This conflict is as related to religion as a doughnut is related to the cultivation of sugar cane. Impossible to exist as it does without it, but could (and probably would) have arisen under different circumstances and with slight differences without it.
Reducing this conflict into its religious factions conveniently ignores the cascading history and various material interests that allied imperial states have within the region. It also happens to be an easy way to ideologically frame the conflict about out-of-touch religious fanatics, even though it never would have happened at this scale or on this timeline without the vested contributions of secular liberal states.
I hope you’re not one of those reactionary evangelists who believe the rapture will come once Israel is destroyed and are therefore aroused by the boundless death of innocent people.
The ‘scale of this conflict’ is still very small if you compare it to, say, the Syrian, Yemeni or Sudanese civil wars.
Of course you’re one of those reactionary evangelists who’ll claim none of these have anything to do with religion and the people in the region are just puppets waiting for the secularist liberals to pull their strings.
Or maybe they’re just donuts
Of course you’re one of those reactionary evangelists who’ll claim none of these have anything to do with religion and the people in the region are just puppets waiting for the secularist liberals to pull their strings.
Religion is only the rationalization of universal self-importance and a justification for unjustifiable violence, but the desire for violent domination is always rooted in an intense desire for material security and liberation.
compare it to, say, the Syrian, Yemeni or Sudanese civil wars
And yet they each were still ultimately fighting over the control of land, water, and the material production of their countries. The justification may have been couched in religious symbols and significance, but the outcome was still definitively material.
Edit:
I’ll also add - the existence of secularist liberal states investing in the conflict isn’t an attempt to frame it as an ‘evil secular proxy war’, it is to show that secularist liberals have reason to involve themselves even without a religious justification. It’s a counterexample to the assertion that this conflict is a religious one: if that were true then it leaves more than half the involved parties without any apparent rational to engage in the bloodshed.
