The Hundred-Year Holy War

Just over a year ago, the entire world woke up to news of a massacre.

We all know the horrid tale. Waves of gunmen—some on paragliders, others on motorcycles—attacked families at kibbutzim and young people attending a music festival. The marauders filmed their murders on GoPro cameras. They burned families alive in their safe rooms, raped and mutilated their victims, and took hostages back to Gaza on golf carts. 

Why did they do it? 

This is how Al Jazeera journalist Marc Lamont Hill ascribed the motivation: “Before October 7, the people of Gaza didn’t have one minute of self-determination.” Never mind that Israel pulled out of the territory in 2005. Hill calls this fact “a right-wing lie that we’ve got to dissect with the truth, which is that for a hundred years there’s been a settler colonial project.”

For progressives, October 7 was a jailbreak from an open-air prison. 

But for the belligerents, it was Operation Al-Aqsa Flood: an act of jihad, or holy war. 

That’s what Hamas said shortly afterward, anyway. On October 10, they released a communiqué, which explained that the purpose of this massacre was “to bolster the steadfastness of the Palestinian people in the face of the open aggression of the occupation, thwart its schemes and dreams of Judaizing Jerusalem and Al-Aqsa, and achieve victory for the just cause of our Palestinian people and our struggle for the liberation of our land, prisoners, and sanctities.” 

It’s worth lingering on that phrase, “Judaizing Jerusalem and al-Aqsa.”

Because it reveals something very important about the Israel-Palestine conflict: that much of this is not about a country; it is about an ancient city. The world knows it as Jerusalem. The Palestinians call it Al-Quds. In the middle of this city is a large hill known to Jews as the Temple Mount and to Muslims as Haram al-Sharif, or noble sanctuary. Here, there are two great mosques: Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa. This, Muslims believe, is where the prophet Muhammad ascended to heaven in a dream.

And if you listen to Hamas, they’ll tell you that there is a plot by the Jews to destroy Al-Aqsa and build a third Jewish Temple where it now stands. 

That is a lie.

It’s been 57 years since Israel won the territory in the Six-Day War—plenty of time to Judaize Temple Mount. And though there are a few on the fringe of Israeli politics who speak fanatically about the desire to build a third temple, every government since Jerusalem was reunified has entrusted the mosques on top of the mountain to the guardianship of a Jordanian religious agency known as the Waqf.

Muslims, not Jews, remain the custodians of Al-Aqsa. 

But it’s worth understanding where this lie came from.

Palestinian nationalism has taken many forms over the past century, from Maoism to Islamism, but this one theme persists: Jews have no place in their ancestral homeland, and they threaten the third holiest site in Islam. You hear it over and over again in the history of Palestinian revolts. And it stems directly from one man.

Born in 1895 to one of Jerusalem’s great families, he could trace his lineage back to the prophet Muhammad himself. He was a seminary school dropout, an antisemite, and a Nazi collaborator—and the first leader of Palestine. His name was Haj Amin al-Husseini. And while Palestinians today are embarrassed by his legacy, it’s a legacy that explains many of the pathologies that still afflict their leaders—from the celebration of spectacular violence to the rejection of compromise.