Are Three Religions Battling Over Israel?

In a word, no.

by Rod D. Martin
December 29, 2016

It is often said that "three religions are battling over the Holy Land". Indeed, in the last 12 hours alone, I've heard some variant of that phrase by two separate commentators on cable news and at least three different people on Facebook. It is just accepted as certain -- and often stated as the "conclusion" of arguments -- that "these people have been fighting for thousands of years" (which is only true if you string together battles that happened centuries apart) and that there's therefore some rough moral equivalence among them.

But "battle" is an interesting term. A Christian army last took Jerusalem almost a thousand years ago, and there aren't any Christian armies today. The British army (which you could argue was "Christian") took Jerusalem in 1917, but only because the Ottoman Empire had declared war on Britain. No Christian of whom I'm aware "battles" over this area at all.

The Jews didn't either. While Jews have lived in Israel since Moses, an…