whiterock said:
Redbrickbear said:
joseywales said:
Osodecentx said:
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said "we are at war, and we will win it" as the country's air force began striking Hamas targets in Gaza on Saturday, in response to a surprise assault on the 50th anniversary of the start of the 1973 Yom Kippur war. Hamas militants infiltrated Israeli territory from the Gaza Strip including by paraglider and over the sea and launched more than 3,000 rockets, Israeli military leaders said.
The confrontation, which has killed at least 40 Israelis and injured at least 740, is one of the most serious in years following weeks of rising tensions along the volatile border. A militant group in Gaza, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, announced Israeli soldiers were being held captive as the Israeli Defense Forces refused to comment on unverified videos circulating of hostages allegedly being taken by Hamas.
Stupid asses fighting over a small piece of land and my guess some man-made religion is the cause.
Its more of an ethnic-national war than a religious war.
for the Palestinians, it is 100% a religious war. Learn more about islam.....
And secularism is on the rise in the region just like everywhere else...but the conflict goes and and would continue to go on if both sides were completely agonistic.
For instance "68% of Israeli Muslims say religion is very important in their lives...30% of Israeli Jews say religion is important in their lives, but a 2021 survey found that 45% of Jewish people over 20 identify as secular or not religious"
So basically 1 in 3 Arabs say they are not really religious anymore and almost half of Jews say the same.
The most religious group over there (Hasidic ultra-orthodox Jews) are the most checked out of the conflict and don't even serve in the army and take a very ambivalent stance on Israel as a State.
Satmar for instance (one of the largest Hasidic dynasties) is open hostile to State at all.
[most ultra-Orthodox Jews oppose Zionism in some way, groups like Neturei Karta and the Satmar Hasidim do not recognize the modern State of Israel.]
https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/ultra-orthodox-anti-zionist/
Secularism is not on the rise in Palestine, or Lebanon, or Syria, or Iran, or Yemen....nor anywhere else in meaningful ways.
I think it is
[Recent developments. A 2020 Online Survey by Gamaan found that
8.8% Iranians identifying as Atheist and a large fraction (22.2%) identifying as not following an organized religion and only 40% self identified as Muslims. This has been noted as a transition of Iranians towards secularism.]
Secularism is also proceeding at pace in Lebanon
[Muslims in Lebanon are the least likely to say religion is very important in their life just over half (54%) say religion is very important]
https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2006/07/26/lebanons-muslims-relatively-secular-and-prochristian/And in Israel and Palestine the Arab nationalist movement and Zionism were strongly secular....
[
Palestinian nationalism's primary affiliation was not to the global umma but to the Arab world a concept defined in secular terms and including significant Christian populations. When the Israeli state was established in 1948 resulting in the
dispossession of around three-quarters of the Palestinian people Arab voices everywhere attributed their defeat to
Arab disunity, rather than Islamic foundering. For much of the 1950s and 1960s, the hero of the Palestinian cause was Egyptian President
Gamal abd-Al Nasser, who promoted an ideology of secular pan-Arabism.
The roots of Zionism were similarly secular. While
religious forms of the ideology existed from the early days of its emergence in the late 19th century, the mainstream movement was inspired far more by post-Enlightenment notions of secular nationalism than any religious text.
Zionist forefather Theodor Herzl was an atheist, as was his close colleague Max Nordau. Ze'ev Jabotinsky, who led the hardline Revionist Zionist movement in the interwar years, also eschewed religion, defining his Jewishness in
secular nationalist terms.
This trend continued after the establishment of Israel. President
Chaim Weizmann (in office 1949-52) and Prime Minister
David Ben Gurion (in office 1948-54 and 1955-63) were both self-proclaimed atheists. For the first three decades of Israel's existence, national politics were dominated by the socialist
Mapai/Labor Party, which favoured a secular leftist form of Zionism. The popularity of the
kibbutz movement in the first few decades of Israeli history was a further testament to the mainstream nature of socialist secular ideas in early Israeli society.
Similarly,
Palestinian nationalism had strongly leftist dynamics in the mid-twentieth century. From the late 1960s, two of the largest parties in the umbrella
Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) were the
Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and the
Democratic Front for Liberation of Palestine (DFLP). Both adhered to Marxist-Leninist ideologies and promoted the notion of Palestinian liberation through full political and economic revolution.
The parties' leaders were not only secular, but were avowed atheists from Christian backgrounds; the PFLP's
George Habash had
sung in his church choir as a young boy, while DFLP founder
Nayef Hawatmeh had been raised in a Catholic family. In other words, they were as far removed from political Islam as possible.]
