Theme
“When the conflict is a prophecy”
For some on every side, this isn't a political conflict with possible compromises but the last act of a script written in scripture: the gathering of the Jews, the Temple, the war before the end, the victory of the faithful. Inside that frame a compromise is a betrayal of prophecy.
What's left out
Victory as proof of providence.
Every side reads wins as signs. On one side: the 'miracle' of 1948 and the Six-Day War, and 'I will bless those who bless you'; on the other: Hezbollah's 'Divine Victory' of 2006 and Hamas presenting October 7 and its survival as divine victory. Both leave out the wars that weren't won, or not cleanly: the first days of 1973, Lebanon 2006, October 7 itself. Outcomes are poor evidence of whose side God is on, and Jewish tradition's own memory of catastrophe after certainty says as much.
Traps here:◆ The exception as proof
The picture
Christian Zionism: the Jews' return as a sign of the end.
Dispensationalist Protestantism, spread from the 19th century (John Nelson Darby) and hugely influential among American evangelicals, reads the gathering of the Jews in the land as a precondition for the end times: the rapture, a great tribulation, the return of Christ. Genesis 12:3, 'I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse', is quoted as a reason for nations to support Israel, and organised lobbying rests partly on it. Some groups support rebuilding the Temple, including the breeding of red heifers for ritual purity; heifers raised in Texas were brought to Israel in 2022 ⚠. In many versions of the script, Jews are instruments: most perish or convert in the tribulation (see 'Allies in destruction').
Iranian Mahdism: the end of Israel as part of the redemption.
Twelver Shiism awaits the return of the hidden twelfth Imam, the Mahdi. The Islamic Republic has woven Israel's disappearance into this horizon: the annual Quds Day, the promise that Israel will 'not see the next 25 years' (see the timeline), and presidential speeches, including at the UN, calling for the Mahdi's hastened return ⚠. Many Iranians, and many Shia clergy, don't share the regime's political reading (see the Iran entries).
Sunni apocalyptic: the stones and the trees.
A hadith about the last day, in which stones and trees will call out 'there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him', except the gharqad tree, is quoted in Article 7 of Hamas's 1988 charter. Jihadist movements such as ISIS built whole propaganda campaigns on end-times prophecies (its magazine was named after Dabiq, the site of a prophesied final battle). Most Muslims read these traditions very differently or not at all (see 'Which Islam?').
Traps here:◆ Which Islam?
Jewish messianism: redemption through the land.
The mirror exists within Judaism. Religious Zionism, especially Gush Emunim from 1974, read the conquest of 1967 as 'the beginning of redemption' and settlement as a religious duty; the Temple Mount movements seek to build a Third Temple; Kahanism fused messianism with expulsion. Much of Jewish tradition warns against exactly this: the Talmud's 'three oaths' against forcing the end, and the memory of Bar Kokhba, whose messianic revolt (132–135) ended in catastrophe. Many Haredi Jews reject Zionism for this reason (see 'A religion doesn't justify having a country.').
A reading that takes no side.
Not every religious reading turns the conflict into a finale that someone wins. The Bahá'í Faith, whose world centre is in Haifa and Akka because the Ottomans exiled its founder there in 1868, and which takes no political side, reads the return of the Jews to the Holy Land as part of humanity's movement toward unity, something to be worked through rather than won. Its writings link the return to 1844, and to the Ottoman edict of that year that ended executions for apostasy ⚠. In 1919 'Abdu'l-Bahá was reported as saying: 'If the Zionists will mingle with the other races and live in unity with them, they will succeed. … The Zionists should make it clear that their principle is to elevate all the people here and to develop the country for all its inhabitants' (Star of the West, 8 September 1919) ⚠. The Faith does not proselytise in Israel, and its members, persecuted in Iran partly as supposed 'Zionist spies', take no part in partisan politics.
Where it leads if pressed
Where it leads: prophecy makes compromise a sin.
What unites the end-times readings is their effect on politics: if the outcome is written, every compromise is a betrayal of God's plan, and every enemy is cast in a cosmic role (see 'The strict enemy frame'). That's why these movements sit behind several of the deadlocks: the Temple Mount, the refusal to give up land, the refusal to recognise the other. The honest question to ask a believer on any side is not whether the prophecy is true, but whether it tells you to stop looking for a solution. The readings that don't (in all these traditions there are many) are allies of the people who want one.
Traps here:◆ The strict enemy frame