Wars and other conflicts (and crime now I come to think of it) are about ‘I want what you have’. That is usually basically about economics and in the west has largely been resolved by trade. Internally to the west it has been about grossly unequal allocation of resources - uprisings and revolutions resulting. That has largely been resolved by redistribution, although is drifting dangerously in the wrong direction once more.
But sometimes it’s not economic and is about land for the land itself, or about who gets to dictate the social order, or whatever.
This one is one of those and more difficult, because the Israeli’s want somewhere they feel safe which given the historical treatment of Jews is understandable and certainly not something they will be persuaded on. The Palestinians want the return of their ancestral home, which again is understandable and not something they are going to be persuaded on. Then the Israelis will point to it being their own ancestral home originally taken at the point of a sword by the antecedents (rather than ancestors) of the Palestinians.
It’s not as simple as religion though it’s a factor, especially given some of the dynamics within the Islamic world that Davy set out, but which I sometimes feel people don’t wish to understand, feeling on safer ground with generic ‘religion’.
But Netanyahu is an atheist - or at least declared himself to be before a political career which probably requires some more circumspection - the PLO were secularist etc. The idea that people can just intermix, interchangeably is a dubious one, and strictly a western one. Even in the west we have a ‘culture war’ because intolerant forces wish society to be remade as they see fit - that’s their ‘want’.
Now I believe they do constitute a religion of a kind - their worldview being based on faith articles and doctrine that comes from them - but most others don’t, believing religion to be Theistic, perhaps overlooking large swathes of eastern religion.
That point aside, internal cohesion is getting harder to maintain as people no longer share the same worldview. All of that happens in the west without people killing each other - though it is getting increasingly oppressive and dangerous - because the means exist to contain it.
Where those means don’t exist, results are predictable. Anyone who sighs ‘oh humanity’ needs to ask themselves if they would happily live under sharia, or communism, or a Christian order, or whatever else. If not, then there’s your problem. It’s not abstract humanity it’s you - well either that or it’s a reasonable position that is difficult to resolve. This is what diversity really means - and it’s almost the opposite of what the label is used to mean; uniformity and conformity to one world outlook which unthinkingly assumes itself to be the default (just as Islam does, incidentally).
No system is neutral and unless you have a shared consensus, you are going to have difficulties. It’s only going to get worse in the west and it’s hard to see how it gets resolved in any of the world’s hotspots.
