From Nationalism to Waqf: Religion and the Palestinian Claim

Oct 21, 2026 · @Hannan Lis

The claim changed its foundation

In 1964 the Palestinian National Charter did not mention God. In 1988 the Hamas Charter mentioned little else. Between those two documents the Palestinian claim to the land changed from a political argument that could in principle be settled to a religious argument that, by its own terms, cannot. Understanding that shift explains more about why there is no peace than any map of settlements ever will.

The standard story runs the other way. Palestinians, we are told, were a people with a national cause; Israel's intransigence drove them into the arms of the Islamists. There is a grain of truth in it, and a great deal of convenience. The fuller record shows something else: religion was in the Palestinian claim from the first decade of the conflict, was deliberately suppressed by the secular leadership for forty years because it was bad for business, and came roaring back the moment that leadership failed. It did not come from nowhere. It came home.

This piece traces that arc: what Palestine meant in Islam before anyone had heard of Zionism, how the Mufti of Jerusalem turned a land dispute into a holy war in the 1920s, how Nasser and Arafat buried the religious claim under a nationalist one, how Iran, Hamas and the Intifada dug it back up, and what it means today when the governing movement of Gaza holds that every inch of the land between the river and the sea is an Islamic endowment that no human being has the authority to give away.

What Palestine meant in Islam before Zionism

Jerusalem is holy in Islam. That is not propaganda; it is doctrine. It was the first direction of prayer before Muhammad turned his followers toward Mecca in 624. Islamic tradition places the Prophet's Night Journey at "the farthest mosque," al-masjid al-aqsa, which later interpretation fixed on the Temple Mount. The Dome of the Rock, built there in 691, is the oldest surviving monument of Islamic architecture. Jerusalem ranks third after Mecca and Medina, and has for thirteen centuries.

But notice what is holy and what is not. The sanctity attaches to a mosque and a rock, not to a country. The word Palestine does not appear in the Quran. There was no Islamic province, pilgrimage or jurisprudence that treated the land between the river and the sea as a sacred unit. For most of Islamic history there was no Palestine at all as an administrative fact: the Ottomans ran the territory from Damascus and Beirut as parts of Greater Syria, and when they did carve out a special district of Jerusalem in 1872, they did it to manage European consuls, not to honor a holy land.

Muslim attachment to Jerusalem also ran hot and cold with politics. The Crusader conquest of 1099 provoked a century of sermons about the city's sanctity, and Saladin's recovery of it in 1187 fixed Jerusalem in Muslim memory as the place where the infidel is expelled. Then it went quiet. Under the Mamluks and Ottomans, Jerusalem was a backwater of pious endowments and a few thousand people. By 1800 it had perhaps 9,000 inhabitants. The Ottoman sultan never visited. Mecca mattered; Jerusalem was a place for old men to die.

The Jews, meanwhile, were there the whole time, as dhimmis. They were a majority of Jerusalem's population by the 1860s, well before political Zionism existed, praying at a wall the Ottoman authorities allowed them to approach but not to furnish with so much as a bench. The legal status of that wall, the Western Wall, was a Muslim waqf property. Keep that detail in mind. It is where the modern holy war begins.

So the baseline is this. Before 1917, Islam held Jerusalem's shrines sacred and the rest of the land ordinary. The claim to "Palestine" as a whole did not exist in religious terms because "Palestine" did not exist in any terms the Muslims of the region used. That claim had to be built. It was built fast, by one man, in about ten years.

1917–1948: the Mufti invents a holy war

The British appointed Hajj Amin al-Husseini Grand Mufti of Jerusalem in 1921 and president of the Supreme Muslim Council in 1922. He was twenty-six, had failed his religious studies at al-Azhar, and had just been pardoned for inciting the 1920 Nebi Musa riots. He understood something his secular rivals did not: Arab nationalism could not compete with Zionism for the loyalty of illiterate peasants, but Islam could.

His instrument was the Haram al-Sharif. From 1922 he raised money across the Muslim world to restore the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa, and used the campaign to broadcast a single message: the Jews intend to destroy the mosques and rebuild their Temple. The claim had no basis in anything the Zionist movement said or did. It did not need one. Pamphlets showed the Dome with a Star of David flying over it. Delegations to India and Iraq came back with cash and the story.

The Western Wall was the detonator. In September 1928 Jewish worshippers brought a screen to separate men and women on Yom Kippur; the British tore it down at Muslim demand. The Mufti answered by driving mules through the Jewish prayer area, building a doorway so the alley became a thoroughfare, and holding noisy dhikr ceremonies on top of the wall during services. He was manufacturing a confrontation, and in August 1929 he got it. Rumors that Jews had seized al-Aqsa sent mobs through Hebron, Safed and Jerusalem. One hundred thirty-three Jews were killed, sixty-seven of them in Hebron, a community that had lived there since before Islam. Hebron's Jews had nothing to do with Zionism. They were killed for being Jews near a mosque.

