This chapter examines religious claims and aspects within Palestinian nationalism from the time of the British Mandate to the present. Since such endeavor necessitates an engagement with Zionism, the chapter starts by refuting a common misperception that seeks to equate Palestinian nationalism with Zionism in the latter’s use of religion to attain its political ends. The distinctions between the two regarding their “use” of religion can be conceptualized on the basis of two guiding notions: functionality and centrality of religion and/or religious claims in either respective projects. Each uses religion differently in terms of the purpose (function), and the assigned place (centrality) within the subsequent discourse and practice. The conceptualization of these two notions is offered in this chapter as a framework for analysis in discussing the specific case of Palestinian nationalism. In undertaking the analysis of the Palestinian national movement over more than a century, the chapter is divided into three parts: the decades of the British Mandate; the decades that followed the creation of Israel up through the late 1980s; and finally the decades where Palestinian Islamism has become an integral part of the Palestinian national project – from the emergence of Hamas in December 1987 to the present.

This chapter examines the impact of the fusion between religious claims and nationalism on state policies – domestically, regionally, and internationally. It offers a comparative perspective on the extent to which religious claims bestow sacredness on the state’s workings of power – or what we define as sacralized politics. The chapter analyzes how, through hegemonic nationalism, states invoke religious claims to legitimize political and national strategic goals in domestic and international politics. To trace the matrix of power that sacralization of politics mobilizes, and when looking comparatively at various case studies, the chapter points to three main (among other) modes of sacralization’s profound impact on politics. The first operates through managing consciousness, including the construction of self-identity in relation to others; the second, through territoriality and the politics of land claims; and the third via political governance, using violence and a necropolitical regime of control. While each mode can operate separately, all operate through mutual reinforcement and each with elements of sacredness, resulting in an emergent power structure that is self-sustaining, religiously infused, and resistant to change.

This chapter examines how nationalism, religious claims, and settler colonialism enmesh within Zionism and demonstrates how their interaction played a major role for Israeli academia and politics in sidelining or obfuscating settler colonialism as an appropriate frame of analysis for Zionism’s encounter with the Palestinians. The chapter makes three main arguments: first, that while settler colonialism is an obvious framework for analyzing and understanding the unfolding of the Zionist project in Palestine, the framework has been obscured by highlighting the connection between Jewish nationalism and religious claims; second, that the steady rise in religious encroachment into institutions and the public sphere in Israel is rooted in the need for legitimation (grounded in religious claims) in face of rising Palestinian resistance to the expansion of the settler-colonial project from Israel to the West Bank; and third, that while secularization was possible in other settler-colonial contexts such as South Africa, Northern Ireland, and North America, it is impossible to achieve secularization within a Zionist regime. Rather, for secularization and democratization to take place, Israel has to recognize the settler-colonial reality of the Zionist project, a recognition that will make it possible to free Israeli Jewish nationalism from religionism and work toward decolonization.