Palestinian nationalism is one big lie.
Islam made Palestine. The struggle is not political, but religious.
Please consider supporting our mission to help everyone better understand and become smarter about the Jewish world. A gift of any amount helps keep our platform free of advertising and accessible to all.
This is a guest essay by Dan Burmawi, a former Muslim from Jordan who left Islam and the Middle East. He now lives in the United States.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
Before “Palestinian nationalism” was ever uttered as a phrase, before communists in Moscow even bothered to discuss the Middle East, and long before Western academics tried to retroactively frame the conflict through Marxist or postmodern lenses, Palestine was an Islamic land.
Its very status under the Ottomans was not debated in nationalist categories but in theological ones. Palestine belonged to Dar al-Islam, the abode of Islam, and that designation was not symbolic; it was binding. The land was not just territory; it was waqf, an inalienable trust consecrated to God. Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa Mosque gave it sacred gravity, making the defense of Palestine a religious duty long before it was ever recast as an anti-colonial slogan.
Ottoman administration entrenched this Islamic order. Sharia courts mediated daily life, waqf revenues funded mosques and schools, and the ulema gave religious legitimacy to political authority. Even as cracks appeared in the empire in the 19th century, the cultural language of loyalty was still Islamic.
When the Nahda (Arab renaissance) began to stir nationalist thought among Arab intellectuals in Cairo and Beirut, in Palestine it barely registered beyond the coffeehouses of a few urban elites. For the masses, overwhelmingly rural, poor, devout, their world was structured by faith, not ideology.
This continuity mattered. Because when the empire collapsed in 1917 and 1918 and Britain took over under the Mandate of Palestine, the framework into which Zionism was received was not “national sovereignty” or “class struggle” but the religious framework of Dar al-Islam. To transfer this land to Jews, to promise it to another people, was not seen as a political experiment, but a desecration of the sacred. The Balfour Declaration was received not merely as a betrayal of Arab interests, but as a violation of God’s law. And that is why jihad — not nationalism, not communism — would define the reaction from the outset.
After World War I, communism attempted to plant itself in Palestine, carried on the backs of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. Many of these young men and women had been socialists in Warsaw and Odessa, steeped in the rhetoric of class struggle and inspired by Lenin’s revolution of 1917. They arrived in Palestine determined to transplant Marxism into the Middle East.
In 1919, they formed the Socialist Workers Movement (Mifleget Poalim Sozialistim), which soon internally fractured into competing factions. Some believed that Zionism itself could be justified as a socialist project, the creation of a Jewish workers’ society on Palestinian soil. Others, skeptical of Zionist colonization, leaned toward a universalist anti-imperialism that called for solidarity with Arab workers.
The Comintern in Moscow, ever eager to expand its network in the colonial world, recognized that the only way for communism to survive in Palestine was to “Arabize.” In 1923, the factions merged into a single Palestine Communist Party, formally recognized by the Comintern in 1924.
On paper it looked promising: anti-imperialism, anti-Zionism, solidarity with the Arab masses. In reality, it was a joke. Membership was still overwhelmingly Jewish, and Arab recruits were few and far between. The Palestine Communist Party’s atheism alone was fatal in a deeply religious society. To tell a Palestinian peasant that the defense of al-Aqsa was not about God but about “class struggle” was not only insulting; it was incomprehensible.
The Palestine Communist Party tried to bridge the divide. They sponsored Ehdut in 1926, a binational workers’ organization meant to unite Arabs and Jews under one class banner. It collapsed almost instantly. Arabs distrusted Jewish motives, suspecting that “internationalism” was a Trojan horse for Zionism. Jews, meanwhile, were reluctant to abandon the Zionist principle of “Hebrew labor” that excluded Arabs from work. The communists had engineered a perfect ideological cul-de-sac: too Zionist for Arabs, too anti-Zionist for Jews, too atheist for everyone.
