Fight to Destroy Israel Fundamentally Religious

Superficially, the conflict is about who has sovereignty in Israel: "the occupation," "colonialism," etc. On a deeper level, however, it is about jihad, a religious obligation in Islam that many interpret as a demand to destroy Israel. That is the core and heart of Palestinianism. From this perspective, the Arab-Israeli conflict is not only national, the desire for a state; it is fundamentally a religious conflict. Islamists consider "Palestine" to be part of the house of Islam and Jews as "dhimmis," a subject religious community, not a nation.