Palestine

Palestine is home to one of the three most sacred sites on Earth to Muslims, Masjid al-Aqsa (Al-Aqsa Mosque). It is the epicenter and metaphorical “beating heart” of the holy city of Jerusalem, and of the blessed region of the Levant (bilad al-Sham) more generally.

Masjid al-Aqsa served as the first qibla (direction of Muslim prayer) before God instructed the Muslims to pray toward the Kaaba in Mecca.

It is the hallowed ground upon which Muslims believe the Prophet Muhammad led all of God’s thousands upon thousands of prophets and messengers in prayer, from Adam to Abraham to Moses to Jesus and beyond, during his miraculous Night Journey (Isra) from Mecca to Jerusalem and Ascension (Miʿraj) to the heavens.

Beyond Masjid al-Aqsa and Jerusalem, other locations across Palestine wield great sacred significance to Muslims for having been lands upon which the stories of countless prophets and messengers of God unfolded.

To learn more about why the land of Gaza specifically is important in Islam, please refer to the article, Why is Gaza Important? Honoring a Land of Ribat.

Masjid al-Aqsa (Al-Aqsa Mosque) refers to the entire tract of elevated land located in the Old City of Jerusalem and presently enclosed within the compound’s walls. Also known as al-Haram al-Sharif (The Noble Sanctuary), it is of tremendous spiritual significance to Muslims and among Islam’s three holiest sites alongside the sacred mosques of Mecca (Masjid al-Haram) and Medina (Masjid al-Nabawi).

The site is commonly referred to by non-Muslims as the Temple Mount. It is worth noting that, contrary to popular misconception, the entirety of the mosque complex, not just the famed golden Dome of the Rock (Qubbat al-Sakhra), is considered holy. Presently, the site features a walled compound enclosing numerous mosques, gardens, libraries, fountains, and other structures.

Due to its religious significance to both Muslims and non-Muslims alike, Masjid al-Aqsa has frequently served as a major flashpoint of tension, conflict, and Israeli aggression in recent decades.

To learn more about the significance of Masjid al-Aqsa and Jerusalem, please refer to the article, Why Do Muslims Love Jerusalem? If you’d like to learn more about the history and features of Masjid al-Aqsa itself, please refer to The Noble Sanctuary website.

For roughly the first sixteen to seventeen months after the Prophet Muhammad and his followers migrated to Medina, Muslims prayed in the direction of Jerusalem and Masjid al-Aqsa, not Mecca. Al-Aqsa was the first qibla (direction of prayer) in Islam and, according to the Sunnah, the second house of worship ever established on earth after the Kaaba. God later revealed that the qibla be turned toward the Kaaba in Mecca, but Jerusalem’s early role fixed the city permanently in the Muslim heart. This early role means the Muslim attachment to Jerusalem is rooted in worship and revelation from the earliest days of Islam. To learn more, see Al-Aqsa: Past, Present, and Promise.

The Night Journey is one of the most celebrated events in the Prophet Muhammad’s life. In a single night, God carried him miraculously from Mecca to Jerusalem (the Isra), and from there raised him through the heavens (the Miʿraj). At Masjid al-Aqsa he led all of God’s earlier prophets, from Adam and Abraham to Moses and Jesus, in prayer, before ascending to receive the command of the five daily prayers. The Qur’an opens its seventeenth chapter by referring to this journey to “the farthest mosque,” al-Aqsa. For Muslims, the event ties Jerusalem directly to the Prophet and to the whole line of prophets before him, which is part of why the city ranks in sanctity just after Mecca and Medina.

Palestine and the wider region of al-Sham were home to many of God’s prophets, and the Qur’an describes this region as “the land that We blessed.” Abraham migrated to it. Solomon’s kingdom was centered there. Jacob, who was also called Israel, and his descendants are bound to it. Zechariah and Mary are described worshipping in the sanctuary of al-Aqsa, where the infant Jesus is said to have spoken. Moses led the Children of Israel toward it. Because so many prophets lived, worshipped, and were buried across this land, Muslims regard it not as ordinary territory but as sacred ground, holy long before the modern era.