By the early 1930s, the Palestine Communist Party survived only because Moscow subsidized it. Britain monitored it, Zionist leaders distrusted it, Arab nationalists dismissed it. The Comintern kept demanding “Arabization,” and eventually in 1934, under Radwan al-Hilu, the Palestine Communist Party got its first Arab secretary-general. But even this breakthrough could not disguise the obvious: The communists were outsiders, parasites on a conflict they neither created nor could control.
If the communists failed because they had no roots, the nationalists at least had names, families, and social standing. In the 1920s and 1930s, two families dominated Palestinian politics: the Husseini’s and the Nashashibi’s. They led the Arab Executive, petitioned the British, and maneuvered for influence. They spoke in the language of nationalism, invoking Arab unity and the right of self-determination.
But for all their rhetoric, their mobilizing power was weak. Nationalism among the educated elite was just that, elite. It circulated in newspapers, not in mosques; in notables’ salons, not in peasant villages. The Nashashibis, in particular, often preferred accommodation with the British and even cooperation with Zionists when it suited their interests. This pragmatism only deepened the divide between them and the broader population, who wanted something more visceral, more binding than nationalist speeches.
Nationalism also suffered from being conceptually thin. What exactly did it mean to be “Palestinian” in the 1920s? Most people’s identity was still local (a village, a clan) or religious (Muslim, Christian, Jewish). The idea of “nation” was abstract, borrowed from European categories. Islam, on the other hand, was not abstract. It was the lived reality of prayer, law, community, and history. That is why nationalist slogans could not compete with the religious cry that “al-Aqsa is in danger.”
This explains why the most consequential Palestinian leader of the Mandate period was not a secular nationalist, but a religious authority: Haj Amin al-Husseini.
Appointed Grand Mufti of Jerusalem in 1921, Husseini became the single most important figure in Palestinian politics. His power was not bureaucratic but spiritual. As head of the Supreme Muslim Council, he controlled the waqf funds, the mosques, the religious schools. In a society where Islam framed daily life, this meant he controlled the very soul of the people.
Husseini’s genius, and his danger, was in fusing religious obligation with nationalist politics. He did not frame opposition to Zionism as merely “political” or “economic.” He declared it sacred. To defend Palestine was to defend Islam itself, and to fight the Jews was to fulfill the command of God. This gave nationalism a backbone it otherwise lacked. Under Husseini, nationalism put on Islamic armor.
The Nebi Musa riots of 1920 were an early glimpse. What began as a religious procession to a shrine was turned into an anti-Jewish pogrom, with Husseini playing a central role. By 1929, at the Western Wall riots, the pattern was unmistakable. What might have remained a dispute over prayer rights was escalated by Husseini into a call to arms. Jewish presence at the Wall was cast as a desecration of al-Aqsa, a violation of Islam. The cry went out: jihad. And thousands answered.
The nationalists petitioned the British, the communists circulated pamphlets, but it was Husseini’s framing that moved the masses. Sermons, fatwas, religious festivals, all became tools of mobilization. Islam was not a backdrop to the conflict; it was the engine.
The Arab Revolt of 1936 to 1939 was the watershed moment of British Mandate Palestine. For the first time, the conflict erupted into sustained mass violence: strikes, assassinations, bombings, and guerrilla campaigns against both the British and the Zionist community. Historians have tried to frame it as a “nationalist revolt,” but this is misleading. At its heart, it was driven by Islamic energy, directed through religious institutions, and justified by theological duty.
When the revolt began in April 1936 with a general strike in Nablus, it was not simply a labor protest, but a call issued from mosques. The Arab Higher Committee, dominated by Haj Amin al-Husseini and his allies, framed the strike in religious terms: Jewish immigration was not merely a demographic threat but a violation of Islam’s rights over Palestine. Friday sermons thundered with warnings that al-Aqsa itself was under siege. The movement’s iconography was not Marxist hammer-and-sickle or nationalist flags but Qur’anic verses and calls for jihad.