In 1931 the Mufti convened a General Islamic Congress in Jerusalem with delegates from twenty-two countries. Its purpose was to make Palestine a Muslim cause rather than a local Arab one, and it worked: from then on the land itself, not just the shrines, was spoken of as an Islamic trust under threat. When the Arab Revolt broke out in 1936, its slogans were religious, its fighters were called mujahidin, and its leader spent the Second World War in Berlin, raising Bosnian Muslim SS divisions and broadcasting to the Arab world that killing Jews pleased God.

Yet the Mufti did not own the movement. The men who wrote its newspapers, ran its parties and argued its case before British commissions were largely secular, and a striking number were Christians: Khalil al-Sakakini, George Antonius, the Khoury and Tuma families. For them Palestine was an Arab national cause in the mold of Egypt or Syria, and religion was a liability that let the British dismiss them as fanatics. The 1948 war was fought by this coalition, nationalists on top, the Mufti's jihad underneath. Then the coalition lost everything, and the nationalists took over.

1948–1987: the secular interlude

For forty years after 1948 the Palestinian claim spoke the language of nations, not of God. That was a choice, and it was made in Cairo.

Nasser had no use for political Islam. He hanged Muslim Brothers, jailed thousands more, and sold the Arab world a creed of secular pan-Arab nationalism in which Palestine was the central wound of the Arab nation, not of the Muslim umma. The PLO he created in 1964 was built in his image. Its charter speaks of "the Palestinian Arab people," "Arab unity" and "armed struggle." God, Islam, al-Aqsa and waqf do not appear. Article 20 dismisses the Jewish connection to the land as a matter of religion, not nationhood, which is itself a secularist's argument.

Fatah, which took over the PLO in 1969, was founded by men who had passed through the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza and Cairo, Arafat among them, and who concluded that religion would not deliver a state. They borrowed from Algeria and Vietnam, not from the Mufti. The factions to their left, George Habash's PFLP and Nayef Hawatmeh's DFLP, were Marxist-Leninist, and Habash, like the founders of the movement in the 1920s, was a Christian. The PLO's diplomatic and intellectual face in the West was Edward Said, an Anglican.

This was the era when the Palestinian cause became a Third World liberation struggle, was welcomed at the UN in 1974, and joined the Non-Aligned Movement and the Socialist International's conversations. The claim it made was the kind of claim the twentieth century knew how to process: a people, a territory, a demand for self-determination. It could be partitioned, negotiated and traded. In 1974 the PLO's "phased program" accepted, in principle, taking any part of Palestine first. In 1988 it accepted UN Resolution 242 and, by implication, Israel's existence. Whatever one thinks of the sincerity, the form of the claim allowed it.

Religion did not vanish. It was pushed into the mosques and the refugee camps, where the Muslim Brotherhood quietly built schools, clinics and welfare networks, especially in Gaza under Sheikh Ahmed Yassin from the 1970s. Israel, seeing a pious alternative to the PLO, left it alone. The secular leadership saw a rival it could outgun. Both were wrong about what they were looking at. It was not an alternative to the national claim. It was the original claim, the Mufti's, waiting for the nationalists to fail.

1979–1988: the claim becomes waqf

Three failures opened the door. Nasser's armies were destroyed in 1967, and with them the credibility of secular Arab nationalism. The PLO was thrown out of Jordan in 1970 and out of Lebanon in 1982, and sat in Tunis, two thousand kilometers from anyone it claimed to lead. And in 1979 the Iranian revolution showed every Muslim in the region that a religious movement could topple a Western-backed state when the secular left could not.

Islamic Jihad came first, founded around 1981 by Gazan students who had watched Khomeini from Cairo and concluded that the Brotherhood's patient welfare work was cowardice. Its doctrine was simple: Palestine is the central Islamic cause, jihad is the only path, and the state to be built is Islamic. It was small, violent and the first to kill in the name of a religious Palestine since the Mufti.

The Intifada of December 1987 forced the Brotherhood's hand. If it stayed out, it would lose the street to Fatah and Islamic Jihad. So Sheikh Yassin and six colleagues founded Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement, and in August 1988 published its charter. Read it. It is the single most important document for understanding why the conflict has no end.

Article 11: "The Islamic Resistance Movement believes that the land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf consecrated for future Muslim generations until Judgement Day. It, or any part of it, should not be squandered: it, or any part of it, should not be given up." No president, no king, no organization and no plebiscite has the right to cede any of it, because it belongs to God. Article 13: peace initiatives and international conferences "are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement," and "there is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad." Article 7 quotes the hadith in which the stones and trees call out that a Jew is hiding behind them, and tells the Muslim to come and kill him. Article 22 explains that the Jews were behind the French Revolution, both world wars, the League of Nations and the Rotary Club.

