Only Palestinians are allowed to invoke religion for nationalistic purposes

Arab leaders and pundits habitually warn, in English, that Israel is threatening to threatening to turn the conflict into a religious war. 

A recent example comes from Ramzy Baroud in Arab News, saying, 

What is currently taking place in Palestine is not a religious war, but some Israeli officials and political parties are keen on turning it into one. 

Though warnings against “religious wars” in Palestine — in fact, the entire region — have been mostly linked to Israel’s current “most rightwing government in history,” religious discourses have been the most dominant since the establishment of Israel’s founding ideology, Zionism, in the late-19th century. 

This is absurd to the extreme. 

This has been a religious war for decades, and it has been Palestinians making it one.

From their first leader, the Mufti of Jerusalem, their claims have been based primarily on religious themes and arguments. Religion suffuses everything they do - their words, their actions, their thinking - all the way back to the Mufti's claim that "Al Aqsa is in danger!" from Jews.

The Palestinian Arab armed forces in both the 1936 riots and the 1948 war were called the "Army of the Holy War."

The Palestinian constitution says, "Islam is the official religion in Palestine. ...  The principles of Islamic Shari’a shall be a principal source of legislation."

The Palestinian Authority has a Ministry of Religious Endowments.

Members of the PLO executive Committee marked Eid yesterday by laying a wreath on the grave of Yasir Arafat. 

Mahmoud Abbas' speeches - even to the UN - all begin with "In the name of God, the most gracious, the most merciful."

Abbas referred to rebuilding Gaza in 2016 as a "jihad."

Every Palestinian media outlet refers to those killed by Israeli forces as "martyrs," not "victims."

The religious aspect is so ingrained that a supposedly secular UNRWA is asking for Muslims to give it "zakat" (religious charity) funds, quoting the Quran. Do any other UN agencies ever quote any other religious texts?  (I found an exception that proves the rule.)

And, of course, Gaza groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad are Islamic extremist groups which use Islam to justify attacking Jews. 

It isn't Israel that seeks a religious war. It is the Palestinians, and their own religious justifications are accepted without any objection by the world.

But whenever Jews assert their own religious desires in the land of the Torah, they are demeaned - not only by Palestinians - for acting in such a primitive, non-enlightened manner.

The Palestinians claim, and much of the world accepts, the idea that only Muslims have an unquestioned religious claim on the land and the holy sites that were all invariably Jewish holy sites 1500 years before Mohammed was born. 

Jewish religious claims are treated with scorn while Muslim religious claims are accepted without question. And part of the reason is exactly because religion is the major component of the Palestinian nationalist philosophy.

Disparaging the Jewish religious claims to the land - especially while not questioning the Palestinian Islamic-based claims - is another manifestation of the antisemitism that is accepted as normal nowadays.. 

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