Communists, desperate to make themselves relevant, tried to infiltrate the strike committees. They distributed leaflets, denouncing British imperialism and Jewish capitalists. But their atheism was poison. In villages where muezzins summoned the faithful to resist, communist agitators were viewed as foreign, even traitorous. The Palestine Communist Party barely managed to insert a handful of Arab cadres into the revolt, and those often cloaked their ideology to survive.
Nationalists, too, quickly realized that without Islam their cause had no mobilizing force. Even secular leaders found themselves adopting religious rhetoric, speaking of Palestine as sacred land and invoking Islamic duty. It was Husseini, not the communists or the Western-educated liberals, who set the terms of the struggle.
The revolt revealed another critical truth: violence against Jews was not framed primarily as class conflict or political competition but as religious obligation. Armed bands attacked Jewish farms and convoys with the conviction that they were fighting infidels encroaching on Muslim land. The language of martyrdom, of paradise for those who died resisting, was pervasive. Even when nationalist tracts were printed, the oral culture of resistance was saturated with Islamic imagery.
The revolt collapsed by 1939 under the weight of British repression, internal divisions, and strategic missteps. Thousands of Arabs were killed, villages destroyed, leadership exiled. Yet its legacy was profound. It demonstrated that Islam, not Marxism, not Western-style nationalism, could mobilize the masses into a sustained insurgency.
The 1936-to-1939 revolt also cemented the irrelevance of the communists. Despite Comintern directives urging Arabization and anti-Zionist solidarity, the Palestine Communist Party remained peripheral. When Radwan al-Hilu, an Arab, became secretary-general in 1934, Moscow hoped this would transform the party into a genuine Arab vanguard.
But the revolt showed otherwise. Al-Hilu himself was caught between Moscow’s line and the realities on the ground. The Comintern’s insistence on opposing Zionism aligned superficially with Arab sentiment, but its equally strong opposition to Islam as “opium of the masses” was suicidal. To gain Arab recruits, the Palestine Communist Party had to mute its atheism, but this only made it look hypocritical and weak. Worse, Jewish communists within the party often had divided loyalties, reluctant to break completely with the Zionist labor movement.
When the revolt ended, the Palestine Communist Party had gained nothing. The Arab street did not rally to Marxism. The peasants who had carried rifles in the hills of Galilee and Hebron did not lay them down to join class struggle. They returned to their villages with a deeper conviction that jihad was the true framework of resistance. Communism had been tested in fire and found wanting.
The outbreak of World War II shifted the entire political landscape. For Arab nationalists, the immediate enemy was still Britain, the colonial overlord of Palestine. For communists, loyalties followed Moscow’s shifting line: from neutrality in 1939 (when the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact tied Stalin to Hitler), to rabid support for the Allies after June 1941 (when Germany invaded the USSR). These reversals only deepened Arab distrust of the communists, who now seemed opportunistic tools of a foreign ideology.
Haj Amin al-Husseini, meanwhile, charted a course that revealed the true axis of Palestinian politics: Islamic-motivated Jew-hatred. Exiled after the revolt, Husseini found refuge first in Iraq, where he helped stir the pro-Axis Rashid Ali coup of 1941, and later in Berlin, where he became the Nazis’ key Arab ally.
In Berlin, Husseini did not speak the language of Marx or liberal nationalism. He spoke the language of jihad. His Arabic broadcasts on Nazi radio called on Muslims to rise up, presenting Hitler as a defender of Islam against Jews and British imperialism. He met personally with Himmler, expressed support for the extermination of the Jews, and recruited Muslim units for the Waffen-SS in the Balkans. For him, the war was not a clash of ideologies but a holy war against the Jews.
This episode is critical because it exposes, in the starkest terms, the futility of reducing Palestinian politics to nationalism or leftist ideology. Husseini’s alliance with the Nazis was not about anti-colonial solidarity or class struggle. It was about Islam’s theological enmity toward Jews, weaponized in the service of totalitarian power.