Gaza has long been known as Gaza-Hashim, because Hashim, the great-grandfather of the Prophet Muhammad, is buried there. It also lies within al-Sham, the blessed region the Qur’an repeatedly calls holy, and it has long been regarded as a land of ribat, a frontier held and guarded for the protection of Muslim lands.

This history is significant, but it is not the main reason Muslims around the world feel such a strong attachment to Gaza today. For many, Gaza has become a symbol of steadfastness and resistance in the face of Israeli occupation. Its situation is distinct even among the occupied Palestinian territories. Since 2007, Gaza has been under a blockade that restricts the movement of people and goods by land, sea, and air, enclosing more than two million people in a narrow strip of land. The way its people have held onto their faith, their families, and their dignity under these conditions is what many Muslims now think of first when they hear Gaza’s name.

Jerusalem came under Muslim rule in the year 637, about five years after the Prophet Muhammad’s death, during the leadership of Umar ibn al-Khattab. Rather than entering as a conqueror bent on plunder, Umar accepted the city’s peaceful surrender and issued a written covenant guaranteeing the safety of its inhabitants, their property, and their places of worship, along with their freedom to practice their religion. Under the preceding Byzantine rule, Jews had been barred from living in Jerusalem; after the Muslim conquest, they were once again permitted to return and settle there, and Christians and Jews continued to live and worship in the city. The order Umar set in place held for centuries, until the Crusader invasion ruptured it. Muslims often cite this history as evidence that Muslim rule over Jerusalem was marked by the protection of other faiths rather than their erasure.

Salahuddin was a twelfth-century Muslim leader famous for recapturing Jerusalem from the crusaders in 1187, nearly ninety years after they had first seized it. When the crusaders had taken the city, they massacred much of its population. When Salahuddin retook it, he did the opposite: He spared the inhabitants, protected Christian residents and holy sites, and restored Jerusalem as a place where different communities could live and worship. In Muslim memory he stands as a model of power exercised with mercy and restraint, and his name endures as a symbol of the just and dignified return of Jerusalem.

The Qur’an affirms that God chose and favored the Children of Israel over the other nations of their time, and it acknowledges that a sacred land was granted to them at a point in history. But Muslim scholars read that choosing as a religious responsibility, not a permanent ethnic entitlement or an eternal deed to territory. The Qur’an ties inheritance of the land to righteousness rather than lineage, stating that “the land is inherited by My righteous servants.” Classical commentators understood the favor shown to the Children of Israel as relative to the peoples of their own era, not a standing claim across all of history. According to the Qur’an, no people holds the land by blood; it is entrusted to those who uphold faith and justice upon it.

In the Qur’an, the “Children of Israel” (Bani Israʾil) refers to the descendants and followers of the prophet Jacob, who was also called Israel. It names a religious and historical community bound by a covenant with God and defined by faith and conduct, not a modern nationality. The name Israel in scripture belongs to a prophet; it is not a reference to the nation-state founded in 1948. The Qur’an also stresses that belonging to this community was never a guarantee of favor regardless of behavior, because the Qur’an measures every people by righteousness rather than ancestry. Reading the Qur’anic Children of Israel as the modern state collapses a scriptural category into a present-day political one, an anachronistic reading that the tradition does not support.

Religion, undoubtedly, plays a significant role in this conflict. The Palestinian struggle, however, is rooted in a story of colonialism and dispossession, rife with violations of human rights and international law. Portraying it as an ancient feud between Muslims and Jews makes the occupation seem permanent and unsolvable. It also supports Israel’s claim to speak for Judaism as a whole, a claim many Jews reject and one at odds with the largely secular outlook of Israel’s founders.

In response, many supporters of Palestine insist the conflict is about anything but religion, and describe it purely as a humanitarian or human rights issue. That framing assumes religious concern is narrow and divisive, while the language of human rights is neutral and universal. Yet that same language has been used by settler groups to justify the displacement of Palestinians.

For Muslims, standing with Palestine is a religious commitment. Many Palestinians understand their resistance through faith, divine justice, dignity, and patient endurance, as members of the global umma. The Qur’an’s call to justice is not limited to Muslims. It extends to Palestinians of every faith, including the Christians who live under the same occupation.

For centuries, Palestine has been home to a religiously and ethnically diverse community of Muslims, Christians, Jews, and more who have lived in relative peace and without major conflict.

