The War of Religions – Fake News!

I meet a lot of groups of Israelis and Palestinians and my posts on social media reach tens of thousands of people on both sides and around the world. I am so familiar with comments from both Israelis and Palestinians that it is very difficult to surprise me. What may be surprising to many of my readers is that Israelis and Palestinians say the same thing about each other – almost using the same terminology and points of reference. Here is a very common comment that an Israeli sent me today:

“Dear Gershon,
I greatly, greatly appreciate and love you and your efforts to bring about peace.
After October 7, I stopped wanting peace with the Palestinians in this generation.
I do not believe in their sincere desire for peace, and in my view, they would see any peace agreement as a temporary arrangement, a basis for the next brutal onslaught the moment we fall asleep again.

Of course this is a generalization, but it applies to the vast majority of this terrible, Amalek-like, fundamentalist people, and this is a religious war. Their children suck hatred from their mothers’ breasts—mothers who wish for them to die as martyrs when they kill some Jews along with themselves. They have an education system that preaches hatred of Jews from kindergarten onward. I am not interested in peace with this dark people. I am interested in separation.”

I asked the person who wrote this “how do you imagine that they (the Palestinians) think about us? I just asked now so he hasn’t had time to answer. I don’t know if he will. I do know what many Palestinians, maybe a majority of them think about Israelis. They (the Palestinians) use the same terminology as I hear from Israeli Jews speaking about Palestinians. They also talk about a war of religions, about Jewish supremacy, about the brutality of the Israelis and how all Israelis want to kill all of the Palestinians or to throw them off their land so that they can have it all. They talk about a country (Israel) that sees Palestinian lives as cheap and that in order to survive we have to kill Palestinians. That is how Palestinian reality is translated by Palestinians who live under Israeli occupation, or who live in Gaza.

This claim by many on both sides that the conflict is a war of religions and that for Jews, Islam is a religion that sees all Jews as heretics and therefore, must be killed is very prevalent among many Jews. It is not surprising because many Jews, in Israel and around the world have mainly been exposed to the likes of Hamas, AlQaeda, ISIS, Hizballah and Iran. Hamas, Alqaeda, and ISIS are distortions of Islam and Hizballah and Iran are at the extremes of Shia Islam. These are not representative of normative Islam, but it is what much of the western world and Israelis are exposed to and believe is representative of all Muslims and of Islam.

Here are some facts:

As of today (mid-2020s), there are about 2.0–2.1 billion Muslims worldwide. That represents roughly 25–26% of the global population, making Islam the second-largest religion in the world after Christianity.

About 60% of Muslims live in Asia and are not Arabs (especially Indonesia, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh). Only about 20% of the Muslims in the world are in the Middle East and North Africa, and most of them are Arabs. The largest Muslim population by country is Indonesia with about 230 million. Approximately 10–15% of the world’s Muslims are Shia. Sunni Muslims make up about 85–90% of all Muslims. Shia Muslims live mainly in the following countries:

• Iran – about 90–95% Shia
• Azerbaijan – majority Shia
• Iraq – about 60–65% Shia
• Bahrain – majority Shia population with a Sunni ruling Monarchy
• Lebanon – large Shia community along with Sunnis, Christians and Druze
• Yemen – significant Zaydi Shia population

What percentage of the Sunni Muslims in the world are extremists like Salafis, Alqaeda, Hamas or ISIS?

According to research, there is no precise percentage, but most credible research agrees that extremist movements represent a very small minority of Sunni Muslims worldwide.

• Salafi Islam (all types, including non-violent):
  Roughly 1–3% of Sunni Muslims globally
  Important: Most Salafis are not violent. Many are apolitical.
• Violent jihadist extremists (e.g., ISIS-type ideology):
  Well under 1% of Sunni Muslims — generally estimated at 1–0.5% or less
• Active members/supporters of terrorist organizations (ISIS, Al-Qaeda, Hamas, ):
  Far below 0.1% of Sunni Muslims worldwide.

What are these extremist groups?

• Salafis
  A theological movement, not a single political or military group
  • Most reject violence
  • Only a small fringe embraces jihadism
• Hamas
  • A Sunni Islamist nationalist movement, not Salafi
  • Its support base is local (Palestinian), not representative of Sunnis globally
  • It does not reflect mainstream Sunni Islam
• ISIS
  • Rejected as un-Islamic by overwhelming majorities of Sunni scholars
  • Condemned repeatedly by Sunni religious authorities worldwide

The latest large-scale polling (including in Muslim-majority countries) consistently finds that:

Strong majorities of Sunnis:

• Reject attacks on civilians
• Reject ISIS and similar groups
• Support peaceful coexistence, even if they oppose specific states or policies

The Bottom line

• Extremists are a tiny fraction of Sunni Muslims
• Violent jihadists are an even smaller fringe
• Equating Sunnis (or Muslims) with extremism is empirically false

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not a conflict between Judaism and Islam. Our conflict is a conflict over territory and the identity of the territory and those who live there and have the right to live there. Religion has a deep impact on our conflict and a bigger impact on our perceptions of the other side. Extreme voices in both religious groups – Jews and Muslims have a much bigger negative impact on the conflict and on both societies that their absolute numbers in both population groups.

Very few Israelis and Palestinians are ever exposed to the positive sides of the religions of Judaism and Islam and most Israeli Jews and Palestinian Muslims no not have any real first-hand knowledge about the religion of the other side. This is particularly strange because there are so many similarities between Islam and Judaism. People of religion, especially clergy and scholars of these religions have a lot of work to do – not in the field of interfaith theological dialogue, but in the necessity of being an ambassador of their faith to the members of the other faiths who share this Holy Land.