Meanwhile, communists were reduced to irrelevance. Once Moscow joined the Allied camp in 1941, the Palestine Communist Party dutifully supported Britain’s war effort, the same Britain that Arabs despised for repressing the revolt and enabling Zionism. This ideological about-face destroyed whatever little credibility the communists had among Palestinians. While Husseini was recruiting Muslims for jihad under Hitler, the communists were waving British flags for Stalin. The contrast could not have been sharper.
The end of the war brought the Mandate to its breaking point. Britain, exhausted and delegitimized, handed the Palestine question to the newly formed United Nations. The UN Partition Plan of November 1947 proposed dividing the land into Jewish and Arab states.
At first, both the Palestine Communist Party and its Arab offshoot, the National Liberation League (formed in 1944), opposed partition. It contradicted their anti-imperialist line and aligned them, briefly, with Arab nationalists. But when the Soviet Union stunned the world by supporting partition as a pragmatic way to expel Britain and gain influence in the Middle East, both the Palestine Communist Party and National Liberation League obediently reversed course. Overnight, they endorsed partition.
This flip-flop was catastrophic. While Husseini and the Arab Higher Committee declared holy war against partition, communists were suddenly advocating compromise with Zionism. The Arab street saw them for what they were: puppets of Moscow, detached from the actual struggle. Whatever marginal influence communists had gained evaporated.
The 1948 war sealed the matter. When five Arab armies invaded the newborn State of Israel, the rhetoric was religious: jihad, martyrdom, defense of al-Aqsa. Imams preached it from pulpits, volunteers marched under the banner of Islam. Communists and nationalists might have participated in propaganda or skirmishes, but they were not the soul of the struggle. Islam was.
When the dust settled, the communists fragmented: the Palestine Communist Party inside Israel became Maki, the National Liberation League merged into it, and in the West Bank and Gaza new Arab communist groups emerged under Jordanian and Egyptian patronage. But they were irrelevant footnotes. The defining inheritance of 1948 was not Marxism, nor even secular nationalism. It was the deepened conviction that the war against Israel was a religious obligation, a continuation of jihad.
Looking back across the Mandate of Palestine period, the trajectory is clear: Communism tried to take root but failed because it was alien to the soil of Palestine. Nationalism emerged but was too thin to mobilize the masses. Islam, by contrast, was the framework that bound people together, gave the struggle transcendent meaning, and turned conflict into duty.
The communists could never overcome their atheism, their foreign dependence on Moscow, or their inability to speak the language of faith. The nationalists could never bridge the gap between elite rhetoric and popular devotion. Only Islam provided both the vocabulary and the obligation that resonated with ordinary Palestinians.
This is why the claim that “Palestine created jihad” is historically false. The reality is the opposite: It was Islam that created Palestine as a cause. Without Islam, the communists would have been a minor socialist club in Haifa, the nationalists a faction of urban notables quarreling for influence. It was Islam that turned the land into sacred territory, opposition to Zionism into religious duty, and political struggle into holy war.
The legacy is inescapable. Every later development, from the rise of Fatah to Hamas, sits on this foundation. Communism vanished, nationalism faltered, but Islam endured because it was not imported or improvised; it was the very identity of the people.
The creation of the State of Israel in May 1948 and the ensuing Arab-Israeli war transformed the Palestinian question from a local revolt into a central cause of the Arab world. For Palestinians, it was the Nakba (catastrophe), marked by the displacement of hundreds of thousands and the shattering of any hope for immediate statehood. For the broader Arab world, it became a wound that demanded redress.
But the way Palestinians and Arabs interpreted the Nakba was not primarily through the language of class struggle or secular nationalism. The overwhelming frame was Islamic. Mosques became the centers of refugee life. Preachers proclaimed that the defeat was divine punishment for disunity and failure to live by Islam. Quranic verses about exile and divine wrath were invoked to explain the loss, and the struggle to return was cast as jihad.
Communists, meanwhile, were in disarray. In Israel, the Palestine Communist Party was reconstituted as Maki, with both Jewish and Arab members. But their acceptance of partition and of the Jewish state, in obedience to Moscow’s orders, branded them as traitors in Arab eyes.
