The sight of kippa-wearing youth roaming streets with the intentions of a murderous mob to eliminate the Palestinian presence in the cities exposes how religion, when not properly contextualized, becomes both gasoline and fire, a weapon of distraction away from ongoing realities of dispossession and elimination. These cities are вЂњmixed,вЂќ sometimes even celebrated as models of вЂњcoexistence,вЂќ because the events of the Nakba stopped short of a total ethnic cleansing. We witness now, in 2021, yet another escalation in Jerusalem, Gaza, and across the вЂњmixed citiesвЂќ of Israel where belligerent Jewish products of religious Zionism and pre-military religious academies, along with religious Zionists bused from settlements in the West BankВ andВ other Jewish-Israeli bystanders, target Palestinian-IsraelisВ (their neighbors).В These Palestinians trace their roots to cities like Lod, Jaffa, and Haifa going back centuries prior to the Catastrophe of 1948 (the Nakba) and the establishment of Israel. The illusion of cosmic catastrophe serves a political agenda and ideology. Jews and Judaism too are imprisoned within the cages of a nationalistic supremacist ideology, one that needs to be distinguished from Zion as the subject of Jewish longing and messianic anticipation that is hardwired into the tradition. The Palestinians are not the only prisoners of this oppression. Sure, the case of Palestine/Israel often triggers the use of end-time script metaphors, but their deployment only obscures the anatomy of power, ideology, and oppression. (Photo by CLAIRE GOUNON/AFPTV/AFP via Getty Images) Religion is Both Gasoline and Fire To counter such uses, it is necessary to demystify religion and treat it as a phenomenon inextricably bound up with social and historical contexts.ДЄ grab from an AFPTV video shows a tree on fire near the Dome of the Rock mosque in JerusalemвЂ™s Al-Aqsa mosque complex on May 10, 2021, following renewed clashes between Palestinians and Israeli police at the scene. Religion is a powder keg in this situation, useful for those actors invested in further cementing an apartheid regime. The violence carried out through legal means and by mobs proceeds with an impunity that signals a long-lasting policy, not an apocalyptic drama.ДЇocusing solely on the apocalyptic imagery of the youth at the wall, Atalia Omer argues in this piece, risks distracting our attention from the more routine, but still violent, forms of oppression that Palestinians face every day. This history also explains the vigilante violence against Palestinians by settlers within and beyond the Green Line.

This history is one that gave rise to the dispossession of Palestinian residents of Sheikh Jarrah from their homes and the bombing of countless Palestinian civilians in their homes in Gaza. It is part of the history of the occupation and oppression of the Palestinians within the entire space of Mandatory Palestine, as it was once known. This imagery did not appear out of nowhere, however. When images of a crowd of Jewish Israeli youth celebrating in front of the Western Wall as a tree burned near Haram al-Sharif appeared on social media in May 2021, expressions of horror and fear at the apocalyptic imagery followed.

Human apocalypse