The travesty of religious fanaticism is a threat to peace

Hadia Mubarak

The grandmother of my five nieces and nephews, now living in Charlotte, is from Ramla (Ramle in Arabi), which is in current-day Israel. 

When the war broke out in 1948, their grandmother and her family, the Alkoors, were forcibly displaced from their home, unable to ever return. Their fate was the same as 750,000 Palestinian families, whose descendants now comprise approximately 7 million refugees around the world. 

Until today, her grandchildren, who currently live in Charlotte, could never move back to Ramla. Why? One reason: They are not Jewish. Had my nieces and nephews been Jewish, even with no direct connection to the land, they could obtain Israeli citizenship, based on Israel’s Law of Return, and move into the same neighborhood where their grandmother’s family lived for centuries. 

In contrast, Israeli law does not allow Palestinian refugees the right to return to their homes.   

Why does America’s foreign policy invest taxpayers’ money to support this enterprise, which privileges one ethnic group at the expense of its indigenous population? In his recent interview with journalist Tucker Carlson, the U.S. Ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, made explicit two principles that shape his policy approach to Israel and Palestine: 1) Jewish ethnic supremacy and 2) religious fanaticism. Huckabee’s revealing interview with Carlson unabashedly exposed the religious premise of the United States’ full support to illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank and the continued displacement of Palestinians - in violation of international law and the Oslo Peace Accords.

According to Huckabee, support for Jewish sovereignty in the land at the expense of Palestinian sovereignty is for one reason: “The Bible said so.”

If your religion does not subscribe to the Old Testament, it doesn’t matter. According to Huckabee, U.S. policy will be dictated based on a subjective interpretation of a redacted scripture that was compiled nearly 3,000 years ago.

My nieces and nephews, according to Huckabee’s logic, are permanently barred from residing in the land of their ancestors because his biblical interpretation takes precedence over their human rights and international law. International law states, “Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.”

Huckabee’s Bible, not international law, decides whether my Palestinian American nieces and nephews can live in their family’s land in Ramla. And last Huckabee checked, Genesis bars Ishmael’s descendants from their ancestors’ land because Ishmael’s mother was a non-Jewish woman, Hagar. This racist and classist interpretation of the Bible has become so widespread that it is rarely questioned. For the record, for those who take their Bible as the basis of state policy, Genesis 12.7 promises the land of Canaan to all of Abraham’s descendants (that would include Arabs).

Huckabee’s biblical interpretation determines that contemporary Jews living in Brazil, Poland, Russia, the U.S. or anywhere else in the world have a greater right to the land than the non-Jewish families who’ve lived there for the last few centuries, such as the Alkoor family. The notion of a “biblical right to the land” undergirds subsequent policies to displace Palestinians, even in the small batches of land promised to the Palestinians in UN Resolutions 181, 242, 338,  2334 and the Oslo Peace Accords. 

This displacement continues until today in places like the West Bank, Jerusalem, and Gaza. According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Human Affairs, in 2025 alone, Israeli demolished 1,659 structures in the West Bank, displacing 2,116 Palestinians. 

Huckabee’s policy in the Middle East is an outgrowth of both religious fanaticism and religious persecution, two pillars of the Spanish Inquisition, the Romans’ forced displacement of Jews from Roman Palestine, and other tragedies of western civilization. Until Americans wake up and say no to religious fanaticism and persecution, our policies will continue to inflict travesties that will be an embarrassment to our historical legacy, as a people who lived in this time and place.

When Fathieh Um Ali Alkoor, my nieces and nephews’ great grandmother, fled her home in Ramla during the 1948 war, along with her two-week infant and toddler, she left with the keys to her house, expecting one day to return. When she died in Charlotte in 2020, the key to her house in Ramla was still in her possession, like many other Palestinian refugees I know. I continue to pray and hope that one day, her descendants will be able to live securely and freely, side by side, with their Jewish neighbors in one state as equal citizens, just as their great grandmother did. 

Huckabee’s religiously inspired policies that support ethnic cleansing, however, remain one of the greatest obstacles to peace and justice in the holy land.  

Hadia Mubarak is a professor of religion and officer with the North Carolina Democratic Party Arab Caucus.

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