A lead­ing schol­ar in Israel stud­ies, S. Ilan Troen has writ­ten an intro­duc­tion to the reli­gious sig­nif­i­cance of Israel, updat­ed and reded­i­cat­ed in mem­o­ry of the hor­rif­ic events of Octo­ber 7, 2023. His work reminds us that there are com­pet­ing the­olo­gies defin­ing the con­flict. This com­plex­i­ty is mag­ni­fied by the fact that three faith com­mu­ni­ties, as opposed to two in oth­er con­test­ed areas like Cyprus, Ire­land, and the Indi­an sub­con­ti­nent, under­stand the Land of Israel to be cen­tral to their iden­ti­ty. Troen, the found­ing direc­tor of the Israel stud­ies depart­ments at both Ben Guri­on and Bran­deis Uni­ver­si­ty, sug­gests that reli­gious jus­ti­fi­ca­tions for own­er­ship of the Land of Israel have not dis­ap­peared, despite the ris­ing sec­u­lar­ism of the mod­ern age. He claims that the sec­u­lar and reli­gious com­po­nents ​“may be main­tained simul­ta­ne­ous­ly and are often interwoven.”

Troen’s argu­ment is divid­ed into three parts. The first out­lines sec­u­lar claims to the Land of Israel, includ­ing the dis­so­lu­tion of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of both Jew­ish and Arab self-deter­mi­na­tion. The sec­ond part reviews the­o­log­i­cal argu­ments. In three sep­a­rate chap­ters, it traces the Jew­ish, Chris­t­ian, and Mus­lim claims to the land. In chap­ter eight, the author con­sid­ers rad­i­cal Islam’s growth and specif­i­cal­ly Hamas’s 1988 char­ter, which is a the­o­log­i­cal man­i­festo that iden­ti­fies all of Pales­tine as a waqf, a land belong­ing to Islam in per­pe­tu­ity. The third sec­tion explores the inter­sec­tion of sec­u­lar and reli­gious claims. It also rec­og­nizes the rise of anti­semitism that ​“extends to rejec­tion of the Jew­ish state and infects and but­tress­es efforts to dele­git­i­mate Israel’s estab­lish­ment.” Troen then com­pares the lan­guage of Israel’s Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence to the doc­u­ments out­lin­ing Hamas’s claim to Palestine.

Israel/​Palestine in World Reli­gions is an exam­i­na­tion of the most crit­i­cal issues per­pet­u­at­ing the Israeli-Pales­tin­ian con­flict. It high­lights the need to under­stand the con­flict as a nuanced inter­ac­tion between sec­u­lar and reli­gious claims that are near-impos­si­ble to sep­a­rate. This leads those who seek to jus­ti­fy either kind of claim to the land to face resis­tance by detrac­tors across the spec­trum. Troen’s acces­si­ble analy­sis recasts one of the most intractable con­flicts of the mod­ern age into a strug­gle that can be resolved only by a recog­ni­tion, appre­ci­a­tion, and rec­on­cil­i­a­tion of both con­tem­po­rary and time­less challenges.