Hamas's October 7, 2023 attack and Israel's devastating response calls for an examination of the relationship between religion and violence in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Media and political framings of the attack have tended to explain little about Hamas as a religious and political movement. Meanwhile, the Israeli religious settler movement has expanded attacks on Palestinian communities. Scholarship has foregrounded nationalism and settler-colonialism as explanatory rubrics, and while these approaches yield important insights, they can obscure the capacity of religious ideologies and practices to re-shape collective identities and politics on their own terms. How has religion shaped the Israeli-Palestinian conflict historically and in the present moment? How does state violence and chronic destabilization factor into the conditions in which religion emerges as a political force? This forum will examine these and other questions bearing on the difference religion makes in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict before and after October 7.
| Loren Lybarger | lybarger@ohio.edu | View |