When Religious Narratives Make Peace More Difficult
Why do negotiations between Israel, the United States, Iran, and their allies so often struggle to produce lasting results? The usual explanations refer to strategic interests. However, they are not enough to explain why some compromises appear unacceptable to many actors.
Diplomatic negotiations do not face only conflicting interests; they also face symbolic worlds that give war a moral, religious, or historical meaning that is considered superior. Several actors therefore use radical religious literacies that interpret events through messianic, eschatological, or apocalyptic narratives. These narratives are not necessarily the origin of the conflict, but they contribute to its continuation.
This dynamic can be observed in several camps. Among some currents of Israeli religious Zionism, contemporary history is understood through the promise of Greater Israel and the prospect of national redemption. On October 25, 2023, Benjamin Netanyahu stated: “We are the people of light, they are the people of darkness […] we will fulfill the prophecy of Isaiah.” Beyond political rhetoric, this reference places the conflict within a moral and biblical horizon that goes beyond the purely strategic language. For some religious movements active around the Temple Mount, particularly the movement for the construction of the Third Temple (HaMikdash movements or Temple Mount Faithful) and organizations such as Im Tirtzu or the National Religious Movement (Bnei Akiva in its most radical fringes), current events are sometimes interpreted through references to the prophecies of Gog and Magog, a biblical figure referring to a coalition of enemy nations destined to collapse before Israel in the end times, and to the future restoration of the Third Temple, seen as a condition for the coming of the messianic era. This perspective concretely implies the dismantling or relocation of the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque, buildings currently located on the Temple Mount, a place that these movements call the Temple Mount and claim as an exclusively Jewish sacred space intended to host a new sanctuary. From this perspective, war is no longer only a response to a security threat; it becomes part of a broader historical narrative.
Dennis Avi Lipkin’s book, Return to Mecca (2012), offers a striking example of this messianic tendency. Lipkin argues that the biblical Exodus did not take place in Sinai, but in Saudi Arabia, between Mecca and Medina. From this, he concludes that Jews have a religious and historical right to these two holy cities of Islam, whose “liberation” would be a prophetic and strategic necessity. To achieve this, he calls for an alliance between Zionists and American evangelicals, presenting this project as a biblical mission. Rejected by the academic consensus, this book nevertheless illustrates with unusual openness
A radical reading of Scripture can become an imperative and sacred territorial claim.
This is also accompanied by the influence of certain American evangelical currents that interpret events in the Middle East through an apocalyptic framework. For these circles, particularly supporters of premillennial dispensationalism, a theological current popularized by figures such as John Hagee, founder of Christians United for Israel (CUFI), or through the legacy of Hal Lindsey and his book The Late Great Planet Earth, support for Israel is not only a strategic alliance; it is also part of a prophetic understanding of history according to which the return of the Jewish people to the Holy Land is a sign preceding the return of Christ. This sensitivity also appears in American political discourse. The Speaker of the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, stated in December 2025: “The Bible is clear: Judea and Samaria are the land of Israel. I do not understand why we debate this anew every single day.” Here again, the scriptural reference tends to transform a territorial and political debate into a question of loyalty to a religious truth perceived as obvious.
On the Iranian side, certain currents and influential actors of the Islamic Republic also use a messianic reading of history. This includes supporters of velayat-e faqih, in its most radical version, circles close to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (Pasdaran), as well as figures such as Hossein Allahkaram, president of the Coordination Council of Ansar-e Hezbollah, and the “super-revolutionaries” of Jabh-e Paydari, who adopt a radical Shiite Islamist position and oppose any normalization with the West. Jabh-e Paydari was created by people close to former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose speeches at the United Nations General Assembly explicitly referred to the imminent return of the Mahdi.
In his speeches before the United Nations General Assembly, particularly on September 26, 2012, Ahmadinejad explicitly referred to the Mahdi, “a man who will come in the company of Jesus Christ and the righteous,” and viewed contemporary geopolitical changes as signs announcing his arrival, stating that he could feel “the sweet scent and the soulful breeze of the spring.” The speech opened with the Shiite liturgical formula “Oh God, Hasten the Emergence of Your Chosen Beloved,” calling for the acceleration of his return. His rhetoric suggested that geopolitical chaos and confrontation with Western powers or Israel could prepare the way for the appearance of the Savior. The expectation of the Twelfth Imam, the Mahdi, is not always understood as a position of withdrawal or passivity. As the specialist Mohammad Ali Amir-Moezzi has shown, this expectation can also be a powerful force for political mobilization. In the official speeches of Khomeini, then Khamenei and Ahmadinejad, tensions with the United States, described as the “Great Satan,” and with Israel are integrated into a historical vision in which resistance acquires a religious meaning that goes beyond simple geopolitical calculation. This reading contributes to placing regional conflicts within a sacred timeline in which present confrontations are perceived as carrying an eschatological meaning.
Finally, the Lebanese-Palestinian resistance, represented by the armed branches of Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas, mobilizes a culture of martyrdom and final confrontation that gives armed struggle a spiritual and sacrificial dimension. Military operations are no longer evaluated only according to their strategic effectiveness, but also through their ability to embody an ideal of resistance presented as sacred. “If they besiege us economically, we are the sons of Ramadan; if they besiege us militarily, we are the sons of Ashura.” This statement by Khomeini constitutes the ideological matrix from which Hezbollah and Hamas built their culture of resistance: in both cases, material deprivation and armed confrontation are perceived as sacred trials that purify the struggle. Direct heirs to this political theology, they translated the Khomeinist axiom into operational practice, which makes any negotiation based on mutual concessions structurally incompatible with their internal logic.
These different radical religious literacies do not mechanically produce war. However, they contribute to shaping representations of the world in which compromise can appear as a moral, historical, or religious surrender. When war is invested with a transcendent mission, peace is no longer simply one political solution among others. This phenomenon is particularly visible in the rejection of peace agreements by actors from these three horizons: orthodox Iranian circles close to the Pasdaran see them as a betrayal of Islamic resistance; part of the religious Zionist right rejects any territorial freeze perceived as an abandonment of the Promised Land, particularly in Judea and Samaria (called the West Bank by the international community); and some American evangelical circles oppose any diplomatic solution that could challenge Israeli sovereignty over the entire Holy Land, on the grounds that it would contradict the divine prophetic plan.
This logic also appears in the way each camp describes its opponent. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently stated that some Iranian leaders might seek to provoke an apocalyptic confrontation linked to the expectation of the Mahdi, adding that these were actors with whom it would be impossible to negotiate. Whether or not this representation is accurate from a theological perspective, it produces a political effect: it tends to essentialize the opponent and make compromise appear suspicious, or even impossible.
Perhaps this is the real challenge. Each camp finds in the narratives of the other confirmation of its own beliefs. The imaginaries of war reinforce one another and feed the idea of eternal conflict.
*AI-assisted translation
