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.