This is the Mufti's claim, written down and given a constitution. The land is not the homeland of a people; it is the property of a faith. The enemy is not a rival nationalism; it is the Jew of medieval theology. And the dispute cannot be ended by agreement, because the one party with standing to sign, God, does not negotiate.

Hamas replaced the charter in 2017 with a softer document that accepted a state on the 1967 lines as a "national consensus formula" while explicitly refusing to recognize Israel or give up any of the land. The waqf doctrine was not withdrawn. The 1988 charter was never annulled. And the movement that wrote both has been the elected government of Gaza since 2006 and the most popular Palestinian faction in most polls since October 2023.

2000 to today: the sacred claim swallows the secular one

The test came at Camp David in July 2000. Ehud Barak offered Arafat a state on most of the West Bank and all of Gaza with a capital in East Jerusalem. The talks broke on the Temple Mount, and they broke on theology. Arafat told Clinton that there had never been a Jewish Temple in Jerusalem; it had been in Nablus, or Yemen. The leader of the secular PLO, the man who had kept God out of the charter for thirty years, reached for the Mufti's argument the moment he had to sign. The Intifada that followed was named for al-Aqsa, not for Palestine.

Temple denial has since become orthodoxy. The Palestinian Authority's official position, repeated by Abbas, the Waqf and the PA's school curriculum, is that the Jews have no historical connection to the Mount and that Jewish prayer there is a crime. The "al-Aqsa is in danger" cry the Mufti invented in 1922 is now the standing justification for every round of violence: the 1996 tunnel riots, the 2000 Intifada, the 2014 and 2015 stabbings, the 2021 war. Hamas named its October 7 massacre "Operation al-Aqsa Flood." Its first statement did not mention occupation, settlements or statehood. It mentioned the mosque.

The secular factions have followed rather than led. Fatah's own martyr posters now carry Quranic verses. The PA pays stipends to the families of Hamas and Islamic Jihad killers as readily as to its own. Abbas, in his eighties and unelected since 2005, speaks of Jerusalem as "the eternal capital of the Islamic nation." The Christian Palestinians who built the national movement have left: from roughly 10 percent of the Arab population under the Mandate to under 1 percent in the territories today, driven out less by Israel than by the Islamization of their own society.

The two claims are now different kinds of thing, and the table shows why one of them can be settled and the other cannot.

	The national claim (PLO, 1964–1993)	The religious claim (Hamas, 1988–present)
Who owns the land	The Palestinian Arab people	God, as a waqf for all Muslims until Judgement Day
Who can sign	A recognized leadership	Nobody; ceding any part is forbidden
What ends the conflict	Statehood, borders, a deal	The disappearance of Israel; at most a hudna (truce)
Partition	Rejected, then accepted in stages (1974, 1988, 1993)	Forbidden in principle; 1967 lines accepted only as an interim step
Who the enemy is	Zionism, a colonial movement	The Jews, as a people and a faith
Jerusalem	A political capital	The site of the Night Journey, non-negotiable
Role of the Temple	Irrelevant	Denied; a Jewish Temple would undermine the waqf
Allies sought	The Arab states, the Third World, the Soviet bloc	The Muslim Brotherhood, Iran, Hezbollah, the umma
Christian Palestinians	Founders and leaders	Tolerated minority, now largely gone

Every line in the right-hand column is a reason that Oslo failed, that Gaza's disengagement produced rockets rather than a Singapore, and that no Palestinian leader has been able to say the words "end of conflict" and survive.

What a sacred claim means for anyone who wants a deal

You cannot split a waqf. That is the whole point of a waqf: it is taken out of the market forever. A claim to land that rests on peoplehood can be met halfway, because peoples make compromises all the time; Germany gave up Silesia, Finland gave up Karelia, and life went on. A claim that rests on God's title cannot be met at all, because the person across the table has already told you he lacks the authority to accept your offer.

This is why the Western habit of treating Hamas as a harder-line version of Fatah misreads the problem. Hamas is not a more demanding negotiator. It is a movement whose founding document declares that negotiation is apostasy. Its willingness to accept a state on the 1967 lines is explicitly a stage, not a settlement, and it has never pretended otherwise. Taking it at its word is not cynicism; it is literacy.

It is also why Israel's own religious right matters less to the outcome than its critics think. Religious Zionists who claim the West Bank by divine deed are a minority in a state that has twice uprooted settlements, in Sinai and Gaza, by majority vote. The Israeli claim remains, at the level of the state, a national one, and national claims can be bargained. No Palestinian government has ever uprooted anything, because the authority to do so has been handed to God and God has not been consulted since 1988.

