Thinking about the war between Hamas (short for "Islamic Resistance Movement") and Israel as the Jewish state, a major problem for the people of South Africa in understanding this conflict is that a great majority of the people have no understanding and no history of religious war. Up to now, there has been no religious conflict and no religious oppression in South Africa, which fortunately has a history of religious freedom. There have been no signficant religious political parties.
Yet Hamas is a religious political party, in the same way that Islamic State and al-Qaeda are religious political parties as well as religious military organisations. And of the three monotheistic religions - Judaism, Christianity and Islam - Islam is both the most recently formed in terms of history, and also the religion which was most fundamentally formed in terms of war. There is no equivalent in the Talmud or the Four Gospels to direct instructions in the Qur'an, such as those stating "Prophet, make war on the unbelievers and the hypocrites and deal rigorously with them", and "Believers, make war on the infidels who dwell around you" (The Koran, Penguin, tr. N.J. Dawood, 1977. Surah, or chapter, 9, "Repentence", verses 73, 123. Pages 328, 333).
ANC government has no understanding about religious war, and is supporting Hamas in the same way it keeps quiet about the current killing by Islamic jihad of innocent people in Nigeria, Mozambique, Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda and other states in Africa, in addition to Hamas's deliberate pogrom against Jewish civilians in Israel on 7 October.
Yet religious violence is an African issue. There is no other way of understanding the killing of 41 Christian worshippers in St Francis Xavier Catholic Church in Owo city in Nigeria on Sunday 5 June last year. They were killed by Muslim jihadis because of their religion. Tribal differences and differences in producing a living - as between herders and city dwellers or farmers - are secondary, since the same kind of religious massacres are being carried out by Muslims in other countries.
The essence of the current war in the Middle East is that the people of Gaza are Muslims while the people of Israel next door are mainly Jews. The Jews lived for centuries in a wide area around Jerusalem long before Islam was born in Arabia in the first half of the 7th century, 600 years after the crucifixion of Jesus, a Jew, on the outskirts of Jerusalem.
After the death of Muhammad in 632 CE, Arab Muslims under the command of Abu Ubayda besieged Jerusalem beginning in November 636, leading to the submission of the city to Caliph Umar in 637 or 638. (Historians are not sure of the exact year). After this Arab Islamic conquest, Jews have continued to live in Jerusalem over the subsequent 14 centuries.