli army chief Benny Gantz, what then? Every war eventually ends, either by the total annihilation of the enemy, which will never happen in this conflict, or by weariness forcing people to the table for talks.

In a thoughtful article in Haaretz, the left-leaning Israeli newspaper, Dahlia Scheindlin cites the example of S’iah Shalom – Talking Peace as a possible way forward. It facilitates meetings between both secular and religious Jews and Palestinians. The aim is not to sell a western, liberal vision of peace, but to explore tentatively what a peace that respects and builds on their respective religious traditions might look like. Moderate voices such as Talking Peace, or the Interfaith Encounter Association, get little attention but their slow, painstaking work underpins what little hope now exists. No solution will be found that ignores the depth of people’s religious identities.

As David Rosen, former chief rabbi of Ireland points out, when the famous handshake happened between Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat on the White House lawn in 1993, no prominent Israeli Jewish religious person or Palestinian Muslim figure was present.

Shortly after, Douglas Johnston’s seminal book, Religion: The Missing Dimension of Statecraft, appeared. The need for inclusion was reiterated by Tirza Kelman, who is a Yoetzet Halacha, Orthodox female authority in Jewish Law. She visited Belfast in 2017 with a group of Israeli religious figures. There are more dissimilarities than similarities between Northern Ireland and Israel, but she found it immensely valuable and challenging.

Her visit taught her that peace is flawed and partial, and not in any way utopian. What, she mused, would an imperfect peace look like for Israel and Palestine, one that respected different identities and allowed them “to sit beside each other”? Let us hope and pray that one day they will have a chance to find out.