An iconic example that dispels this myth of perpetual and irreconcilable religious conflict is the centuries-long Muslim custodianship of the keys to one of Christendom’s most revered sites, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

Unfortunately, the misrepresentation of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is not always an honest mistake. It is often portrayed as being an “impossibly complicated” or centuries-long religious conflict in order to deliberately obscure certain inconvenient truths or to shield Israel from accountability. This myth works to minimize or obfuscate clear Zionist injustices and rights violations, as well as to dehumanize the Palestinian people as a collective of irrational religious zealots, thereby justifying Israeli apartheid, occupation, and anti-Palestinian violence.

But, in the words of acclaimed Black American author and activist, Ta-Nehisi Coates, the conflict is, in many ways, shockingly “uncomplicated”:

The most shocking thing about my time over there was how uncomplicated it actually is. Now, I’m not saying the details of it are not complicated. History is always complicated. Present events are always complicated. But the way this is reported in the Western media is as though one needs a PhD in Middle Eastern studies to understand the basic morality of holding a people in a situation in which they don’t have basic rights, including the right that we treasure most … the right to vote, and then declaring that state a democracy. It’s actually not that hard to understand. It’s actually quite familiar to those of us with a familiarity to African American history.

During the Great Revolt of 1936, the largest anti-colonial uprising in Palestine in the twentieth century, Palestinian Muslims and Christians organized side by side against British colonial rule and accelerating settlement. They issued joint petitions, sustained a months-long general strike, and fought under shared leadership. Colonial authorities worked deliberately to manufacture a Muslim-Christian split through propaganda and divide-and-rule tactics, because a united population was far harder to control. The image of Palestinians locked in an ancient religious feud obscures this record of solidarity. For centuries Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived together across Palestine, and its modern resistance has often been a national cause shared across faiths.

While the overwhelming majority of Palestinians are Muslim, there exists a significant minority of Palestinian Christians, as well as a very tiny percentage of Palestinians who belong to other religious groups including Samaritans and Druze. Palestinians of all faiths experience apartheid, aggression, and occupation.

In 2022, famed Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, a Christian whose family hails from the city of Bethlehem, was shot and killed by an Israeli soldier. Her Jerusalem funeral would later become the site of violence by Israeli police who attacked crowds of mourners and pallbearers causing Abu Akleh’s casket to nearly fall to the ground.

Despite underreporting in Western media, Palestinian Christians and their churches have also been attacked during Israel’s latest war on Gaza. For instance, in December 2023, Israeli snipers shot and killed two Palestinian Christian women on their way to the bathroom as they walked within the grounds of the Holy Family Church where they had been seeking refuge.

The word nakba (Arabic for “catastrophe” or “calamity”) is used to describe the massacres, atrocities, and ethnic cleansing through which the state of Israel was established. Between 1947 and 1948, Zionist militias carried out wide-scale atrocities against thousands of Palestinians (including civilian women, children, and the elderly), destroyed thousands of homes and around 530 Palestinian villages (effectively wiping them off the map), and forcing over 700,000 Palestinians into exile, amounting to what was then around 85 percent of the total population of ethnically cleansed territories.

Many also describe Israel’s actions as an ongoing nakba, given that Zionist state and vigilante/settler violence, active theft and occupation of Palestinian lands and resources, and discriminatory apartheid rule persist through the present day.

Yes, it would be accurate to describe Israel’s war on Gaza as a genocide. Many would also characterize Israel’s actions and the wider Zionist project preceding its current assault on Gaza as genocidal.

The United Nations Genocide Convention defines genocide as

any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: Killing members of the group; Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

In March 2024, the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) concluded that “there are reasonable grounds to believe” that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.

This conclusion was reached after analyzing not only the nature and impact of Israeli violence against the people of Gaza, but by taking into account statements of numerous Israeli political and military leaders and soldiers indicating genocidal intent.

In addition to a growing body of genocide scholars, rights groups, and international bodies such as the (UNHRC) describing Israeli actions as genocidal, a growing number of prominent voices from across the political and media spectrum, including in the United States, have described Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide.

To hear more about Israel’s genocide in Gaza and other crimes against the Palestinian people, please refer to this conversation between Dr. Omar Suleiman and Kim Iversen.