In the West Bank and Gaza, under Jordanian and Egyptian rule, communist cells survived but remained tiny and under constant suspicion. They produced pamphlets, debated dialectics, but had no answer to the raw, religious passion that animated the refugees in camps from Jericho to Gaza.
Arab nationalism, embodied by figures like Hajj Amin al-Husseini in exile and by the Arab Higher Committee, likewise lost credibility. Their incompetence in 1948, their corruption, and their factionalism discredited them in the eyes of ordinary Palestinians. If nationalism could not defend the land, then it was Islam that would.
The post-1948 decades were defined by the Cold War. For Palestinians, this meant that communism, which had already failed to take root during the Mandate, was now doubly discredited as a foreign ideology tied to Moscow.
Arab communist parties did exist in Jordan, Lebanon, and Iraq, and Palestinians participated in them. But they were constantly torn between two identities: loyalty to Moscow’s shifting geopolitics and loyalty to the Palestinian cause. When the Soviet Union courted Israel in the late 1940s and early 1950s, communists were paralyzed. When Moscow shifted in the mid-1950s to support Arab regimes against Israel, they dutifully followed. But at every step, it was clear they were puppets, not leaders.
Even when communists tried to take a harder line against Zionism, they could never mobilize the masses. Their atheism alienated ordinary Palestinians, who saw them as godless outsiders. Their slogans about “imperialism and capitalism” rang hollow compared to the simple Islamic message that Palestine was waqf, sacred land of Islam, that must be defended until the Day of Judgment.
In refugee camps, it was not communist cells that provided hope but Islamic charities, Qur’an schools, and preachers. Communists had pamphlets; Islam had a living community.
If communism remained foreign, Arab nationalism briefly appeared to offer a homegrown alternative. In the 1950s and 1960s, Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser became the hero of the Arab world. His call for Arab unity, his defiance of the West, his nationalization of the Suez Canal in 1956, all made him the symbol of anti-imperialist strength. For Palestinians, Nasserism became a beacon.
Nasser framed the Palestinian cause as an Arab cause. He promised that the collective power of the Arab world would one day liberate Palestine. The Palestinian fedayeen (guerrillas) of the 1950s and 1960s operated under his patronage. The Palestine Liberation Organization, created in 1964 under Ahmad Shukeiri, was explicitly an Arab nationalist body, heavily controlled by Egypt.
But there was a fatal problem. Arab nationalism was, at root, an elite ideology. It promised a modern, secular, socialist Arab future. But it did not speak the language of religion, which was the only language most Palestinians truly trusted.
Moreover, Arab nationalism’s failures were catastrophic. The humiliating Arab defeat in the 1967 Six-Day War shattered the myth of Nasser’s invincibility. The Arab armies, Egyptian, Syrian, Jordanian, collapsed in six days, while Israel seized the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, Sinai, and the Golan Heights. For Palestinians, this was not just another loss; it was a revelation. Arab nationalism had promised victory and delivered disaster.
In the aftermath, Nasser’s prestige declined, Ba’athist regimes in Syria and Iraq grew harsher and more corrupt, and Palestinians increasingly saw that salvation would not come from secular Arab states. Once again, the field was open for Islam.
After 1967, the center of Palestinian politics shifted to the Palestinians themselves, embodied in Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement and later in his leadership of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Unlike Shukeiri’s Egypt-controlled Palestine Liberation Organization, Arafat’s Fatah claimed to be independent, pragmatic, and focused solely on armed struggle to liberate Palestine.
For a time, Fatah and the Palestine Liberation Organization seemed to embody Palestinian nationalism. They trained guerrillas in Jordan, Lebanon, and elsewhere. They carried out spectacular operations: cross-border raids, hijackings, and the infamous attack on the Israeli team at the 1972 Munich Olympics. They became icons of Third World revolution, embraced by leftist movements worldwide.
