Abraham’s Bloody Legacy and the Tragedy of Palestine
The greatest disservice done to humanity is the reduction of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict to religion. For decades, the West, and much of its echo chamber in Africa and Latin America, has cast it as a crude civilisational feud: Christians against Muslims, Jews against Arabs, East against West. This framing has proved convenient for political leaders, theologians and media outlets alike. But it is also profoundly misleading. It masks the real dynamics of a modern settler-colonial project, it erases the lived history of Palestinians, and it makes the search for justice seem almost impossible.
To understand the depth of this tragedy we must look beyond 20th-century geopolitics and reach further back, to the foundational stories of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. At the centre of these traditions stands Abraham, revered as the father of faith. Yet if the myth is stripped of its pious aura, it reads less like a story of faith and more like the first recorded charter of dispossession. Abraham, in delusion, leaves Mesopotamia with a band of armed followers, and his descendants are, supposedly, commanded to wipe out the original inhabitants of Canaan; Jebusites, Hittites, Perizzites, Amorites. Cities are razed, genocide entrenched with populations slaughtered, and survivors enslaved.
Whether one treats these accounts as delusion, history, allegory or myth is almost beside the point. What matters is that they set a precedent. They created a template in which delusion and consequent conquest could be sanctified, displacement normalised, and the erasure of entire peoples (genocide) justified as the will of God. The Canaanites disappeared not only from their land but from the memory of history itself. In their place, a theology of election (being chosen) took root, destined to be retold in new guises across centuries.
The Myth as Manual
What might have remained an unsettling ancient tale became, over time, a manual for conquest.
Judaism retained the promise of return to Zion. Christianity reimagined itself as the “new Israel,” and unleashed Crusades that drenched Jerusalem in blood. Islam invoked divine mandate during its early expansions. Each tradition drew, in some form, from the well of Abraham’s election (being chosen).
But perhaps the most devastating appropriation came with European colonialism. When Puritan settlers arrived in North America, they explicitly likened themselves to Israelites entering the promised land. Native Americans were the Canaanites of the New World: heathen, expendable, destined for removal. Sermons and laws were infused with this language, providing spiritual sanction for extermination and displacement.
In Africa, and anywhere else the black man was found, the pattern repeated itself. Missionaries and administrators cast colonisation as a civilising mission, a divine duty to subdue the “pagan.” The Berlin Conference of 1884, where European powers carved up the continent, may have been driven by economics, but it was cloaked in a moral language that echoed the Abrahamic delusional myth of chosen peoples and promised lands.
Everywhere, the story was the same: the original owners were wiped off, their cultures erased, their presence made inconvenient to destiny. The conquerors recited Abraham’s script, and the world paid the price.
Zionism and the Return of Joshua
In the late 19th century, Zionism emerged as a response to Europe’s violent antisemitism. But its legitimacy was framed in the language of delusion, couched as prophecy: a people returning to the land promised to Abraham. The slogan “a land without a people for a people without a land” was as false as it was revealing. Palestine was not empty; it was full of villages, orchards, markets and families. Yet, like the Canaanites before them, Palestinians were rendered invisible.
The British Empire sanctified this vision through the Balfour Declaration of 1917, turning imperial strategy into biblical fulfilment. Then came 1948 and the Nakba: the destruction of more than 400 villages, the expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians, the creation of a refugee population that endures to this day. The Book of Joshua had been replayed, not with swords and chariots but with rifles, bulldozers and UN resolutions.
The pattern persists. Settlement expansion continues, Gaza is bombarded, and Palestinians (Muslims and Christians) alike are treated as if they were never there. The myth of Abraham’s promise still hovers over policy, turning dispossession into destiny.
Why the West Needs the Myth
Why does the West cling so tightly to this framing? Because it serves its interests.
For American evangelicals, support for Israel is not merely foreign policy; it is theology. Israel’s survival is recast as a precondition for the Second Coming, and Palestinian Christians (among the oldest Christian communities in the world) are written out of the story entirely.
For Europe, guilt plays a decisive role. Centuries of antisemitism, culminating in the Holocaust, have left many governments reluctant to criticise Israel’s actions, even when they mirror the very exclusions and erasures that Europe itself inflicted on Jews. To support Israel, uncritically and at any cost, has become a form of penance.
And for Western media and political elites, the “religious war” narrative is simply easier. It transforms a struggle over land, sovereignty and human rights into a clash of identities. It relieves the world of the burden of acknowledging settler-colonialism in real time.
The Colonised Who Echo the Coloniser
If the West’s motives are cynical, the mimicry of the Global South is perhaps even more tragic. Africa and Latin America should be able to recognise Palestine instinctively. Their own histories are full of dispossession: slavery, conquest, cultural erasure. Their ancestors were the Canaanites of empire, swept aside by new Abrahams with muskets and crosses.
Yet today, many of these states uncritically parrot Western framings. Aid dependency buys silence. American evangelical churches export pro-Israel theology into African and Latin American congregations. Leaders seeking Western approval echo the coloniser’s script.
The result is bitter irony: those who once suffered dispossession endorse its repetition. History’s victims have been persuaded to cheer for the conqueror.
The Price of Believing the Myth
The costs of continuing to believe in this myth are immense.
It legitimises genocide, by cloaking violence in sacred duty. It erases indigenous peoples, making them vanish from maps and memory. It divides humanity, pitting Jews, Christians and Muslims against one another as if destined for perpetual conflict. And it distracts from the real motives of power; land, water, resources, strategic control.
This is not scripture as heritage; this is scripture as weapon. And its blade still cuts.
Breaking the Cycle
If there is to be a future beyond endless dispossession, humanity must break free from Abraham’s bloody legacy.
That means reframing the Israeli–Palestinian conflict for what it truly is: not a feud between religions but a confrontation between coloniser and colonised, between dispossession and dignity.
It means recovering solidarity across the Global South, recognising in Palestine the mirror of Africa’s partition, of Latin America’s conquest, of the Trail of Tears in North America.
And it means decolonising faith traditions themselves. Judaism, Christianity and Islam all contain strands of justice, compassion and coexistence. These must be elevated above the old myth of conquest. To continue to sanctify the delusion of being chosen at the expense of others is to trap humanity in Abraham’s script, endlessly replaying the annihilation of Canaan.
Beyond Abraham
The delusional story of Abraham ought to be read not as destiny but as warning. When any people believe themselves chosen to erase others, humanity suffers.
The Canaanites were wiped off. Native Americans were wiped off. Africans were stripped of land, freedom and memory. And today, Palestinians face the same fate.
The tragedy is not simply that Abraham once marched from Mesopotamia to Canaan. It is that, in the 21st century, with drones and tanks and surveillance satellites, the world still allows that delusion to dictate its politics.
Conclusion: Justice in Spite of Myth
The Israeli–Palestinian crisis is not an inevitable clash of faiths. It is not the fulfilment of prophecy. It is a modern colonial struggle, hiding behind an ancient story.
The task for our time is clear. We must strip away the myth. We must name land theft, occupation and erasure for what they are. And we must stand, not with conquerors, but with the dispossessed.
Justice for Palestine, and indeed for all peoples once erased by conquest, requires rejecting the myth of being chosen once and for all. Humanity’s future depends on it.
Dr. EK Gwuru writes from Nkolo Ikembe.
