This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
The conflict began, in its early twentieth century origins, as a contest between two national movements over the same land, the Zionist movement and the Palestinian Arab national movement, both substantially secular in their founding leadership; the Palestinian movement's own early leadership was partly Christian as well as Muslim. Mainstream historiography, following the historian Benny Morris, treats this national and territorial contest as the conflict's basic structure.
Layered onto that national contest is Jerusalem, whose sites carry religious significance to Judaism, Christianity and Islam, a significance felt by adherents of all three faiths worldwide and not only by the parties living there.
Scholars of religious violence, among them Mark Juergensmeyer, argue that a distinct religious dimension has grown more central since the late twentieth century. Religious Zionist settlement theology, emerging after the 1967 conquest of the West Bank, reframed the territory as covenantal rather than merely national. The rise of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad since the 1980s cast resistance to Israel in explicitly Islamic terms, a religious duty rather than a nationalist claim alone.
This atlas records the nationalist reading as the conflict's basic structure and the growth of religious framing since as a debated addition to it, adopting neither position over the other.