My first exposure to the Palestinian–Israeli conflict came in high school when I travelled with a group of American teenagers for a month-long stay with Elias Jabbour, founder of the House of Hope in Shefaᶜamr, an Arab–Israeli village near Haifa. Jabbour, a Melkite Christian, framed his approach to the conflict through his religious beliefs, describing himself as ‘a Christian, Palestinian, Arab, Israeli’. Two years later, while living and studying the conflict in Jerusalem as a college student, I was confused when the programme director insisted that the conflict was not about religion at all, but about land, economics and politics. This academic argument did not match up with the explanation I had been given while living in Shefaᶜamr. How could religion not be integral to the conflict, when those who were living in it insisted it was essential?