Religion functioned to invent Zionist land claims but only to mobilize Palestinians.

Evidence

Functionally, the Zionist movement heavily used and consciously deployed Judaic claims as a primary force to invent a strong nationalist Jewish connection with Palestine and to mobilize Jews worldwide behind Zionism. Literature confirming this point is massive; commonly indicating that “even for Ben Gurion and other secularized Jewish nationalists the Hebrew Bible was the spiritual, and cultural touchstone for Jewish identity and the Jewish people’s link to the land of Israel” (Landau 2009). By contrast, the Palestinians resorted to religious Islamic claims only secondarily by way of affirming their connection with the land of Palestine. For the Palestinians, uninterrupted millennia-long habitation and ownership of Palestine created a natural and uncontested collective connection to the land that warranted no need for imposing meta-religious claims over such links. Even with the alarming rise of Zionist claims over Palestine in the first quarter of the twentieth century, the Palestinians still felt that they neither needed to prove their indigenous status in Palestine nor their subsequent unbroken links with it. — Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, When Politics Are Sacralized, 2367

Categorization

• XREF: Builds on ch4’s and ch13’s claims that religious sacralization in the settler case is constitutive — this chapter is the direct reverse case testing that asymmetry. — connects to: Zionism required religious myth because it lacked the land and language pillars of nationalism. — Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, When Politics Are Sacralized:…, 2373; Even the most religious Palestinian factions used religion for mobilization, not land claims — Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, When Politics Are Sacralized:…, 2408; Zionist and Palestinian uses of religion differ fundamentally in function and centrality — Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, When Politics Are Sacralized:…, 2366
• DEEPTHINKING: A clean natural experiment in the reader’s hypothesis: same land, same religion available to both sides, yet only one side needed sacralized claims — because the other side already possessed the two pillars of modern nationalism (territory + language).

Broader Connections

• Even the most religious Palestinian factions used religion for mobilization, not land claims #corroborates (0.90) — Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, When Politics Are Sacralized, 2408
• Zionist and Palestinian uses of religion differ fundamentally in function and centrality #expands (0.85) — Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, When Politics Are Sacralized, 2366