The honest conclusion is uncomfortable for everyone. The conflict did not become unsolvable because of settlements, or the wall, or any Israeli government. It became unsolvable when the Palestinian claim reverted to what it was in the Mufti's hands in 1929: not a demand for a share of the land, but a refusal, in the name of heaven, to let anyone else have any of it. Until a Palestinian leadership is willing to say in Arabic what the PLO once said in English, that the land belongs to people and people can divide it, every peace process will end where Camp David did, on a rock, arguing about a Temple.

Glossary

Term	Meaning
Waqf	An Islamic religious endowment: property placed permanently in trust for God, withdrawn from sale or inheritance forever. Mosques, schools and the Western Wall area were waqf properties. Hamas applies the word to all of Palestine, meaning no one may cede any of it.
Dhimmi	A non-Muslim (Jew, Christian, later Zoroastrian) living under Muslim rule as a "protected person": safe in life and worship in exchange for a tax and legal subordination. Plural dhimmis; the arrangement is the dhimma.
Jizya	The annual poll tax paid by dhimmis, from which Muslims were exempt. The main fiscal reason early caliphs discouraged conversion.
Umma	The worldwide community of Muslims, as opposed to any nation or state. Islamists frame Palestine as the cause of the umma, not of the Palestinian people.
Jihad	Literally "struggle"; in the usage here, armed struggle in the name of Islam. A fighter is a mujahid, plural mujahidin.
Hudna	A temporary truce with an enemy, permitted in Islamic law for a fixed period. Hamas offers a hudna; it does not offer peace.
Haram al-Sharif	"The Noble Sanctuary": the Muslim name for the Temple Mount, the platform in Jerusalem holding the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa Mosque.
Al-Aqsa	"The farthest mosque," from the Quranic account of the Night Journey. Names the mosque on the Temple Mount and, loosely, the whole compound. Islam's third holiest site.
Night Journey (Isra and Mi'raj)	The tradition that Muhammad was carried by night from Mecca to "the farthest mosque" and ascended to heaven from there. The basis of Jerusalem's sanctity in Islam.
Mufti	A Muslim jurist authorized to issue religious rulings (fatwas). The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem was the senior Muslim religious office in Mandate Palestine.
Supreme Muslim Council	The body the British created in 1922 to manage Muslim religious affairs and waqf property in Palestine. Under the Mufti it became the political engine of the religious campaign.
Caliph	The successor to Muhammad as leader of the Muslim community; the title of the rulers of the early Islamic empire.
Umayyads	The first dynasty of caliphs (661–750), ruling from Damascus; the conquerors of the Middle East, Spain and Central Asia.
Abbasids	The dynasty that overthrew the Umayyads in 750 and ruled from Baghdad; opened Islam fully to non-Arab converts.
Mawla (pl. mawali)	A non-Arab convert attached as a client to an Arab tribe in the early period; the main route by which Persians, Copts and Syrians acquired Arab identities.
Monophysites	Christians, including the Copts and Syrian Jacobites, who held that Christ had a single divine-human nature. Condemned as heretics by Constantinople, which is why many welcomed Arab rule.
Nestorians	The Church of the East, dominant among the Christians of Iraq and Persia; ancestors of today's Assyrians and Chaldeans.
Copts	Egypt's native Christians, descendants of the pre-Arab population; about 10 percent of Egypt today.
Zoroastrians	Followers of the pre-Islamic state religion of Persia, centered on the worship of a single creator god and the sacred fire. Now a tiny remnant.
Mandaeans	A small baptizing sect of southern Iraq, neither Christian nor Muslim, now mostly in exile.
Samaritans	A community in Nablus descended from the ancient Israelites of the northern kingdom, keeping their own Torah; about 900 people today.
Sasanians	The Persian imperial dynasty (224–651) destroyed by the Arab conquest.
Muslim Brotherhood	The Islamist movement founded in Egypt in 1928 by Hassan al-Banna; parent organization of Hamas.
Islamic Jihad	The Palestinian Islamic Jihad, founded around 1981, Iranian-aligned; the first Palestinian group to make jihad for an Islamic Palestine its sole program.
Fatah	The nationalist movement founded by Arafat in 1959 that took control of the PLO in 1969.
PLO	The Palestine Liberation Organization, founded 1964, the secular umbrella body recognized as the Palestinians' representative.
Intifada	"Shaking off"; the Palestinian uprisings of 1987–1993 and 2000–2005. The second was named the al-Aqsa Intifada.
Temple denial	The position, now official among Palestinian institutions, that no Jewish Temple ever stood on the Temple Mount.
Arabization	The process by which the conquered peoples of the Middle East adopted Arabic as their language and "Arab" as their identity over the centuries after 636.