Religion and Nationalism: Palestinian Christians and Religious Leadership in the Midst of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Focusing on the period between the first and second Intifada, the paper aims to analyse the relationship between politics and religion within the Israeli-Palestinian context, focusing on the participation and engagement of Christian communities, their ecclesiastical institutions and leaderships within the “Holy Land”, with particular concentration on the role of Michel Sabbah, and in relation to the Israeli-Palestinian conflicts. Along with other Palestinian Christian theologians, Michel Sabbah concentrated on developing new meanings and understandings of the message of the Bible, contextualizing its significance within contemporary local political fields and therefore promoting a new role for the local Christians and a new political consciousness. This inevitably introduced a new understanding of the notion of Palestinian nation and the struggle for Palestinian independence. This is testimony to the possibility of reappraising the relationship between religion, politics and territory from the minority perspective and to overcome this boundary, that deserves to be assessed and researched.