But here again, the limits were clear. The Palestine Liberation Organization spoke in nationalist and socialist rhetoric, often borrowing Marxist slogans to win Soviet and Third World support. Groups like the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, led by George Habash, were explicitly Marxist-Leninist. They saw themselves as part of a global revolutionary struggle, linking Palestinian liberation to Vietnam, Cuba, and Latin America.
Yet inside Palestinian society, these ideas never truly penetrated. The Palestine Liberation Organization could attract intellectuals, militants, and international attention, but not the broad loyalty of ordinary refugees. In the camps, families sent their children to Qur’an classes, not Marxist study circles. When they prayed, they prayed in mosques, not in revolutionary cells.
By the late 1970s, the Palestine Liberation Organization was increasingly seen as corrupt, exiled, and detached from the grassroots. Its leaders lived in Beirut or Tunis, attending summits and signing declarations, while ordinary Palestinians lived in camps under military occupation. Once again, nationalism without Islam proved hollow.
While communists and nationalists battled for leadership, another force was quietly growing: the Muslim Brotherhood. Founded in Egypt in 1928, the Brotherhood had a branch in Palestine since the 1940s, focused primarily on religious education, charity, and building an Islamic society. During the heyday of Nasserism, it seemed marginal. But in the long run, it had the most enduring influence.
The Muslim Brotherhood’s strategy was patient. While communists distributed tracts and nationalists plotted guerrilla raids, the Brotherhood built mosques, schools, and social services in Gaza and the West Bank. It shaped a new generation of Palestinians whose identity was not Marxist or Arab nationalist but Islamic.
The decisive moment came in the late 1980s. By then, the Palestine Liberation Organization was weakened, exiled to Tunis after being expelled from Lebanon in 1982. Corruption and inefficiency plagued its leadership. Meanwhile, Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza had entered its second decade, and resentment was boiling.
When the First Intifada erupted in 1987, it was not the Palestine Liberation Organization that led it but local grassroots networks, many tied to the Muslim Brotherhood. Out of this uprising was born Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement. Unlike Fatah or the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Hamas did not frame its struggle in terms of nationalism or socialism. Its charter of 1988 made it explicit: The struggle for Palestine was jihad, an Islamic obligation until the Day of Judgment.
Hamas did not merely fight for territory; it fought for Islam. It rejected secularism outright, denounced compromise, and rooted its legitimacy in scripture. For the first time since Husseini, Islam had reclaimed open, unapologetic leadership of the Palestinian movement.
Looking back across the entire century, the verdict is unavoidable. Communism, imported from Moscow, never took root. It was alien, atheistic, and foreign. Its moments of visibility were always at the mercy of Soviet directives, not Palestinian reality.
Nationalism had its heyday under Nasser and the Palestine Liberation Organization, but it failed catastrophically in practice. It could not mobilize the masses in a lasting way, and its defeats discredited it. It promised liberation through secular unity but delivered corruption and compromise.
Islam, by contrast, endured and triumphed. From the 1936 revolt under Husseini, to the jihad rhetoric of 1948, to the mosque-based leadership of the Intifada, Islam was always the authentic voice. It was not imported from Europe or dictated by Moscow; it was the native language of the people.
This is why it is historically false to say that “Palestine created jihad.” The opposite is true: Islam created Palestine as a cause. Without Islam, communists would have been a sect, nationalists a clique. It was Islam that sacralized the land, made resistance a duty, and gave the conflict its enduring, unrelenting character.
And this is why, in the end, even today, the banner of Palestinian resistance is not Marx, not Nasser, not even the faded nationalism of Arafat. It is the green flag of Islam, carried by Hamas and its allies, declaring openly what has always been true: The struggle is not political, but religious.
Excellent, thank you! I would like to add that it is no longer just about the Middle East/Israel. In the language of Islam, the religious necessity is a world-wide caliphate: The entire world must become all-Muslims and infidels must convert or die. And they have the validation for their beliefs clearly stated in the Quran.
Excellent history!