The Religion of Palestinianism

There was a time when “Palestinian” described a people and a political aspiration. Today, it has become something more, a moral creed, a liturgy, and for many in the West, a surrogate religion. “Palestinianism,” as Alan Dershowitz and others have described it, no longer functions merely as a political stance but as a belief system complete with saints, martyrs, sacred symbols, and heresies. In a secular West starved for moral purpose, it offers a ready made theology of innocence and guilt, Palestinians as eternal victims, Israelis as perpetual sinners. What began as a national movement has metastasized into a quasi religious narrative, where emotional certainty substitutes for historical accuracy and moral theater replaces truth.

The Theological Roots of Palestinianism

The intellectual seed of Palestinianism was planted long before it had a name. Its roots reach back to the early twentieth century, when the Arab leadership of the British Mandate began framing the Jewish national revival as a form of colonial intrusion rather than decolonization. Haj Amin al Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, transformed anti Zionism into a religious obligation, portraying Jewish return to the Land of Israel as a desecration of Islamic sanctity. The theological element was clear, the land was waqf, an endowment of Islam, never to be surrendered.

Over time, this religious motif fused with political nationalism, creating an enduring myth of cosmic struggle rather than territorial dispute. Later, Arab Christian leaders, especially in the Levant, absorbed and reinterpreted this fusion through the lens of liberation theology, turning the Palestinian cause into a passion narrative of suffering and redemption. By the time Edward Said published Orientalism in 1978 and The Question of Palestine in 1979, the groundwork had been laid for a moral inversion, the Jewish struggle for liberation was recast as oppression, and Arab rejectionism rebranded as righteous resistance.

To move from genealogy to evidence, sermons, textbooks, and media across the region have long presented the conflict as a holy struggle, a test of faith and identity, which social scientists analyze under the themes of sacralized politics and political religion. For conceptual anchors, check out the two written works by Emilio Gentile’s Politics as Religion and Robert Bellah’s classic essay Civil Religion in America are great resources..

The Western Appropriation of a Sacred Narrative

Said’s influence cannot be overstated. In Orientalism and The Question of Palestine, he turned a regional conflict into a global allegory of Western sin. Israel became the emblem of imperial excess, while Palestinians were cast as the pure other. This framing took root in Western universities and cultural institutions and then flowed through nongovernmental organizations and media networks until it acquired the properties of a civic religion. For readers new to Said, long form profiles and overviews trace how his work shaped the post colonial conversation and public sentiment.

This new civic religion drew energy from liberation theology, absorbed the totalizing ambition of Marxist critique, and harnessed the performative intensity of social media activism. Protest weeks, encampments, and viral imagery increasingly act as ritual enactments in which performance activism substitutes for policy literacy.

At the same time, the movement’s power in the Muslim world remains theological and eschatological, Jerusalem as symbol of divine promise and sovereignty. Among segments of Arab Christianity, Palestinian liberation theology reads the passion of Christ through the experience of Palestinian suffering, a shared moral grammar of resistance in which grievance supplies the scriptures and protest supplies the prayers.

In the West, the appeal is also psychological. Palestinianism functions as a displaced form of Western guilt, a secular eschatology in which redemption is sought through identification with a suffering other. Cultural critics such as Douglas Murray have argued that for some Westerners the cause becomes a substitute faith, visible in campus and street rituals and in media framing. Readers can find accessible discussion of this claim in recent interviews and essays around his work.

The Moral Rituals and Nihilistic Core of Palestinianism

The rituals of this new faith are familiar. Social media feeds become confessionals, protests turn into liturgies, and the keffiyeh replaces the cross as a badge of belonging. The Nakba becomes a creation myth, Gaza the perennial passion play, and every Palestinian casualty a sacrament of suffering to be shared and repeated.

Western adherents, many who have stepped away from traditional religion, find in Palestinianism a moral framework with clear binaries, oppressor and oppressed. As Murray and others have observed, this grants a sense of prophetic purpose without the demands of introspection. Yet beneath the moral certainty lies a nihilistic logic, redemption arrives not through peace but through the undoing of Israel. Because the identity depends on permanent accusation, no concession ever suffices, the sacrament requires perpetual guilt.

Here is where empirical and psychological research helps, studies of collective guilt, moral cognition, and political performance illuminate how identity can be maintained through ritualized outrage even when policy goals remain undefined.

Historically, the rise of this civic religion tracks with the retreat of traditional faith in the West. Moral energy that once flowed through churches and synagogues now finds substitute hosts, climate activism, identity movements, and the cult of the Palestinian cause. Civil religion and political religion scholarship provides a vocabulary for this transfer of sacred intensity into public ideologies.

Palestinianism is unique in one crucial respect, it often borrows Jewish moral language and biblical imagery in order to delegitimize Jewish self determination, an inversion visible across activist and academic narratives since the late twentieth century. Said’s works are central to that intellectual turn and remain widely cited and debated in contemporary media.

For Zionists, this ideological religion demands not only territorial concessions but moral surrender, the admission that Jewish sovereignty itself is a sin. To resist is to assert the equal right of Jewish self determination and the legitimacy of Jewish survival. The antidote to Palestinianism is not counter propaganda but moral clarity, a willingness to be governed by history rather than fashion. The answer is not despair but defiance, the same defiance that built a state from the ashes of exile.

Palestinianism promises redemption through perpetual outrage, but delivers only emptiness. It thrives on protest but fears peace, claims justice but sanctifies vengeance. In elevating grievance to godhood, it betrays those it claims to champion, fixing their suffering as a permanent exhibit. Real peace begins not with Israel repenting for its existence, but with the world abandoning its new religion and remembering that morality without truth is idolatry in its purest form.