Israelis and Palestinians are national identities; Jews and Arabs are ethnic identities; Judaism and Islam are religious identities. Two of these can coexist but not three. By the founding principles of both religions, unequivocal domination and/or total genocide of the outgroup is a divine mandate.

Hebrew scripture: Joshua 11:8-23 “And the Lord delivered them into the hand of Israel who defeated them and chased them… and they struck all the people who were in [the city] with the edge of the sword utterly destroying them, there was none left breathing. As the Lord commanded Moses his servant. So Moses commanded Joshua and so Joshua did… Thus Joshua took all this land… None of the Anakim were left in the land of the children of Israel, they remained only in Gaza – in Gath and in Ashdod.”

Hadith 2925: Sahih al-Bukhari :”Allah’s messenger said ‘you will fight with the Jews until some of them will hide behind the stones until some of the stones betray them saying ‘oh slave of Allah there is a jew hiding behind me, come and kill him!’”

Along with their own additions (sequels) both Christians and Muslims use the Hebrew scriptures as foundational to their monotheistic worship of Abraham as their god. Both Israel and Palestine, as they have been since their founding, have been Theocracies for different competing religious sects. Both these cults are founded upon (allegedly) divine mandate towards brutal slavery and extermination. These belief systems are playing zero sum games against each other.

Who attacked who first, the shifting geopolitical ramifications, even racial tensions, all roll back to the founding scriptures commanding total domination of the rival tribe. How can there be a “one state solution?” Only by the total subjugation and extermination of the outgroup. Why can’t they just do the sensible thing and become Isreal-istine? Because that would require both groups to adopt the principles of a secular (religiously nonpartisan) democracy, and that is not what either theocratic, segregationist nations currently are.

A ”two-state” solution would face the same problem as the Israel and Palestinian territories do now. Constant border tension at best, perpetual cycles of invasion and retaliation at worst. Again, why? Because of race hatred geopolitical game theory, or jingoistic supremacy? No. Those are merely the hideous symptoms of the still unresolved root cause: the founding virus of theocratic zero-sum zealotry, which afflicts a significant enough population of both tribes so as to make any rational compromise appear to be morally unacceptable.

Ideas are not like race, sex, or species. People act on their beliefs, but they are not their ideology because beliefs can be changed, updated, or replaced. As I’ve written before in “The Desert War Gods,” I do not care about the fabricated tribalistic abstractions that are ideas of nations and religions nor the symbols of flags and ruins. I care about minimizing the very preventable suffering of REAL people. I care about actual Civilians who, no matter their level of religious affiliations, just want to be left to live In peace. A peace that is simply impossible so long as the minority of zealots continue to hold political power captive at everyone else’s expense.