Zionism is a settler colonial ideology and movement, tracing back to the nineteenth century, that calls for the establishment and maintenance of a Jewish (i.e., Jewish-majority) nation-state in the land of Palestine. Maintaining this Jewish majority has necessarily required and continues to require violent demographic engineering by methods including the dispossession, disenfranchisement, and ethnic cleansing (killing and forced exile) of millions of Palestinians.

Not all Jews are Zionists, nor are all Zionists Jews. In fact, globally, there are actually more non-Jewish Zionists than there are Jewish Zionists. Some of the most important and powerful opponents of Zionism and advocates for the Palestinian cause are Jewish individuals and organizations.

No. Opposing or being critical of Zionism and the state of Israel are not to be equated with anti-Jewish hatred or bigotry.

To equate the two is a common tactic used to chill the discourse around and deter (or delegitimize and even criminalize) any and all criticism of Zionism and Israel as well as advocacy for Palestinian rights and self-determination.

The Palestinian cause is not one predicated upon dehumanizing or fomenting racist hatred against the Jewish people or any group of people for that matter. Rather, it is about the exact opposite: advocating for the restoration of the rights and dignity of the Palestinian people.

Moreover, equating anti-Zionism or criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism conflates the religion of Judaism with the political ideology of Zionism, erasing the countless Jewish individuals and groups committed to a just future for the Palestinian people and who, to varying degrees, oppose or strongly criticize Zionism and the state of Israel.

The suffering in Gaza is the result of human oppression, not a sign of God’s approval of it. The Qur’an presents this life as a test in which people are free to choose justice or injustice, and scholars explain that God permits evil to exist without endorsing it, bringing about through it goods that would not otherwise be possible. The Qur’an and Sunnah point to a wisdom for each party involved.

For the oppressors, delay is not neglect. The Qur’an warns, “Never think that God is unaware of what the wrongdoers do. He only delays them for a Day when eyes will stare in horror” (Qur’an 14:42).

For the oppressed, nothing they endure is lost. The Prophet Muhammad taught that trials raise the rank of the patient believer, and the Qur’an describes those killed unjustly as alive with their Lord. Many in Gaza pray for victory with full confidence in God's power, while trusting His wisdom in delaying it.

For everyone watching, Gaza is itself a test. The Qur’an says God will test people “until We make evident those who strive among you and the patient” (Qur’an 47:31). The question is not only what the people of Gaza are enduring, but what the rest of the world will do in response. Gaza has also forced the world to reassess the material, political, and spiritual failures that made this moment possible, including the weakness of a Muslim world that could not prevent it. Scholars note that suffering can bring about the reform of a society and prepare it for good that would otherwise be impossible, and for many, what the world witnessed in Gaza marked a turning point from which there is no going back. The faith of its people has already drawn people across the world to the Qur’an and shaken many Muslims out of complacency and into action.

Even when the wisdom behind a trial is not apparent, Muslims are called to seek it rather than stop at the question, and the Qur’an repeatedly urges reflection on the events of this world.

The Qur’an and Sunnah frame standing with the oppressed as both a spiritual and a practical duty. Dua, sincere prayer for the oppressed, is the least anyone can do, and Muslims are taught never to underestimate it. But prayer is meant to accompany action, not replace it. What is needed is real effort, and scholars point to giving charity, staying accurately informed and countering misinformation, using one’s voice and influence to oppose injustice, taking part in ethical boycotts and advocacy, and building principled alliances with others who seek justice. Just as important is the inward work: turning anger into steady, disciplined effort rather than despair, and holding to one’s own moral and religious integrity, since movements are often undone from within before they are ever defeated from without. Striving for justice and refining oneself are two halves of one duty.

The Qur’an and Sunnah tie the future of Jerusalem to divine justice. The Qur’an’s account of the Children of Israel is presented as a warning to every people: Power built on oppression does not endure, and those given the land are expected to hold it with justice or forfeit it. Muslims believe the final outcome of history belongs to God, who has promised that justice will prevail and that tyranny is temporary. Jerusalem also features in Prophetic narrations about the end of time, including the return of Jesus. The prevailing tone is one of patient hope: confidence that the city will again be held with justice and dignity, paired with a warning against Muslims themselves ever becoming like the oppressors they resist.